One of the greatest coaches in college football history died a few weeks ago. You probably didn’t know about it.
John Gagliardi is the all-time winningest coach in college football history. That’s right — more than Nick Saban, Woody Hayes, Bear Bryant, and Joe Paterno. During his six-decade career, he won 75 percent of his games, 30 division championships, and four national titles, mostly at Division-III St. John’s University in Minnesota. (The coach who preceded him in the job said, “Nobody can win at St. John’s.”)
Gagliardi did this while:
- Never yelling at players
- Never using a whistle during practice
- Never cutting a player
- Never having a playbook and only minimal film study
- Allowing players as many water breaks as they wanted (he started this in 1940s, mind you)
- Limiting practices to no longer than 90 minutes and banning tackling during practices
- Eliminating hazing rituals (again, this man started coaching football during the Roosevelt Administration)
This part of his career is fascinating to me. In the Hollywood version of this type of story, of course it makes sense that the gifted player leads his teammates to victory simply by not doing all of the stuff they don’t like doing. The reality is that usually the stuff teenagers don’t like doing is the exact things they need to practice. Think running wind sprints or, on the academic side, writing and re-writing essays in English class.
Since I’ve spent quite a bit of time attempting to motivate sixteen-year-olds, Gagliardi’s early success is all the more remarkable to me. Usually if you leave teenagers to their own devices, it’s not going to turn out well. Whether it’s a classroom or a team, divisions are likely to emerge and would-be leaders (understandably) don’t yet know how to lead an entire group. Teaching is more a learned skill than an innate one and it takes some years to even achieve proficiency. Gagliardi seems to be the Yo-Yo Ma type of prodigy — gifted at the start, then able to build on early mastery.
The other that strikes me is Gagliardi's instinct for doing obvious things that were 180 degrees from what most of his coaching peers were doing. The thing about never yelling at players really sticks out. A lot of modern research on leadership shows that people are likely to learn more efficiently in a calm environment. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow is worth checking out on this and related topics.)
Findings like that aren't surprising, so it's striking how often coaches and teachers still — on purpose, mind you — yell to make a point. Tell me a time you performed better when someone was screaming at you. Nevertheless, the myth of yelling endures — just tune into your local sports talk radio on pretty much any day. You’ll hear caller after caller say that what really needs to happen to fix ________ team is that the coach essentially just needs to "get tough" — i.e. yell more.
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Another thing about the implications of Gagliardi's lifetime of work is this: Gagliardi plied his craft for decades, won early and often, has a legion of adoring alumni, and seems to have influenced pretty much none of his fellow coaches in any significant way.
Instead, as his career started around the same time as Bear Bryant's and stretched well into Nick Saban's time, the latter two, with their dour demeanors and aggressive-even-by-football-standards approach ("Gotta be more physical!"), are considered the gold standard of football coaching.
This makes me consider: how many other popular assumptions about coaching and teaching are off the mark? Could Bear Bryant had won even more if he hadn't had such brutal practices? If Nick Saban didn't yell, would he be even more successful?
To be more personal: what if some techniques I've been doing most of my career are kind of ineffective and the reason no one notices is that most everyone else's techniques are pretty ineffective, too?
I mean, I think I know some stuff that works. My students have done well by many measures. I don't yell at kids or do a lot of old school stuff. But still. Are there breakthroughs to be had in transferring skills and knowledge to young people?
Is there another John Gagliardi out there?
Instead, as his career started around the same time as Bear Bryant's and stretched well into Nick Saban's time, the latter two, with their dour demeanors and aggressive-even-by-football-standards approach ("Gotta be more physical!"), are considered the gold standard of football coaching.
This makes me consider: how many other popular assumptions about coaching and teaching are off the mark? Could Bear Bryant had won even more if he hadn't had such brutal practices? If Nick Saban didn't yell, would he be even more successful?
To be more personal: what if some techniques I've been doing most of my career are kind of ineffective and the reason no one notices is that most everyone else's techniques are pretty ineffective, too?
I mean, I think I know some stuff that works. My students have done well by many measures. I don't yell at kids or do a lot of old school stuff. But still. Are there breakthroughs to be had in transferring skills and knowledge to young people?
Is there another John Gagliardi out there?
