The Knockoff Economy (21 page)

In this chapter we are interested in how this innovation occurs, but also in how it survives the inevitable copying that ensues. Football plays and formations, like most everything in this book, are not covered by copyright or patent law. Not that some haven’t tried: in the 1980s James R. Smith applied for a copyright on his “I-bone” offensive formation. We can find no record of a Copyright Office registration (although they did grant a copyright to a book describing the I-bone). While, as we will explain in a moment, it might be possible in theory to copyright a formation, as a practical matter copying is free and easy in football. Nothing stops another coach or team from imitating a great innovation on the field. But at the same time, that prospect doesn’t stop great innovations from being introduced.

Let’s take a quick look at a few of the more famous examples:

The West Coast Offense.
The West Coast Offense, which relied on quick, short passes to control the ball and gain incremental yardage, was the brainchild of Bill Walsh, a three-time Super Bowl winner as head coach of the San Francisco 49ers and a man players referred to as “The Genius.” Walsh formulated the West Coast offense when he was offensive coordinator for the Cincinnati Bengals, which, in the late 1960s, were a recently formed and hapless NFL expansion team. He was one of the first to really understand how the short passing strategy could reshape the game.

In an interview given to
Football Digest
not long before being diagnosed with the leukemia that would eventually end his life, Walsh described how the West Coast Offense was born. The Bengals, he said, were an

expansion franchise that just didn’t have near the talent to compete. That was probably the worst-stocked franchise in the history of the NFL. So in putting the team together, I personally was trying to find a way we could compete. The best possible way… would be a team that could make as many first downs as possible in a contest and control the football. We couldn’t control the football with the run; teams were just too strong. So it
had to be the forward pass, and obviously it had to be a high-percentage, short, controlled passing game. So through a series of formation-changing and timed passes—using all eligible receivers, especially the fullback—we were able to put together an offense and develop it over a period of time. In the process, we managed to win our share.
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Walsh’s new approach did more than win a reasonable share; when used by the 49ers and Joe Montana it led to three Super Bowl victories. Still, the West Coast Offense was not universally lauded; football traditionalists saw it as a cheap trick. As Walsh told
Football Digest
, “The old-line NFL people called it a nickel-and-dime offense. They, in a sense, had disregard and contempt for it, but whenever they played us, they had to deal with it.”
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Eventually, the West Coast’s advantages were recognized—and imitated—by Mike Holmgren and the Green Bay Packers, Jon Gruden and the Philadelphia Eagles, and many others.

The Zone Blitz.
Once the West Coast Offense proved its mettle on the field, it began to spread around the NFL. Defenses, accustomed to seeing offenses that relied on the run most of the time, were ill-prepared to deal with an attack based mostly in short passes. They had to adapt. One particularly successful adaptation was the Zone Blitz—a defensive innovation perfected by Dick LeBeau during his mid-80s stint as defensive coordinator of the same Cincinnati Bengals franchise that had been the platform for Walsh’s offensive ideas, and originated by the early ’70s Miami Dolphins under Bill Arnsbarger.

LeBeau’s aim was to disrupt the quick, short passes of the West Coast Offense by increasing pressure on the quarterback while still covering receivers. He did this by focusing on cornerbacks capable of fulfilling demanding man-to-man coverage assignments, and by using a defensive lineman or a linebacker to play a shallow zone defense. He would then send a fast defensive player after the quarterback. The problem for the offense was picking up where the blitz was coming from. The result was a potent counterstrategy to the West Coast attack.

The No-Huddle Offense.
As we noted in the introduction, in 1989, Sam Wyche, then head coach of the Cincinnati Bengals (the Bengals again!) pioneered the use of the “hurry-up” offense during the entire game. Known as the “No Huddle,” it worked exactly as it sounds—Wyche’s Bengals rapidly ran plays, confusing and tiring the larger, less mobile players on the opposing
defense. The strategy was very effective, but equally controversial. It was first denounced as cheating by Buffalo Bills coach Marv Levy, among others. But Levy’s Bills soon saw the light and ran the no-huddle offense themselves—and went on to play in four straight Super Bowls.

The Spread Offense.
Until he lost his job in a scandal involving mistreatment of an injured player, Mike Leach of the Texas Tech Red Raiders ran perhaps the most consistently innovative offense in college football. Leach’s principal innovation was the spread—an offensive system that throws (both short passes and long) on almost every down, that uses every eligible receiver, and that implements a limited number of plays run out of a variety of formations in which the offensive linemen spread out across the field. The result is a defense that is both confused (so many receivers!) and tired from covering an offense spread over the entire field. Leach’s Texas Tech teams, long treated as also-rans in a conference dominated by powerhouses like Texas, Oklahoma, and Texas A&M, won a disproportionate number of games despite their inability to compete with better known rivals for the most talented players.

The initial reaction to Leach’s spread offense was, as with Walsh’s West Coast Offense, contempt. The second reaction, just as inevitably, was imitation. Teams on both the college and pro levels adopted various forms of the spread—Rich Rodriguez developed a “spread-option” offense at West Virginia and Michigan, and in 2007 the New England Patriots used the spread and compiled a perfect 16–0 regular season.

There are many other variations and plays we could recount. But we think the basic point is clear: football is a very innovative sport. And rules about copying have played almost no role in shaping that innovation. It is not as if the NFL is unaware of intellectual property. The league and team owners employ some very expensive lawyers, and they are highly attuned to the value of things like trademarks. But to our knowledge no football play or formation has ever been patented, or successfully claimed to be copyrighted.

And this is not because there is an insuperable legal barrier. Crazy as it seems, a football formation might be copyrighted as a sort of dance. In fact, that is exactly what James R. Smith tried with his I-bone (though his effort apparently failed). Choreographic works are specifically mentioned in the US copyright statute as protectable. And formations and plays are, broadly, a way to choreograph the movements of a group of athletes. If an innovative
coach or player could successfully copyright a formation as a piece of choreography, rival teams could not copy it.
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But no such claim has ever been upheld or even seriously attempted, to our knowledge. It is also possible that patent law might protect these innovations. Patent protection extends to new and useful “systems,” and a formation or play might be characterized this way. It might also be characterized as a “method of doing business,” which is also patentable, with some restrictions, under American law. (Football is nothing if not a business.) In sum, IP law might conceivably protect gridiron innovations. But it never has.

Why then do football coaches continue to innovate, even when they know their rivals will study their innovations, copy them, and even use these innovations against them? We think there are several reasons.

First, as the previous stories suggest, innovations in football often involve coaches who are struggling to find a way to win with players of inferior talent. An effective innovation may be the only way to level the playing field, at least temporarily. So competition spurs teams to innovate, even if in the long run these innovations will be adopted by opponents. This dynamic of innovation by competitive underdogs is by no means limited to sports, of course. But football, with its intensive rivalries and big money riding on winning seasons, highlights how important competition can be to spurring innovation.

Second, and related, all football coaches are short-term thinkers. The rewards of winning a game can be immense—one Super Bowl victory makes a career—and this means that they are focused on winning
now,
and less deterred by the prospect of losing their edge over the long term. An innovation that gives any advantage—even a temporary one—is worth pursuing no matter what will happen next week, or next season.

Third—and perhaps most important—even though there are no protections against copying a successful play in the long term, there are practical barriers that prevent immediate copying. These barriers ensure a brief
window during which the innovator can’t effectively be imitated. Innovative offenses and defenses must be understood to be copied. The first time a formation or play is used, it can create a big element of surprise that really favors the innovating team. Once the innovation is deployed on the field, however, reverse engineering is relatively quick. More difficult—or at least, more time-consuming—is the process of rebuilding a team to take full advantage of the innovation once it is understood. Employing any complex offense or defense requires players to be retrained in that system. It also may require a different type of player—for example, the spread offense favors smaller, speedier, and more highly conditioned offensive players and places less emphasis on enormous offensive linemen.

Economists refer to this brief window as
first-mover advantage
—the period of de facto exclusivity that innovators often enjoy, even in the absence of any legal protection for their innovations, due to the practical difficulties of copying. If the first-mover advantage is substantial enough, it might offer a sufficient incentive to engage in innovation even if copying is inevitable. In football, where the potential rewards of a successful innovation are large, the time until the reward short, and the period required for successful imitation not inconsiderable, first-mover advantage may be enough to incentivize innovations.

Football highlights another important facet of innovation that deserves more attention. Innovators, like innovations, come in different varieties. Consider one major distinction among innovators. Some innovators come up with something radically different from anything that has been done before. These people—the Thomas Edisons of the world—are the kind that we’re likely to call to mind when we think about innovation.
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We will call them “Pioneers.” But the Pioneers aren’t alone. There are many innovators who improve ideas and products by refining or reconceptualizing what others have done. This type of innovator adds something new to a familiar way of doing things, improving and refining it. We will call these people “Tweakers.”
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Tweakers do not get nearly the attention that Pioneers do. In particular, legal rules about copying are generally focused on the interests of Pioneers. As many observers have noted, IP law often reflects a romantic notion of the lonely Pioneer, toiling away in obscurity while creating a new and great invention. Tweakers, on the other hand, are mostly an afterthought. Yet as football illustrates, Tweakers can be very important to the development of successful, effective innovations.

Consider one of many examples from the offensive side of football. Traditionally, football offenses were run out of “power” formations like the wishbone. In this formation, the quarterback took the snap directly behind the center, a fullback was behind him, and offset from behind the fullback were two halfbacks. The positions of the backs formed an extended V, in the shape of a wishbone, as shown in the following diagram.

The wishbone was adapted for a game that focused on running, and it became progressively less effective as the pass became the dominant offensive weapon. The game’s shift toward passing prompted a major rethinking of offensive philosophy, one outcome of which was the spread offense.

Mike Leach of Texas Tech, as we noted earlier, is typically thought of as the Pioneer who brought us the spread. But perhaps Leach was really a Tweaker. The deep origins of the spread are disputed, but a lot of fans think that the principal Pioneer was Darrel “Mouse” Davis
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, who, during the 1970s, ran an early version of the spread called the “run-and-shoot” as head coach of the Portland State Vikings.
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Leach tweaked the run-and-shoot by moving the quarterback from behind the center to the shotgun position (about 7 yards behind the center), moving the running
back from behind the quarterback to beside him, and spreading the offensive linemen and receivers farther apart across the field. By doing this, Leach oriented the spread further toward aerial attack—his spread was built around a corps of great wide receivers and threw on virtually every down. The result was an offense that led the NCAA in passing yardage for four consecutive years.