New York Times: High School Football Formation: Offense of the Future, or Just Unfair?

Malcolm Gladwell's recent discussion of the full-court press in basketball as an example of insurgent innovation reminded me of this story about the A-11 offense in American football. Underdogs use it to beat conventional tactics and some in the game's establishment think it's unfair or unsporting. Boohoo.

The New Yorker: Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath

Malcolm Gladwell: "When the game becomes about effort over ability, it becomes unrecognizable—a shocking mixture of broken plays and flailing limbs and usually competent players panicking and throwing the ball out of bounds. You have to be outside the establishment—a foreigner new to the game or a skinny kid from New York at the end of the bench—to have the audacity to play it that way. George Washington couldn’t do it. His dream, before the war, was to be a British Army officer, finely turned out in a red coat and brass buttons. He found the guerrillas who had served the American Revolution so well to be “an exceeding dirty and nasty people.” He couldn’t fight the establishment, because he was the establishment."

Charles on… anything that comes along: David v Goliath in the newsroom, and why we need new wrappers for journalism

"What the established news organisations in the US really need to have right now is some people on their commercial side who really live on the internet, in the way that so many technology journalists have been for years and years. I wonder to what extent they do; all the talk about paywalls has that slight tinge to me of people who don’t live there, and look at all those millions of page views and think “surely we can persuade a few of them to pay'."