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)
He was a coach since age 16 when his high school coach was drafted to serve in World War II. His teammates asked him to coach and he proceeding to eliminate all the parts of practice he hated. He coached his high school team for the next six years with the school paying his tuition at Colorado College.
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.
***
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?
The Tennessee Titans fired their wide receivers and assistant wide receivers coaches today.
I find this interesting and not just because I follow the Titans to a degree that would surprise even most people who know me.
Anyway, NFL position coaches are one of the rare places in high profile sports where the job is mostly about teaching. While most folks don't know who these guys are (sadly and unfairly, most of them are guys), they are likely some of the most highly paid and heavily scrutinized teachers in the country.
(How much of an impact can they have? One of the reasons given for the New England Patriots' successful season is the return of their offensive line coach from retirement. The Patriots offensive line, with pretty much the same players, went from being one of the worst in the league last year to one of the best.)
Their job is mostly focused on people development. There's an aspect of evaluation, too, though actual decisions about which players make up the team more heavily influenced by the scouting staff and general manager (and head coach in some cases). Unlike college coaches, NFL position coaches don't recruit players to a program. Their job is take the players they have and develop their skill set according to the larger vision of the head coach or coordinator.
So, they teach.
This firing raises those questions because the Titans' head coach has been friends with the more senior coach he fired today. The guy actually came out of retirement to coach the wide receivers. It doesn't seem personal. This seems like the head coach had an issue with how he was teaching.
I'm curious as to what actual instruction looks like at an NFL level. How do coaches develop their craft? How do they teach complicated game plans that can change significantly even in-game? How are position coaches evaluated at the end of the year?
I'm pretty sure "Hard Knocks" or any number of "NFL Insider" segments aren't representative of the teaching position coaches do. I would also bet that the people who coach at this level conduct themselves differently from the stereotypical screaming high school football coach.
A few weeks ago, San Antonio Spurs coach Gregg Popovich hinted at the approach one takes with adult, professional athletes.
"No Knute Rockne speeches." (Since I read more sports media than is healthy, I take special pleasure when future Hall of Fame coaches knock down sports cliches.)
While I really don't have an idea what teaching looks like at an NFL or NBA level, it's worth noting that U.S. Soccer hired Teach Like a Champion author Doug Lemov to consult. He's been working high-level coaches across the country to improve how advanced soccer players practice. He reflected in a recent post:
Had a pretty amazing day in Chicago on Wednesday, talking teaching with a group of (mostly) MLS professional soccer coaches who are enrolled in US Soccer’s new Pro License course. The group includes guys who I admire as coaches and who I followed as players. I was a little bit starstruck… but I got over that fast because the conversation was so rich.
Interestingly, we didn’t watch any footage of soccer training. We watched classroom footage and applied the principles to teaching during training.The closest we got to watching “practice” was an amazing video of music teacher John Burmeister (who I’ve written about before) wokring with an upstate New York youth orchestra. His session is a master class on having a clear and specific goal and breaking the session up into rounds of progressive challenge, each with a single piece of feedback to focus on and execute.
The rest of the post is worth reading for its discussion of how to actually run a highly successful practice. One of the things I appreciate about Lemov is how he's evolved his focus to the intricacies of practice, then looked across disciplines -- teaching, music, soccer -- to apply it. (Hell, he wrote a book about it.)
Great teachers run great practices. I wish I could observe more high-level coaches when they're planning and running practice. I bet I'd find quite a few things to apply in my classroom.
This week, researchers reported that they can now image brains to diagnose CTE while people are alive. Previously, the only way to know if CTE caused a person depression, dementia, or suicidal tendencies was through an autopsy. Repeated concussions have been linked CTE.
Ta-Nehisi Coates puts together a damning timeline on the NFL actions regarding concussions. Essentially, league executives have had a reason to suspect for quite some time that players were playing Russian roulette with their post-football lives, yet they told players differently. An excerpt:
2007 - An NFL safety pamphlet notifies players, "Current research with professional athletes has not shown that having more than one or two concussions leads to permanent problems if each injury is managed properly.
2009 - NFL spokesman Greg Aiello acknowledges, "It's quite obvious from the medical research that's been done that concussions can lead to long-term problems,
2009 - The NFL begins to put up posters in locker rooms that state, in part, "Concussions and conditions resulting from repeated brain injury can change your life and your family's life forever."
"This is about Roger Goodell, that fraud, covering his own ass," says former defensive lineman Dave Pear.
In 2007, the NFL was still arguing that concussions wouldn't lead to serious problem? Surely they heard of what happened to these former players two years earlier:
2005 - In June, former Pittsburgh Steelers guard Terry Long commits suicide by drinking antifreeze. Neuropathologist Bennet Omalu later examines Long's brain and concludes he suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
"People with chronic encephalopathy suffer from depression. The major depressive disorder may manifest as suicide attempts. Terry Long committed suicide due to the chronic traumatic encephalopathy due to his long-term play," Dr. Omalu tells the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette "The NFL has been in denial."Steelers neurosurgeon Joseph Maroon says Omalu is employing "fallacious reasoning" saying "I don't think it's plausible at all ... to go back and say that he was depressed from playing in the NFL and that led to his death 14 years later, I think is purely speculative.
2005 - In July the peer-reviewed journal Neurosurgery prints Omalu's autopsy and brain analysis of "Iron" Mike Webster. Omalu concludes that Webster suffered from Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy.
I've enjoyed watching football for a long time, but now every time I see even a highlight on "SportsCenter" I just think about how guys are destroying their brains. Sure, they get glory, celebrity, and big paychecks, but ask the widow and children of Junior Seau if that's a tradeoff they'd make again. Even researchers find that it's only a relatively small number of former players affected, say 10 or 20 percent, it's still too much of a sacrifice for something driven primarily by people wanting something to watch on Sunday afternoons.
And I'm a guy who grew up immersed in Southern football culture. I live a mile away from where the Titans play.
I wonder how many other people are going to start feeling the same way? I mean, with the NFL, we're talking about a $9 billion business and that's without taking into account the massive media industry built around. For that matter, what about the cultural and financial impact of college football?
When I read Seabiscuit, I learned that the major American spectator sports during the Depression were horse racing and boxing. History shows there's nothing guarantees that football will continue to dominate the modern sports landscape.
Given all this, it looks like a Major League Soccer franchise would be a bargain investment.
