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My jaw ticked with frustration. Football was a game of adjustments. Usually, those adjustments came from a set of pre-practiced plays, but if they knew every move we were about to make, maybe that was the wrong approach. Maybe it was time to stop making moves they’d expect.

I stopped pacing. That thought was reckless. Stupid. Every coach I’d ever known would’ve called it irresponsible. There was a reason we spent months building every part of this team, memorizing every play, and practicing every route. Structure won football games.

But structure wasn’t winning this one.

An idea began taking shape, something not scribbled in our playbook and not something we’d practiced. It consisted of fragments of concepts I’d seen over the years, pieces that didn’t belong together but somehow made sense. It wasn’t quite a play—not yet anyway—but it could be.

And damn it, if I was going to lose, I’d rather lose betting on my players than watching someone else read our every move before we could make them.

I scribbled thoughts out on paper, moving my players around left and right. I stacked play upon play until something made sense. X’s became arrows. Arrows became routes. Routes became possibilities. I crossed out half of them almost as quickly as I drew them, my pen scratching rapidly across the paper. If Amarillo expected us to zig, we’d zag. If they keyed off our formation, we’d disguise it. If they expected short plays, we’d make the impossible long one. Every tendency we’d spent weeks building suddenly became something I wanted to weaponize against them.

Lucky for me, football wasn’t all that different from engineering. Every play was a system. Every player was a moving part. Every move was an equation. Change one variable, and the entire outcome shifted.

The trick was to know which variables mattered and which didn’t.

My gaze lifted to the field where Theo jogged back to the huddle. Their linebackers cheated toward the line every time he lined up in the backfield. Their safety rotated before Jude ever snapped the ball. Their defensive end crashed inside every chance he got.

They weren’t reacting to Theo moving at this point. They were anticipating his every play—every play designed specifically to maximize his skill. Good. Their anticipation could be manipulated. At least, I fucking hoped it could. If so, I could use that to my advantage.

I scribbled notes over notes until I found a combination just stupid enough to work. All I had to do was sell the team on it.

“All right, listen up!” I yelled as my offensive players gathered around. “I think we can all agree that what we’re doing out there isn’t working.”

“More like they’re working us over,” Jude muttered.

“We can keep doing what we’re doing, or we can do something so stupid they’ll never see it coming,” I said.

“At this point, I think we’ll try anything,” Ray replied breathlessly.

“Bring on the stupid,” Jude agreed.

“I mean something stupid,” I reiterated. I waved my playbook in the air. “They know every move we’re going to make before we make it. The only way to stop that is—”

“To do something we’ve never done before,” Jude finished for me. He pulled off his helmet, and I felt the full weight of his stare as he considered me. “Do you know how dumb it is to do an on-the-fly play?”

“I do, and I wouldn’t suggest it if I didn’t think the lot of you could pull it off. We’ve worked extensively on team building and trusting each other.”

“Oh, I know we can do it,” he said. “We’ll go out as either really fucking lucky or really fucking stupid.”

A murmur of agreement rolled over them, accompanied by nods.

“All right then,” I said, gesturing for them to come closer, “this is what we’re going to do.”

My coaching staff was pissed as I threw the playbook out the proverbial window. Hale turned more shades of purple than should’ve been humanly possible as I overrode all of his suggestions and did whatever I wanted with the team. I’d smooth it over later—probably.

“It’ll never work,” Hale snapped as he paced the sidelines behind me.

“Maybe,” I answered, my eyes glued to the field. Anxious energy coursed through me. The team was as frustrated with the game as I was, which meant they were easily on board with this plan.

But was it a stupid plan?

That single thought wouldn’t leave me alone. I didn’t care about dealing with the coaching staff—they could go fuck themselves if they weren’t on board with a pivot. But the team? They were trusting me on this, and I didn’t want to let them down.

“It’ll work,” I mumbled more for myself than anyone else. I watched Amarillo shuffle their defense, clearly expecting the same thing we’d shown them all night. Good.

The whistle blew, and Vaughn snapped the ball back to Jude. Before the defense could gain any decent yardage to push us back, Jude dropped to one knee.

Confusion rippled through the defense, and the whistle shrieked.