A while ago, I was at a dinner with a club chairman, and he asked me about the consistent traits that I’d observed in elite coaches.

I think he was expecting me to answer along the typical lines: great motivator, hard working, organized.

But that’s not what came to mind.

“Neuroticism,” I said.

“The job sends you a little bit bonkers,” I added, before silence befell the room. He didn’t ask me any more questions after that.

I’ve found that you have to be a little bit crazy to be a head coach, but once you’re in the job you end up closer to certifiably crazy. In this line of work, calm people start jumping at shadows, small obsessions start becoming big ones, and odd quirks start turning into full-blown superstitions.

Which is why I appreciated former UNC Tar Heels basketball coach Roy Williams writing about his coaching superstitions in his book.

In 1982, while Williams was still the assistant coach with UNC, the Final Four was held in New Orleans. One of the food vendors on Bourbon Street told him that it was good luck to spit in the Mississippi River, so every day he’d walk down to the waterfront and spit into the river.

North Carolina went on to win the national championship, so anytime his teams played along the Mississippi he continued the tradition.

(Having Michael Jordan and James Worthy on the 1982 team might helped the winning part, but who knows…?)

Here are some others Williams writes about:

• Before every home game at Kansas, he’d go for a jog, stop at Phog Allen’s gravesite, pat the headstone and say, “Doc, we need all the help we can get tonight.”

• If it was a particularly big game, he’d do the same thing at Dr. James Naismith’s gravesite as well.

• He never got a haircut on the day of the game.

• If he wore a tie for the first time and the team lost, he’d never wear the tie again.

• He had to nap before every game.

Of his funny list of superstitions, Williams writes: “Common sense tells me that the result of a basketball game does not depend on whether or not I got a haircut that day, but it settles my mind to think that I have done something to help us win. As a coach, I feel really limited about how much I can affect the game. I just want to say I’ve done my part.”

I’m all for it.

If it helps settle your mind to put your right sock on first, kiss the grass, eat coco puffs for breakfast and wear lucky underwear, I’d urge you to go for it.

Our objective is to be more human, and superstitions are deeply human. If you have them, lean in!

And besides, do we really know that it wasn’t Williams spitting in the Mississippi River that won UNC the 1982 national championship?

Crysencio Summerville did everything right:

• He placed the ball on the penalty spot.

• Walked to the top of his run.

• Took a few deep breaths.

• When the whistle blew, he paused to breathe again and gather himself.

• Then he ran in, kept his head down, and shot the ball towards the top corner.

The only problem was, the goalkeeper had moved early and was already standing exactly where Summerville shot it.

The goalkeeper, still on two feet, merely raised his left hand and batted the ball away without ever leaving his feet.

Three-quarters of the goal was completely unattended, but Summerville — so fixated on what he was doing — never saw it.

After Summerville’s penalty was saved, Morocco converted their attempt to win the shootout, sending the Dutch home from the World Cup at the Round of 32.

Summerville did everything right, except understand what he was doing.

Orientation vs. Fixation

‘Just focus on the process’ is the modern catch-all, solve-all advice. It’s widely administered as the only thing you need to achieve your goals.

The theory goes that because outcomes are largely uncontrollable, the only thing you can control is executing your process.

And here’s the thing: ‘just focus on the process’ is great advice, until it’s not.

‘Just focus on the process’ is sound advice when the outcome is static — writing an essay, driving off the tee, shooting a free-throw.

However, when the outcome is dependent on co-adaptation between you and an opponent, deep flaws start to emerge in ‘just focus on the process’.

The self-absorption that works for achieving static outcomes all of a sudden becomes a weakness that an opponent can use against you. Like when you have your head down so much that you miss seeing an open goal.

Summerville did everything right, except understand what he was doing. He treated scoring a penalty as a static, one-dimensional effort that only required him to execute a process.

In reality, of course, scoring a penalty is the result of a co-adaptive relationship between the shooter and the goalkeeper. They rely on each other. There’s two combatants, not one.

And the goalkeeper is entitled to read, react, respond, adapt and deceive — which is what he did.

In a weird way, if Summerville had been slightly less process-fixated he might have seen three-quarters of the goal were completely free and unattended.

‘Just focus on the process’ is great advice, until it’s not.

A Return To Orientation

Process-orientation was meant to re-orient us away from goal-fixation and put us on a path towards a healthier relationship with goal attainment. Largely, it has achieved that objective.

However, somewhere along the line, process-orientation also took a nasty turn. It started to become obsessed with itself and has morphed into process-fixation. I’m not sure that process-fixation is any healthier than the goal-fixation we sought to move away from. And it is here where our lesson resides.

We must return to orientation: a word that literally means ‘headed in a direction’. It lacks finality and precise instructions.

A fixation, on the other hand, is an unnaturally strong, persistent preoccupation or attachment to something. It thrives on certainty and precise instructions.

We need to return to process-orientation, and buck our recent trend towards process-fixation. We need to find ways of creating players who can lightly hold a goal and a process in their minds, and still read and react to the game that’s unfolding in front of them.

That’s what presence is!

Process-orientation is what creates adaptable players, and adaptable teams. Let’s head in that direction.

PS: Crysencio Summerville was marvellous last night. He played at a speed and intent that made him a real handful for Morocco’s defenders. He provided the assist for The Netherlands’ goal, and I thought he was one of the standouts of the game. This is not a critique of him or his overall game performance, it is me using an event to help us think differently.

John Tortorella has 777 wins as an NHL head coach; the ninth best record of all-time. He’s a two-time Coach of the Year, and in 2004 guided the Tampa Bay Lightning to the Stanley Cup.

He’s been back in the headlines recently after taking over the Vegas Golden Knights with two weeks left in the season.

It was seen as a panic hire by Vegas, who despite a championship-caliber roster had slumped to third in the division and were flirting with missing the playoffs altogether. In their eight regular season games under Tortorella, the Knights went 7-0-1 and ended up winning their division, before romping to the Stanley Cup Final.

It’s quite the redemption story for a coach who, a year earlier, had himself been fired with two weeks left in the regular season, after his rebuild of the Philadelphia Flyers struggled to take flight.

Asked how he did it, Tortorella had this to say:

“In the short time I’ve been with them, I’ve watched them and listened to them. I’ve learned a ton from them. I think, as coaches, we over-coach. I think we over-coach and we get in the way sometimes. This group, after me being with some younger teams, I learned to have some listening skills when you’re dealing with veteran players. That’s what they brought to me. In the regular season, sometimes you coach at them…during the playoffs you coach with them. So it gave me an opportunity to be with them, and understand what they see.”

He had similar things to say during an NHL Coaches Association webinar earlier in the year as well:

“I think one of the most important points for a head coach is to adapt to his team, not pound your chest and say this is the way we’re doing it. I think you need to look at your personnel, figure out what type of group you have, and mould your philosophy to that. I’ve gone through the process of doing this for so many years, and early-on I was trying to put a square peg into a round hole because I wanted them to play the way I wanted to play. But it’s their game, not our game. We need to mould to them. I think I’ve learned along the way, not to be so stubborn, and my listening skills have gotten better.”

Tortorella’s quotes, given his recent experiences, provide an interesting juxtaposition to us to consider.

In Philadelphia, he coached a young, rebuilding, player development driven team.

In Las Vegas, he coached a mature, contending, performance driven team.

Those situations are wildly different and require vastly different coaching styles.

In Philly, you’d probably want to overcoach, instruct, and educate more.

In Vegas, you’d probably want to undercoach, guide, and reinforce more.

Tortorella himself put it this way: “I think if you coach an older team like you’re developing a young team and go through the same stuff, I think you’re disrespecting the athlete. So I think that’s got to be a read on the coach’s part on how you go about it.”

And just like you don’t coach an older team like a developing team, you don’t coach a developing team like an older team.

The Rush To Redundancy

Tortorella’s quotes lit up social media because his new-age awakening aligns with the popular modern coaching methodologies.

And while I wholeheartedly agree we should aim to coach less, aim to listen more, and aim to mould our playing styles around what our players can do…I also want to add a word of caution here.

A trend I’ve noticed recently is what I call the rush to redundancy. That is, too many coaches taking the phrase ‘make yourself redundant’ too literally.

We seem to be in a rush to the end state of our team, rather than having the end state emerge as a result of many years of good practice, solid teaching, and team maturity.

• I’ve seen young groups without adequate instruction.

• I’ve seen young groups given leadership positions but no leadership development.

• I’ve seen exciting groups peter out because the coaches were so detached from where the team was in their development cycle.

• I’ve seen established groups flame out because they were handed full autonomy over the team culture without any guidance and revision.

This is the rush to redundancy. The idea that you just position yourself at the end state of a team and eventually they’ll figure out how to meet you there. You’re supposed to make yourself redundant at the end, not at the start.

Perhaps this is an unintended consequence of getting to more player-centric environments. Perhaps this is an unintended consequence of everyone reading Legacy. Or perhaps this is an unintended consequence of needing to win immediately due to dwindling tenure.

Whatever it is, it’s not good coaching. It’s an abdication of leadership.

To bring it back to the NHL, there’s 32 teams and realistically there’s maybe four who are genuine contenders.

So there’s four coaches who can play the Tortorella in Vegas role.

For the other 28 coaches, they should be closer to the Tortorella in Philly role.

This is the same equation in most leagues, in most sports. A majority of teams still require a coach who coaches a lot, who helps them win and learn about winning, who isn’t detached from the playing group, who values autonomy but gives it only when they’re ready, who helps them lead themselves but will step in when needed, who stays in the learning environment, who isn’t passive, who teaches, instructs, cajoles, and drives.

We may have an overcoaching problem, but the remedy isn’t to stop coaching altogether.

Over the years, I’ve assembled a list of reflective questions that I ab-so-lutely love.

Initially, these were individual questions that took my notice, but were scribbled in one of the twenty notepads that I have on-the-go at any one time.

As I’ve started to consolidate my notes, I’ve put them in one place and realized these questions pair quite nicely together. Since then, I’ve started using them as an end-of-season reflection exercise for my coaches.

I call them my ‘reflective action questions’ because the intent isn’t to merely reflect, it’s to take action off the back of the reflection.

Here’s the eight questions, and a brief explanation of each:

1. What leadership does this team need from me at this time?

   If you’ve followed me for any duration of time, you’ll know that contextual leadership is at the core of my philosophy, and this question aims to focus that search for context. This team at this time — not another team at another time.

Read more

Over the first ten days of the FIFA World Cup, what has stood out to me has been the teamwork on display.

Two things facilitate this:

1. That collectivism and selflessness are deep-rooted in our countries more than any other group, and;

2. International teams are forced to work together as they cannot buy or import new players to fill gaps.

I’ve been impressed by Switzerland; a team almost unchanged across the whole four-year World Cup cycle. I’ve been impressed by Japan; a mature team with no true superstar. I’ve been impressed with Australia; a young team with mostly second-tier players who took down highly-fancied Turkiÿe.

In an era of individualism and ‘personal brands’ in football, it has been a welcome change to see teams work together. I even saw Kylian Mbappé chase defensively one time!

And that’s meaningful because Mbappé plays for his club football for Real Madrid, whose new coach is José Mourinho — a man who has never wavered from his staunch belief in the team over individuals.

Here’s three separate interview questions that I have collected over the years, where Mourinho outlines how deeply engrained teamship is within his philosophy:

1. Mourinho’s introductory press conference at Chelsea

Journalist: Are there any particular Chelsea players who have really caught your eye, who have impressed you, from what you’ve seen so far?

Mourinho: Yes, I have to say yes. But at the same time I have to say that I am a great defender of the team spirit and teamwork. And the first thing I have to promise to my new players is that I will look at them with the same eyes. I don’t want to have a special relationship with one of them, and in fact I hate to speak about them individually. Players don’t win trophies, teams win trophies.

2. Mourinho’s interview for The Playbook on Netflix

Journalist: You’ve coached some of the biggest stars in the world. Ronaldo, Ibrahimovic, Drogba. People that because of their pure athleticism feel like they can do it their way all of the time…

Mourinho: If you are not able to coach the big players, you are not able to coach anyone. It’s very important for a coach to understand you are not going to teach them how to play football. You are not going to teach Ronaldo how to take a free kick. You are not going to teach Ibra how to control the ball on his chest. You are not going to teach Drogba how to attack at the front post and score in the air. You are going to teach them how to play football…in that team. They are special talents, but without the team, they cannot express everything they have. I always say, I don’t coach football players, I coach football teams.

3. Mourinho’s interview after the 2022 World Cup

Journalist: Were you shocked by Japan’s 2-1 win over Germany at the World Cup?

Mourinho: Of course, it's a fantastic achievement but, to be honest, it was not a crazy surprise. Japan is a good team, has good players, and is getting an accumulation of experience at these events. I think the mentality of the players and the team can also make a difference. At this moment, in European football, there is a big focus on individuals and egos. When I look to Japan’s profile as a people, your profile as a country, the team is the most important thing. People play for the team, they don't play for themselves.

Cody’s Notes

• I know there’s a lot of belief in individual player development in elite sports. And there’s a belief that when we put together a bunch of players who’ve been individually developed that they’ll just figure the teamwork stuff out. But it doesn’t really work that way.

• I also know it’s incredibly difficult to measure a lot of the teamwork and team dynamic that happens within a game. This difficulty in measurement, particularly in a world where you’re not allowed to hold an opinion without an academic paper to back it up, makes it difficult to be steadfast in your belief in the team concept.

• But I’d urge you to consider what more you can do to teach your players to play in a team (beyond individual events like passing the ball). What more can you reinforce with them? What selflessness can you teach them? What can you incentivize that can’t be measured?

Hi — it’s Cody.

My move to Substack is now complete, and you can find the entire back catalogue of Coach Craft here.

While I will continue to publish my free weekly newsletter as usual, I also wanted the ability to write about more expansive and explorative coaching topics.

And so, I’ve added a membership tier to the newsletter. Here’s how it will look:

Free Tier

• Nothing changes. You will continue to receive my weekly Coach Craft newsletter, where I document the wisdom hidden away in coaching autobiographies. For the record: I’ve read 120 out of my list of 244 books, so there’s another couple of years of free content coming.

Membership Tier

• Deep Craft is Cody’s personal newsletter, where I will document what I’m seeing in the field, write about contemporary coaching challenges, investigate new research, and share tools that I use with my clients.

• One of the reasons for me joining Substack was the ability to embed videos right into my newsletters. This allows me to create How-To Videos to cover modern craft topics, or add detail to popular coaching discussions.

• Cody’s Mailbag has always been one of my most popular articles, and now members will have the exclusive ability to ask me questions about coaching, business, books, and more.

• Coach Radio is my return to podcasting, a space I haven’t occupied since Where Others Won’t finished in late 2021. This won’t be a public podcast, however. It will be exclusively available to members. Coming soon.

When I started writing Coach Craft my intent was to give away all of my coaching notes. But as I started to get into a groove of writing about coaching autobiographies, I noticed that my stack of notes weren’t dwindling at all.

If anything, my notes have expanded over the last two years. Expanding beyond the weekly written newsletter is one way I can get those notes to you faster.

If that sounds interesting to you, there are three new member-only posts up:

1. Agree To Disagree: my 5-step process to solve arguments

2. The Kroenke Question: the one thing you should ask the owner before taking a job

3. The No Excuses List: how to guarantee you stay active on road trips

I have more to give, so this is my new space to give it all to you.

Subscribe now

One of the most significant challenges that head coaches face is the ability to remain active during the season.

It’s not through lack of ambition. Most of the coaches I work have a plan to stay activ…

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There’s a famous scene in All or Nothing where three games into the season, Arsenal sit dead last in the Premier League.

They’d lost all three games, hadn’t scored a goal, and had conceded nine.

The da…

Read more

It goes understated how much time head coaches spend trying to resolve conflicts within the organization.

As the entourages around players have grown, staff sizes have ballooned, and organizational co…

Read more

I realized recently that I’ve spent years writing about other coaches’ craft, and done very little to explain my own.

I’m not sure why, but I’ve always found it difficult to write about myself. It’s why I loosely narrate in my books and rarely insert myself into storylines.

Similarly, I’ve struggled to include my voice in this newsletter, where Cody’s Notes tending to be my short bullet-point narration at the end of each post.

As I expand this newsletter and provide more offerings, I’m going to push myself to get uncomfortable and share more of my own story.

To understand me, perhaps a good place to start is to outline what I’m not.

• I’m not a psychologist, although I have been called a ‘natural psychologist’ by a prominent practitioner.

• I’m not an academic, although I have been called a ‘PhD without the debt’ by a prominent coaching researcher.

• I’m not a keynote speaker, although I have been called a ‘welcome change of pace from the motivational nonsense’ by a prominent event organizer.

When I’m asked what I do, or how I’d like to be introduced, I say that I’d like to be called a coach. I’m a coach.

I do recognize, however, that part of the reason for the misunderstanding is that I’m a bit of a different thinker. But there’s a perfectly good explanation for that.

To understand why, you really have to understand two things about me: my upbringing, and my life experience.

Part I - My upbringing

At the core of all of my coaching is the fact that I live and breathe sport to a level that, upon reflection, seems highly abnormal. My identity isn’t so much shaped by obsession with one sport as it is interlinked with the whole sporting industry.

Take some of these parts of my upbringing that have shaped me:

1. I was born onto the steps of the Australian Institute of Sport, where as a toddler my mother would take me to watch the athletes prepare for the Olympics.

2. I grew up in the pitlane of V8 Supercars, where at the age of 10 I was able to walk over to former F1 world champion Alan Jones or former MotoGP world champion Wayne Gardiner and ask them questions.

3. I have an aunt who was Arsenal’s receptionist during the 90s Highbury era, and I have an uncle who is in the Socceroos’ greatest ever XI.

4. I completed my grade 10 work experience at Hawthorn Football Club, where I got to cut up film, spot the injured players in the gym, and train with the team in the afternoons.

5. One of my first junior coaches was AFL premiership player Steven Icke, who drip-fed me elements of professionalism even at U13 and U14 level.

There’s a famous line in The Dark Knight Rises where Bane says to Batman, “You merely adopted the dark. I was born in it, molded by it.”

That’s how I feel about sport — I was born into it, molded by it.

It’s most of what I think about every day. It’s all I’ve ever wanted to do. And nothing else has ever come quite so naturally to me.

But on top of my upbringing, I also got extremely lucky. Despite being a highly-talented junior player, I didn’t make it.

That’s the lucky bit — not making it.

Part II - My life experiences

Had I been drafted into the AFL, I would’ve been holding on for dear life. By age 18, my body was already starting to give in, and I probably didn’t have the temperament to carve out a long-term career. While a career as a professional athlete was my singular dream (at the time), my life would’ve taken on a completely different trajectory had I made it.

Instead, I played a couple of seasons of suburban footy with my lifelong best mate. I got a job in the city. I started coaching. I moved overseas. I resolved to push the limits of my own potential.

This added skills and experiences on top of my natural ease within sport:

1. I worked in HR, so I understand contracts and collective bargaining. I worked in sales, so I understand pitching and persuasion. I worked in technology, so I understand user experience design and agile work methodologies.

2. When I moved to Toronto, I didn’t know a soul. I just had two suitcases, the money I’d saved, and a resolve to push the limits of my own potential. (Who you become while travelling was actually my first idea for a book, way back in 2013).

3. While playing suburban footy with my best mate, our assistant coach convinced me to try coaching. He became my coaching mentor, and would spend hours with me at his kitchen table telling me everything he knew.

4. Our first Under 15 team together included three Top 10 draft picks, and six draftees total. What a group. I was hooked.

5. That role opened up opportunities to coach senior men, which opened up a national team role, which connected me to the other national teams, which allowed me to start sharing my coaching ideas — including a full circle moment where I spoke at the Australian Institute of Sport, where I’d hung out as a toddler.

Like most coaches, I have worked diligently on my technical knowledge for nearly 20 years. I’ve built my own weighted statistical models. I’ve tinkered with how to physically prepare athletes for the rigors of the game. I’ve obsessed over details like jersey design, how to accelerate teamwork, how to design the perfect training exercise, and what side of the street the bus should arrive on.

But these technical details are built on and fueled by my upbringing and my life experiences.

As Memphis Grizzles head coach Tuomas Iisalo recently pointed out: “Sport is not its own island that is separated from the human experience.” He says that it’s the fact that coaching is such a holistic endeavour that makes it so enjoyable for him, a sentiment that I share.

Part III: The mission to re-humanize coaching

My stated goal is to be a catalyst of the re-humanization of coaching. I’ve chosen this goal not because it’s some noble or virtuous cause that sounds good in the woke era, but because coaching is not separate from the human experience.

Since it cannot be separated from the human experience, it means that your upbringing and your life experiences count as part of your coaching craft.

You may have fallen for the trap of believing only your technical prowess counts in coaching. That’s certainly the message the industry reinforces.

Somewhere along the line we started making coaches spend years sitting in classrooms and writing academic research in order to amass as many qualifications as possible. What became more important was knowing which peer-reviewed paper referenced a certain technique, rather than making coaches better at coaching.

But take some of these examples that I’ve written down over the years:

• Sir Alex Ferguson credits owning pubs as being a great grounding for him in human nature, managing unpredictability, and public speaking.

• Eddie Jones credits his background as a teacher as being foundational to his pedagogical approach to coaching, and being a substitute PE teacher taught him how to adapt his language to different groups.

• Woody Hayes credits his military experience with shaping his ideas of discipline, teamwork, and game strategy. Hayes captained a submarine and a Navy destroyer in active combat during World War II.

Or, consider former Swansea head coach Luke Williams, who was spotted working at Bristol Airport after being sacked by the football club. Asked why he was wearing a high-vis vest and helping passengers reach their gate on time, he said:

“You can learn a lot from anything that you do. It doesn’t have to be in football. It doesn’t have to be in sport. Pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and doing something completely different, meeting new people, listening to what they say and listening to their gripes. I’m working with a lot of people at the moment who have line managers and it’s really interesting to hear the things that they find difficult about how they’re being managed.”

We need licenses. We need minimum standards of ethics and safety. This is undeniable. But the objective is to develop well-rounded people, because well-rounded peopole become well-rounded coaches. And well-rounded coaches are the ones who change players’ lives.

Isn’t that what we’re trying to do?

So if you have an unusual upbringing or a winding career path, or you’ve worked at an airport or in a phone store…I’d urge you to look deeper at how it has fed your coaching craft.

Don’t disregard gaps in your ‘career’ to do other things. Refuse to treat maternity leave as ‘time away from coaching’. Go and take up a traditional ‘craft’ and see what you learn from doing pottery or woodwork.

We cannot develop well-rounded coaches in a classroom. We have to go out into the world and do stuff. Lots of stuff.

I’ve done lots of stuff, and that’s where my craft comes from.

Earl Weaver is mentioned once in Moneyball.

Here’s what it says:

“Bill James’ analysis was consistent with an approach to the game championed most vocally by the former manager of the Baltimore Orioles, Earl Weaver. Weaver designed his offenses to maximize the chances of a three-run homer. He didn’t bunt, and he had a special taste for guys who got on base and guys who hit home runs. Big ball, as opposed to small ball.”

Now let me tell you the real story — the one Michael Lewis willingly overlooks.

Across two stints as manager of the Orioles (1969-1982, and 1985-1986), Earl Weaver amassed a record of 1,480 wins and 1,060 losses.

Between ‘69 and ‘82, no team in Major League Baseball came within 70 wins of Weaver’s win total over that timespan.

Across the full seventeen seasons of his managerial career, Baltimore won 90+ games eleven times, and 100+ games five times. The Orioles won six division titles, four American League pennants, and won the World Series in 1970.

Since divisional play was introduced in 1969, Weaver’s .583 win percentage is the highest of any manager with over 1,000 wins.

And he did it by being the first manager in baseball to use data aggressively.

Not only did Weaver intuitively arrive at many of the same approaches to the game as the Moneyball-era Oakland Athletics, he also pre-empted many of the current-era approaches too.

In his book — which came out 20 years before Moneyball — Weaver explains his penchant for statistical analysis and how it fed his competitive drive.

“From the day I took over the Orioles I wanted all the statistical information I could get,” he writes. “Maybe I wouldn’t use everything, but I wanted to see it. I believe that what you don’t know can hurt you and that you can never know enough.”

Weaver built a systematic matchup database which would tell him how his batters had fared against each pitcher, and how his pitchers had fared against the opponent’s batters. “On the day of a game the first thing I did when I arrived at the park was to examine the sheet showing how our hitters performed against that night’s starting pitcher,” Weaver writes.

Pitching First

“When people ask me to simplify my approach to baseball,” Weaver writes, “I often reply that the way to win is with pitching and three-run homers. While everyone knows how much I love the home run, notice that I mention the word pitching first. Pitching is the most important part of the game.

During his tenure with the Orioles, the club had a 20-game winning pitcher for thirteen straight years. In 1971 alone, they had four 20-game winners on their roster. Weaver knew how to both scout and develop pitching talent.

Primarily, he looked for two things: can he throw hard, and can he throw strikes?

To help, Weaver was the first manager to make extensive use of a radar gun. During home games, the Orioles would use the radar gun on their own pitchers to measure velocity, but also look for declines in speed in order to predict tiredness. They would also use the gun on opposition pitchers and relay the velocity to Oriole hitters before they went to the batters box.

(Throwing hard is about as contemporary an approach to pro baseball as you can get, as evidenced by recent events in the MLB)

Runs Win Games

“The home run is my favourite subject,” Weaver writes in his chapter about offense.

“On a home run, nothing can go wrong,” he continues. “You can’t be robbed by a fielder making a great catch or by your baserunner falling down or by someone being thrown out. Why people can’t see that, I’ll never know.”

Weaver’s obsession with home runs wasn’t just because it’s the most exciting play in baseball — although he does acknowledge the entertainment value. Rather, Weaver’s love of the home run is because he loves winning baseball games, and runs win baseball games.

“In my mind, the home run is paramount, because it means instant runs,” he says. “The minute you hit a homer you have a run, no questions asked. With anything else, you aren’t guaranteed a run.”

In Weaver’s first full season managing the Orioles, they scored 779 runs — 200 more than the season before. In his second full season they went even further, scoring 792 runs en route to winning the World Series.

Runs win baseball games — and Earl Weaver knew it 8 years before Bill James had even begun self-publishing his Baseball Abstract.

In particular, Weaver was fond of the three-run home run, and it was this approach that led to people first deciding he was ‘smart’. But he saw it as a fundamental truth of the game rather than his own intelligence.

“The power of the home run is so elementary that I fail to comprehend why people try to outsmart this game in other ways,” he says. “If I were to play a singles hitter in right field, he’d have to hit well over .300 and get on base often to be as valuable as a twenty-five-homer man.”

The Value Of Outs

One of the largest corrections caused by the analytics era in baseball has been the value of an out. In Moneyball, Michael Lewis went to great lengths to describe Oakland’s attempts to change the mindset around throwing away your outs.

Twenty years earlier, Early Weaver was ahead on that, too. He put it this way: “Your most precious possessions on offense are your twenty-seven outs.”

Weaver believed that bunting was rarely worth the trouble, and that for a sacrifice bunt, the clue was in the name: “Sacrifice means you are giving up something. In this instance, you’re giving up an out to the opposition. There are only three an inning, and they should be treasured.”

He held similar views about stolen bases: “In theory, the stolen base is a good weapon, but everything depends on how often it works. For the steal to be worthwhile, the runner should be safe around 75 percent of the time.”

And despite his penchant for big ball over small ball, Weaver recognized the value of the walk: “There is a lot to be said for the base on balls. It isn’t as good as a hit, especially when that hit is a double or a homer, but there are certain guys who can mean a lot to your offense because they draw walks.”

This strategy was underpinned by one of Weaver’s key philosophies of baseball: don’t play for one run unless you know that run is going to win the game. His caveat, though, was that bunts and walks and steals can make sense if you have a player who is truly capable at that skill — like Rickey Henderson with stealing bases.

Building An Aggregate Player

In one of the more famous scenes in the Moneyball movie, Billy Beane and Peter Brand sit with the scouts and try to figure out a strategy to replace three outgoing superstars.

Beane says to his staff: “You’re still trying to replace Jason Giambi, whose on-base percentage was .477. We can’t do it. But what we might be able to do, is recreate him in the aggregate.”

Across the three outgoing superstars, they find that the collective on-base percentage is 1.092.

1.092 divided by three players equals .364.

So the task becomes not to replace Giambi’s .477 (which would be too expensive) but to find three players capable of an on-base percentage of .364 (much cheaper).

Or…as Earl Weaver puts it: “By matching your bench-players’ strengths to your starters’ weaknesses, you can create a ‘player’ of All-Star caliber from spare parts.”

Undervalued Talent

Michael Lewis wants you to believe that YaleBros reinvented baseball. In reality, it was a coach who reinvented baseball.

The real story isn’t that ‘smart’ economics grads from Ivy League schools saw something that the ‘dummies’ in baseball had never thought about.

Rather, the real story is of a high school graduate from a rough part of St. Louis, with a drinking problem and a fiery temper, who used statistics to win more baseball games than anyone else in his era.

Brad Pitt may not play him in a movie, but that doesn’t make Earl Weaver’s story any less Hollywood.

Weaver’s is the ultimate story of uncovering undervalued talent. It’s just that he’s the undervalued talent.

Cody’s Notes

• Here is what Tom Verducci wrote about Earl Weaver in Sports Illustrated in 2009: “Just as Copernicus understood heliocentric cosmology a full century before the invention of the telescope, Weaver understood smart baseball a generation before it was empirically demonstrated.”

• John W. Miller’s recent biography, The Last Manager, rightfully places Weaver back in his rightful position as ‘the grandfather of the modern game’.

PS: if you’re receiving this and you’ve previously unsubscribed from my newsletter, I want to apologize. As I migrated my newsletter from Beehiiv to Substack, my subscriber list pulled over everyone who has ever subscribed. I’ve tried to manually remove the unsubscribers one-by-one, but I’m sure I’ve missed a few. If that’s you: sorry.

“You never blame players when you lose. Never! You take responsibility, as a grown man. You take responsibility. You never throw a player under the bus!”

That was John Calipari at his introductory press conference as head coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks.

Calipari is best known for guiding Kentucky to a national championship in 2012, but he’s also taken UMass and Memphis to the Final 4, and spent two and a half years as head coach of the New Jersey Nets.

His coaching career has been guided by a single rule: Players First.

Calipari’s philosophy has held firm through the ‘one-and-done’ era of college basketball, and is now living through the NIL and transfer portal era too.

Both of these eras have been marked by pressure to adopt more transactional coaching methods as retribution for the fact that athletes can leave at any stage. Plenty of coaches have already caved, throwing their players under the bus after a loss or calling them uncoachable. But Calipari refuses.

“Players First is mostly a watchword for me, for my assistant coaches, and for everyone else connected with my team,” he writes in his book, aptly titled Players First. “It reminds us what our program is all about and it influences every single thing we do — from recruiting to our style of play to my interactions with the NCAA to the amenities in our facilities and locker room, to a hundred other things.”

It’s a philosophy that can be seen, which means it can be seen when it’s not happening as well. Calipari says he’s willing to make this commitment and be held accountable to it because he feels a responsibility to the families who send their kids to him. “I coach for the names on the backs of the jerseys — not just the front,” he writes.

Your commitment to transformational coaching was never contingent upon having player control. And the edict to help players grow was never contingent upon how long they’re with you. As coaches, we’re called to pour everything into our players whether they’re with us for four days, or four years.

On May 10, 2006, Gareth Southgate captained Middlesbrough in the UEFA Cup Final.

On June 7th, 2006, he was announced as Middlesbrough’s new manager.

He didn’t have any coaching experience. He didn’t have a UEFA Pro License. In fact, he didn’t even have a UEFA A license.

And now he’d be in charge of a mid-table Premier League team who’d just made an FA Cup semi final and a European cup final.

It’s quite the origin story.

Despite being a captain throughout his playing career and being quite clear on what he valued as a leader, Southgate found parts of the job especially challenging.

“Here was my problem: I didn’t know what I didn’t know,” Southgate writes in his memoir. He’d played under some of the game’s top coaches like Venables, Eriksson, Keegan, Hoddle, and McClaren, but it turns out Southgate massively over-estimated how much he’d absorbed from observing them.

“From my first day in charge at Middlesbrough, however, it became abundantly clear to me that being a footballer had only exposed me to a fraction of what a manager has to get up to in his working day,” he writes. “The job, it turned out, was multi-disciplinary to a degree that I had barely imagined.”

One area that he writes about in detail is how he struggled with the difficult conversations around selection and deselection.

During his second season in charge, Middlesbrough beat Portsmouth without their suspended captain, George Boateng. Wanting to reward the players for an important victory, Southgate decided to keep his team the same for the next fixture. Despite being club captain, Boateng had lost his spot in the starting lineup.

After consulting his staff, Southgate decided not to address it with Boateng personally, and proceeded to read out the lineup before the final training session. Boateng was fuming. Southgate had created an unnecessary problem, one that would ripple through the squad and affect his personal relationship with Boateng - albeit temporarily. “All because of a conversation I didn’t have,” Southgate writes regretfully.

“I’d always hated having difficult conversations, and I’d always stepped around them when I could. Avoid confrontation, maintain good relations, be the nice guy, stay popular,” he writes. “That had basically been my way of going about things. But that wasn’t going to work, I quickly realized, as a manager. The difficult conversations were now officially on me.”

The Process

The Boateng incident shaped Southgate, and changed how he went about communicating with his players.

“It inspired me to ensure that my communication with players was regular, respectful and thought-through,” he says.

And so, as good coaches do, he made a plan. As Southgate’s career developed and his difficult conversations became more consequential — like leaving England players out of major tournaments — this planning would serve him well.

Part 1: Intent

“Every conversation needs a plan of some sort,” Southgate says. And the first part is to identify what type of conversation you’re having.

• Am I delivering bad news?

• Am I trying to explain a decision?

• Am I trying to make a coaching point to challenge the player?

• Am I trying to make sure a player not in the starting team was motivated and ready to play his part from the bench?

“All of this needed to be carefully considered and strategized in advance,” Southgate says. “I quickly learned that if I turned up for difficult conversations underprepared and without absolute clarity on the conversation’s desired outcome, then I risked coming across as complacent and detached, and was practically bound to make an already bad situation worse.”

Part 2: Message

Once you know what type of difficult conversation you’re having, you can start to script what you’re going to say.

• What do I want to say?

• What do I need to say?

• How is this likely to land?

• How do I want the other person to feel at the end of the meeting?

• What might I need to avoid saying that might cause a bigger issue down the line because I’ve set a precedent or given an explanation that could be used against me?

And as these conversations are never one-way, Southgate would take it another step and began sketching out the dialogue. He writes: “It was so important to me to get it right that I even went as far as writing down the desired flow of the conversation in advance, and mentally rehearsing it in my head, before delivering it to the recipient.”

I’ve not met a coach who doesn’t hate selection and deselection. In is a topic that appears in almost all of the 100+ autobiographies I’ve read for this project. But it being a crappy part of the job doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have a plan and aim to become more skillful at having difficult conversations.

Cody’s Notes

• While this post has focused on selection/deselection, Southgate’s framework is useful for any difficult conversations that appear in the coaching taskscape — of which there are many.

• Having a plan doesn’t mean you’ll even get to have the conversation in the forum that you intend (in-person, for instance). But it’s a good starting point.

• Having a plan doesn’t mean that the conversation is going to go the way you think (a player may lose their cool, for instance), but it’s a good starting point.

• Having a plan doesn’t mean that you’re going to deliver your message in the way that you intend (you may be tired, for instance). But it’s a good starting point.

• One of the key discoveries I’ve made with my craft framework is that coaches need to do a better job at connecting skill to the domain in which that skill plays out. We say things like ‘good communication’ or ‘take risks’ or ‘be brave’ but it’s crucial to understand where those actions are taking place. Am I taking risks with my budget spreadsheet (Organizational Craft) or with my game model (Game Craft). Because the difference matters. What I appreciate about Southgate’s approach to difficult conversations is that it starts to takes this context into account.

• Southgate’s final consideration in Part 2 — where else might this show up or come back to haunt me — is another major discovery from my craft framework. Since all four domains are overlapping and interdependent, you must factor in the impact of your actions on all the other domains, and anticipate the timescale as well. Doing this in advance can help you make smarter decisions.

You’ll be hard-pressed to find another coach who is as universally revered as Dean Smith.

And I’m choosing my words carefully in that categorization. He is not just admired. He is not just respected. He is revered.

Have a listen to how some of the godly figures in coaching spoke about Smith:

John Wooden: “I’ve always said he’s a better teacher of basketball than anyone else. I couldn’t begin to teach players the things Dean has taught them. I’ve admired him because there’s more to him than just wins.”

Bob Knight: “Let me say some things that he won’t say. His being able to win all these games and do it at a single institution, do it through all the years without ever having a problem with any kind of recruiting violation or probation, is a very singular accomplishment in college basketball. It’s indicative of a guy who really knows how to coach and has decided from day one that things are going to be done the absolute right way.”

Mike Krzyzewski: “Dean set the standard for basketball that everyone is still trying to reach. He demanded that his teams play as one. And what he got in return from all these guys who played for him was the intense loyalty that they feel toward him. And that’s something I’ve admired since I started coaching. It’s really one of the great things in all of sport: that intense loyalty the Tar Heel players have for Coach Smith.”

The intense loyalty Smith received from his players was reciprocal.

Upon his death in 2015, his former players started receiving mail from Smith. He had instructed the executor of his will to send a $200 cheque to each of his former players, with a request that they use the money to “enjoy a nice dinner”.

Smith had roughly 180 former players, meaning he’d set aside $36,000 for them.

Part of how Dean Smith developed such deep relationships with his players is detailed in Chapter 17 of his book, The Carolina Way.

“I believed strongly in scheduled one-on-one meetings with our players,” Smith writes. “It was a good way to keep communications open as well as to learn what was going on with them. They also learned in greater detail what I was thinking about their overall college and basketball performance.”

How it was structured:

Meeting 1: when the player arrived on campus to begin the fall semester

Meeting 2: before the start of practice on October 15th

Meeting 3: after the annual blue-white scrimmage game in early November

Meeting 4: mid-December

Meeting 5: midway through the ACC season (early February)

Meeting 6: at the conclusion of the season

These meetings were scheduled in advance, and occurred regardless of what circumstances the player or the team found themselves in.

In essence, each player knew that they were going to get to spend time with Coach Smith every month.

(Remember: these are student-athletes who also had class, homework, social activities, family time, and sometimes other sports to participate in. Setting aside time outside of practice was not an easy task).

“In addition to these scheduled one-on-one meetings, others popped up from time to time on an as-needed basis,” Smith adds. “Also, if a player had a problem he needed to discuss, he could come see me immediately…even if it meant asking the governor of North Carolina to leave the office temporarily.”

Modern athletes are being engaged constantly by a whole whack of coaches, analysts, psychologists, performance staff, and administrators. They get face-time and meetings with lots of people in the environment, but the reality is there’s one person they all crave time with: the head coach. (This isn’t specific to athletes, we all want time with our boss).

Of the content of these meetings, Smith writes:

• “The players knew and honored this one rule about our one-on-one meetings: What was said stayed behind closed doors.”

• “One of our young payers asked to see me to discuss a problem he was having. ‘Coach, I want to break up with my girlfriend. How should I go about it?’ That was not part of the practice plan.”

• “I never conducted the talks in a way that pitted a player against one of his teammates, such as ‘To beat out Jerry, you must…’ That would have been counterproductive to building team play. If playing time was a concern, I told the player to work hard for improvement each day in practice.”

Smith would pre-load his calendar to ensure that these one-on-ones happened, and then he would use the time to deepen his understanding of each player.

“It was up to me to find out the best way to deal with each player on an individual basis,” Smith recalls. “For instance, during my one-on-one meetings with the players I asked each one if it would bother him if I criticized him in front of his teammates. I told him that if it would, I could bring him to the office after practice and do it. Waiting until after practice to criticize wouldn’t have been as effective, of course, but it was an option. I can’t recall any players choosing to do it that way.”

This is how Dean Smith built reverence among his peers. He cared, genuinely, and his actions matched his claims that his players were the most important thing to him.

Asked what he missed the most after retiring, he said: “practice, competitive games, late-game situations, and my relationship with our players.”

Cody’s Notes

• Scheduling regular one-on-one meetings is vastly different to having an ‘open door policy’ where you expect your players to walk into your office when they have a problem. Both are helpful, but they are not the same thing.

• I’ve observed multiple professional environments recently where players reported to me that they’d gone an entire season without having a single sit-down meeting with the head coach.

• Don’t forget: your staff want regular one-on-one meetings with you too!

Paul Brown was such an icon in Ohio that they named a team after him.

After a public vote, Cleveland locals chose to name their new pro football franchise ‘the Browns’ in honour of the coach who’d already delivered four high school national championships, and a college national championship to the state.

While Brown said that coaching Ohio State was the only job that he ever really wanted, ultimately he’d become more recognized for his contributions to pro football.

Here’s a snapshot of just some of the innovations that Paul Brown would introduce to football:

• The modern playbook: he began testing players on their knowledge and using classroom techniques to teach.

• In-helmet communication: he was the first to place a radio in the quarterback’s helmet.

• The coaches’ box: he placed an assistant coach in the press box to collect and communicate information.

• Full-time staff: he was the first to ensure his entire staff were dedicated to football, and didn’t have to work elsewhere to make ends meet in the off-season.

• Breaking the color barrier: he signed two black players, Bill Willis and Marion Motley, in 1946, a year before Jackie Robinson’s MLB debut.

• Stay together to stay together: he required players to stay in a hotel together the evening before home and road games.

• The practice squad: he wanted more players to practice, so had the team owner hire them to work in his taxi company. This is where the term ‘taxi squad’ comes from.

He also invented the face mask, the draw play, the 40-yard dash, and the notion of quarterback pocket.

Now, if you know anything about American Football, that’s already an extraordinary contribution. But we haven’t even touched on how much he won once he got to the pros.

Paul Brown won seven pro football titles — four in the AAFC, three in the NFL — and is tied with George Halas as the most successful coach in history.

In third: Bill Belichick with six titles.

But if you’ve followed this newsletter for any length of time, you’ll know that I look to the great coaches of the past not as legends to be celebrated, but as practitioners to be studied. Craft is rooted in skill developed to a high standard, and this is where Paul Brown becomes a particularly interesting study.

“The proper player-coach relationship is the first commandment in my philosophy of football,” Brown writes in his autobiography, published in 1979. Brown says that during a normal day he spent most of his time with his players: in the training room, in his office, in the locker room. “We’d talk about football situations or about their families because I was interested in them and I wanted them to know it,” he writes.

In each of his 25 seasons in pro football, Brown delivered the same opening lecture to his players on the first day of training camp.

“I never left anything to their imagination; I laid out exactly what I expected from them, how I expected them to act on and off the field and what we expected to accomplish each day of the season,” Brown writes.

He continues, with perhaps the most fascinating passage of his book: “I always told them ‘why’ we asked them to do something. I consider this one of the most important principles of coaching.”

“The word ‘why’ appeared more than any other in our playbook,” he says. “Why we work at running. Why we do our routine warmup daily. Why we take calisthenics. Why we practice our daily drills. When we told our players ‘why,’ they were more willing to accept everything we asked them to do.”

We’ve convinced ourselves that relationships, standards, and explaining the why behind our coaching are all modern coaching principles. We have a misguided perception that we found these things recently, or that we’re ahead of the game if we’re doing them now.

Paul Brown was doing them the year after World War 2 ended.

But wait, there’s more…

On His Camp Philosophy

“I always strived to make life as natural and as pleasant as possible during those few summer weeks. I thought putting a group of men in the wilderness, cutting them off from their families, was a bit unnatural and unfair to them, and to their families. We sent our players home every weekend after a Saturday practice or preseason game, and they didn’t have to report back until Sunday night. I wanted them to keep their families intact, to spend time with their wives and children. Sometimes my wife lived at camp with me because I felt that a woman’s presence lent a certain tone to this kind of existence, and our coaches usually had their wives come and visit on Wednesday and join us for dinner. The coaches could also go home on weekends.”

On The Highlight of Training Camp

“The highlight of training camp was the family picnic. We had games for the kids, and I kept a dish of candy on my desk and a few dimes in my top drawer for the kids to find. All this was an effort on my part to show the players and their wives that we valued their friendship. It also helped foster a warm feeling within the team.”

On Teaching

“In every camp I applied the basic laws of learning — seeing, hearing, writing, then doing again and again. All the players diagrammed the complete play and wrote their individual assignments in their playbooks. We wanted them to know the play’s complete concept, not just their individual parts.”

On Workaholism

“As a coach I never believed in working into the wee hours of the night. I personally functioned and thought more clearly when I was well rested, and I think a coaching staff does, too. I’ve heard some professional coaches brag about working eighteen and twenty hours a day, sleeping on cots in their offices, and I’ve always wondered just how much they really accomplish during all those hours. They must feel insecure because I don’t know any of them who has ever won a world championship.”

All of these quotes are tightly nestled away in just five pages of his autobiography.

Bill Belichick once said of Brown, “I really think of him as the father of professional football. Everything that he did as a coach, 50 years later, everybody is still basically doing the same thing.”

I’m willing to go a step further. Paul Brown is the father of professional sports.

Whether directly observed through him, or absorbed through his proteges like Don Shula, Chuck Noll, Bud Grant, and Bill Walsh, the technical innovations and modern approaches to coaching highlighted in this article have undoubtedly permeated through world sport.

But here’s the troubling part: you can’t even buy Paul Brown’s book directly from Amazon. You have to go through secondary retailers.

That’s how much seepage there is in our coaching wisdom.

All of this is written down for us, documented first-hand by someone who started coaching almost 100 years ago. We rush to write it off as ‘old school’ and it quietly drifts out of the mainstream, into coaching oblivion.

Then we have to hire expensive consultants and academics to come up with ‘new ideas’ to teach the next generation of coaches. And they just come up with ideas that match the ones we already had.

Instead of looking for new ideas, maybe we should be looking for old ideas.

Every other Tuesday for fifteen years, Cori Close would visit John Wooden at his house. On the drive over, she’d stop at Baskin-Robbins to pick up a pint of ice cream — either strawberry or lemon custard.

Close was just a young assistant coach back then, but Wooden took an immediate shine to her because she spelled her name the same way as his great-granddaughter.

Wooden passed away shortly before Close was hired as the head coach of UCLA’s women’s basketball team, but she would use his teachings and mentorship to forge a path that feels eerily similar to the Wizard of Westwood.

It took Wooden sixteen seasons to win his first national championship at UCLA, and Close just guided the Bruins to her first national championship in her fifteenth season.

But underneath the timeframe, there’s deeper similarities that would, no doubt, make Wooden immensely proud.

Throughout the Bruins’ title run, Close used Wooden’s famous Pyramid of Success to guide her team, using it to speak about the types of habits that were going to be necessary to achieve competitive greatness.

“The Pyramid of Success is about character, and I don’t think character ever goes out of style,” Close says.

“One of the biggest gifts Coach Wooden gave me,” Close says, “is that his success validated the way he went about his process. It encouraged me that you can be at the highest levels of excellence and still treat people well, you can hold high standards and not doing it in a demeaning way.”

Close’s principle-centered approach got its own stamp of approval when they beat South Carolina to win the national championship, but was meaningfully validated on WNBA Draft night, when a record six Bruins were selected.

6th overall pick Kiki Rice had this to say on her teammates’ success:

“I think it definitely demonstrates that being a selfless team, that maybe giving up individual stats for team success, that you can win with that formula. You can still be successful. You can win at a high level as a team but you can also achieve individual goals.”

The Bruins had used the word uncommon to describe their way of doing things, and it’s certainly uncommon to hear a modern athlete championing the virtues of selflessness over their personal brand.

Character never goes out of style.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson that Wooden gave to Close, though, was to be herself. In those bi-weekly meetings, she would frequently ask him what he would do in a situation, and Wooden would refuse to answer that way.

“One of the things he would affirm in me,” Close recalls, “is don’t try to do it like anybody else.”

She adds: “I would always say to him ‘What advice would you give me’ or ‘How do I do it like you did’ and he would respond, ‘That’s the wrong question’. He would tell me I’m uniquely wired and gifted to do it the way I’m called to do it.”

Close said that she drew on this memory a lot during the 2026 NCAA Tournament. “It really freed me up to know that I don’t need to be like Dawn Staley or Geno Auriemma or Vic Schaefer, who all have amazing resumes. But it’s okay to do it in the way that I’m uniquely gifted to do it.”

Asked what it will be like to have her championship banner hanging alongside Wooden’s inside Pauley Pavilion, a teary-eyed Close said:

“To be next to him, it’s this pay-it-forward moment to be able to say thank you to him, and I listened!”

Cody’s Notes

• A week before the national championship game, Cori Close said she was considering walking away from coaching due to burnout: “I think it’s harder for coaches now. I’ve never been as tired as I’ve been in the last two years, and it’s made me think how much longer I can do this.”

• She also said that she wants to be part of the solution, rather than just complain, but did have one clear ask: “If there’s one thing I would ask of our governing bodies and the NCAA and our administrations is please develop infrastructure and boundaries that create an opportunity to have sustained excellence and sustainable pace. Otherwise, we are going to continue to lose some of our best coaches, and I do not think our game can afford to do that.”

• I’ve written and spoken about coach burnout for nearly a decade, so my thoughts on it are widely available, but I just want to reiterate this point: here we have the (literal) Second Coming of John Wooden, and we’re going to chase her out of the game because of ham-handed administrators, negligent governance, and greed. This doesn’t seem like a good result for anyone.

At halftime of the 2018 College Football Playoff National Championship Game, Nick Saban walked into the locker room trailing 13–0, and benched his starting quarterback.

At the time, Jalen Hurts was 26–2 as Alabama’s starter. He had personally dragged the Crimson Tide to back-to-back national championship games, but in 30 minutes of football against Georgia he had completed just three of eight passes for 21 yards.

Saban looked at Hurts’ output, looked at a true freshman who had barely played a meaningful snap all season, and made the call.

“I thought Tua would give us a better chance and a spark,” Saban said.

Tua Tagovailoa entered the game in the second half and threw three touchdowns. Alabama won 26–23. The decision is now widely described as the greatest halftime adjustment ever made.

But rather than ascribing the decision to Saban’s individual brilliance, we can dissect it further to see the craftsmanship behind the call.

What The Team Needed

In The Tough Stuff, I wrote this passage:

Being able to read energy might be one of the defining characteristics of the coaches we look to as standouts. Their clairvoyant awareness mixed with their decisiveness to change the plan to suit the needs of the players may indeed be what we ascribe as good coaching.

One of the areas that the great coaches excel is their ability to read teams. Specifically, this team — the one right in front of them right now.

The ability to add or remove stimulus, or conceive of changes that can get them closer to their desired outcome in that moment.

Not: What do I want to happen?

Not: Where did I imagine this team should be by this stage?

Not: What is the right call based on how this team got here?

What does this team need at this time?

Saban looked at an offense that had produced 94 total yards in the first half. He looked at a group of elite skill players, all future NFL stars, who were getting nothing from the game plan as it stood. And he looked at a freshman who had been practicing at full speed all week, whose left-handed delivery the Georgia defense had never prepared for in any meaningful way.

It would have been easier to stay with Hurts. American Football is big on continuity at the quarterback position, and they’re big on earned loyalty. Even for someone of Saban’s stature, if the switch didn’t work he would’ve faced heated criticism for going against those conventions.

But the question still remained: What does this team need at this time?

The answer was Tua.

Sir Alex Ferguson once famously stated, “Some people can make decisions, others cannot. It just doesn’t work if you are congenitally hesitant and allow things to linger in a state of suspension.”

For Saban, there was no hesitation, no lingering. He made the decision.

To outsiders, the decision to swap quarterbacks looked spontaneous. It was anything but. Saban had prepared for this contingency. “We had this in our mind that, if we were struggling offensively, we would give Tua an opportunity,” he said post-game.

Saban had prepared so meticulously that he could ‘coach free’, using his awareness to read the subtle cues on offer from his team.

Cody’s Notes

• Of course, reading your team isn’t just a game craft tactic, it’s an every day strategy. If it’s not the right meeting, change the meeting. If it’s not the right training plan, change the training. If it’s not the right time, change the time.

• I’ve seen head coaches waste a lot of energy sticking with things because they don’t want to undermine their own authority. They’ve invested too much in something to pivot, or they’re scared of how a player will take being removed from the game. But it is good leadership to change course when you come into new information, and the most consistent source of information is the team.

• Winston Churchill once wrote, “the best generals are those who arrive at the results of planning without being tied to plans.” It urges you to do diligent planning, but not be in love with your plan. Adaptability is the best ability for any leader.

To date, the 1972 Miami Dolphins are the only team in NFL history to go undefeated through an entire season.

Their 17-0 season is famous across football, but a detail that tends to get lost is that they also went to the Super Bowl the year before — and the year after.

The Dolphins lost Super Bowl VI to the Dallas Cowboys after the 1971 season, but returned to win back-to-back titles in 1972 and 1973.

Over that three year span, Miami went 44-6-1.

Don Shula would eventually retire as the winningest coach in NFL history, with 347 victories across 33 seasons. He only had two losing seasons.

In his book Everyone’s A Coach, Shula explains that he attributes his level of success to a belief that it was possible to win every single game. He writes: “In my work with the Miami Dolphins over the years, one single vision of perfection has motivated all of my coaching — that’s winning every football game.”

The Moonshot

“I believe that if you don’t seek perfection, you can never reach excellence,” Shula says. “Maybe it was because I regarded an unbeaten NFL season as a possibility that the feat became a reality.”

He’s right. Much like landing on the moon (or Mars) or running a four-minute mile, it is the genuine belief that it’s possible that precedes its execution.

“I’d say that, in the long run, winning coaching has more to do with the coach’s own beliefs,” Shula says. “If you’re going to be a good coach, you may have to set aside temporarily the fascination with game science and look first at what’s true to you.”

Most coaches — especially now — lead with method. The system. The process. The data. This is the game science he mentions. However, Shula is suggesting you lead through belief, and build a system behind it that supports that belief.

He’s not soft on this point.

“Inadequate beliefs are setups for inadequate performance,” Shula argues.

“You won’t be a successful leader if you don’t have a clear idea of what you believe, where you’re headed, and what you’re willing to go to the mat for.”

I’ve seen this happen many times over — coaches stop coaching because they stop believing in what’s possible. They are so obsessed with their system that the only reasonable explanation for it not working is that the players are faulty. They start coaching to an imagined ceiling, instead of an imagined possibility.

But the job is to find a way.

Find a way to connect with that player.
Find a way to draw more potential out of them.
Find a way to drag the team over the wall.

Find a way to keep believing, even if it seems unreasonable right now.

The Rocket

You can dream of the moon all you like, but you also need to build a rocket. This is the execution part that must match up with the belief.

More than just a starry-eyed belief, Don Shula supported his vision of perfection with a set of well-refined coaching principles that would play out over time.

These helped guide his behaviour, add perspective, and ensured he kept striving through the natural ups and downs of an NFL season.

“My coaching beliefs,” he says, “are these…”

1. Keep winning and losing in perspective

2. Lead by example

3. Go for respect over popularity

4. Value character as well as ability

5. Work hard but enjoy what you do

It’s here where you realize that the great craftsmen can hold two things to be true at the same time.

Don Shula both chased the perfect season, and had a first principle of keeping wins and losses in perspective. Those two ideas are often seen as competing with each other. Same with hard work and enjoyment. They’re seen as polar opposites, but Shula sees them as working in concert.

This is how you get a team to repeatedly go back to the Super Bowl, instead of falling off a cliff after delivering the perfect season.

And that’s the point here: the Dolphins went back to the Super Bowl again the season after going 17-0. They reached the moon, and went back for more!

Cody’s Notes

• I’ve knowingly written this post in this way this week. The launch of Artemis II, a mission around the moon, has captivated many, and reinvigorated a long lost sense of discovery that exists deep in humanity.

• What’s fascinating about space exploration of this nature is it is (possibly) the most scientific endeavour we can undertake, and yet it pulls on the deepest elements of our collective souls. We admire the teamwork, the bravery, the possibility.

• Artemis II comes at a time when sports is losing these same elements. Some sports don’t even believe teamwork exists, we discourage coaches from being brave, and we seem determined to exterminate dreams and possibility from sports because they upset the spreadsheets.

• For me, NASA’s mission has reminded us that the best parts of science and humanity can, and should, co-exist.

“As I read it, I was like holy shit!”

Last week, Toronto Blue Jays manager John Schneider returned to his office after an off-season away. With the team’s spring training facility in Florida, Schneider hadn’t been in Toronto for five months.

On his desk sat a letter. It was from four-time NBA champion head coach Steve Kerr.

The letter read:

Dear John,

I don’t know you but I felt compelled to reach out after watching your incredible leadership on display during the World Series. Your poise, your strength, your empathy, and your confidence all shined through in all of the toughest moments. I can see why your players love playing for you. I was just so impressed every time you were interviewed.

Congrats on an incredible season and I’m so sorry for the heartbreak. We lost Game 7 of the ‘16 Finals to Cleveland in similar fashion, and the pain was real. But what always survives through the tough losses is the character and connection of the group. The loss won’t define you, but the way you and your guys carried themselves afterwards will.

Much respect

Steve Kerr

Kerr says he was inspired by a letter he’d received in 2015 from then-Saints head coach Sean Payton.

“I like the idea of coaches supporting coaches. It’s a great profession, but it’s also a hard one,” Kerr says. “I don’t do it all the time, but if I’m moved by someone or a team, then I’ll write a note and send it off.”

It’s a great reminder for us coaches that, despite the fact we’re competitors, that we primarily belong to the coaching community. It is this community that gives us strength, reassurance, and belief. Even when our allegiances sometimes lay elsewhere.

Steve Kerr is a lifelong Dodgers fan — the team that beat Schneider’s Blue Jays in Game 7 of the World Series.

But he wrote the letter anyway.

“There’s something special about an actual handwritten note,” Kerr says. “It’s purposeful and it shows that you didn’t have your secretary write it.”

We often hear stories of coaches who will write hand-written letters to their players, but Steve Kerr has reminded us that — from time to time — we should also take the time to pen a message to coaches that impress us.

Under Jürgen Klopp, Liverpool’s playing style was called ‘rock ‘n roll football’ for its up-tempo, unrelenting style.

Klopp’s game style was set in stark contrast to the intricate ‘classical music’ style of his long-time foe, Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola.

But not only does this comparison undersell the intricacy of good rock ‘n roll music, it gives the impression that Klopp’s work was just all thrashing and headbanging.

Klopp’s assistant coach was Pep Lijnders, who wrote his book Intensity to give us unprecedented insight into Liverpool’s 2021/22 season, and it shows the level of craft required to sit atop Europe’s footballing mountain.

Speed From Constraints

In the pre-season, Liverpool have some teething problems. Lijnders writes, “Jürgen spoke about the ‘new’ ideas like playing the first pass forward.”

Liverpool’s straight-to-goal methodology is lauded, and has generated many replica versions over the years. But it’s often misconstrued as being at its most dangerous because of foot speed on the transition.

In fact, the speed that is most troublesome for a transitioning defense is the speed of action. This is where ‘first pass forward’ or ‘first action forward’ is so brilliant.

By constraining the options available to their players on offensive transition, Liverpool’s entire team had clarity about where the ball was going — forward — and can react quickly to speed up out-of-position defenders.

Conversely, when your players have unlimited options, not only is the on-ball player unsure of what they’re going to do, so are all of their teammates. The difference may only be a fraction of a second, but at the pinnacle of European football, a fraction of a second is an eternity.

Trained Identity

In my Craft of Coaching webinar last week, I spoke of the idea of embedding and embodying — the idea that your coaching philosophy needs to come to life.

This has perhaps never been so visible as in the case of Liverpool.

Lijnders says that it gives him immense pride that his quote is plastered on the wall in big letters at Anfield: ‘Our identity is intensity’.

This wasn’t your typical case of words on the wall. Intensity was embedded and embodied. Intensity was embedded in their training sessions, in every exercise.

“A good team isn’t born – it’s created through many, many exercises focusing on the same aspects time and time again; searching constantly for an intensity so we can go and the opposition can’t. That’s what we wanted: to be able to cause each team problems this season by creating as many speed-up situations as possible. A collective display of intensity, provoke them offensively and cut their connections defensively.”

In a separate passage, Lijnders articulates how he embodied this idea and made it come to life in his coaching.

“Out on the training pitch I made this intensity clear by shouting: Each opportunity we get, we speed up the play with the simplest passes; play quick free-kicks; spot and play; first pass forward; counter-press immediately; quick throw-ins; quick restarts and play on each opportunity in the back of them!”

As many speed-up situations as possible is about as clear as it comes, and these are trained in every phase of the game.

This differs drastically from a lot of coaches who want an embodied identity until that identity causes a player to make a mistake. Then that player is dissuaded from embodying that identity, causing confusion not just for that player, but for every player.

Two Rules To Belong

Lijnders says that Liverpool only really had two rules in training:

1. Always 100% attitude

2. Everyone is responsible for everything

They believed that togetherness and character would provide the glue that would allow them to beat just about anyone on their day. Their collective identity, shaped by repeated belonging cues, unlocked levels of performance that were inaccessible otherwise. “It’s about a strong collective idea which makes the individuals flourish. The team transforms the players, not the players transform the team,” he writes.