In 2008 a third-year NFL veteran came to Shawn Myszka with combine numbers that had dropped since his draft year. They chased the numbers, and they got them back. Then he went back to his team and had an average season.
Shawn is the founder of Emergence and a co-author of Enhancing Skill in American Football. He has spent two decades training NFL players and watching the gap between what the combine measures and what wins on Sundays. That 2008 season showed him the physical metrics were the wrong variable. The variable that mattered was perception, cognition and action working as one system, inside a game context the combine cannot simulate.
Design the problem
Shawn walks through a case from his NFL work. A tight end kept missing tackles on punt coverage. Film showed he had almost no practice exposure to that problem. The fix was to recreate the game-day situation under fatigue, with real uncertainty about who would block him, where the returner would go, and what the surface and weather were doing. More reps of generic tackling drills would have missed it. That is the constraints-led approach. Practice design makes the player read and react.
Mark McGrath and I brought the OODA loop alongside Shawn’s work, and the conversation grew from where they overlap. Orientation sits at the center of Boyd’s real OODA loop, and perception and action couple through it. One idea from the conversation is to coach the player more than the method.
From attrition to cognition
We close on where this goes next. Shawn expects AI to play a large role in player development. He argues football has to move from alignment, where everyone runs the called play, to harmony, where eleven players share enough understanding to adapt when the play breaks. He sees a shift from attrition football to cognitive football as the frontier the NFL has not built around yet.
What do you measure on your team that has never predicted who wins?
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Written by Ponch Rivera with AI assistance in production. The full conversation is in the player below.