Purple Insider - a Minnesota Vikings and NFL podcast - USA Today's Doug Farrar talks about his book "The Genius of Desperation" and how it relates to the Vikings

Episode Date: May 27, 2022

In the debut episode of the Purple Insider Book Club, Matthew Coller talks with Doug Farrar of USA Today, whose book The Genius of Desperation brilliantly lays out the history of innovation in the NFL. Doug discusses how the AFL set the stage for today's game and how teams beat the Vikings with innovative strategies in the early Super Bowls. Plus he discusses the origins of different defenses and how that connects to what the Vikings are set to play this year under Ed Donatell. Buy his book here: https://www.amazon.com/Genius-Desperation-Schematic-Innovations-Modern-ebook/dp/B07BB4C94S Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello, welcome to another episode of Purple Insider. Matthew Collar here and joining me on the show for the first ever Purple Insider Book Club, which is a thing I just invented today. Doug Farrar, he's NFL editor at USA Today and wrote one of my favorite books that I have read in years, The Genius of Desperation, which takes us through an incredible journey of advancement in the NFL. Doug, how are you? Welcome to the show. Good. Thank you for having me. I'm sorry people won't hear the guitar podcast we just did, but Randy Rhodes and Paul Gilbert and back when people actually learned to play the guitar as opposed to I still see people in music videos holding guitars. I just don't hear anything that they're really doing with them.

And so there's like 11 YouTubers who can still shred. And those are the people that we watch. That's just how it is. Pretty much it. Yeah. But we're, you know, we're too old farts who,

well, guitar has regressed football. Football is certainly not. And, you know, I feel like I should get a PR fee maybe a little bit for the number of times that I mentioned in your book. And I thought we really need to have a discussion here, especially since it's May. And I can't ask you about people being in the best shape of their lives. I'm not in the best shape of mine. You're probably not in the best shape of yours.

And these football players should be because they play football. Not a lot of time to get to the gym when you're doing the draft. That's the excuse I'm holding to right now. Yeah. And the book writing and things, this book that you wrote, Genius of Desperation, is incredibly well-researched. And I went back just even last night, of course, I read it when it first came out and read the first 150 pagesresearched. And I went back just even last night. Of course, I read it when it first came out and read the first 150 pages again last night. And what I love about it, Doug,

and we'll get into a lot of the details, is just, it's just a waterfall of great NFL story after great NFL story. And the way that you were able to connect all the schematic advances with great stories is really amazing. And I guess I would love to hear the background of the project. Is it just because you are the nerdiest of the nerdy when it comes to NFL in

scheme that you wanted to put it all down on paper? Because this is like in a lot of ways, an anthology of NFL advancement that you put together. And I I'd love to know kind of what inspired you. Well, it's funny i i mean you see the nerdiest and there are so many people especially i the the idea came to me in like 2015 i didn't finish the book until 2017 and it was published in 2018 and i had read a book called inverting the pyramid which is a history a chronological history of soccer tactics, which is an utterly brilliant book.

That kind of arc where it was like, you know, this era responded to this era and everything moves forward. And I figured, well, given how many football books are there has to be something like this about football. So I looked around and, you know, there are scheme books, The Thinking Man's Guide to Pro Football by Dr. Z, the late, great Dr. Z, which is the gold standard. Games of Change Game by Kosel and Jaworski, which is, you know, it's Greg. It's great. Duh. Next. Keep Your Eye on the Ball by Pat Kerwin.

There were scheme books, and Games of Change Game was a little close to it because it was like, we're going to take this game, this game, you know, these, these different games and here's how things change, whether it was the 63 AFL championship game and Sid Gilman's offensive concepts or the blue, the bullseye blueprint that Belichick had for the Rams in that first Super Bowl win. But I, I thought there has to be a schematic chronological history of professional American football, and there wasn't.

So the idea then was, okay, I'm going to write something that I want to read. But I kept thinking, well, why doesn't Chris Brown, smart football, write it? Especially then because I had always been aware that I want to write about scheme and I just don't know enough. I didn't play the game. I didn't coach. So I got, you know, all the books back here and just asked people, including Greg Cosell, a lot of dumb questions and just trying to learn. So I think by 2015, I thought I had, I guess the chops to do it. I just figured there'd be people better at it than I was. And I was talking to Mike Tenier, who's at Football Outsiders in Indy at one of the combines. We were having dinner and I was like, I don't think I should write this. I don't think I did. All the reasons I shouldn't write it and someone else should. And Mike just looked at me and said, why don't you just F and write it?

Just F and write the book. And, you know, Mike is a very pointed guy. And I said, okay, I'm going to try it. So there were three arcs. There were, yeah, there was the, you know, this begats this, begats this. You know, here's the West Coast offense. Well, okay, here's his own blitz. Here's the pro you know here's the west coast offense well okay here is his own blitz here's the pro set here's the 46 whatever um you know here's the shotgun well here is the five-man front so that was the one arc is everything responding to everything else

the second was the overall story arc when people talk about it reading is a great story i really appreciate that because that was kind of the main thing and then there was the other arc sort of the middle arc which was doing it by decade and when i signed with triumph books they said well can we go from the origins of pro football to 1949 and then do 50s 60s split into two aflL, NFL, 70s, 80s, 90s, current, and then looking forward. So the other arc was, you know, the beginnings, kind of, you know, George Hallis to Paul Brown and the AAFC, and then we, you know, go from there. So probably the hardest part was, you know, it was a lot of whiteboarding, a lot of making sure that everything was connected. But when you're writing a book with three arcs, you know, it's, I had the stories and I did,

you know, the research part is easy. It's how you put it together. It was a lot of free writing. It was a lot of blocks of stuff that I had to attach to each other. And honestly, I wrote the book backwards. I wrote the, the, the end chapter looking forward. I wrote that last because I was done with everything else, but like, um, the early two thousands, you know, Belichick talking to Chip Kelly and all that stuff. I wrote that first. Cause that's what I knew the best. And I would just, I moved backward. I think I wrote the AFL chapter sooner than later because I'm just an AFL history junkie because I grew up in Denver and, you know, Broncos and whatnot. So the process was first believing that I could do it and then, OK, what is it? And I outlined it and it was through the whole process.

It took a couple couple years to write i signed with triumph books and the last 40 percent of it was written in about three months during the season because they were like okay if we get it you know february 2018 we can release it september 2018 um so that was a lot of sleepless nights at the end that was um so the process of it the the hardest thing was not the research the hardest thing was connecting everything into those three arcs and making it because you do all this work you want it to you want it to look easy to the reader you don't want the reader to suffer through what you suffered through you know you want to you want it to look easy to the reader. You don't want the reader to suffer through what you suffered through. You want to strip all the pain out of it so the reader can just enjoy it. And hopefully I did that, but that was a big part of the process. Well, and I think you did a tremendous job with

that because it's a book about how there are schematic adjustments and how they connect to these big moments and these big personalities. But at no point did I feel like, okay, Doug, I have no idea what you're talking about with all this scheme stuff because of the way that you lay it out, especially in told through those people, which I think was really important. And one of my favorite parts of the book is the AFL. And I wanted to talk with you about that um specifically i mean sid gilman is just like this larger than life type of figure when it comes to that but the afl is maybe one of the coolest and lost things of history like it just happened so much so long ago and now we see the usfl and the xfl and we're like ah side leagues like who needs them but once upon a time people were rolling their eyes at the afl and i grew up in buffalo we had

the the rock pile the war memorial i think it was called yeah way back in the day and uh you know the buffalo bills were great back then and well they were also really antithetical to the rest of the league because it was run the ball and play this amazing defense. Joe Collier calling the shots and, you know, putting linebackers in stunt tackle formations in 1964. You're like, what? I thought Joe Collier did that. No, he didn't. That was another part of it.

By the way, the points of origin of football schematics is really hard to nail down. And sometimes you just can't. Because, like, three different guys in three different decades invented something and you have to sort of okay it was these three guys like um george jones i believe the guy's name was a coach for george hallis way back in like the 1930s actually invented the defensive numbering system and it's been you know bud wilkinson invented it bum phillips invented it so a lot of it was you can't nail down who invented something. It's just the earliest guy and then who forwarded it. So, but with the AFL, I think one of the most interesting things,

and the chapter was called Rockets in the Air, and everyone thinks about, you know, Charlie Hennigan and his 1,700 receiving yards in like 1961. You know, I wrote about the bills specifically with the run game with cookie gilchrist the defense and the stuff joe collier was calling what the afl doesn't get credit for and this happened with the raiders dan connor is kind of that move linebacker from off ball to line we talk about you know aren't sparking doing that with the early 70s dolphins the raiders were doing that in you know 1968 uh bum phillips tried to install the 4-3 defense with the uh san diego chargers in 1967 and sieb gillen was like no no no we can't do that

so there were a lot of defensive it wasn't like today where defenses are obviously more multiple than they've ever been, but the AFL was really good at, and, you know, and Hank's drama offense and defense would do all kinds of crazy stuff. I remember the Packers before Superbowl one, a couple of them said, I think Jerry Kramer was one of them. Like we've never seen these, you know, three, three, five stack defenses before because everything in the NFL was umbrella defense. It was four, three Tom Landry, you know, we all do this.

So I think with the AFL, it was, and I tried to focus on this. I mean, Sid Gilman was the dominant character in the chapter because as I wrote, there is the passing game before Sid Gilman and the passing game after, and the one after is the modern one. He invented the modern passing game with everything from receivers motioning to slot. I mean, Clark Shaughnessy had done that before, but five-level option routes and flood to this side and vert to the back. But I really wanted to focus with the AFL chapter on all the defensive

innovations, because that's never talked about. We think of the AFL as this league where everyone was throwing the ball and defenses were crap. And that's why they had all these yards. And the reality is a bit more complex or a lot more complex. And that that's the kind of stuff when you're researching a project that it's cool to get those little nuggets and put them together. Well, and in that chapter, not only do you mention the Jets win the most famous Super Bowl for the AFL, but they win it a lot on defense as much as they did through Joe Namath. And then there was also you mentioned in that chapter about how the NFL was not really recruiting black players the way that they should have. So the AFL was bringing a lot of them in, which I think is a really interesting detail of finding even the genius of desperation to find players and saying like, well, if you guys aren't going to take some of these guys, then we'll take some of these guys and we'll develop these superstars where

you guys won't in order to be able to compete. And I think that there's, like you said, there's a lot that sort of gets lost because we remember the AFL for just airing it out and everybody throwing the ball downfield all the time. But there's a lot of other details that came from that, that influenced the way that the game ultimately became. Yeah.

That was, you know, Al Davis has, you know, Al Davis, you know, we can say what we want about later Al, but Al was very, and we know this, Al was very much a trailblazer as far as race, you know, gender, whatever. He didn't care if you could do the job, whether it was Art Shell or Amy Trask. I mean, if you can do the job, you're in. Sid Gilman was Jewish and he had experienced his own discrimination.

So he was attuned to that. But it really wasn't some major civil rights thing. What it was, was, you know, the whole genius of desperation thing is you are on the balls of your ass. You cannot figure out how to beat this team with your talent. You have to do it. You have to invent something that they've never seen before. The NFL had a very definite quota system in the 1960s. They were less than two decades away from the 14-year black player ban. And the NFL said, oh, we're not going to do that. We're going to hit these small black colleges that you guys aren't scouting at all.

And we're going to take the best guys. And it's just, I did a top 51 HBCU players of all time list last year. And the sheer amount of talent that went to the AFL in that feeder stream, just because the NFL didn't want it. And then by the late 60ies, we better catch up in, in neither way. Was it any sort of civil rights initiative? It was let's go get the best guys. Oh crap.

They have the best guys. Well, now we have to get the best guys. It was as simple as that. Right. Right. But in a way pushed the NFL forward and forced them to pay attention. Some of the parts that of course,

perk my ears up are related to the Minnesota Vikings. And there's a bunch of, you know, of course, you know, they lose four Superbowls and they keep showing up throughout the book. Like, well,

how did this team deal with the purple people eaters? How did this team deal with the purple people eaters? I was hoping you could talk about that a little because that defensive line forced everybody else to figure out a way to handle that defensive line. And they did so successfully, but also in very creative ways. Yeah. In Super Bowl eight, because in the 70s chapter, it became much more about a lot of inaccurate deep balls and power running because that's what the 70s were. It was guys completing 30% of their passes and running the ball 45 times a game.

And in the Super Bowl VIII highlight that NFL Films produced, this was Dolphins 24, Vikings 7, I believe, Don Shula talked about the counters and the traps and the influence blocking he used with his offensive line. By the way, five guys who were not drafted by the Dolphins altogether, two Hall of Famers on that list, and they just waxed the Vikings up. And it was a lot of using their aggressiveness against them. The Chiefs did that in Super Bowl IV, and the Vikings famously did not call one defensive check against a Chiefs offense that was by far the most multiple at any level of football at that point. They were running everything from three running back wishbone to the moving pocket to five wide.

Chiefs ran a ton of five wide in Super Bowl I, and it was, I believe, 14-10 against the Packers at halftime. And Lombardi went up to Phil Bengston, his defensive coordinator at the half. Are you going to frickin' blitz at some point? And they called blitz three, and that was the Willie Wood interception. But, you know, and this is not to disparage Bud Grant, who's one of the best coaches of all time. And this also showed up in Super Bowl III. There's an anecdote in the book where Bubba Smith goes up to Don Shula during the game and says, you know, if I kick inside, I can beat their guard and get to Namath.

And Shula looks up at Bubba Smith and says, shut up and play your bleeping position. The NFL, I don't want to make it sound like the NFL was completely stoic or robotic or dogmatic in its ability to adjust schematically but compared to the AFL it wasn't even close and that's where the AFL also started to take over because they had guys like Stram and Gilman and Joe Collier these people who just did not care they were going to throw the entire book at you um as it relates to the vikings their defense was great uh the front obviously paul kraus obviously a lot of great players but they didn't you know it was and it's funny that pete carroll is a bud grant acolyte because you look at seattle's defense last year it's kind of the same diff it was like we're gonna put our guys out there and you know run the legion of

boom defense without the legion of boom see how that and, you know, run the Legion of Boom defense without the Legion of Boom. See how that worked out. I think with the Vikings defense, it was, you know, just catastrophically good talent. But when you don't adjust against offenses like that, you're screwed. I mean, at any level, at any time. Right. And I found that really interesting because I didn't ever, I mean, I've watched the old NFL films things. Usually it's the week in between with the Super Bowl where NFL Network plays them, but never really kind of put that together.

Always just thought, well, maybe bad breaks or whatever else. Also, my friend Patrick Royce likes to tell a story about that Kansas City Super Bowl that the Vikings lost that they knew it was over when they saw the Kansas city kicker making 60 yarders and warm up like, Oh, these guys must be way more talented than us. Cause Fred Cox was making 48% of his field goals or whatever. So I miss the days when kickers looked like your grandfather or Tony fresh, who, you know, looks like he should be serving you beer with later hosing at Oktoberfest. It's like, why don't kickers look like that anymore? Uh, yeah.

Kickers are jacks now. I mean, or, or punters. I watched, I don't think there's looks like our dads, like they should, you know,

right. Pat McAfee is retired. And I watched him like body slam a guy on a wrestling match. It's just not right. Yeah. The, the, you know,

guitar solos and kickers. Yeah. We're advocating for these things. And, and 48 year old men look like George Blanda and not Tom Brady. Yeah. Well, George was, you know, he was puffing the lung darts in the parking lot of the stadium. That's how you look like that.

Almost like once every few weeks, that picture of Len Dawson burning a heater on the sideline with a fresh gun. I got to, it was a Snacks Chiefs game about 10 years ago, and I was in the press box. And a mutual friend knew Len Dawson. He was calling the game for the Chiefs. And he knew I was an AFL junkie, and he introduced me. I actually got to sit down and talk and eat breakfast with Len Dawson for like and we were just talking AFL he was so gracious and just absolutely sharp as a tack remembered everything told these great stories and I just walked away like I'm seven

years old and I'm just gonna go like retire quit it'll never get cooler than this that's awesome yeah I mean uh it's funny when you go back and look at the numbers that len dawson was putting up and like up until like the 90s those would have been pretty good like that's how that's how ahead of everybody else that and the nfl didn't think he was anything was i think stram yeah stram coached him in college and said let's go get this guy right and dawson i i mentioned this the, Dawson was terrible at first. He was absolutely just garbage. And then it hit, and there he was, most productive passer in AFL history, Hall of Famer.

Now, I want to tie some of these things to today, because my brain and the wheels are spinning. By the way, this book came out five years ago. I have like three chapters I could write at least in five years. That's how fast it's moving. A second edition, maybe. It could happen. If I wait another five years, it'll be a whole new book.

So this was really interesting. The other day, Kirk Cousins was saying he watches McVay's offense on TV and he played in McVay's offense in 2016. He'll be like, oh, I don't recognize that. Or what's the, you know, that's different from something that we did or that read looks different. And it's so amazing that throughout your book, I'm reading in the sixties, the seventies, the eighties, and I'm going, oh, the Vikings do this, or this is something we still talk about different defensive fronts and the advantages and different things like that.

And yet it's like moving so slow and so fast. You're talking, you're writing about the first people who are using motions to get an advantage. Well, teams are still using motions to get an advantage. I wonder what you think about that, about how all these minuscule innovations are happening all the time. And yet some of the broader stuff continues

to remain the same that still works that was invented way back in the day yeah it's interesting i like a year and a half ago i got to watch tape with joe montana if the len dawson breakfast wasn't going to make me retire that you know that could have done it and i brought up one play from the second super bowl where they beat the bengals at 26 i don't i don't remember the numbers but the second bengal super bowl and one of the the touchdown to john taylor jerry rice went in motion and it was a it was because there's motion to indicate motion to disrupt it wasn't to disrupt it was oh the bengals were playing zone because they're not following Rice, which that's a problem in and of itself.

Probably want to follow 80 because he's pretty good. But back then it was treated like this. Oh, my God thing. Why are you doing that? Bill Walsh talked about when he was a Bengals offensive coordinator in the mid 70s. He and I think it was Tiger johnson who eventually paul brown hired as the head coach after brown retired and walsh was like screw you i'm you know i'm out of here um they talked about well what if we just move the tight end in motion they were playing the raiders and the raiders linebackers were like frozen in space what are you what is this alchemy and this was you know late 70s, early 80s. Now, if you're not using pre-snap motion, you're seen as a dinosaur.

And I would say that in the last 10 years, well, I could say two things. In the last 10 years, I've never seen so much schematic innovation on both sides of the ball. In the last five years, it seems to have doubled. In the last two or three years. It seems to have trebled. It's like everyone. It's like it went from, you know, two on the volume knob.

We're all the way up at 11 with Nigel Toffman now, because everyone is just trying. It's so much a scheme and spacing league and everything is about creating and defending explosive plays. And the ways in which to create those explosive plays are different. And the ways to stop them are different. The Fangio, Staley, too high, light box defense being the most recent example. Someone's going to come out with a way to figure that out in the next two years.

And everyone's going to stop doing it. It'll go back to single hire or whatever. But I think, you know, the concepts that last, they work and that's great. But I think on both sides of the ball and in every capacity, there's more schematic innovation in the last even three years than at any time in the NFL's history. There is no point now, and as a writer, and you know this because we both, you know, make a living talking about football, it's so much fun to see because you always know something else is coming around the corner.

Like I did an article about why the 49ers should just, you know, rip off the Band-Aid and go with Trey Lance. And you think about, you know, how they use counter bash with Trey Lance and Jimmy Garoppolo against the Raiders in the preseason last year. You're like, all the things that Kyle Shanahan must have in his quiver because he's always had these sort of system quarterbacks and whatever. And now he has a guy who can pretty much do anything.

He just needs to, you know, be elevated a bit in his ability to read defenses, which you start 17 college games and you're 21 years old. There's only so much you can expect. But I remember talking to Scott McGluin in 2000. It was my first combine I went to in 2007. And he was the Niners GM at the time. And Scott has had his personal stuff he's had to go through. But in my mind, there's no better personnel guy at the time. And I, you know, Scott has had his personal, you know, stuff he's had to go through, but in my mind, there's no better personnel guy in the league, whether he's in the

league or out of the league as a consultant, that guy, he has built champion after champion after champion. And I asked him about, because in 2007, you know, this, the. The whole idea of playing spread in the NFL was like, ah, no way. You can't do that. And 2007, the Patriots, who set the scoring record, were the first team in NFL history to run shotgun more than 50% of their offensive plays per football outsiders. And what McLuhan told me is eventually this will happen. The feeder stream from college will come up and somebody is going to figure out we had better take these spread guys and figure out a way to use them or someone else will. Well, take that in 2007 and multiply it by 50, because to say spread offense now is like to say I'm buying a car. Well, it's a little more involved than that.

You know, you have to drill down. So it's the proliferation of spread offenses. It's guys like Mahomes throwing 50 touchdowns in a season when even a generation ago, he would have been perceived as this weird outlier guy. Like we can't do this guy's supposed to stand in the pocket. If he doesn't, he'll just get killed. We, you know, we can't, we have to have supposed to stand in the pocket. If he doesn't, he'll just get killed. We, you know, we can't, we have to have a tight end on the field.

Oh my God, Sid Gilman's response to the run and shoot. I don't want to be in an offense where you don't have a tight end on the field. Buddy Ryan called it the Chuck and Duck. There were so many sort of, and with all due respect, we're talking about two of the greatest schematic geniuses ever, but there was a lot of you know really inflexible thinking back then you can't survive in the nfl today if you think that way you you will be booted out and it'll just it won't be anyone doing it to you except yourself

so that's a very long-winded way of yes, there are things that are stable that will never change. But the things that are changing in today's NFL, even in the last two or three years, I've never seen an acceleration of change like there is now. So I wonder why that is. I mean, I guess data and information so that everyone who's coming into coaching is so well researched from the past that I was thinking about when you used to play Madden and you would pick your coach and you'd pick your style and it would say like West Coast or Air Coriel or whatever, right? 3-4, 4-3. And it seems like today it's all. Like everybody's offense is everything. Well, there is no 3-4, 4-3. Those things are gone. That's gone. It's a nickel base league. People are playing more dime than base. There's more, you know, four, one, six than there is four, three, or three, four. Last year, NFL teams played dime 21% of the time.

They played base 18. And, like, half of that was the Seahawks and Cardinals. So, you know, now the other side, most of the dime was the Packers, but and a couple other teams. So the, the designations of we are going to install our defense in the West coast. We are not going to do air choreo. We're going to do this. Well, if you look at what Andy Reed and Eric, the enemy are calling Kansas city, can call it a spread coast.

It's all these spread elements. So Ron Rivera at the 2011 Combine was talking about Cam and the Rookie of the Year thing and all that, and he said what we did with Cam, and this was a watershed moment for me in my head when Ron Rivera said what we did is we took the stuff that he really loved at Auburn and we velcroed it to the stuff that we had in our playbook and it's like we'll do about half and half and we'll you know we'll throw stuff in or throw stuff out as you like it but that was one

of I think one of the changes is and this this is another matter of survival, you cannot ask all of the GM to the head coach, position coaches, whatever, you have to adjust and adhere your schemes to your players and change it. And, okay, we now have this quarterback. We had a Phillip Rivers stand in the pocket and get your head beaten in and throw a 60-yard bomb anyway. I mean, Davis Mills did it really well last year. There aren't a lot of guys like that anymore. Josh Allen is a big guy, but he freaking runs like Cam Newton.

I mean, he's Cam Newton with a better arm. How do you defend that? So it's more about the personnel and the qualities of the players. And it's less a scheme league and more of a spacing league. How can I, you know, am I going to reduce my splits so I can then sort of mirror the wider hash marks in college football? McVeigh obviously is brilliant at that. But it really is more about adjusting your playbook to your players and getting them open in space, whether it's running back, receiver, tight end, whatever.

So the revolution schematically to me has been coaches realizing, you know, when they come out, when our players come out of college to the NFL, as they develop, as they, you know, work together, because you're not just drafting a series of individuals, you're drafting a team of people. Coaches have had to bend to the skill sets of their players much more than ever. I think that's the primary reason we're seeing that, that schematic acceleration now, as opposed to, you know,

Tom Landry would get players that fit his scheme, you know, and the Cowboys with their, you know, their computers and, you know, Tom Landry would get players that fit his scheme, you know, and the Cowboys with their, you know, their computers and, you know, Gil Brandt and all the genius guys. But Landry wanted a player to fill a role. Now you don't create the role. You get the player and the player tells you what the role is. Well, every player is different. So now you can't just play a cover three.

You can't just go two by two. You have to do everything. Right. And this reminds me of one of the few mistakes that the Vikings made under Mike Zimmer in terms of evaluating their own players, because he was very good at it. But Cordero Patterson, they just didn't know what to do with. Right.

Because Patterson could not run routes. And I don't think he was very good at understanding the details of them or even how they worked within the playbook. And that drove Norv Turner absolutely insane. So they took one of the greatest players in the league with the football in his hands and sat him on the bench and only let him return kicks. And then he goes other places and New England uses him differently. You know, the Raiders a little bit, Chicago a little bit,

and then he goes to Atlanta and they're like, just give this man the football. And so it's like half of Cordero Patterson's prime as one of the most exciting players in football was wasted because the Vikings wanted him to run the routes a certain way that they wanted. And it feels like that mistake that was made even in 2015, 2016, Pat Schirmer started to do it a little 2016.

It feels like that mistake just would not be made even just five, six years later. Well, and this is obviously not to disparage North Turner, but you wonder, I mean, Arthur Smith, you know, came up as the USC of the Titans. He had been the tight ends coach. Then he got the head coaching job at Atlanta. He didn't have all those Cowboys Super Bowls on his back.

Right. And, you know, to be an older guy and to have done this for so long this way um you know i think it's harder to decide okay i'm going to change it for this guy it's like well if you can't run my offense and i don't want you that's how you get into trouble i you know we talked about pete carroll before i give pete a ton of credit because he's hired all these you know mcveigheigh or Fangio Staley disciples, the guys from Chicago, Desai and all those guys, who are now in and Pete saying, all right, the defense that we had with Ken Norton and the, you know,

that whole thing we've done for 10 years and we were greatly successful with it, it doesn't work anymore. I need to get new guys and new concepts. And again, not to disparage North Turner, North Turner was amazing at what he did but it was kind of all he did and that you know it's a big i've seen nerve playbooks it's a big playbook there are all kinds of things and here's another element of it it used to be and i know doug peterson has talked about this sean mcveigh has talked about this. It used to be that you wanted to blow defenses away with your multiplicity.

Now McVay, he hammers this all the time. And Peterson, and certainly in the Eagles Super Bowl, you talked about it a lot. We want to make everything look the same pre-snap, and then you don't know what the hell is coming post-snap. Well, what are defenses doing? Yeah, it's single high, you think. If you turn your back, if you run play action, when you turn your head,

the safety that was here is now, you know, we're doing this. We're hanging two. Or we were hanging two, and here comes the rat. So it is also much more of a pre- and post-snap league than it was before where everything was pretty static. Yeah, and this is something that the Vikings are guaranteed to do with Ed Donatel where they're going to line up with two deep safeties every time, and that's going to change depending on all sorts

of different circumstances and what they want to do. And we were seeing in that defense, ooh, that kid is a hammerhead. I can't wait to see him ripping down and just demolishing somebody. I feel for the slot receivers who have to play the vikings this year yeah his uh his game against alabama specifically was so impressive after they drafted and went back and watched that and even even like in the in the run stopping where he is just lightning getting from way back as you know too deep and then he's stopping a guy three yards after the line of scrimmage like wait where did that guy come from because you know the tv i was

watching the tv tape and all of a sudden lewis seen like a lightning bolt comes out and tackles a guy so i think i think it is a great fit for him and to have um you know the even three safeties on the field at times will be an interesting development that Mike Zimmer just didn't use because he liked Anthony Barr and Eric Kendricks. The thing I want to ask you about is, you know, when you have some of these innovators from the 80s, say, like Bill Walsh, who you wrote a lot about, deservedly, I mean, he's doing something that's so different that defenses are completely lost at a lot of times. and he's got the guys to execute it of course is there a version of that today when everybody kind of knows what everybody else can do or is it we're going to you know we're going to do all these things we have all these options

and we're going to just make it so you can't guess what's coming next i just wonder if like is mcveigh or shanahan the guy who is Bill Walshing at the moment or will we never really see that again because of the access to tape data everything else that these guys have that's gonna be tough I mean Walsh came up with the West Coast offense in an era where the Steelers were able to draft John Stallworth because they stole his tape he's they stole his one game tape I mean now I can go up on I'm not working for, now I can go up on it. I'm not working for a team. I can go up on my laptop, and if Stallworth is coming out this year,

I'd be able to watch every one of his games and sort it by 20-yard plays and this and that, and where is he lined up? Outside of the slot. I can just click a button, look at all the slot targets and everything else. It's an interesting question. I think Kyle Shanahan is the best offensive play designer in the NFL right now. I think you talk to most people in the league, they will, you know, whether begrudgingly or not, admit it. But the thing about Walsh, and this was another genius of desperation thing,

Walsh, the Bengals drafted Greg Cook in the first round of the, I think it was the 69 AFL draft. In his second season, Jim Lynch hit him in the shoulder, and it just, shoulder surgery was obviously nowhere near what it was now. Greg Cook's career was over. Walsh would say after that Greg Cook was Steve Young, but better. And if you watch his highlights, I mean, that's a big, you know, that's a big ladder to climb. But Cook was an outstanding vertical passer. When he got hurt, they had to bring in a guy named Virgil Carter, who they got

from the Bears, and he was kind of a Chad Pennington type. And it was because Walsh didn't have the quarterback he wanted. He had to figure out, okay, I'm going to implement these kinds of short passes, you know, these ideas from Sid Gilman and these ideas from Al Davis. Walsh worked for the Raiders for a year in 66, running backs coach, I believe. But he had to create a whole new language for offense based on the fact that he didn't have the quarterback he wanted. If Greg Cook had stayed healthy, Walsh would have run three-digit gilman and you know that's that's a whole different story um and it made ken anderson the most efficient passer in

the nfl in the mid 70s and certainly you know we saw what happened in san Francisco. I think to do that today is just about impossible. As you said, the access to data and tape is so complete and comprehensive and illuminating that for someone to surprise, well, look at the Wildcat. Okay. Week three of the 2008 season, the Dolphins get housed in their first two games. They were 1-15 the year before. And David Lee, who was their quarterback's coach, was the offensive coordinator in Arkansas the year before, 2007. And he had Felix Jones and Darren McFadden. And you can see it on YouTube.

There's a video in which he calls up Steeler, Power, and Counter, which are the three primary Wildcat plays. Here's how we run them with Darren McFadden and Felix Jones. And in week three, they're flying back from Arizona where they just got their asses kicked. And David Lee goes up to Tony Sperano, the head coach, and says, hey, what if we tried this stuff? And we all know what happened.

They went out, scored five touchdowns at Patriots, coming off their nearly undefeated season. They fooled Bill Belichick. That's pretty impressive. Ten or 11 weeks later, the Dolphins tried the wildcat against the Ravens. The Ravens were like, you have three plays and a couple of variants. What have you clocked? I think to do what a Walsh did or a Clark Shaughnessy did, where you're putting wrinkles on the t formation and creating the pointy minute

rams offense and stuff like that i think now because there's access to so much more information you might get six weeks of that or a year of that or a year and a half of that and you know look at i mean what what fangio sort of put in, and then Staley took it to a different level. And now everyone's running too high. And all the quarterbacks in the league, you look at the stats against too high for quarterbacks, they're terrible. I mean, everybody. A couple exceptions. Well, now it's like, okay, too high one last year.

How do we counter it? And is it these smaller receivers like a Wandale Robinson or Calvin Austin who can do the middle stuff that, you know, your land backers and safeties can't cover? So we go back to the whole thing I said about schematic acceleration. Dick LeBeau came up with the zone blitz pretty much in 84 with David Fulcher as his sort of, you know, ginormous safety. And that was supposed to counter the West Coast offense.

Well, then Walsh came back with vertical concepts, but really the West Coast stayed and stayed and stayed, stayed through the 90s. Andy Reid added additional vertical components, and he still runs it today. But to say that, you know, I'm going to come in with the Bill Walsh West Coast offense, the Tom Landry 4-3, and this one thing is going to change the game for 20 years.

Now, it might change the game for 20 weeks if you're lucky, but everyone is grinding all this tape and all these numbers. And, you know, I have a PFF and an SIS subscription, and I have all these different ways to look at tape. I don't work for a team. I'm a guy in my office at home. Think about what they have with XOS and all that. Yeah, I don't, I don't, I could be wrong, but I don't think you're going to see that sort of, you know, decade or multi-decade dominance from one particular concept because the ability to

take that concept and counter it is just, it's, you have so many more tools at your disposal. So everything is quicker. And as it pertains to Kevin O'Connell taking his first coaching job, I feel like this is maybe the hardest part because six weeks into a season, you might have something working and then all of a sudden it doesn't. And I think we've seen this from Cliff Kingsbury a couple of years in a row where it's like halfway through the year, Kyler Murray, MVP, the Cardinals are the hot team. And then all of a sudden something, a flip switch flips, and then they can't do the same things that they've done before.

This is the biggest challenge I think for coaches is to constantly be adapting and changing. And I thought that I learned a lot from Gary Kubiak when he was here and just listening to him talk on a weekly basis. And the players would talk about how Gary Kubiak would take something that was a base concept for them. They'd run it successfully. And then they would change just one thing about it when they ran it eight weeks later, because they knew the other team was prepping for it. And so it was like, okay, well, this team is creeping a safety down. So we're going to change this route just ever so slightly. That I think is a really, really hard

thing. And kind of the thing that separates, you know, the, the good from very great. And then also like you're talking about this thing that will fundamentally always matter, which is, can you maximize your quarterback skillset? And in that way, everyone has to be innovative all the time. Like after 2018 didn't work for the Vikings, Mike Zimmer said, no, no, no. We're running boots now. We're running wide zone. And Kirk Cousins put up career numbers each year. Kirk Cousins has always been an outstanding boot quarterback.

Right, right. Because Mike Zimmer recognized that. And this classic mike zimmer the opening press conference for kirk cousins mike zimmer mentions how good he is in the boots it's just like classic mike zimmer stuff but recognizing my quarterback does x y and z well and that's what we're going to focus on but also we have to constantly change stuff i mean it's tough man it's it is a it is an incredibly tough league to get an edge well a couple things uh i wrote an article about this i think it was cliff's second year with the I mean, it's tough, man. It is an incredibly tough league to get an edge.

Well, a couple things. I wrote an article about this. I think it was Cliff's second year with the Cardinals. Exactly what you'd expect in the first half of the season, just a metric crap ton of 10 personnel, four receivers, no tight ends, one running back. And halfway through the season, all of a sudden he's running 12. He's running 13.

He's running 11, like a lot of 11, not Sean McVay 80% 11, but different. And all of a sudden Larry Fitzgerald's like, hey, this offense is really trucking. And that was when Kyler was sort of looking like, could he be the MVP? And then the next year they came out early in the season, and Cliff adjusted back and went back to what he had done before. And you always wonder what like the thought processes are there um kubiak i remember he and peyton manning and i don't know if kubiak i'm trying to remember kubiak wanted manning to run uh to throw the pistol more than manning wanted to or vice versa but they had when manning came to denver and kubiak was a head coach they had a few

weeks where they didn't really see eye to eye kind of like arians and brady in that first tampa bay year where by about week eight against the saints brady's overshooting scotty miller by 30 yards like okay he wasn't this bad in 2000 what the hell and then it was a bye a bye week, and Arians and Lefkowitz and Brady got together, and Brady was like, can we use more pre-snap motion? Because Arians had said, Peyton Manning didn't need pre-snap motion. Why should anyone else? And Bruce, who is credit, okay, the greatest quarterback to ever play the game is telling me that I need to do these three things.

Maybe I should listen. And that goes back to what does my player need? You know, how does that work? You talked about Cordell Patterson. A lot of people got caught up in what he couldn't do. And I remember talking to John Schneider, Seattle's GM about this years ago. And Schneider said, we are far more focused on what a player can do. Now they take that to a fault sometimes, which is why this draft was good. The last five or six were bad. That's why they're rebuilding. But focusing on what you're, what a player can do that also puts the onus on you as the coach to say, okay, here's what he can do. How do I fit him into my offense? You know, how,

that, you know, that's the, the sort of, that's the one-on-one. How do I fit him into my offense? Grad school is how does my offense fit him? That's, that's where you get special. That's, you know, and Belichick say what you want. And they're going through kind of a rough patch right now. Belichick, and I wrote about Belichick in, I think, three different decades and the looking forward because that's just how, you know, how transitive his influence is.

But it was, you know, he will go from back when one gap or two gap was a thing, which it really isn't anymore because now you just play all over the place. He would look at what are the best colleges? What are the best college defenses? Is it a one gap year or a two gap year? I will draft those guys and flip my defense. And then he thought, you know what I'm really going to do? I'm going to really mess with people.

I'm going to run two gap in the middle, one gap outside, or this guy will be two gap, this guy will be one. The Belichick hybrid defense is what I called it. And other teams had done that. But the overriding point with Belichick is, and you know this, I'm not breaking news here, he has always been so adaptable to the players he had. With the one exception, Mark Schofield, who works with me at USA Today and is a Patriots fan, brilliant guy, you know, does quarterbacks better than anybody. We were both shocked because we figured when Cam Newton signed with the Patriots, we figured, I figured, Belichick defended

Randall Cunningham twice a year in the early 90s as the Giants defensive coordinator. He's seen Michael Vick. He got pole axed by the Wildcat. He must have reams of stuff for a mobile quarterback, which he never had in New England. He didn't care because, you know, it's Tom Brady. And how vanilla that QB run game was, I it's like really come on bill but that was a that was a rare exception yeah well and uh also the player being really washed was maybe a problem

also i mean yeah but i mean that's it that's where i think maybe maybe they were free he was gonna get hurt i don't know yeah no that could. Well, Doug, we could talk about this stuff all day, but I want to just ask you one more thing, because we could just go page by page and have a discussion about so many things. I mean, I really mean it with your book that anybody, regardless of knowledge of football, can read this and really take a lot out of it, just of, of how things evolve and some, some of the great stories. But each one has its own tentacles that sort of expand and grow and have an impact on where today's game is. That's so fascinating.

I just wanted to ask what your favorite part was of like when you, when you finally completed the book and you kind of looked back on it and just said, you know what, this is, this is a thing that's going to stick with me about this experience of writing the book. Like what, what would that be? I think it was really like Joe Collier, as I said, I grew up in Denver. So I was, you know, he built the orange crush defense with Al Zeddo and Gratish on all those guys.

Oh, Ralph Jones was the guy who worked for George House, came with the numbering system. I'm looking at that right now. The stuff about Clark Shaughnessy. He was a college coach, and I think it was 1935 at a football dinner. George House, either familiar with Shaughnessy or heard him speak. I don't have the book in front of me. And moved the place card so he could sit next to Shaughnessy. And he hired Shaughnessy as a consultant for 2000 a month, which back then, that's a lot. And he expanded

the T formation to the point where as a primary offensive weapon in the Bears, 73 to nothing thrashing of the Redskins, the 1940 1940 championship game still the biggest margin of victory ever in pro football history that year he led the stanford cardinal to a 10 and 0 record and a win over nebraska in the rose bowl he was the one who created or really he was i think he was an assistant uh with the rams in the late 40s and the owner dan reeves not that dan reeves fired the head coach made shaughnessy the head coach he's like this guy's a genius and he created the point a minute rams offense he uh brought back the middle guard to counter the shotgun which red hickey had invented in san francisco and then took to Dallas for Roger Staubach.

Clark Shaughnessy was kind of the Belichick of his day and nobody really talks about him. And so the, the, the fun parts for me, I like to myth bust and I like to bring things up that maybe people haven't thought of before. So like the, we, we talked about the AFL and defense. I loved reading that part um the stuff about sid gilman i think was really satisfying just to get a a more global picture of his offense and the stuff about shaughnessy was like the more i i knew the name and i knew a little bit of the history but the more i unearthed and researched, I'm like, my God, this guy is one of the pivotal thinkers in the history of football. And he's just not seen.

So to get to stories of guys like that, I think that's the most fulfilling part. Yeah. And I just wanted to tell a quick story because I felt the same way. I had never heard the name before I read your book and you know, the stuff from so far back in the day where I almost know nothing about even from NFL films is where my knowledge begins right in the sixties. And then through there of watching all of those, they used to play them on Sundays before the pregame show, they would play like the half hour specials of NFL films. I wish they still did because it was so good, but my knowledge doesn't go YouTube. I don't know anything about that.

Yeah. I spend way too much time on YouTube watching old games, but it was just so interesting to read about those people that I had never heard of. I know Bill Walsh and you're able to still shine new light on Bill Walsh, but I had never heard of some of these other people before. I did want to tell a of these other people before. I did want to tell a quick story about your book. I was talking with someone who had spent 30 years in the NFL working with a team that's won multiple Super Bowls. I don't know if the guy wants me to say who he is. Anyway, so we're talking about some of this stuff and he says, hey, you know, a great book that you should read, The Genius of Desperation by that Doug Farrar guy. And so that was kind of the idea to have you on the show to talk about the book and start interviewing some people who have written books.

And this was really fun. I'm really glad we did it. So that's a huge compliment to your work, that people have spent a lot of time inside the league, are reading your stuff and nerding out on it as much as I am. So an honor to have you on. A couple of examples happened to me personally that were like, whoa. And I like that. I think the one thing I'll say about it,

little pat on the back. I like that people have said and written it's a scheme book, but it doesn't read like that. It reads easy. And I think that when you're writing scheme as much as I do or Mark does or, you know, we all know the people. Laurie Fitzpatrick, who also writes for us and does, you know, just great job. When you're writing scheme, it's still a story. You have to tell a story. You have to have an arc and arcs, if possible.

Narrative, you know, what here is your here's my starting point. Here's my end point. How do I get there? It's not just, oh, you're in six bows. People don't really care about that. You have to make them care about it. You have to make it personal. I saw one book review that said I would have liked to know more about the personal stories, you know, like what said Gilman liked to eat or how he dressed or the fact that he learned his love of cutting tape from working in a movie theater when he was a kid, stuff like that. So there's a balance between because I could tell those stories, but then it kind of veers you away from the point of the book.

But I do like I'm very grateful that people say it reads easy for a book about a really complicated subject that, cause that was the end goal. That was the whole, I didn't want to write a book. You had to like get a headache reading three pages in. Right. Right. And when I was even just rereading it to have our conversation, cause I read it when it first came out, I mean, in a couple hours, I'm blasting through it. Like it is an easy read for something that has a lot of complicated concepts. So awesome work. You should be very proud of it.

People can follow you on Twitter at NFL underscore Doug Farrar. USA Today, of course, is where your work is. And the genius of desperation, you can find it anywhere. I have it on my phone. I got it for like 12 bucks. So, you know, you can go get the e-book version if you want. Amazon has sales all the time. There you go.

Okay. Well, Doug, it was great to catch up with you, man. Excellent, excellent work. Well, it's a great podcast idea. I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah. Thanks, man. Thanks.

You know, I just because I love to watch writers talk about writing. That's cool. Yeah, and I love to listen to people who know more about football than me talk about football. That's you. Oh, a couple more things. One more thing. If you're writing a book, On Writing by Stephen King and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott. If you're writing a book, get both of those. It will make your journey a lot easier. On Writing by Stephen King and Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott.

If you're writing a book, get both of those. It will make your journey a lot easier. Trust me. Okay. I wish you had told me that before. Well. Now I know. I appreciate it, Doug.

Thanks for your time, man. Thank you.