The Strategic Importance of the Offensive Line
The small running back leading the large offensive line onto the field
My 10 year old son has begun playing tackle football this year, and I honestly can’t tell which of us is more excited about this fact. We now find ourselves spending a fair amount of time talking football strategy. He plays running back and is easily the smallest kid on the team. As a small, nimble, ball-carrying back, my son has quickly developed an appreciation for the strategic importance of his offensive line. Without them blocking for him, he would quickly be overwhelmed by the 11 defenders eager to tackle the kid with the ball.
I often compare the football offensive line to a startup company’s tech operations; the guys who keep our servers and systems up and running. As a startup that prides itself in being small, nimble and quick – with weekly sprints and product releases – the analogy to 5th grade tackle football feels somehow appropriate.
As an offensive lineman your primary job is to protect the guy with the ball. If you play a perfect game, the credit you’ll get is that nobody will ever call your name. If you screw up just once, a defender will sack your quarterback or tackle your running back for a loss and you’ll look like a buffoon and likely kill the drive your entire team is working on. Same goes for the operations of a small tech startup; being perfect 90% of the time means that 10% of the time you are down which will almost guarantee the failure of the entire organization – no matter how good you are in every other position. In other words, 90% perfection isn’t even close to being good enough as an offensive lineman or a sysadmin.
Startups are a team sport where the true “skill” positions are most often behind the scenes, technical and usually very underappreciated. In honor of football season kicking off across the U.S., I want to point out how important the tech ops folks are and say a great big thank you to every one of them.
–Keith