Brian Burke

And it was very, very clear at that moment that passing was far superior to running.

Teams are running far too often.

And the way you know that is because if they're doing each in the optimum mix, the payoffs would equalize.

There would be what people commonly refer to in game theory as

That's the Nash equilibrium.

As long as you have an intelligent opponent, you can assume that that equilibrium is going to be the optimum mix.

And they were far out of whack.

From that moment on, we knew that you need to pass more.

What year was this?

2008 is when I first did this, but it took years to permeate the football world.

It was a slow process.

I think Franco Harris is a good starting point for the modern era.

That's where people of our age grew up learning our football, and same with coaches.

This is the 1970s.

In those days, passing was very, very difficult.

So running was a much better strategy.

And then in 1978, the league massively rewrote the rules that had to do with passing, not just illegal contact.

The way linemen could pass block radically changed.

And the league is still catching up to this day in terms of exploiting those rule changes.

Over time, different systems started to exploit the new rules.