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“O-Ring Theory? Piece of cake” says Cowboys fan Devin Dehoyos, 10, of San Antonio.
Harvard-Professor Michael Kremer developed the O-Ring-Theory in part based on the 1986 Challenger disaster. The O-Ring, worth a couple of bucks at most, was defective and caused the explosion of a multimillion dollar spacecraft and the loss of seven lives.

The O-Ring Theory in essence postulates that in otherwise equal production processes, the worst input factor (or ‘weakest link’) will determine the overall quality level of the final product.

Henning Voepel from the World Economic Institute in Hamburg, Germany, reapplied the theory to team sports and found that like in the economic theory, the weakest player on a team (the ‘weak link’) determines the overall quality of a team. To judge the true quality of a team, you can’t simply add up the quality of the individual players, you actually have to multiply it in order to adequately account for the impact a of weaker player. Based on these findings, he developed the Zidane Clustering Theorem. Named after the former French international soccer player Zinedine Zidane, the theorem argues that a balanced distribution of quality across all players is always better for a team.

Let’s see if and how this could apply to the NFL and to the Dallas Cowboys.

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