War is not football, and football is not war, but having done both, they sometimes look like one another.

 

Author’s Note: The mother of your dedicated author (whom he loves dearly) is an Afrikaner. Her family lived in southern Africa since the 1700s. His family still has their great-grandfathers Mauser on the wall of their farm. Nevertheless I have tried not to let that effect my objectivity.

 

We all know that warfare evolves, time being a flat circle. As the Cantabrian circle helped check heavy infantry, infantry borne artillery helped check the Cantabrian Circle. Ever since Sargon of Akkad forced his Akkadians into battle in formations, a dance has existed between the primacy of massed and powerful formations against more autonomous and flexible power. These adaptations have been the difference between victory and defeat countless times.  After hundreds of years of training troops to stand in line and fire quickly, to form tight squares and decimate whatever was in front of them, the British Army marched into the Transvaal in modern day South Africa and Zimbabwe in 1899 brimming with confidence. Despite having lost what was known as the First Boer War almost twenty years earlier, the British Army had come off victories in the Sudan and in Africa, and were considered to be the best battle tested infantry in the world. They had gained this reputation by piling their soldiers in close against under prepared and under equipped foes, and churning anything in front of their lines into a meat grinder.

The Boers who they faced were a motley crew of irregular soldiers, but they had an advantage. They had been training their entire lives on their rifles. Not to the British standard of rate of fire, but to accuracy. The Boers were also experts at the use of terrain, entrenchments, and maneuver. Despite their generations of dominance on the battlefield, the British were about to be taught that they were again behind the ball, and again by colonial farmers.

Boers

  

The second week of December 1899, the British Army suffered three humiliating defeats at the battles of Stormberg, Magersfontein and Colenso. Thousands of British soldiers perished under the withering long range accuracy of the Boer Mausers. (Second time that rifle has appeared here!) The pack masses of British soldiers died in the ranks they had marched in. It was so bad, that at Colenso, British Infantry were said to have stood in ranks, dying, waiting for someone to tell them which rock to take cover behind. The defeats humiliated the British Army, and the Empire itself. But this story isn’t about the losses, it is about the lessons.

This:

Against This: Only ends one way. 

 

Seemingly overnight, the British Army rewrote almost all of its infantry training doctrine. Officers were retaught almost everything their fathers and grandfathers had learned. They were taught this new way of war, letting their soldiers fight in space, trusting them to make decisions and win the battle.  The changes were revolutionary in the British Army, and combined with other British tactical innovations (and some concentration camps for Boer women and children), quickly turned the tide. By the end of the war two years later, no one even remembered Black Week, the British Army had simply come out in the second half and crushed Boer resistance everywhere. To those looking back at war’s end, it seemed inconceivable that there was ever a moment the Boers might have won, despite how close they came. Twelve years later, on a field in Ypres, Belgium that same British Army would use those same tactics against a much more competent enemy, the foot soldiers of the German Kaiser, and save the Allies.

British infantry after adaptation 

 

 

I don’t know what’s going on with the Michigan Offense. I don’t pretend to be on par with some of the experts you read here. What I do know is that if Joel Klatt can pick up your tendencies mid game from the booth, it can’t be going well. I understand that the goal is to win, and Harbaugh doesn’t seem to care by how much, but watching this game against Indiana, I was struck with a sense of foreboding I haven’t felt since a previous Indiana game. The one where their receivers ran crossing routes all over us. Michigan came with an uninspired scheme, called plays that were at times baffling, and for yet another game, struggled to adjust their scheme to what the opponent was showing them. In chess, game theory and in tactics this is called “getting inside your opponents OODA loop”. Forcing them to try and be the ones to adapt to what you are doing.

We have seen this with Michigan teams in the past. That Michigan arrogance that most of the time pays off, but occasionally (and often on the biggest stage) cripples us. We hear people talk about the “co-coordinators” being a problem, we hear that we need to do X, or Y more, but what we really need to do is to adjust to what the opponent is doing, and take advantage of where they are weak. This game had all the earmarks of a “keep the playbook closed and get out of there with a win” sort of scheme, but we have seen those things trap greater teams against worse ones. We have time to figure it out, time to look at real play actions, time to look at how to confuse the defense pre-snap, time to figure out how to design route combinations that are not just four verts. We have seen this offense do amazing things against inferior opponents, but with the Kaiser’s Army coming, we are going to need it to adapt to what is coming.