There’s an article that I come back to every once in a while for big picture purposes. It’s almost a decade old and has nothing directly to do with football, but its application is evergreen. Really, it’s just a line from it.
You gain more by not being stupid, than you do by being smart.
Or to put it another way, being really smart is hard. Being not dumb is considerably easier, and has great benefits. It raises your floor, reduces your mistakes, and makes it hard for the opposition to beat you by capitalizing on your mistakes.