This off-season for my series, Summer Scheming ‘25, I’ll be using the Lean Canvas Business Model and Abraham Maslow’s ‘Deviants’ of achievement to demonstrate success and failure as a college football program.
College athletics are a business and that’s never been more evident than in the current state of the FBS. GM’s, NIL deals, million dollar assistant coaches… college football is a business.
In the world of startup businesses, many entrepreneurs use the Lean Canvas Business Model. The LCBM has nine segments but we’re going to combine a few and eliminate some more to get down to a five-segment Lean ‘Canes Business Model.
The Five Segments
The LCanesBM will focus on five segments of success: Problem, Solution, Unique Value (Proposition), Key Metric, and Competitive Advantage.
As you can see above– the Problem category covers one area of “pain” from the year prior. The Solution is going to cover whether or not the program solved that issue, at least on paper, this off-season.
The Unique Value (Proposition) is what is clearly unique about the program that makes it a special place to play football. The Key Metric segment will cover one data point that will show us that the program is finding success (aside from wins, of course).
And the Competitive Advantage is like the Hedgehog Concept from Summer Schemings of old. What can the program do better than anyone else that leads to wins?
Maslow and College Football
The positive and negative deviants comes from Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs research with the Blackfoot Tribe. Maslow found that too many psychologists studied the lower achievers and didn’t focus enough on the people who were highly successful.
We’re going to look at both and compare them to what the program we’re discussing does. Do they replicate the high achievers, low achievers or stay in the middle 80%?
Per Bill Connelly and his early preseason SP+ data, the high achievers are Clemson (11th), Miami (14th) and SMU (18th). The low achievers are Stanford (88th), Wake Forest (83rd), and Virginia (82nd).
A Buzz-worthy Example
Miami and Georgia Tech don’t play in the regular season in 2025. That’s good news for Mario Cristobal who has choked two close games away to Yellow Jackets head coach Brent Key. If we put the Jackets under the spotlight of the LCanesBM we’d come up with:
The Jackets are 46th per Bill C’s preseason SP+ metrics. GT is 26th on offense, 65th on defense and 100th in special teams.
Problem: Defense. Defense. Defense. Geoff Collins never got the defense figured out in Atlanta and Key struggled to as well at first. Andrew Thacker was out and Tyler Santucci was in for 2024.
Solution: Tyler Santucci started the trend in the right direction on defense before being poached by John Harbaugh and the Baltimore Ravens as a position coach. Now it’s a well liked position coach, Blake Gideon from Texas, to take his crack at it.
Photo by Erich Schlegel/Getty Images
Unique Value: Key’s Jackets can out bully ball a more talented pseudo-bully ball program like Miami. They also went toe to toe with rival Georgia in an 8 overtime loss. Tech has cornered the market on controlling the football and possessions for a non-military academy program.
Key Metric: Missed tackles. There’s no way to tank your defensive SP+ and special teams SP+ quite like missing tackles. If GT can clean up their ‘finishing’ on defensive plays they’ll see drastic improvement.
Competitive Advantage: What can GT do better than the rest that drives their success? Control the football. Tech finished 16th in the nation in ‘giveaways per game’ in 2024 with 0.8. In comparison, Miami was 50th with 1.3 per game.
Photo by Steve Limentani/ISI Photos/Getty Images
Deviants: What can GT do that the best teams do? Create more takeaways. Notre Dame, Clemson, Alabama, Texas and Indiana were all in the top-25 for takeaways per game.
GT already avoids this low achieving stat and needs to keep it that way- penalty yards per game. The Jackets finished 23rd in FBS with only 42.6 PYPG. It’s a data point that tripped up some good teams from being great ie. Miami, SMU, Alabama and Tennessee who were all in the bottom-25 in FBS.
The Wrap
This will be the meat and potatoes of the Summer Scheming pieces for 2025 along with my favorite concept/s the teams run, and the Canyonero Keys to Victory for the Miami Hurricanes against the opponent.
Summer Scheming ‘25 will kickoff with a Self-Scout piece on the Hurricanes before running down the schedule starting with Notre Dame and ending with a trip to Pittsburgh to face the Panthers on Thanksgiving weekend.
Put on your shades and drop that umbrella in your drink for the Summer Scheming vibes.