Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Of course we want to win every game, but winning forever is more about realizing your potential and making yourself as good as you can be. Realizing that is a tremendous accomplishment, whether it's in football or in life.
I was the best guy, you know, all through Little League and Pop Warner and that kind of stuff. But when I went to high school, I was undersized. I didn't grow. I was behind the whole puberty cycle. I didn't like high school.
You do what you have to do to compete, and that takes you to places where you are in a relentless state to find an edge and compete. That mentality keeps you on and on point. The how is following the drive, being resourceful and creative.
I'm talking about: Are we competing today, every minute, in everything we do in practice. Are we letting loose and daring to be great here and now? And can we sustain that? And repeat it. Trophies are great, but we're trying to win forever.
One of my favorite guys was Ronnie Lott. I had and have such tremendous respect for him that when I finally got a chance to coach him, I couldn't get enough of uncovering and understanding what made him tick and what made him be who he was.
I would say that we have to explore and find ways to make our game a better game and take care of our players in whatever way possible. Regardless of what other stigmas might be involved, we have to do this because the world of medicine is doing this.
Recruiting is the lifeblood of any program, so you can't put anything above that, ... But it wouldn't matter who you had here if you didn't have the right mental attitude and work ethic. You need all those elements to come together to do something like we are doing.
I'm telling you what I'm telling you. I will go wherever I have to go, listen to whoever I have to listen to. Whether it's a player or it's a coach. Whether it's a corporate leader, a political leader or it's the guy sitting on the corner. It doesn't matter to me; I'm on, I'll go wherever.
It's not that you're not smart anymore; it's that you're unwilling to do it. Coaches who coach know what I'm talking about. You just keep battling to help your coaches and your players, to refine your scheme, to break down your opponent, to find ways to travel and take care of your players.
We're not going to do anything different for this game since we're not treating this game any different than another game. Every game is a championship game for us, so we'll treat this one, the last one and the next one exactly the same. And that goes for our practices leading up to it as well.
I really admire the job that not just coach Belichick has done but that Robert Kraft and his family have done, and the decisions that they made to let Bill do what he's capable of doing. I think it's a great illustration of a way to structure an NFL organization when you let the coach really run the thing.
Dancers work and they work and they work, and they master their skills so far that improvisation just comes flowing out of them. Their natural expression of the best they can possibly be comes out of them because there is no boundary to hold them back... That's the mentality that I'm trying to create, recreate and hold on to forever.
I think that drive to fight the fight day in and day out, I think that can go away. You can lose that. As long as you continue to be consumed and overwhelmed with the desire to get better and find another way and keep competing to figure out what you can do to help make this guy be better than he was a day ago, as long as that's there, I don't agree.
We've lost a lot of coaches around here, but the philosophy and the approach, the standards we have set and the expectations we have maintained have always been upheld from one year to the next.I attribute that to the great character of the players and the willingness of the coaches to not get influenced and get off-message and to get out of the way.
I learned a tremendous amount about what was important to me as a head coach in that I was not in charge. I didn't have final say about what was going on, and I was always having to represent other people's views, and it was very difficult to be real, to be authentic, to be true because there were a number of people who had say about what was going on.
Our philosophy doesn't change. We're always competing. But the ways to approach it and the ways to make that up and make it available to our players, there's no end to that. That's why the thought is that you're either competing or you're not, and that's why I'm learning and searching and trying to transfer information to our coaches and to our players.
I had no plan for that year but it wound up being one of the most important years of my football coaching career. It hit me along the way that I needed to really get at the heart of what's really true to myself. And then I was able to mold it and shape it in the years at SC to become the approach and the concept and the culture that we try to create here at Seattle.
I’ve learned that possibly the greatest detractor from high performance is fear: fear that you are not prepared, fear that you are in over your head, fear that you are not worthy, and ultimately, fear of failure. If you can eliminate that fear—not through arrogance or just wishing difficulties away, but through hard work and preparation—you will put yourself in an incredibly powerful position to take on the challenges you face.