It seems now that Bama and LSU have reluctantly and successfully gone to the big offense, enough defense trend...who still hasn't? Stanford? Michigan? MSU? Georgia?
.
Anywho. If Bama doesn't win the West next year, I see them going back to their previous style of bullying you with talent and depth and defense. Can a program do that? Go back?
With Tua gone, they may try to. It'll be interesting to me.
I think it's, as I've said before, an attempt to avoid variance.
When you're stronger than your opponent, the most statistically sound strategy is to wear them down, avoid mistakes, play the field position game, etc. The idea is that because you're better than your opponent, you want to limit possessions, limit their big-play ability, and generally rely on you being better to win a game. For that, you want a low-risk, low-variance offensive philosophy, and just trust your ability. It's Tresselball.
When you're weaker than your opponent, you have to rely on higher-risk, but higher-reward strategies. You're not going to beat your opponent in straight-up, hat-on-hat, big boy football. So you go for more aggressive offense, which has big-play potential, but more chances for downside variance (turnovers, two incompletions in a row basically killing a drive, etc). It means that on a good day you can beat a team that you absolutely shouldn't beat. But on a bad day, it might mean that a team that would ordinarily beat you by 14 beats you by 35 because you lose the TO margin and have too many three-and-outs.
Now, when you're a strong opponent AND have a wide-open offense, you can be insanely explosive. If an aggressive offensive strategy can make an average-talent team much more explosive, it can make an elite-talent team truly unstoppable. But... It doesn't eliminate the inherent variance of an aggressive offense. It means that on a bad day, you're more likely to lose to an inferior team than if you had a less aggressive but lower-variance offense.
But there's a downside to the less-aggressive low-variance offense too... If you're facing a high-variance but inferior team, and they're having a good day, you may not have the firepower necessary to beat them--even if you played well offensively. It's a lot easier as a coach to defend your job if your team played well and your inferior opponent just played out-of-their-minds better, than if you play poorly and lose to an inferior team that just played average.
What I think we're seeing is that it's more likely that as coaches start to accept the wisdom of analytics, they're starting to see that being risk-averse is worse in the long run, even if it means they have to accept some variance.
