Malcolm Gladwell: Lions Should Have Run the No-Huddle

One of the maddening things about the Detroit Lions over the eight-year Matt Millen era -- and especially during their winless season in 2008 -- was that no matter how awful the team was, the coaches and front office seemed to feel certain that they were doing things the right way, and that they didn't need to change.

Every time Millen addressed the media during his horrendous run as the team's president, reporters would pose him questions about ways that the Lions should change their approach, and Millen would, without fail, insist that he had the right plan for changing the team's fortunes, and that they were close to turning the corner. And after Millen was finally fired early in the 2008 season, head coach Rod Marinelli constantly insisted that his approach to coaching was the right one, even as he became the first coach ever to finish a season 0-16.

That's what I was thinking about as I read Malcolm Gladwell's e-mail exchange with Bill Simmons, in which Gladwell suggests that the Lions had nothing to lose -- and maybe a lot to gain -- if they had used the no-huddle offense:

Right now, great teams (such as the Colts and Patriots) use the no-huddle selectively, as a way to maximize their dominance. But why don't bad teams use it? If you were the Lions, why not run the no-huddle this season? Why not put together a lighter, better-conditioned offensive line and a radically simplified playbook and see what happens? It's not as if you are risking a Super Bowl if it backfires. Your offensive line is lousy anyway, so there's no harm in tearing it down, and your fans aren't going to turn on you if you get killed while you work out the kinks. Last I checked, your fans have already turned on you. On the plus side, maybe the no-huddle exhausts the other team's defense so much you slow down their pass rush in the second half. And maybe giving your quarterback a bit more autonomy helps develop his knowledge of the game, and his leadership skills. The consistent failure of underdogs in professional sports to even try something new suggests, to me, that there is something fundamentally wrong with the incentive structure of the leagues.

Whether the no-huddle actually would have worked for the Lions is debatable, but that's not really the point. The point Gladwell is making, and I agree with him, is that it's crazy that the Lions went through an 0-16 season and never made any radical changes to their in-game strategy. They benched some players and promoted others to the starting lineup, but the Lions' game plans didn't vary much from week to week, even as they continued to lose.

The flip side of that is what the 2008 Dolphins did. After coming off a 1-15 season in 2007 and losing their first two games of 2008, the Dolphins radically altered their offense and implemented the Wildcat, and they went on to win 11 of their remaining 14 games. That's the kind of creative thinking Gladwell is talking about, and the kind of creative thinking the Lions refused to implementover the last eight years.