Gridiron Genius

Psychologist Angela Duckworth conducted a study in her book Grit, which found that the factor most predictive of whether a pledge would endure at West Point was mental toughness. No surprise when Bill Belichick finally became a head coach in Cleveland, he was on the lookout for players with that same characteristic, to particularly lead the special teams unit. 

From the beginning, Belichick has been a master at developing toughness. In my book Gridiron Genius, I talk about one of Belichick’s first acts as head coach was to have a hill built beside the indoor facility in Ohio, to hone the players' bodies and minds alike. Much like the hard-core training for Navy SEALs candidates, the hill was a test of determination. If players can fight past exhaustion, if they can focus when they're completely drained, well, that's mental toughness. It's easier to commit penalties and to take plays off when you're exhausted. There was no fooling the hill. Today in New England, there are two hills. The point was always to be able to disqualify players who could not handle the mental challenge before they saw real action and fell short when it mattered most. If you can't make it through the training, you can't be a SEAL. In Belichick's case, if players couldn't handle the hill, they couldn't play on Sunday.

Belichick isn't the first coach I saw use special teams to change the broader culture. When Kansas State hired Bill Snyder to be its head coach in 1989, the program was among the worst in college football. Snyder took over a program that had gone 27 games without a win. In the fifty-three years before his arrival, the Wildcats won a total of 137 games. A couple of years earlier, I had sat in the Manhattan, Kansas stands watching practice as a San Francisco 49ers scout. I wondered if anyone could ever have success there. And then Snyder put up 136 wins in 17 seasons. He won many of those games with a wide-open offense and by taking advantage of the instant upgrades that junior college transfers offered.

But it was from the kicking game that Bill Snyder concocted that all-important, all-in atmosphere. Just recently, Snyder shared with me that he knew to go into the project of turning around Kansas State would mean developing tough-minded players. He also knew that excelling in the kicking game was something all coaches said they wanted but rarely spent the effort to achieve. Snyder walked the walk from the beginning, devoting as much practice time to the kicking game unit as to the other phases. Snyder still boasts about how much time he has spent on the kicking game. There is no magic pill to any of it; it's merely a matter of time spent and the head coach's level of attention. Bill Snyder once said, "You think about the number of repetitions in the course of a ballgame that you get in some aspect of special teams, and it is pretty substantial, so it deserves the time you invest in it." When Snyder landed in Kansas, he was determined to make starters play on special teams because that was how he was going to create what I call the "tornado effect." 

 "All-in" teams are, in fact, a bit like tornadoes. Different energies that band together into a single destructive force and cut down everything in its path. The greatest example of this concept is the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team. Coach Herb Brooks didn't collect the best hockey players in America for his squad. Instead, he found the right players. To help assemble the roster, Brooks, a psychology major, gave each prospect a lengthy test, from which he was looking for high scores in three areas: open-mindedness, willingness to learn and coachability. Coach Herb Brooks felt those interrelated qualities would allow him to build a team that could overcome the significant talent gap the team would confront as college kids playing against the best teams across the globe.

Duckworth, Belichick, Snyder, and Brooks all recognize the importance of developing a robust culture of mental toughness in health, sports, business, and life. Understand that mental toughness is the ability to see the bright side of a hopeless situation.

Adversity is always an experience, not a final act.

Gridiron Genius: A Master Class in Building Teams and Winning at the Highest Level is now available in paperback!

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