Six or seven weeks ago, when NFL and college football were mid-season, NBA and Premiere League were getting started, the World Series was still fresh in people’s minds and college basketball was about to start, innovators had reason to hope. It was peak sports season. Any sort of post-mortem on innovation were not on anyone’s mind. The experiments that these innovators had started, in many cases, were still in process and running their course.
Now it is different. The end of football season prompted lots of job insecurity in the NFL and college. Recognized quality coaches like Rex Ryan (Jets), Jim Harbaugh (49ers) and Doug Marrone (Bills) were out as head coaches. In Chicago, Atlanta and Jacksonville, those NFL teams sought advantages through innovation and just finished seasons with mostly losses and fired coaches.
The long NBA and Premiere League seasons are about to move into their most brutal periods when the games and travel pile up. Teams have either created a trajectory that gives them hope they can improve, or they are settled into the pattern that will play out to the end of the season, or they have some pivot transition ahead (injuries or transactions) that defers their season long destiny to a later date. The big innovations, the experiments that were hatched during pre-season have played themselves out. Anything new that teams will try is ad hoc and on the fly.
College basketball offers more promising possibilities. The heart of their season consists of teams’ conference schedules, with it comes a relatively standard pattern of practices, travel and games. Optimism still holds for most every team. If the college basketball winter season was like the NBA winter season, heavy on games and travel with no time for practice or even adequate recovery, there would be less reason for teams to hope. But practice they will, and some will improve noticeably.
It makes a big difference when innovation and the improvements they seek are in front of or behind a team. The reason comes out of the nuts and bolts of operations, moving people and making product, and how it gets in the way of trying things. Tim Brown, CEO of the innovation consultancy IDEO put in this way in an interview with Yale School of Management:
You have to remember that like any organization, if you get into an operational mindset where we we’re just doing the job, then it’s easy to forget about innovation. So, you know, constantly we’re putting resources aside for teams to go and work on things just because we’re interested in learning about them, not necessarily because a client’s paying for them. So doing your own R&D, even in an innovation organization, is really important.
The operations of a professional sports accumulates as a season goes on and the job of maintaining inertia becomes all-consuming. In collegiate sports, the smaller scale makes things more manageable (but not necessarily easy).
Continuous improvement is a challenge for any organization and continuous innovation is tougher still, pro sports teams do not seem equipped to function well at either level. It is another reason to look closer at universities for advances in Applied Sports Science and to be skeptical about whatever pro teams say they are doing, especially at this time of the year.
The coaches who were hired to innovate but did not last long in their jobs can probably point to operational shortcomings that their more successful peers possess. There is a real competitive advantage for teams who innovate, but pro sports have so much operational bullshit to overcome that it takes enormous dedication and confidence to follow through.