I’m referring to where different approaches become more widespread and accepted over time, only to be replaced by others. Question is whether these are always genuine advances in strategy, such that a team using the newer strategy will have an edge over a team using any prior one, or whether this does not always hold.
I’m certain there are some strategies that are truly advances, and/or the results of different equipment or rules. But I’m wondering if there’s also a rock-paper-scissors aspect in some cases, in which some strategies are only more effective in the specific context of the then-prevailing strategies.
For example, suppose the widespread approach at a certain point is “rock”. Few are going to try to beat it with “scissors” and those who do will tend to fail and not be emulated. OTOH, a clever coach who comes up with “paper” will have above-average success and will be emulated, until eventually “paper” becomes the prevailing approach. At that point someone who comes up with “scissors” will be successful, and will in turn be emulated, until that becomes the prevailing approach. At which point “rock” will be ready to come back in style, and so on.
Take the NFL for instance. Right now the league is crazy pass happy, rendering the running game virtually obsolete. Therefore, the defenses are being created solely to stop an high-offense passing attack. It’s inevitable that eventually the defenses will be so finely-tuned to stopping the pass, that a team is going to pivot and have a heavy run-based offense. They’ll do extremely well, then other teams will do it, then defenses will be created to stop this new running attack, and it will work perfectly fine until a team decides to pivot again and focus on the pass.
The rock-paper-scissors analogy sounds like a good one for relatively simple games, but sports like American football or tennis (or most other popular sports) have so many different “moving parts” and potential strategies that I’m not sure if it works that way. Something that sounds broad like “quick-timed passing attack (for American football)” is actually pretty complicated, and I’m not sure if there’s a single strategy that can consistently disrupt it (or vice versa).
So I would lean towards a “survival of the fittest” type of explanation, with a bit of trendiness and such thrown in (an example of the trendiness – there are tons and tons of Samoan NFL players relative to the population of Samoa – is this because of some great unmined talent in the Samoan islands, or is it because American football is hugely popular in Samoa, or because the NFL noticed and now sends scouts and invests in football development in Samoa, or some combination?).
The NFL isn’t just pass-happy “right now” – it’s been a continuing trend for the past 4 decades, as the league has made repeated rules changes designed to favor the passing game, and as the concepts that were originally termed the “West Coast Offense” became pervasive through the league.
We occasionally see wrinkles in offense in the NFL, things that stand out as being different from the norm. Two fairly recent examples: the Wildcat offense (prototypically run by the Dolphins, using Ronnie Brown, around 2008), and the mobile QB offense of a few years ago, as typified by Colin Kaepernick, Robert Griffin III, and Russell Wilson. When these different styles become suddenly effective, writers and analysts talk about “this may be the future of the NFL”…but they haven’t been, so far. One reason is that defenses may be caught off-guard for a time, but they quickly figure out how to react to these novel approaches.
Another factor is that these different approaches often are built around a player with a particular set of skills, and not every team has such a player. Plus, in the case of the mobile QB, it’s an offensive style which places the key player at heightened risk of injury, and several of the players who were seen as the leading practitioners of that offense (Griffin, Kaepernick) weren’t effective for particularly long, due to injury or other factors.
In NCAA Division I football, most offenses currently run some version of the “spread” offense. There are some teams in the NCAA (e.g., Wisconsin) that have done well without the spread, and by with using a traditional, run-heavy, road-grading style of offense. I’m not sure that I see such an approach working in the NFL, but I could well be wrong.
I’ve seen this phenomenon referred to as “the meta-game”, or just “the meta”. It’s commonly discussed in Magic: the Gathering. If you can figure out what the most popular deck is (or the few most popular), and then make a deck that can beat that (or those) deck(s), then you can turn in a decent performance in a tournament. You probably won’t win, because at some point you’ll probably face a deck that isn’t one of those few, and which can beat yours (before being beaten itself by a popular deck). Or sometimes you will win, and that deck will itself become one of the popular ones, which results in the decks it beats falling out of favor, and some new deck becoming the challenger.
Perhaps not useful for a predominately USA audience but the book “Inverting the Pyramid” is a fascinating discussion of Football (proper football!) tactics through the ages. it speaks to a lot of the OP’s questions.
You can even take this further because in MTG there’s a few deck archetypes (control, aggro, etc). At different points in time throughout MTG’s history, different archetypes have been dominant, so in MTG it tends to be very cyclical. Of course in the case of MTG, because it is designed, some of that cycle is intentional with Wizards of the Coast introducing cards to counter the current meta or simply intentionally making a particular archetype strong (usually for a specific colour) because they want to or feel that a particular colour or colour+archetype has not been played much lately.
And even without deliberate interference in the meta, there’s still continual churn in M:tG because new cards are constantly rotating in, and old cards out, of the most common tournament formats. A particular deck or archetype can cease to be dominant, not because of actual counters, but just because certain key cards aren’t re-printed and hence no longer valid in Standard.
It seems to me that the NFL has been pass-crazy for as long as I can remember (and I saw my first pro-game, Eagles vs. Chicago! Cardinals) in 1948.
Baseball has undergone more profound changes. First there was little ball, one run offenses. Then the Babe came along and they outlawed the spitball and the offense went into the ascendant node. One year around 1930, the NL batting average (including pitchers) was a bit over .300. Then the pitching caught up and things stabilized for a while. Meantime, the balk rule was hardly enforced and base stealing went down the tubes. One year around 1950, Richie Ashburn won the steal crown with 27. Then they started enforcing the balk rules and the SB took off. Meantime, the leagues played with the strike zone with predictable results. Nowadays, MLB is in an era of HRs and Ks. As far as I can tell, it is cyclic only if the rules–or their interpretations–change. Otherwise it is evolution all the way.
I have been watching curling for many years and it is a totally different game from 40 years ago. In the early 90s, it got to be purely defensive and boring. The national championship was won 2-1 with about 8 blank ends. They changed the rules against the defense and is gotten more interesting. But teams are getting defensively better again and they are talking about modifying the rules once again. But again it looks like evolution.
Depends on what you mean by pass happy. Compared to the 20s maybe, but passing is far far more prevalent today than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Example: 16 of the 20 QBs with the highest average yards per game are active players. 19 played within 10 years and all of them played within the last 20 years. You have to go to #55 before you find a guy that retired before the 80s
Was there a rock-paper-scissors operating with medieval military? Perhaps Cavalry beats Archers; Archers beat Pikemen (infantry); Pikemen beat Cavalry. And then infantry made a come-back when archery fell into disuse? Or something like that!??
I’d just like to point out that I predicted the emergence of the 3-5-2 back in the late nineties when I discovered that you could totally crush people using it in Championship Manager 3.
Yes, there’s the Napoleonic theory of Artillery>Infantry>Cavalry>Artillery.
Artillery can destroy infantry from long range. Infantry can beat cavalry by holding firm. Cavalry can beat artillery by closing the distance before the artillery can do much.
But then in classical times we had a period where heavy infantry like greek and macedonian phalanxes just crushed everything, including archery-heavy Persia. Nobody today really knows why greek-style heavy infantry suddenly started beating everything, but it did.
Then in medieval times there was the theory that heavy cavalry beats everything.
So sometimes it’s good old rock. Nothing beats rock.
I’m wondering if this might be a factor in the McGregor-Mayweather fight. It’s been suggested that McGregor has some advantage in his unpredictability, since his style and moves won’t be what Mayweather is familiar with and expecting. But I’m wondering if even beyond that perhaps it will turn out that Mayweather’s talents and boxing approach happen to be perfectly adapted to the conventional boxing approaches, and that faced with a completely new approach from left-field, it might just turn out that this is something Mayweather’s style is not dominant over.
Not betting on it or anything, but you never know.
A much better example in the NFL is defensive fronts. While defenses are more flexible than ever, all teams still have a base 4-3 or 3-4 scheme. And the schemes need distinctly different physical types, so if almost every team is playing 4-3, the 3-4 player types will be less in demand and therefore cheaper, and teams have an incentive to adopt 3-4 schemes.
This isn’t theoretical: Bill Belicheck is on record saying that was in fact a big reason behind the Patriots adopting a 3-4 style.
Eventually, that should lead to more teams adopting the 3-4, so the players become more expensive, giving an incentive for teams to move back to a 4-3.
Not necessarily. That sounds like a situation that’ll have a stable equilibrium. If we assume that one of those configurations is actually better, then that configuration will be more common (especially among richer teams), with the other one used only by teams with a lower budget. You’d never see the inferior one becoming the majority, because that would mean that teams using it would be paying more to get an inferior result.
Of course, it might take a while to reach that equilibrium, if it’s not immediately obvious which one is better. And you could still get instabilities if there are other variables available to be changed (for instance, if the two types of defense work better against two different types of offense, and teams also change their offense according to what defense is more common).
Your theoretical points are valid, but again, a real, actual NFL coach has said that it did in fact happen that 3-4 scheme players were underpriced (and adopting the 3-4 didn’t seem to make his team too inferior…)
So there does seem to be a pretty strong case that there is at times a cyclical element to the choice of 4-3 vs 3-4 (which doesn’t necessarily mean that the center point of the cycle is an equal split of the two schemes, of course).
By the way, the NFL has a strong salary cap that (in practice as well as theory) significantly restricts every team, so there aren’t really rich and poor teams (at least for this purpose). Every team in the league would benefit from saving money at a group of positions (even at a tiny loss of effectiveness), because that’s money now available to buy better players at another position.
