Changes in Common Sports Strategies: Evolutionary or Cyclical?

[Really_Not_All_That_Bright]

@Chronos

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.

Team budgets in the NFL are essentially identical. The hard salary cap and floor ensure that no team has more than a 10%-ish salary advantage in any given season.

[kenobi_65]

@Quercus

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).

Definitely so.

Before ~1970, the 4-3 defense was essentially ubiquitous in the NFL (and the AFL, before the merger). The 3-4 apparently originated in college football, and was adopted by several AFC teams (notably the Dolphins, with their trademark “53” defense) in the early-to-mid 1970s.

When I first started really following football in the mid-to-late 1970s, the 3-4 was used by a number of teams, but interestingly, nearly all of them were in the AFC. By the end of the 1970s, the 3-4 became more widespread, and many (if not most) NFL teams were using the 3-4 in the 1980s.

The pendulum swung, and most teams moved back to the 4-3 in the 1990s – the Wikipedia article on the 3-4 claims that, in 2001, only the Steelers were using the 3-4.

In recent years, the 3-4 has come back into vogue, and about a dozen teams are using it again.