Dave Archibald has written about the NFL for Inside The Pylon, The Washington Post and NFL Spin Zone. In his first book, The Inches We Need (2023), he examines approaches to team-building in the modern NFL and identifies the principles that point to success.
How did the book come about?
I’d always been interested in team-building stuff and over the years, I found a lot of excellent books on team building but they were largely from the perspective of a specific team. Even Mike Lombardi’s book, which goes into the franchises he worked for, only has three data points. I wanted something all-encompassing, but that’s difficult to do because what unites successful teams is that they aren’t doing the same as other teams. A lot of times, they’re not even doing the same things as each other. Finding commonalities was difficult. What I ended up doing was finding broad principles that apply to a lot of teams and I found that those patterns repeat.
Did you come away with the impression that everyone’s trying their best or are their organisations that just aren’t trying that hard because an NFL team makes money either way?
When you see teams that have repeated problems, it’s owners that are meddling. They’re setting up unclear organisational structures where whoever has the owner’s ear that week gets their way. Some of the stuff that’s come out lately about David Tepper, where he saw a play that he liked and gave it to the coach… I think there’s less of that than there was. The salary floor has helped somewhat. There’s not a lot of incentive to not try. You’re spending the money either way, so you might as well be good.
What organisations did you identify as being really well-run?
The Patriots have been the gold standard, which is funny to say because that’s fallen off a little bit. In terms of continuing to compete in a shifting landscape, the Chiefs’ Andy Reid has built different kinds of teams, from his Eagles days, McNabb to Vick, then with Alex Smith and Mahomes in Kansas City.
One that surprised me was the Rams because I thought: ‘Oh, they’re trading away first-round picks. That’s not good business. They’re spending a lot on the cap and deferring it out.’ But when I studied them in detail, there was method to their madness. They had plans for what to do with those star players, they had strategies to help them find late-round talent and good complimentary players. They had principles around what draft capital they were willing to trade. And they’re willing to move on from mistakes, which is a big thing.
One trend I see is that teams aren’t as scared of dead money as they used to be. If they need to get out of a bad contract, they’ll get out of it, even if they’ve got to eat a bunch of money. You didn’t see that 10 years ago, and the Rams have been good at that.
What are the things that teams should be doing more of?
I get into some of these in the final chapter. One is scouting infrastructure, which is often an artefact of an older era, where the only way to watch film was to physically go to campus and watch tape. You couldn’t get tape otherwise. That hasn’t been true for 20 years but scouting still largely operates the same way. Instead, you could have people in the office watching digital film and maybe you could structure things differently. Rather than regional scouts, you could have experts on positions, or corners and receivers because they’re matched up against each other. There are going to be things you still need to do face-to-face, such as meeting coaches if a player has work ethic concerns. You might want to get that in person, but even that can be done on Zoom. That driving or flying time could be spent watching tape.
A lot of the book brings together stuff you’ve learned over several years, but what new insights did you find when you were writing?
Good question. I ended up putting more about analytics in the book than I expected. I’ve always been interested in that, but I realised you can’t write about this in 2023 without getting into analytics. There are a lot of challenges. If I run a linear regression, basic statistics, I can say, ‘when number A goes up, number B goes up’. That’s easy to explain to a coach even if he doesn’t understand how to run a correlation. But imagine trying to explain to a coach ‘watch out for this guy because somewhere in this neural network that we don’t understand there are weights that say he is likely to blitz in this scenario.’ How do you make that case? Even the person who wrote the software doesn’t necessarily understand why it gets the results it gets sometimes. It’ll be interesting to see what we do in future as these techniques become more complicated. How do you marry that with traditional football minds that are great at what they do, but don’t necessarily understand modern analytics?
I want to turn to some books questions. What are your favourite football books?
That is a tough one. My favourite football writer is Paul Zimmerman, Dr. Z. His The New Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football is a model for pretty much anything that’s come since. I love his style, which is a blend of stories and analysis. He really knew his X’s and O’s but he knew how to tell the people stories too.
What about an overlooked or forgotten gem?
One I liked a lot that people don’t talk about a ton is The Draft by Pete Williams. That’s a neat perspective on the draft and ties it to human stories of the players.
What are five books you would want with you on a desert island?
One that immediately comes to mind that was a big inspiration is The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I started my book a long time ago, and I got blocked for a while and The Artist’s Way really helped me get unblocked and finish it. It provides a guideline for exploring your artistic self, which if I’m trapped on a desert island, I would definitely want to. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is probably the book I’ve read most in my life, so that would be another. The New Thinking Man’s Guide to Pro Football – a good football read. And I’ll get some more fiction on there. Maybe Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton. That’s a great book. I’d read that one again. And then something super long. How about… Infinite Jest.
