As a baseball fan I love data. I also loved hard tags, breaking up double plays, and backing batters off the plate. I grew up watching a lot of sports and I gravitated to personalities like Earl Weaver, John Starks, and Joe Gibbs. Joe Gibbs might appear to be an outlier in that grouping but let’s examine the facts.
Yes, Joe Gibbs is known as being Mr. Nice Guy. On the surface he appears to be a church pastor that got lost one day and became a football coach or that one teacher everyone loved, but there is another story under that. Joe Gibbs used his niceness to bring out the tenacity in others. John Riggins, “I’m bored, I’m broke, and I’m back moment,” and figuring out Dexter Manley didn’t understand the plays because he couldn’t read. He brought one violent running back out of retirement and turned a defensive freelancer into a feared monster all from being a nice guy.
Then there is the system. The system itself was down and dirty violence. Trips right 44 gut. You know the play. The fun bunch lining up in that bunch formation and then the QB turning around and handing the ball off to Riggo running behind the Hogs. It was devastating and it built to counter plays, long passes to Art Monk, play action fakes. All from one formation. It is the essence of the modern power spread offense that is being used today in colleges. It has even evolved today with modern motion rules.
This is the essence of my upbringing. Sports fandom and that is why I bring that into my business models. I am currently and will continue to work on marketing plans for 2026. At first I compared it to the UNLV mindset of press on defense and fast break on offense, and then it morphed into the Showtime Lakers and while I love using the term Showtime it might be more like that Gibbs mindset. Take what is old and make it new again and find your under utilized assets and turn them into true game changers.
The last couple mornings have been spent parsing data. First our revenue reports to find out what areas we are strongest in and how to turn shotgun marketing into sonar marketing and second looking at the website and search data and seeing if all the improvements we’ve made are leading to results. We are building a marketing playbook and right now it is starting to resemble the Gibbs precursor to the power spread offense. Look fancy but then hit them straight up the gut with the one thing that has always worked, big beefy men running behind big beefy men.
David Huzzard Writes 