Despite Limitations, “The Essential Smart Football” Offered Unique Insights

“The history of football is essentially the history of ideas meeting talent meeting a moment.”

“There are few absolute truths in football. One is that championships are won with talent and hard work more than anything else. Another is that good ideas don’t die. They merely get assimilated.”

“The Essential Smart Football,” by Chris B. Brown, is less a book than a collection of short essays about various strains of the game, leading to some repetition. The piece is also littered with grammatical errors, a pervasive sense that it was copied-and-pasted from the Internet, and some fanboy-ish usage like referring to Urban as “Coach Meyer.”

That being said, there was plenty to learn as well from these essays. For example, I learned that Bob Davie may have been a misunderstood genius from a schematical standpoint; I learned quite a bit about zone blitzing; I learned about “constraint plays” and what they are designed to do; I learned how “intelligent chaos” and “safe pressure” could, in fact, be football terms; and I learned how the “Run ‘n’ Shoot” offense still sort of lives on.

For good measure, I also learned how many layers are involved in decisions about whether to spike the ball to stop the clock; I learned about all the variations hidden within the broad moniker of “spread offense”; and I learned that Mike Leach once peed on a dog.

The eternal good coaching vs. good players debate was even broached, built into a discussion of Leach’s Texas Tech offense and how a pre-hair-plugs Wes Welker forced some adaptations to it.

“And this is not an uncommon theme in football: great players often do as much to make the game evolve (from both protagonist as well as antagonist perspectives) as coaches.”

To balance out much of the chalk talk and discussion of ongoing trends in the game, the book interspersed some welcome humor as well, the best coming from a conversation between the author and his friend, a high school defensive coordinator.

“When asked what kind of players he likes to coach, he told me: ‘Give me the 2.5 GPA kids. I’ll take them all day, every day. Smart enough to know what’s going on, too dumb to know when something is going to hurt, and not smart enough to remember what hurt last time.”

With an introduction that reminded me a bit of Pat Kirwan’s seminal “Take Your Eye Off the Ball,” Brown has compiled an easy, quick read that also includes a number of important teaching points, intriguing concepts and informed theory. Though short on cohesion and editing, this is a fine book for the avid football fan curious about the ideas behind some of the ubiquitous changes in football.

“And there is simultaneously very little in football that is truly new in and of itself; what is actually new is how the old ideas are synthesized and assembled together, and streamlined in a method that can be taught.”