NFL Coaching Trees and Halakhic History

A Better Way of Thinking About Influence in Halakhic History. Or not. I Could Be Wrong

So, I’m a football fan, and one of the interesting things about football is that is the sport that coaching has the most impact on. Unlike basketball, soccer, or hockey, each play is a discrete unit that is planned individually (rather than being part of a flow of action). And unlike baseball, where most actions are dictated by the rules of the game (eg, if you’re up, try to hit the ball), football offers a wide latitude for the type of things you can do with your team. You can vary personnel, formation, the movement of each individual player, basically everything within the rules of the sport. So coaching has a lot of impact on success, to a greater degree than any other sport.

As such, and I’ve touched on this previously in my gemara pedagogy piece, coaches and coaching are very important to football, and coaches who can successfully institute their system can overcome deficiencies in personnel to a greater degree than any other sport.

So let’s say you’re an extremely talented football coach who is successful at teaching not just players, but your assistant coaches as well. Your career will have an arc to it. You’ll start off as an assistant coach yourself, eventually evolving your own system and style, and you get noticed for the success of the part of the team you coach. So you get hired as a head coach, and you implement your system, and it’s successful. Soon enough, not just will you have fame and success, but your assistants, who have learned your system, speak your vocabulary, and have assimilated to some extent your style, become hot coaching candidates in their own right. Some of them get hired by other teams, where, if you’ve taught them well, they’re successful as well, and then they have their own assistant coaches, and so on and so forth until the entire league is now running your system and using your vocabulary.

This is not because anyone appointed you Head of Football coaches, or elected you to a Council of Ruling Football coaches, rather, this is a natural result of your success as a coach. Coach well enough, and your students become coaches, who coach their own students, and soon enough you become a monumentally influential football coach.

So what ends up evolving is what we call “coaching trees”. If, say, Bill Walsh invents the West Coast offense, and his assistant coaches went on to coach other teams using that offense and that vocabulary, then Bill Walsh has a whole tree of coaching “descendants”, and it looks something like this:

Bill Walsh had 6 assistant coaches who went on to coach successfully in the NFL, each of which had their own assistants, who are part of the Walsh coaching tree.

This is not just a curiosity, it helps you understand every coach on that tree because you know that they were taught using Walsh’s vocabulary and system and in Walsh’s conceptual world. It’s a way of not just understanding Walsh’s influence, but also a way of understanding the roots of his descendants. Even when members of the coaching tree are also members of other coaching trees (For example, Sean Payton is much more a product of Bill Parcells than Walsh) it is still useful for understanding the various roots that influenced them to make their own hybrids of those influences. This is not saying that no coach here was innovative by themselves; no one is actually a carbon copy of their teacher. Rather, that the conceptual world they bring to their coaching is taken from Bill Walsh’s innovations.

Walsh’s coaching tree is particularly rich (particularly the Mike Holmgren branch) because he was both a conceptual innovator and from all accounts an excellent teacher. Because that’s really what the root of this is: Education. Coaching is teaching. The best teachers have many students, who go on to teach others. And that’s how influence spreads in education.

What I want to argue is that halakhic history works similarly, being also about education. No one anointed Rabbeinu Tam as head of Ashkenazi Jewry. No one had to write rules about how you’re supposed to respect Rabbeinu Tam because he was The Gadol HaDor. He had the authority he did¹ because he had many students who listened to him, and he had that many students because he was a successful teacher². And if we want to understand Rabbeinu Tam’s influence, we need to understand his “Teaching Tree”, and if we want to understand the people in Rabbeinu Tam’s “Teaching Tree”, we need to understand that they worked in a conceptual universe built by Rabbeinu Tam. Fortunately, we have a name for the members of Rabbeinu Tam’s “Teaching Tree”. They’re called the Tosafists. And indeed, they are all marked not just by a common intellectual origin, but by a dialectic methodology that seems to have been Rabbeinu Tam’s innovation.³

So basically, in both football and halakha, we have a system of influence in which a creative or talented individual⁴, who is able to successfully implement their system of education, producing successful students, who themselves produce their own their own students, all of whom either inhabit or incorporate the intellectual and conceptual universe of the founder.

So when talking about figures in halakhic history, we should not just be talking about who they were individually, but from which “Teaching Tree” (or trees) they come from. It matters that a Tosafist is a Tosafist! It matters that Ramban was taught by members of Rabbeinu Tam’s Teaching Tree!⁵ This is really something that ought to be obvious and I worry that I’m not really telling anybody anything new, but hopefully this is a formulation that makes the obvious clearer.

And just for fun, here’s comparisons between famous football coaching trees and halakhic teaching trees. This is just for fun, and if my comparisons suck, make better ones in the comments! (Some of this was talked out with Moshe Schorr in conversation)