When I read this post on the Freakonomics Blog, it hit home a little bit because of the fact that it is an idea I was toying with for coaching football. See, after putting countless hours into film study with the desperate hope of nailing down tendencies and thus strategies, I came to a conclusion that it may actually be beneficial, as an offensive or defensive coordinator, to worry less about the down and distance and more about making sure that you don’t reveal and tendencies… because you don’t have any.

First, don’t get me wrong, when the situation arises who cares what tendencies you show; your job then is to call the best play possible. But in other areas of the game, might the element of surprise in the form of a completely random play call be just as helpful as following the proper code for the plays to call on 3rd and 2? In the post, the author talks about how it might be used in baseball too:

They could even have a randomized trial of randomization — they could randomly assign the pitches for half the at-bats to be called in the traditional way (by the coach or the catcher) and the other half could be called by a random strategy established in advance. It would be a double-blind study, because neither the pitcher nor the hitter would need to know which system called the pitch.

It does makes some sense that in today’s age, when players and coaches spend so much time studying habits, patterns, strengths and weaknesses, that using randomization could essentially be more strategic than a strategy. After I finish college, and get back to coaching high school football, I think that one of the first things I will try out is some sort of either randomization or at the very minimum a system of playcalling that prevents one from going to the well one too many times.

But do I think this could catch on in sports at any level? Absolutely not. Egos in sports just won’t allow such as thing, just like the egos that put up so much resistance to the use of statistics in the front office of a baseball team. Coaches, players, and other personnel believe that their fantastical brains are much to powerful to be taken out of the mix. So that means that I am either just so humble that I know that I don’t always have the best call, or self-aware enough to know that I don’t want to let my stupidity get in the way. Either way it is though, if you are a coach game planning against me… have fun in the film room. You might be in there a while.

• Why Don’t Sports Teams Use Randomization? A Guest Post (Freakonomics)