Say what you want about Twitter these days since a certain entrepreneur took it over, but the medium is still valuable. Jacksonville Jaguars head coach Doug Pederson, one of the NFL’s most creative offensive minds and play-callers, found it easy to verify that as he spoke to the media on Thursday in anticipation of Saturday’s divisional round game against the Kansas City Chiefs.
Pederson was asked during his Thursday presser whether he liked to install new things this late in the season.
“I think you can still be creative this time of year,” he said. “Guys like having creativity. They don’t want the same sort of mundane things, which are good, you’ve got to have them, but at the same time, you still want something fresh and unique and different. Because again, we’re playing a team we played two months ago, so we want to have some things that are fresh and new. They’re going to have stuff that’s new and some wrinkles in there as well.”
Yes, the Jaguars lost 27-17 to the Chiefs in Week 10, but it would appear that Pederson and his staff have been looking at social media for schematic inspiration.
“You do get a lot of stuff off of Twitter. People send you those videos and stuff off of Twitter and YouTube and things like that. A lot of it is just like fan video that might have saw something in a training camp practice. All that stuff gets posted nowadays. That’s the thing about it, everybody has a microphone and a camera. That’s usually the most creative place we find stuff.”
Of course, not everything works at the NFL level.
“You’ve got to be careful because the high school and college rules are different, formationally, than ours, so you’ve got to be a little bit careful there,” Pederson concluded. “You can’t just put a play in and go, ‘Wait a second, the tackle’s got to be covered up somehow,’ to be able to run something. You look at them, and there’s a lot of good ones out there, a lot of creative minds, which is good.”
So, if you’re watching Jaguars–Chiefs on Saturday, and you see something that looks very similar to something you recently posted? It’s entirely possible that you inspired the concept.
