From Gladwell’s David and Goliath:

A regulation basketball court is ninety-four feet long. Most of the time, a team would defend only about twenty-four feet of that, conceding the other seventy feet. Occasionally teams played a full-court press—that is, they contested their opponent’s attempt to advance the ball up the court. But they did it for only a few minutes at a time. It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played, Ranadivé thought, and that conspiracy had the effect of widening the gap between good teams and weak teams. Good teams, after all, had players who were tall and could dribble and shoot well; they could crisply execute their carefully prepared plays in their opponent’s end. Why, then, did weak teams play in a way that made it easy for good teams to do the very things that they were so good at?

Ranadivé looked at his girls. Morgan and Julia were serious basketball players. But Nicky, Angela, Dani, Holly, Annika, and his own daughter, Anjali, had never played the game before. They weren’t all that tall. They couldn’t shoot. They weren’t particularly adept at dribbling. They were not the sort who played pickup games at the playground every evening. Ranadivé lives in Menlo Park, in the heart of California’s Silicon Valley. His team was made up of, as Ranadivé put it, “little blond girls.” These were the daughters of nerds and computer programmers. They worked on science projects and read long and complicated books and dreamed about growing up to be marine biologists. Ranadivé knew that if they played the conventional way—if they let their opponents dribble the ball up the court without opposition—they would almost certainly lose to the girls for whom basketball was a passion. Ranadivé had come to America as a seventeen-year-old with fifty dollars in his pocket. He was not one to accept losing easily. His second principle, then, was that his team would play a real full-court press—every game, all the time. The team ended up at the national championships. “It was really random,” Anjali Ranadivé said. “I mean, my father had never played basketball before.”

From Brafman’s Sway:

The most flattering way to describe the Gator [football] team upon Spurrier’s arrival in 1990 was as a “fixer-upper.” The team had never won a conference title; in fact, it was on probation because of allegations of rule violations by the team’s former coach.

… Spurrier’s most important move was to identify a weak spot in the strategy employed by his opponents. For year the teams in the conference had adhered to a “war of attrition” game strategy: they called conservative plays and held on to the ball for as long as they could, hoping to win a defensive battle…

… Spurrier came to dominate the conference by… introducing what he called the ‘Fun-n-Gun” approach…

Spurrier mixed things up with a generous helping of “big chance plays, where you got to give your players a shot.” In other words, Spurrier’s team passed more often, played more aggressively, and tried to score more touchdowns.

..Spurrier gained an advantage because the other coaches were focused on trying to avoid a potential loss. Think of what it’s like to be a college football coach. As you walk around town, passing fans offer themselves up as instant experts on the game — never afraid to give you a piece of their minds on what you did wrong in yesterday’s match-up. You make one bad move and you get skewered by fans and commentators alike. Meanwhile, ticcket sale revenues, your school’s alumni fundraising, and your job all depend heavily on the football team’s success. All of that pressure adds up… the losses loom large…

You’d have thought that after losing a few games to a team like [the Gators]… the [other] coaches would have reevaluated their war-of-attrition model. But they didn’t. And so Spurrier and his Gators continued to dominate former powerhouses like Alabama, Tennessee, and Auburn. Over the next six years, the coach and his team went on to win four division titles, culminating in the national championship.