The Big Takeaway
Load management isn’t just about playing guys less. It’s about asking why they can’t play more—and whether your programming is solving that problem or just working around it. Two undefeated teams, two opposite strategies. One prioritized rest. The other prioritized availability.
Indiana—the team with no five-star recruits, the team Vegas didn’t favor, the team that ran a full game’s worth of more plays—went 16-0 and won the national championship. They didn’t need to rest because they had athletes at Point B who could sustain the full season.
Load management is a programming problem.
And this past college football season just gave us the clearest case study we could ask for.
Ohio State and Indiana both finished the regular season undefeated. Both have highly competent staffs. Both intended to win the college football playoff. But they got there with opposite strategies — and now we know how it played out. Indiana beat Ohio State 13–10 in the Big Ten Championship, then ran through Alabama 38–3, Oregon 56–22, and Miami 27–21 to finish 16–0 and win the national title. The availability strategy won.
What We Cover in This Episode
Ohio State’s load management strategy. OSU is intentionally slowing the pace of play to preserve players. Ohio State averaged 62.4 plays per game this season. By the end of the regular season, the Buckeyes will have run 86.4 fewer plays than Indiana—essentially one full game fewer. They also ran 128 fewer plays than Georgia and 74 fewer than Texas A&M. The strategy is clear: pace the season, build in a bye week’s worth of rest through play-calling alone. Fresh legs for the playoff run.
Indiana’s availability strategy. Indiana is number one on the availability tracker—meaning they have more of their top players available more frequently than any other team in the country. And they’re doing it while running significantly more plays. Their metric isn’t fewer snaps. It’s: if you’re available, you’re playing.
Two strategies, same goal—one outcome. Both teams were trying to win. But one managed load by reducing exposure. The other managed load by keeping players healthy enough to sustain full exposure. Indiana’s approach—availability first—carried them to a perfect 16-0 season and the program’s first national championship in history. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a fundamentally different programming philosophy proving itself on the biggest stage.
The real question: Why aren’t they available? If Ohio State needs to pull starters to keep them fresh, the question isn’t whether that’s a good strategy. The question is: why can’t those athletes sustain 12 games at full volume? The answer lies within the athlete—which means it lies within the program and environment. That’s a training and programming problem, not a play-calling problem.
The Usain Bolt principle. Louie Simmons used to say that when you watched Usain Bolt run, what you were actually seeing was Bolt maintaining his acceleration while everyone else slowed down relative to him. Now stretch that over a football season. Performance enhancement isn’t always about getting faster or stronger—sometimes it’s about getting to a level and being able to maintain it while everyone else declines.
This shows up on film. There’s a point in every season where you start to see guys who maybe couldn’t have started early on now playing really good football. Not because they got better—but because they stayed the same while everyone else decreased. Bubble guys. Late-round picks. Now they’ve won a job. The best ability is availability.
The youth sports parallel. The same principle applies at every level. When you have a young athlete who has two days a week for training outside of practice and games, the goal isn’t to chase numbers in the gym. It’s to maintain what they have so they’re constantly available for the next game or practice. You can only generate the emergent behaviors of the sport by playing it. That means you need iterations at the level of competition—which means you need to be available to get those iterations.
Load is a maxim in the Absolute strategy. In the FRS Internal Strength Model and the Art & Science of Programming learning module, load is one of the maxims that constrains intensity. Load determines how you sequence treatment and training. And understanding load from the field—dynamic, chaotic loading—informs how you load clinically, which is predominantly static. That’s why this matters beyond just football. It’s a programming principle.
Key Concepts
