Simplicity and overcomplication

One of my favorite football coaches and personalities in the world is Mike Leach. He was formerly the head coach at Washington State University which is one of UW’s rivals. I loved him for many reasons, one of which is that he never had much success against us. He’s an eclectic personality and quite possibly one of the weirdest people alive.

His twitter account is pure gold. A friend of mine sent me this Athletic article where they interview current and former WSU players about Coach Leach. It’s aptly named.

What the %#$@ is going on right now?

It’s a highly entertaining article, but has a lot of great insight on his style of “leadership” and how he coaches. One of sections in the article discusses Leach’s offensive philosophy and his “playbook”, or lack thereof.

Several players comment about how they didn’t have a playbook and how insanely simple the offensive scheme was. Leach’s coaching entailed telling his quarterbacks to throw it to the open man, not the ones that were covered.

As major college football as offensives get more complex every year to keep up with the times, Leach has been remarkably successful in taking under skilled players and taking them to new levels.

Over complicating matters can be a killer of talent. Sometimes you need to let your players just go out there and play football.

This is what Leach does. He sets the simple groundwork and let’s his most trusted players call plays, adjust on the fly, and just play ball.

We can all be guilty of over complicating matters in our day to day life. Sometimes we don’t need to run a complex analysis to get to the right answer. Most times the best answer is the easiest and simple one right in front of us.