The NFL is often described as a copycat league. The construct of the game enables offensively-minded tacticians to regularly evolve, and their defensive counterparts needing to devise a way to keep up.
Some of the development is entirely new thinking, much of it is predicated on rebooting long forgotten or rarely used ideas from the past, or reconstructing concepts that have been used before but adding a flourish, or nuance not yet seen.
The onus is then on the defense to piece together film, assess ways to combat over a period, which they almost always manage to do, thus forcing new thinking from their opponents.
As such, on both sides of the ball, when something is working effectively, the rest of the league sits up
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