The People Behind The Most Mind Blowing Innovations in Sports

In the world of sports, change often comes about very slowly. For the majority of coaches and players, their No. 1 goal is to keep their jobs and to continue doing what they love, and thus the idea of doing something outside the norm is quite terrifying.

But there are some who dare to dream, and dare to take the old ways and completely flip them on their heads. The idea of change and innovation is as important in sports as it is in the technology or automotive industries, and has made the games we love what they are today.

Where would football be without Knute Rockne’s forward pass? Or what would baseball look like the suicide squeeze or hit and run? How much poorer would or lives be without Don Nelson creating “Hack-a-Shaq?" Things that we take for granted now had to be ushered into the mainstream by somebody, after all.

Since today is the anniversary of the legendary Rockne’s death, we figured we remember him by taking a look at those whose bold changes have profoundly influenced the world’s most popular games. Here’s a look at the People Behind The Most Mind Blowing Innovations in Sports.

Year: 1894

Leave it to a couple Ivy Leaguers to come up with a baseball innovation. Playing at Yale in 1894, Dutch Carter and George B. Case cooked up a guaranteed way to score a runner from third base without the ball leaving the infield. Eight years later, these forward-thinking fellows saw their "suicide squeeze" debut in the Majors, although they probably didn't care all that much; they had gone on to found the New York law firm White & Case in 1901, a practice which has now grown into one of the world's most respected firms.

Year: 1959

Sometimes, the simplest invention can be the most important. Hockey players are still pretty crazy, but until 1959 the goaltenders played without any protection for their faces, which is really next level nuts. Jacques Plante decided to take a stand against that kind of insanity, starting to use a mask to protect his face after getting his nose broken and face cut up by a slapshot. Soon thereafter, all goaltenders began to see the wisdom in keeping their faces relatively safe, and obviously this is a technology that has managed to stick around through the years.

Year: 1975

While the Tampa 2 defense bears the name of the Buccaneers' home city (and was popularized by the team in the late 1990s and early 2000s), Tony Dungy has freely admitted that he lifted the strategy from his time playing under Chuck Noll and Bud Carson with the Pittsburgh Steelers in 1975. The idea is a pretty simple one, but is predicated on having a talented and intelligent middle linebacker; the linebacker simply reads the play at the snap, and when he sees pass he drops back into coverage. It may seem simple, but the Bucs rode it to a Super Bowl title and one of the top defensive rankings in the NFL for the better part of a decade.

Year: 1924

Jimmy Hogan's story is a fascinating one, as he used his tactical innovations to become a legend in European football rather than his native England. He coached in numerous countries, including the Netherlands, Austria, Hungary, France, Switzerland, and Germany before finally making his way home to England, and all along the way preached the idea of possessing the ball with short passes rather than playing the direct, end-to-end style that was the British trademark.

Largely dismissed in England, Hogan's doctrine became a staple of the European game as his former players became the coaches that shaped future generations of players.

Year: 1960s

While the crossover dribble has been used for many years in basketball, the first known person to use it on the national stage was Oscar Robertson. But he took it from Rucker Park legend Pee Wee Kirkland. In the documentary Doin' It In the Park talks about this. If it weren't for a life of crime Kirkland would be in the Basketball Hall of Fame.

Year: 1997

While the Wildcat formation was invented by Billy Ford and Ryan Wilson, it was Kansas State coach Bill Synder who made it popular in the late 1990s as he utilized the many talents of quarterback Michael Bishop to confound opposing defenses. It became the blueprint on the college level for quarterbacks like Tim Tebow, and in the NFL it came into vogue after the Miami Dolphins used it to dismantle the New England Patriots in Week 3 of the 2008 season.

The Dolphins scored five touchdowns on six plays using the wildcat, starting a trend that is still popular on all levels today.

Year: 1950s

In the 1970s and 1980s, nothing was more fashionable in college football than the wishbone. The brainchild of Charles "Spud" Cason, who was a junior high football coach in Texas just trying to figure out how to make use of his slow fullback. Cason's tactic spread to University of Texas Offensive Coordinator Emory Ballard, who at the time was coaching at a nearby high school. From there, Ballard began to implement the scheme with all his future teams, and it became a fixture with Barry Switzer's highly successful Oklahoma squads in the 1970s and 1980s.

Year: 1941

The abomination known as the four corners offense came into vogue thanks to John McClendon. With no shot clock and looking for a way to stall, McLendon would simply set one of his players up in each corner the offensive half court and let his point guard dribble around aimlessly. Dean Smith took this to the next level, culminating with a nationally televised game in 1982 in which North Carolina held the ball against Virginia for the final 12 minutes of the game.

That offseason, the power conferences all adopted a shot clock and three-point line, which mercifully ended this horrifically boring strategy.

Year: 1999

Who is Michael Taylor? Just a guy playing in a softball league trying to come up with a way to hide his team's slow quarterback. Taylor shared his dilemma with a buddy (and softball teammate) who also happened to be a Division III coach named Tom Kaczkowski, and he suggested lining up the quarterback halfway between the traditional shotgun distance and directly under center. University of Nevada coach Chris Ault soon saw the success of the formation at the lower levels, and with quarterback Colin Kaepernick leading the way made the pistol a staple of modern football.

Year: 1971

While the finer points of the zone blitz have been refined throughout the years—most notably by Dick LeBeau in Pittsburgh during the 1990s—the creator of this now commonplace scheme is former Dolphins' defensive coordinator Bill Arnsparger. In charge of the Dolphins' defense from 1970 to 1974 and again from 1976 to 1984, Arnsparger oversaw an overachieving unit that played in five Super Bowls during his tenure, with two victories and one undefeated season along the way.

The blitz scheme is now used by pretty much every NFL team, and it remains an essential part of LeBeau's defensive playbook.

Year: 1969

Rinus Michels' "Total Football" is such a simple concept that it almost goes without saying at this point that every team strives for it. The idea is a simple one: every player on the field (save for the goalkeeper) should be ready and able to fill the roles of teammates as they move around the field. Each position is a revolving door, with any of the team's 10 field players able to capably fill each spot.

It was pioneered by Michels' highly successful Ajax and Dutch national teams of the 1970s, and in the modern game is used by Barcelona in a more evolved form that emphasizes moving the ball all over the field rather than the players.

Year: 1980s

Yes, we do know who you can blame for one of the many reasons baseball is so incredibly slow. Looking for a bridge from his starter to top reliever Dennis Eckersley, Oakland A's manager Tony La Russa began to toy with the idea of matching up a relief pitcher with one specific hitter in the late 1980s. Righty vs. righty and lefty vs. lefty had not been a thing until that point, but now it has become one of the scourges of the modern game. The teams undoubtedly love it too, because they can sell that much more of everything to restless fans and viewers at home during the innumerable pitching changes every single game.

Year: 1914

It's such a simple concept: cover an area, not one guy. And yet, it took many years of competitive, organized basketball to be played before Frank Lindley introduced the world to the zone defense. Who was Lindley? Just a high school coach from Kansas who dared to think a little differently. It certainly worked well for him, as Lindley's teams compiled a 594–118 record and won 10 state championships.

The zone is now used by teams on pretty much every level of basketball, perhaps most famously by Jim Boeheim and Syracuse University.

Year: 1892

Baseball has been around forever, so it's reasonable to assume its strategies have likewise been in existence since the 1800s. And in some cases (like this one), you'd be right. Before he became the second-winningest manager in the history of Major League Baseball, John McGraw was a player who came up with a tactical maneuver that would become a staple of all levels of baseball for the next century-plus. Playing with Baltimore Orioles, McGraw and his teammate Wee Willie Keeler (sidenote: 1800s-era names are awesome) devised the hit-and-run in part because at the time there was only one umpire, and it would be virtually impossible for him to make a close call on the basepaths while also watching the pitch coming in. Very sneaky.

Year: 1990s

Don Nelson brought Hack-a-Shaq into the modern game, although it actually originated with Wilt Chamberlain back in the 1960s. Wilt was such a bad free-throw shooter that teams would literally chase him around the court trying to foul him, even when he didn't have the ball. This unwatchable game of tag led the league to alter the rule, which now allows any player to take the free-throw and the fouled team to maintain possession.

Nellie first started using it against Dennis Rodman (without success), and then started a trend in 1999 when he began his successful assault on Shaquille O'Neal. So next time a game takes 25 minutes too long, you know who to thank.

Year: 1990s

While Utah Jazz legends John Stockton and Karl Malone did not invent the pick and roll, what they did do was show the basketball watching world that this excruciatingly simple offensive set, when executed properly, was unstoppable. The duo set incredible individual records (Malone is the No. 2 scorer in NBA history, and Stockton is No. 1 all-time in assists), and they also reached two NBA Finals and made the playoffs ever year they played together.

As for the pick and roll, it is now a staple of every team's playbook from the professional level all the way down to elementary school.

Year: 1925

Herbert Chapman is not a very popular name with most modern sports fans, but he is widely held as a pioneer in soccer. Believe it or not, traditional English football was played with just two defenders, with the majority of teams deploying a 2-3-5 formation. Chapman flipped this on its head, putting his Arsenal squad in a 3-4-3 formation that emphasized the counterattack and in the process completely changed the way teams approached the game.

On the strength of their manager's tactical mastery, Arsenal won two league titles and an FA Cup, and Chapman became a club legend in the process.

Year: 1968

If you want to know why Bill Walsh is so revered, compare a tape of modern football with the version that was played in the 1970s and early 1980s. Combined with the Air Coryell system used by the Chargers, the short, horizontal pass-oriented offense changed the way football was played. 49ers' coach Bill Walsh is widely credited with leading the way, as his San Francisco teams won four Super Bowls and altered much of the traditional formula for success in the NFL. Of course, it did help too that Joe Montana was his quarterback too.

Year: 1967

When you're so dominant that a league changes its rules to avoid you completely ruining everybody else, you know you're legit. Such was the case of Lew Alcindor (or Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, as he is now known), who after his first year on the varsity squad at UCLA saw the NCAA change the rules to ban all dunking from college games. That's what happens when you're 7'2" and essentially unstoppable in the paint; you just stuff it in the hoop every time. While this change probably helped Alcindor by allowing him to develop other parts of his game, it also thrust dunking into the limelight and made it a more commonly accepted part of basketball when it was finally reinstated by the NCAA in 1976.

Year: 1915

It's kind of unfathomable now to think of football without the forward pass, but until 1906 it was straight up banned in professional football. When they powers that be decided too many people were dying on the field, though, they had the sense to make it legal. It didn't really come into fashion until 1913, when upstart Notre Dame assistant coach Knute Rockne decided to make it a central part of his offensive gameplan. He developed plays over the summer with fellow coach Gus Dorais while the pair was working as lifeguards at a lake in Ohio (seriously), and when the Irish had success using it to beat a much bigger Army squad that season it became a part of the college game forever more.