- What Happened at Columbia High School on August 22, 2026?
- What Did I Inherit at Ann Arbor Huron in 2021?
- Why Did Both Programs Have the Same Diagnosis?
- Why Does Roster Size Beat Strategy in a Turnaround?
- What Are Tier One Moves and Why Do 500 Perfect Reps Matter?
- Why Is Turnaround Intensity Multiplicative Instead of Additive?
- Why Did the Opposite Approach Work Just as Well?
- Did Columbia Win Because the Competition Got Easier?
- Why Should You Measure Slope Instead of Score?
- What Should an Operator Do Monday Morning?
- Frequently Asked Questions
- About the Stagnation Assassin
What Happened at Columbia High School on August 22, 2026?
Columbia High School in Huntsville, Alabama ended the longest losing streak in American high school football, 101 games, with a 41 to 14 win over Greensboro. The Eagles trailed 14 to 0 after giving up a pick six on their first offensive snap, then scored 41 unanswered.
Read that sequence again, because the sequence is the whole story. Eleven years without a win. A national film crew on the sideline. The first offensive play of the season goes the other direction for a touchdown. Every psychological mechanism that produced 101 straight losses is now standing on the field wearing your jersey, and it has just been handed the proof it was looking for.
And then 41 unanswered points.
Teams that lose 101 games in a row do not lose because they cannot execute under pressure. They lose because they never built anything that holds when the pressure arrives. What Columbia showed in the second quarter of that game was not resilience, which is a word people use when they do not want to look at the mechanism. It was inventory. They had something in reserve to draw on, and a year earlier they did not.
Head coach Sammie Coates, a former Auburn receiver and third round NFL pick, took the program over for the 2025 season and went 0 and 10 with 28 players on the roster. His last win as head coach before this one was zero. His record at the start of the 2026 season was 0 and 10. By every metric the community, the press, and the scoreboard had available, year one was a total failure.
It was the most productive year the program had in a decade, and this article is about why almost nobody can see that in real time, including the operators living inside it.
What Did I Inherit at Ann Arbor Huron in 2021?
In 2021 I took over a wrestling program at Ann Arbor Huron that had won one match the entire previous season. In a single season we doubled the roster, rebuilt practice around mandatory mastery of five moves, and won the program’s first team trophy at a dual meet tournament.
I want to be precise about the difference, because the difference is the actual lesson and the sports-story version of this article would flatten it into “believe in the kids.”
Coates took a full year in the wilderness on purpose. He absorbed a 0 and 10 season and refused to optimize for the scoreboard while he built something underneath it. I did not have a year. I had one season with a graduating group and a program that was one more empty season away from not fielding a team at all. So I compressed. I broke the single loudest orthodoxy in coaching a demoralized team, and I bet the season on it.
Two operators. Two opposite doctrines. Two turnarounds. Both of us were attacking the exact same variable, and it was not effort.
Why Did Both Programs Have the Same Diagnosis?
Both programs had the same underlying condition: structural calcification expressed as capacity. Neither was primarily a coaching problem, a scheme problem, or an effort problem. Both had degraded below the minimum headcount at which their own system could physically function, which makes every downstream diagnosis wrong until you fix it.
The Stagnation Genome names five genes that kill organizations. Both of these programs scored on the Performance Decline Gene, obviously, and on the Cognitive Blindness Gene, because everyone around a losing program has a confident theory about why it loses and almost all of those theories are about character. But the load bearing gene in both cases was Structural Calcification, and in a football or wrestling program that gene has a very unromantic expression. It shows up as a number on a roster sheet.
Coates named his own constraint out loud before the 2026 season, and it is the single most useful sentence any operator said about either program. He said coaching 28 kids in 6A football is impossible.
Not hard. Impossible.
Think about what 28 players actually means in a sport that fields 11 on each side of the ball. It means most of your starters play both ways. It means you cannot run a live scrimmage, because you do not have two units. It means one injury at a skill position collapses a position group, so you coach scared. It means your practice plan is not a practice plan, it is a rationing document. A coach in that situation is not underperforming his system. He is being asked to run a system that requires inputs he does not have.
I had the wrestling equivalent. A wrestling roster with holes in it forfeits weight classes, and a forfeited weight class is six points to the opponent before anyone shakes hands. You can win every match you actually wrestle and still lose the dual. Worse, you cannot run a real practice room, because wrestling is trained through partners at or near your weight. A thin room means your best kids drill against people they can beat without effort, which is the fastest known method for making a good wrestler worse.
Here is the business translation, and it is more common than the sports version by an order of magnitude.
A business unit takes three rounds of cuts over four years. Each round is defensible in isolation. Nobody ever recalculates whether the operating system still functions at the new headcount, because the operating system is not written down anywhere, it lives in the gaps between people. Then performance degrades and leadership diagnoses an execution problem. They bring in training. They bring in a consultant. They install a new dashboard. They restructure incentives. Every single one of those interventions assumes a capacity problem is a behavior problem, and every single one of them fails, and each failure hardens the belief that the people are the issue.
The 3-S Method exists to prevent exactly this. Sketch reality across all four capacity dimensions before you streamline, and streamline before you solve. Most turnaround leaders skip straight to solve, because solve is where the credit is. Sketch is where the truth is. If your sketch says you are below the threshold at which your own process runs, you do not have an execution problem to fix. You have a denominator to fix, and everything else you do before you fix it is theater performed at high cost.
Why Does Roster Size Beat Strategy in a Turnaround?
Both turnarounds started with the same move: double the roster. Columbia went from 28 players to 60. We doubled the wrestling room by recruiting football players and having them recruit their friends. Capacity was the binding constraint in both programs, and no tactical improvement survives contact with a constraint you have not moved.
How we each did it is where the doctrines split.
My method was mechanical. I did not recruit wrestlers, because there were not any left to recruit. I recruited football players, and then I recruited the recruiters. A football player who joins the wrestling room brings two things that matter more than his takedown ability: he brings a body in a weight class, and he brings a social network of other athletes who will believe him when he says the room is worth showing up to. You are not adding one person. You are adding an acquisition channel. That is the entire play, and it works in business hiring far more often than anyone runs it.
Coates ran the slower version and got the bigger result. His roster tripled its rate of growth on the strength of a culture the kids could see from the outside. He has said plainly that the kids came out because they saw the shift and because the staff showed they actually cared about them. That is not a soft observation. That is a recruiting engine with a twelve month lag, and he chose to eat the lag.
The business version is the part most operators refuse to run.
When a stagnant business unit finally admits it has a capacity problem, the reflex is to open requisitions. Requisitions are slow, expensive, and they import people who have never seen the system work, which means your capacity goes down for two quarters before it goes up. The faster capacity add in almost every stagnant organization is not a hire. It is re-recruiting the people who already work there and have stopped playing.
Every calcified business has them. The engineer who stopped proposing things after the third proposal died in committee. The regional manager who stopped escalating because escalating never produced anything. The plant supervisor who has the answer to your bottleneck and has decided it is not his job to say so anymore. Those people are already trained, already know the system, and already have the network. They are sitting at 20 percent of their available output and the org chart says they are fully staffed.
The Four Position Framework is useful here for a reason that has nothing to do with personality typing. It tells you which seat to fill first, and the answer is not the same for every turnaround. Coates filled the people champion seat first because his binding constraint was supply. He could not get bodies in the building without it. I filled the provocateur seat first, in my own person, because I had one season and my binding constraint was time. Neither of us was right in general. Each of us was reading a different clock.
I inherited a wrestling program that had won one match the entire previous year. We doubled the roster, made every wrestler drill 500 perfect repetitions of five moves before he was allowed to learn a sixth, and won the program’s first team trophy in a single season.
What Are Tier One Moves and Why Do 500 Perfect Reps Matter?
Tier one is the small set of moves that decide most outcomes: single leg, double leg, standup, switch, half nelson. Nobody in my room advanced to tier two pinning combinations until he had completed 500 perfect repetitions of every tier one move. Mastery of the boring set was the entry fee.
I need you to understand how heretical this is inside a losing program, because if you read it as generic fundamentals-are-important content you will miss the entire mechanism.
When you take over a demoralized team, every instinct and every piece of advice pushes you toward giving them something to feel good about. New moves. Exotic setups. A scheme with a name. Variety in practice, because the practices are why they quit last year. The logic is emotional and it is not stupid: give them novelty, novelty produces engagement, engagement produces effort.
We did the opposite. We made practice more boring on purpose, and we made the boring part mandatory.
Here is why it works, and it is not a character argument. It is a structural one.
A wrestling match is not an open field of infinite possibility. It passes through a small number of positions. If you can execute a takedown from neutral, escape from bottom, and turn a man from top, you have covered the positions the match will actually visit. Everything else is decoration on top of those three transactions. A wrestler with five mastered moves does not beat a better opponent by being better. He beats him by being unbeatable in the four or five positions the match has to pass through, and then by owning the position long enough for a tier two pinning combination to land.
That is the part people miss. Tier one mastery is not the alternative to the exciting stuff. Tier one mastery is what creates the position from which the exciting stuff works. My kids pulled upsets against better opponents that season, and they did not do it with clever moves. They did it by arriving at a familiar position with more certainty than the other guy had, and then closing.
The 80/20 Matrix says roughly 20 percent of your inputs drive 80 percent of your value. The recursive version, 80/20 squared, says there is another 80/20 hiding inside that 20 percent, which means roughly 4 percent of your inputs are driving something like 64 percent of your outcome. Five moves is the 4 percent of wrestling. The entire tier system is a mechanism for forcing an organization to find its 4 percent and then refusing to let anyone spend attention anywhere else until it is owned.
Now put a business in the room instead of a wrestler.
A sales organization running eleven plays is running zero plays. Nobody has enough repetitions on any one of them for it to be automatic under pressure, and sales calls are conducted under pressure. A plant with four flagship improvement initiatives has four initiatives at 40 percent completion, which produces exactly nothing, because a 40 percent implemented standard work document is worse than no standard work document. A product roadmap with no tier gate lets your best engineers spend their attention on the interesting problem instead of the load bearing one, every time, because interesting is more fun than load bearing and nobody stops them.
Here is the exercise, and it is genuinely uncomfortable, which is how you know it is the right one. Write down your tier one moves. Not your priorities. Not your strategic pillars. The specific, repeatable, executable actions that decide most of your outcomes. If your list has more than five items on it, you have not found tier one yet. You have written down a list of things you like.
Then answer the harder question. What percentage of your team can execute all five at a standard you would put in front of your best customer, today, without a deck?
If the answer is under half, you do not have a strategy problem. You have 500 reps of work to do, and every strategic initiative you launch before you do it will fail for reasons your post mortem will describe as cultural.
Why Is Turnaround Intensity Multiplicative Instead of Additive?
Turnaround gains multiply rather than add. Activity, efficiency, and focus each carry their own multiplier, and the product moves the outcome. We doubled conditioning, demanded perfect repetitions rather than more repetitions, and gated the curriculum behind mastery. That is why a doubled roster produced far more than double the result.
The Karelin Method takes its name from Aleksandr Karelin, who went undefeated for thirteen years and won three Olympic golds while his competitors studied his technique obsessively and could not close the gap. When pressed on the accusations that followed him, he said he trained every day of his life as they had never trained a day in theirs. Not better technique. Not better genetics. Systematic intensity that produced an advantage his rivals could not match even when they knew exactly what he was doing.
The formula multiplies three factors: activity, efficiency, and focus. Small advantages that would be unremarkable in isolation become overwhelming when they interact.
Look at what we did through that lens.
Doubling the length of conditioning is the activity factor. It is the least interesting of the three and it is the only one most turnaround leaders ever touch, because it is the only one that is visible from outside and the only one that reads as commitment. Every failing organization in the world responds to failure by working more hours. Almost none of them get anything for it.
Demanding perfect repetitions rather than more repetitions is the efficiency factor. This is the one that requires an actual standard, and the standard is what most organizations do not have. A repetition performed sloppily is not a smaller version of a repetition performed correctly. It is a repetition of the wrong thing, which means you are systematically installing the defect. Volume without a standard makes an organization worse at a faster rate.
Gating the curriculum behind mastery is the focus factor, and it is the one nobody will touch. Narrowing feels like retreat. When you are losing, the pressure to broaden is enormous, because breadth looks like effort and looks like hope, and every stakeholder around you is asking what new thing you are going to try. Telling a losing team that they are going to do five things and nothing else, for months, is the least popular sentence available to you, and it is the sentence that carries almost all of the load.
Additive thinking says a 20 percent better roster plus a 20 percent better practice plus a 20 percent narrower focus equals a 60 percent improvement. Multiplicative reality says those factors compound, and the compounding is why a program that won one match wins a team trophy in the same calendar year rather than three years later.
Operators consistently underinvest in focus and overinvest in activity, because activity is legible to everyone watching and focus is not legible to anyone until the results arrive.
Why Did the Opposite Approach Work Just as Well?
Coates did not compress. He absorbed a 0 and 10 season with 28 players and refused to let the scoreboard set his agenda. He said the streak did not bother him; his focus was building the program in the right direction. That is not the doctrine I ran, and the difference is the clock.
There are two coherent ways to run a turnaround, and most operators pick one based on temperament rather than on conditions, which is why so many turnarounds fail for reasons that look like bad luck.
The aggressive doctrine compresses. You concentrate force on a narrow front, you break the orthodoxy that is protecting the current performance, and you produce a visible win fast enough that the organization gets evidence before it gets exhausted. That is what I ran, and I ran it because I had one season and a graduating class. A slow build would have been the correct strategy executed on a clock that did not exist.
The long game doctrine endures. You accept a valley, you build the underlying asset, and you refuse to optimize the visible metric while you do it. That is what Coates ran, and the discipline it takes is genuinely rarer than aggression. Anyone can be intense for a quarter. Very few operators can absorb ten straight public losses, with a documentary crew filming it, while telling a community that the number on the scoreboard is not the thing they should be watching.
The Inheritance Standard is the test that makes that discipline operational: would I be proud to hand this to my successor? Coates was building something for a class that had not arrived yet, and he said as much about seniors who played four years without a win and kept showing up anyway. Every decision he made in 2025 was priced against a season he would not coach until 2026.
Now, the useful part. How do you know which doctrine you are in?
It is not a philosophical question. It is an arithmetic one, and it has three inputs.
How much runway do you have before someone above you or outside you takes the decision out of your hands? How much of your current capability is walking out the door on a known date? And is the asset you would be building actually buildable in the time you have?
If your runway is short, if your talent is expiring, or if the thing you would build takes longer than the time you control, you compress. You concentrate force, you break the orthodoxy that is holding the current result in place, and you buy yourself more clock with a visible win. If your runway is real and the asset compounds, you endure. You take the valley and you refuse to trade the asset for a quarter of optics.
The failure mode in both directions is picking on personality. Aggressive operators compress when they had runway and destroy an asset that would have compounded. Patient operators endure when they had no runway and get replaced in month nine by someone with a worse plan and better timing. The clock picks the doctrine. You just read it.
Did Columbia Win Because the Competition Got Easier?
Partly, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. Columbia moved from Class 6A to Class 5A under Alabama’s new classification structure ahead of this season. The competitive field changed as the program did. Both facts are true, they do not cancel each other, and the second is a strategic lesson rather than an asterisk.
Coates was explicit that coaching 28 players in 6A was impossible. He was not making an excuse. He was describing a mismatch between his resources and his arena, and when the arena changed, a resource level that had been fatal became merely difficult.
Every operator should sit with that, because the business version is the most underused move on the board.
The Right to Win Matrix exists to force the question most leadership teams never ask out loud: are we competing in segments where we can actually win, or are we competing in the segments we have always competed in? Those are different questions, and most organizations have never separated them. They treat their market like an identity rather than a choice, so the only strategic lever they ever pull is trying harder in a fight they have already lost on structural grounds.
Changing which fight you are in is not cheating. It is frequently the highest leverage decision available, and it is almost always cheaper than winning the fight you are currently losing.
My own version was smaller and entirely deliberate. A dual meet tournament is a different arena than an individual bracket tournament. In a dual meet format, a team wins through consistent point production across every weight class, which means depth and reliable execution of a small number of moves matter more than star power. That format rewarded exactly the asset we had spent the season building, and it punished the thing we did not have, which was elite individual talent. Choosing where to compete was not incidental to the trophy. It was part of the plan.
Ask the question honestly at your own company. If the segment you are defending required you to be excellent at things you are structurally not excellent at, would you know? Or would you keep funding the fight because leaving it would feel like an admission?
Why Should You Measure Slope Instead of Score?
A score tells you what already happened. A slope tells you what the machine is doing to the next unit of input. Columbia’s 0 and 10 season was a terrible score attached to an excellent slope: the roster more than doubled and the asset compounded. Every dashboard said failure. The slope was correct.
This is the same error that destroys businesses, and it runs in both directions.
Revenue growth tells you dollars are entering the system. Operating margin tells you what fell out last year. Neither tells you what the machine is doing to the next dollar, which is the only thing that predicts anything. Direction beats level, and it beats it decisively. A 30 percent gross margin climbing 90 basis points a year is a healthier business than a 42 percent gross margin sliding 80 basis points a year, and every conventional dashboard will rank them in the wrong order for as long as it takes for the trend to become the level.
Columbia in 2025 was a High slope business with a catastrophic score. Roster count, retention, and buy in were all moving hard in the right direction while the win column stayed at zero. An operator reading only the score fires that coach. Several districts have.
The mirror image is the one you are more likely to be living inside, and it is considerably more dangerous.
That is the business with a green scoreboard and an inverted slope. Revenue growing above the industry, top line celebrated in every review, and underneath it gross margin compressing while flow through on incremental revenue collapses. Every additional dollar of revenue is making the business structurally worse, and nobody sees it, because the metric everyone watches is the metric that lies longest. That signature has a name in my work, and the reason it is the most dangerous condition in the framework is precisely that everything on the surface reads as winning.
So pick your slope metric before you need it. In a program, it is roster count and retention. In a plant, it is decision velocity and the percentage of the team that can execute the standard unaided. In a business unit, it is what the next incremental dollar of revenue converts into at the operating line.
Then put it on the wall next to the score, and hold it there through the quarter where the score makes you look like a fool. That quarter is coming, and how you behave in it determines whether the asset survives to produce the result.
Columbia’s roster went from 28 players to 60 in a single year while the record stayed at 0 and 10. The score said catastrophe. The slope said the turnaround was already finished. The slope was right, and every dashboard in the building was wrong.
What Should an Operator Do Monday Morning?
Run the diagnosis in order; the order is the mechanism. Capacity before tactics, tier one before tier two, doctrine chosen off the clock rather than off temperament, and one slope metric posted next to the score. Most turnaround failures are not execution failures. They are sequencing failures dressed up as culture problems.
- Score the genome before you touch anything. Name which genes are active and how severely. You cannot aim a framework at a condition you have not diagnosed, and you cannot diagnose one you have decided in advance is a people problem.
- Sketch capacity across all four dimensions. Technical, operational, management, and strategic. If you are below the level at which your own process functions, stop. Every improvement initiative you launch from here fails, and each failure costs you credibility you will need later.
- Fix the denominator before the tactics. Re-recruit the people already inside the building who have stopped playing before you open a single requisition. They are trained, they know the system, and they are the fastest capacity you will ever add.
- Write down your five tier one moves. If the list runs past five, you have not found tier one. Then measure honestly what percentage of your team can execute all five to standard, unaided, today.
- Gate everything else behind them. Publish the gate. Enforce it when it is unpopular, which will be immediately, and hold it when someone senior asks for an exception, which will be shortly after.
- Read your clock, then pick your doctrine. Short runway or expiring talent means compress. Real runway and a compounding asset means endure. Do not pick the one that matches your personality.
- Post one slope metric next to the score. Choose it before the bad quarter arrives, because you will not be able to choose it credibly once you need it.
Columbia’s first offensive play of the 2026 season was a pick six. The worst possible confirmation of the worst possible story, delivered to a group of teenagers who had every historical reason to believe it. What followed was not a new scheme and it was not a speech. It was 41 unanswered points from a program that had spent a full year, at enormous public cost, learning to do ordinary things correctly.
The streak was never the problem. The streak was the receipt.
A good turnaround shortens the version of that story that you are living through. It does not spare you the pick six. Something will go wrong on your first snap, and the organization will read it as proof that nothing has changed. The only thing that answers it is inventory: the boring, gated, unglamorous work you banked in the season when nobody could see any evidence that it was working.
The Harvard Business Review’s treatment of turnaround fundamentals makes a version of this argument in a corporate register, and it is worth reading alongside this one for the contrast in tone. The mechanism is the same. The consultants just charge more for it.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the fastest way to add capacity in a stagnant business?
Re-recruit the people who already work there and have stopped contributing. They are trained, they know the system, and they carry internal networks a new hire will take a year to build. External hiring temporarily reduces capacity before it increases it, which is the opposite of what a turnaround needs in its first two quarters.
How many priorities should a turnaround have?
Five or fewer, and they should be specific executable actions rather than strategic themes. If your list runs longer than five, you have written down things you like rather than the small set that decides most outcomes. Gate everything else behind demonstrated mastery of those five.
How do you know whether to move fast or build slowly in a turnaround?
Read three inputs: how much runway you control before the decision is taken away from you, how much of your capability is expiring on a known date, and whether the asset you would build is buildable in the time you have. Short runway or expiring talent means compress. Real runway and a compounding asset means endure.
Why do improvement initiatives fail in organizations that are already understaffed?
Because they treat a capacity problem as a behavior problem. Training, dashboards, and incentive redesign all assume the system can run at current headcount and that people are choosing not to run it. When the real constraint is capacity, each failed initiative hardens the belief that the people are the issue.
What is the difference between measuring score and measuring slope?
Score reports what already happened. Slope reports what your organization is doing to the next unit of input. A declining business can post an excellent score for several quarters, and a recovering business can post a terrible one. Slope moves first, which is what makes it useful and what makes it uncomfortable.
About the Stagnation Assassin
Todd Hagopian is a Fortune 500 transformation executive who has generated $3B+ in shareholder value across Berkshire Hathaway, Illinois Tool Works, Whirlpool, and JBT Marel, where he serves as VP of Global Product Strategy. Known as The Stagnation Assassin, he is the author of two published books: The Unfair Advantage: Weaponizing the Hypomanic Toolbox and Stagnation Assassin: The Anti-Consultant Manifesto. His blog is published in 15+ languages and read by operators worldwide. Bring him to your stage via his speaking page or connect with him on LinkedIn.
Your organization has five tier one moves. Most leadership teams cannot name them, and the ones who can cannot tell you what percentage of their people execute all five to standard. Book a 15-minute Tier One Audit and we will find yours, then find out who can actually run them. Start here.