The Two Pyramids

Two pyramids frame this show. In the pilot, Coach Beard reads Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid, a history of how football tactics migrated the point of attack from the front of a formation to the back. In Ted’s office hangs a framed copy of John Wooden’s Pyramid of Success, the basketball coach’s chart that stacks fifteen virtues from a base of industriousness and enthusiasm up to a single apex of competitive greatness. A diagram that inverts, set against a diagram that only ascends. The difference between them is the difference between the show’s two ideas of how a person or a team gets better.

The surface reading takes the two books as coaching influences, and they are that. Jason Sudeikis has spoken about Wooden’s chart, and the Wilson title is a real bestseller about real tactical history. But both objects do the same deeper work under different labels. Each is a picture of how something reaches upward toward a goal, and each makes a claim about what the ascent requires. The interesting question is not which coach the show admires. It is whether the way up is a fixed ladder or a shape that can turn over.

Wooden’s pyramid is often mistaken for a chart of achievement, when its actual argument is about sequence. Competitive greatness sits at the top, but a player reaches it only after industriousness, friendship, loyalty, cooperation, self-control, and poise are already in place lower down. The popular version of Maslow’s hierarchy makes the same claim, and Maslow himself never drew a pyramid. The shape was added later, through management writing, not by Maslow, whose 1943 paper sets out the sequence without ever drawing it. What survived the mistranslation is the sequencing claim, that safety and belonging have to be met before esteem and self-actualization become available at all.

Richmond behaves as if this sequence were literal. The team wins nothing of consequence until the locker room becomes a place where players can be afraid out loud, where a striker can weep after a match and a captain can admit he is lost. The football improves after the base is secured, not before. Read against Wooden and against the textbook Maslow, Ted’s first season is not a story about tactics failing to produce results. It is a story about a coach refusing to chase the apex before the foundation exists, and absorbing the cost of that refusal in the standings while he builds the lower tiers no one can see.

Wilson’s book supplies the counterweight. Inverting the Pyramid documents a century in which the attacking spearhead of early formations drifted backward until defense and midfield organized the modern game. The point that once led now anchors. Beard reading this on the plane is a small joke and a thesis at once, because the season that follows keeps inverting its own hierarchies. The kit man becomes a coach. The owner hires a manager to lose and is undone by his winning. The star striker learns from the aging defender he once mocked for being old. Authority does not flow reliably downward from the top of the chart. It relocates.

Wilson’s century of tactical history demonstrates at scale what Gestalt psychology names precisely. When the organizing figure of a pattern shifts, everything else in the field reorganizes around its new position. The same eleven positions, arranged around a different point of emphasis, constitute a different game. What a team can do is decided less by its individual parts than by the figure those parts are arranged around, and the figure can be moved.

Wooden supplies the base, the insistence that character and safety come first and cannot be skipped. Wilson supplies the top, the insistence that once the base is secure, the roles above it should be free to move. A rigid pyramid holds its shape and cannot adapt. A pyramid that has learned to invert keeps its foundation and lets everything above it rotate. That combination, a fixed base and a fluid apex, is the exact structure the team will later name Total Football, and the two diagrams in the first episodes are the theory of it before the team has the language.

The man reading Wilson on the plane and the man whose office holds Wooden’s chart are not in tension with each other. That is the detail the pilot handles in plain sight. Beard chose a book that inverts everything above its base, Ted a chart that builds toward a single apex, and from the first scene they share, neither looks troubled by the difference. Two coaches, two frameworks, no anxiety between them about which theory is right. The conflict is structural, not personal, and a structural conflict does not require a winner. It requires a form that can hold both shapes at once.

A book on a lap and a framed chart on a wall. Whatever the two pyramids require of a group, these two are going to find out.