Grizz Man said:
NDSU wins because they have the biggest and best athletes AND they keep it simple.
We had a lengthy thread about this mid-season, and the virtues of "simple" strategies after the "simplified offense" worked so well against UND.
There were a few who pointed to the virtues of such strategies, based on superior execution. There was a rather larger number of the usual vitrolic posters who
pointed to the virtues of "game tapes" that exposed the weaknesses of "simple strategies," and therefore worked in favor of the virtues of Stitt's approach which, for reasons beyond me, is considered "complex" and therefore just the ticket for an "offense that can beat every defense" even though when employed against such powerhouses as Chadron State and Western New Mexico, it failed dismally to do so.
Even as that thread descended into the usual ad hominem sparring that accompanies any effort to discuss reality as opposed to a peculiar form of blinkered coach adulation that infects otherwise rational adult males, it was an interesting discussion of "strategy" vs "execution" and the interplay of "coaching" and "athlete skill."
The post above posits that success, in the case of NDSU, requires a trifecta of the biggest AND the best AND a simple strategy. If a team has the "biggest" and the "best" athletes, I'm not sure that they could fail no matter the strategy, but assuming a team can rarely achieve all three vs every opponent, what combination of 2 of 3 can make for a winning team?
NDSU continues to demonstrate that a clean, simple strategy, well done, wins. Or is size simply the ultimate determining factor? What does "best" actually mean in combination with position coaching skill?