What is a system?

People are always discussing "systems." The Urban Meyer system, the Charlie Weiss system, the Norm Chow. The Airraid or what Mike Leach does "is a system." Does this mean anything or is this just the self-important tautology of football coaches and fans? Are they "systems" or just a series of instructions?

If they systems, is what the team who hasn't won a game in 10 years does a system? Why not? They have a series of plays and communications.

I want to highlight a point: A system, in ordinary terms, is no more than a series of parts that interact and work together to form a unified whole. The word unified is helpful since it implies that things work together.

I'm not going to touch today how they work together, that's more of what the past few articles about making plays look alike and even route conversions were for. But the other side of a system is its further definition, "for serving a common purpose." A system is supposed to work!

Sometimes there is much made of "being a spread team" or "having an identity" and such. The only limitating factor for a football offense is what can be executed effectively. It has nothing to do with what you already do, what "we hang our hat on," "we're a passing team," "we're a physical team." These shouldn't even be considerations. You should just try to win games. That's it.

It begs the question: how do you win games? For now I'll just say that one possible answer is "Score more points." So--forgive me for taking the long way to get here--you need the proper "tools" (plays, schemes, formations, etc) to defeat each individual strategy the defense employs. While some plays are more useful than others, everything has a defense, so you need at least one offensive strategy for every defensive strategy (at least broadly defined) that you might face. Otherwise the rational response by the defense would be to do the same thing every down that you have no answer for.

"So you've told me that offenses only are concerned with scoring points (and other offensive goals like getting first downs at important times to control the clock) and defeat what the D is doing. What a great blog buddy!!!"

It seems simple but is important for two reasons: 1) it can help you be a better coach, and 2) it's not actually true.

First, thinking like this should get rid of many slack concerns, particularly stat watching. What was our passing percentage? What was our YPC? How many formations did we run? "Oh but it looked good coming out of your hand, it was a nice spiral, even though it was an interception." All this is meaningless if the point is to win games. We all know this, but we have to defeat these mental traps at every turn.

However, on the second point, sometimes there are other considerations. At the NFL level, it really is all about winning games. The only time things like style and all that are invoked is as an explanation for success. "Oh, the Patriots win because they play it close to the vest." "The Steelers have a great record because they are a physical team." This might be true in a sense, but it mostly comes down to them having effective strategies against their opponent, with each effective strategy being a combination of talent and scheme.

Conversely, at other levels, particularly high school or major college football, you can get more mileage out of being "exciting" than you can out of being "3 yards and a cloud of dust." I'd be lying if I didn't say that I enjoy the passing game more than more staid elements of the run game. Is it purely strategic? Fans would rather watch their team lose 42 to 63 than 28-7 (though that isn't a fair comparison since 42/63 is a better ratio).

Anyway, the overall message is do not worry about identities or styles or systems in the sense of how they look. The question is are they effective? Why is the Norm Chow system effective? Because in about 12 pass plays he has an answer for almost all defensive strategies. Where other coaches need 80, he has 12 (or 10-16 or so, give or take).

If you must concern yourself with "style" then that is fine to a point. Sometimes it is more psychological than anything. But a true "system" is simply concerned with how good the individual parts are at working together to help you win games. If you could win all your games and never throw a pass, I would suggest you do it. Same if you never ran the ball. More likely, you need a mixture of strategies, integrated in such a way to be teachable to kids aged 14-18 (or 18-22, even 10-13, etc) during limited time. It's not easy.