On game days Bill never put pressure on us. I never remember him giving us ultimatums or saying something that would make us tight or wouldn’t make us confident about what we were doing. In fact, his other great saying on game day was, “Hey, remember, it isn’t going to go perfect. Don’t worry about it. This game is not about being perfect. Something’s going to go wrong. Just keep going.”
He puts you in a situation where, if he ever says, “You did a good job,” you know it means so much more than that. It’s a proud moment.
Everybody thinks he’s just a curmudgeon and a mean man, but he definitely cares about his players as people. His approach wouldn’t work if he didn’t care. There were times in my career when I would struggle and he would just find the right moment and the right words, and say them to me.
Here’s another Bill Parcells saying: “If you keep pressuring the other team and apply enough pressure to them, eventually they’ll succumb to it.” What that really means is play as hard as you can play, play smart, and just by doing that—never letting up and continuously coming out every round ready to battle and showing no signs of slowing down—sooner or later the other team will say, “They’re never going to quit, so we might as well just get it over with and pack it in.”
Your philosophical beliefs determine whether you win or lose. What you believe in, deep down, as a coach and as an organization, forms and becomes your team. How you dress it up with some of your X’s and O’s and all the cute stuff is the final piece that really gets you over the top to win. However, what you believe in—great physical conditioning, toughness, practicing under pressure—forms the core, because that’s how you’re going to play.
There has to be a master plan. You’re not going to go out on the field on Sunday and be overly aggressive and the roughest and toughest bunch out there if you don’t work on it in practice. No coach can go through a week where it’s always easy, and then all of a sudden say, “All right, men, let’s turn it on.”
Playing aggressively and having that edge is a deep-seated mentality that you can only develop over a long period of time and through constant reinforcement. It’s something you just can’t create overnight. It’s something you have to learn to accept.
Establishing a foundation is the hardest thing for coaches to do. But once you establish what you are, what your team is, what you’re going to be as an organization, the reinforcement kind of takes care of itself. When the newcomers arrive, the coach doesn’t have to sit down and teach then everything because he knows his incumbent players and his organization are going to mold them. You learn quickly what is accepted and not accepted. The coach doesn’t even have to give the newcomers his agenda-setting speech because his other players are going to snap them into shape. They tell them, “For this to work right, for us to win, you’ve got to get in line with the rest of us.”
Everybody needs disciples. You’ve got to have people help you spread your message. You teach the whole group, but really you need the core guys, the ones making a lot of plays for you, to sell your ideas to everybody else.
