Jacie
5/15/2009, 07:29 AM
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/05/11/090511fa_fact_gladwell
How David Beats Goliath
When underdogs break the rules.
by Malcolm Gladwell
May 11, 2009
When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.
The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”
David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
The article is 8 pages long but the gist of it I have highlighted here.
Look the winning percentage (including OU's) of major football programs. Notice a similarity to the winning percentage of Goliath's 71.5?
Think about how often we accuse sa*et of relying on just being the better team to overwhelm their opponents despite being outplayed and/or outcoached by lesser teams for three quarters but based on OUr record (and if one can go by what they read here in the week following most games) isn't that how the Sooners play? If the lesser team can manage to do that for four quarters you get an upset.
Another example is TTech under Mike Leach. He plays several Goliaths, relative to his program, every season. The unconventional style of play he coaches is his attempt to tip the percentage to David's favor.
Recall everytime a team upset another (including OU) and what followed was a lot of fingerpointing about how unprepared or overconfident the favorite was prior to the game. But maybe it is more of David slinging stones instead of donning armor that produces the stunning upset.
Why should powerhouse programs like Oklahoma take note of this? With few exceptions, every team on OUr schedule is a David. Most opposing coaches aren't going to alter their style of play just to deal with Oklahoma, but it has happened and teams have come into Norman doing things OUr coaches had not prepared for. Lowly Oregon State almost changed the shape of the BCS last season with a remarkable run that started with the upset of USC and fell short only because they lost their Jaquiz Rogers before the Oregon game. Powerhouse teams like OU, even more than underdog teams, can't make huge changes to their style of play for one team but the ability to make adjustments during a game to account for something you didn't scout before or practice against all week can be the difference between winning and losing.
The message for Goliath (yes, OU is the Big G) is don't just rely on being bigger, ya gotta be smarter too.
How David Beats Goliath
When underdogs break the rules.
by Malcolm Gladwell
May 11, 2009
When Vivek Ranadivé decided to coach his daughter Anjali’s basketball team, he settled on two principles. The first was that he would never raise his voice. This was National Junior Basketball—the Little League of basketball. The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.
The second principle was more important. Ranadivé was puzzled by the way Americans played basketball. He is from Mumbai. He grew up with cricket and soccer. He would never forget the first time he saw a basketball game. He thought it was mindless. Team A would score and then immediately retreat to its own end of the court. Team B would inbound the ball and dribble it into Team A’s end, where Team A was patiently waiting. Then the process would reverse itself. A basketball court was ninety-four feet long. But most of the time a team defended only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally, teams would play a full-court press—that is, they would contest their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they would do it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, and Ranadivé thought that that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that made them so good?
Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Most of them were, as Ranadivé says, “little blond girls” from Menlo Park and Redwood City, the heart of Silicon Valley. These were the daughters of computer programmers and people with graduate degrees. They worked on science projects, and read books, and went on ski vacations with their parents, and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé came to America as a seventeen-year-old, with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press, every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”
David’s victory over Goliath, in the Biblical account, is held to be an anomaly. It was not. Davids win all the time. The political scientist Ivan Arreguín-Toft recently looked at every war fought in the past two hundred years between strong and weak combatants. The Goliaths, he found, won in 71.5 per cent of the cases. That is a remarkable fact. Arreguín-Toft was analyzing conflicts in which one side was at least ten times as powerful—in terms of armed might and population—as its opponent, and even in those lopsided contests the underdog won almost a third of the time.
In the Biblical story of David and Goliath, David initially put on a coat of mail and a brass helmet and girded himself with a sword: he prepared to wage a conventional battle of swords against Goliath. But then he stopped. “I cannot walk in these, for I am unused to it,” he said (in Robert Alter’s translation), and picked up those five smooth stones. What happened, Arreguín-Toft wondered, when the underdogs likewise acknowledged their weakness and chose an unconventional strategy? He went back and re-analyzed his data. In those cases, David’s winning percentage went from 28.5 to 63.6. When underdogs choose not to play by Goliath’s rules, they win, Arreguín-Toft concluded, “even when everything we think we know about power says they shouldn’t.”
The article is 8 pages long but the gist of it I have highlighted here.
Look the winning percentage (including OU's) of major football programs. Notice a similarity to the winning percentage of Goliath's 71.5?
Think about how often we accuse sa*et of relying on just being the better team to overwhelm their opponents despite being outplayed and/or outcoached by lesser teams for three quarters but based on OUr record (and if one can go by what they read here in the week following most games) isn't that how the Sooners play? If the lesser team can manage to do that for four quarters you get an upset.
Another example is TTech under Mike Leach. He plays several Goliaths, relative to his program, every season. The unconventional style of play he coaches is his attempt to tip the percentage to David's favor.
Recall everytime a team upset another (including OU) and what followed was a lot of fingerpointing about how unprepared or overconfident the favorite was prior to the game. But maybe it is more of David slinging stones instead of donning armor that produces the stunning upset.
Why should powerhouse programs like Oklahoma take note of this? With few exceptions, every team on OUr schedule is a David. Most opposing coaches aren't going to alter their style of play just to deal with Oklahoma, but it has happened and teams have come into Norman doing things OUr coaches had not prepared for. Lowly Oregon State almost changed the shape of the BCS last season with a remarkable run that started with the upset of USC and fell short only because they lost their Jaquiz Rogers before the Oregon game. Powerhouse teams like OU, even more than underdog teams, can't make huge changes to their style of play for one team but the ability to make adjustments during a game to account for something you didn't scout before or practice against all week can be the difference between winning and losing.
The message for Goliath (yes, OU is the Big G) is don't just rely on being bigger, ya gotta be smarter too.