I love the movie Rounders with Matt Damon and Edward Norton. It’s about a poker player who is trying to avoid the perils of playing high stakes poker in law school. One of the best scenes has Matt Damon stopping by a poker game populated by judges:
The point of the scene is to show how good Matt Damon’s character is at poker. But the judges game can just as easily be the conference you play in. You know the other players, some of them run the same stuff every year, others think outside the box. Every conference has the one or two teams that are normally at or near the top. The real question is: what are you doing to try to win the pot? Is it the same thing as last season? Maybe different talent but the same offense? The same talent in a different offense? Whatever it is, you don’t want to be the coach who has to fold immediately because an outside the box thinker like Matt Damon in this scene shows up and can immediately read your old patterns.
My last year coaching at Trinity(TX). We went to Rhodes and were just going to run the same stuff we always had. They ran nothing they had run before and completely stifled us, beating us by a dozen or so. It forced us to change how we did things but why did we have to get our butts kicked for that to happen? Are you waiting to lose before you make a move? Let this serve as your wake up call to catch those other guys off guard!