The Value of the O Line

I was run­ning this morn­ing, day 2 of the new pro­gram thank you, and got to think­ing about pro­fes­sional foot­ball. I was pon­der­ing the impact of a great offen­sive line on the ulti­mate suc­cess of a pro­fes­sional foot­ball team. My mind drifted back to the 1990’s, and the Dal­las Cow­boys. That offen­sive line was one of the most dom­i­nant in the his­tory of the NFL. I make that claim with­out per­sonal bias, as I freely admit that I am not even a fan of America’s Team. Still I respect those Cow­boy teams that Jimmy John­son led to such over­whelm­ing and con­sis­tent suc­cess. The names that stick out are the stars. Michael Irvin, Troy Aik­man, Moose, Emmit, Jay Novacek, but the thing that truly made the team dom­i­nant was unques­tion­ably the offen­sive line. I could look up the names of the line­men on Google, but to be hon­est I can’t name one off the top of my head. If you want names, I will let you find them on your own. Not know­ing their names is really what pro­voked this thought to begin with.

Now imag­ine that you could jux­ta­pose a foot­ball team into an office set­ting. No, not like the Terry Tate Reebok Com­mer­cial. You would have your stars, whose names you knew by heart, and you would have your line­men — the unsung heros. The stars would likely fill roles like CEO, VP, the Top Sales Per­son­nel, the CMO, the CFO etc… They would drive the flashy cars, do the inter­views with Busi­ness Week and Time, and enjoy all the spoils of vic­tory. While the line­men would han­dle the less glam­ourous things like cus­tomer ser­vice, admin­is­tra­tion, and infra­struc­ture sup­port. It is the line­men that truly put peo­ple like Troy Aik­man and Emmit Smith in the hall of fame. Don’t get me wrong. Troy and Emmit are incred­i­ble, but there are many incred­i­ble indi­vid­u­als in the NFL. It is a team effort, and to be great takes a dom­i­nant O Line to suc­cess­fully exe­cute each and every play. In an office, the line­men play a big part in deliv­er­ing value to the cus­tomer– silently exe­cut­ing play after play with­out any of the acco­lades or the warm glow of the limelight.

As com­pa­nies con­tinue to down­size, and right­size, and off­shore, and out­source, I ask…Are they in dan­ger of cut­ting that which truly makes them spe­cial, the O Line, while still expect­ing to make it to the hall of fame? Now, if NFL teams were traded like stocks, the super­bowl champ would rarely, if ever, have the high­est stock price. Peo­ple would talk about the great prof­itablity and lean oper­a­tions of the 1990’s Ben­gals, not the exu­ber­ance, extrav­a­gance, and dom­i­na­tion of the Cow­boys. Suc­cess depends largely on how you define it. With­out ques­tion, every team needs to make reg­u­lar changes to remain com­pet­i­tive. You have to keep the best play­ers, and you can only have so many on the team. Still, as you look to raise that stock price yet another dol­lar by slash­ing yet another group of jobs, remem­ber the impor­tance that hav­ing a great O Line makes. Remem­ber the impact of the unsung heroes. They don’t always make the high­light reels and rarely show up as assets on a bal­ance sheet. but they make great play­ers hall of famers. They cre­ate leg­ends. Their impact is far flung and res­onates endlessly-randomly decid­ing to main­fest itself in the groggy, oxygen-starved mind of a novice jog­ger and ama­teur blog­ger like me.

Oh, and if you think you might fit into the role of quar­ter­back, it might serve you well to treat your O Line to some gold watches, or a steak din­ner or at least some Starbucks.