THE APPROACHES OF TWO SUCCESSFUL COACHES

I am often asked with my LSU background what makes Les Miles so successful as coach and my first answer is that he conducts himself in such a manner that his players play extremely hard for him.  That is an oversimplification of it but it's amazing how few teams play hard for their coaches.  There is an art to it and I think Coach Miles masters it. He communicates with them in such a way that they have great respect for him and want to give him their best.  If you observe him during a game on the sideline with his players you can see it.

One example was this quote following last night's 21-0 loss to Alabama in the National Championship game.  Without hesitation Coach Miles took complete responsibility for the loss and took it off the shoulders of his players:

"Give credit to our opponent, they had a great game plan.  I told our team that I did not see it coming, and that's my fault. I don't know that the adjustments we made since Nov. 5 were the right ones."

On the other side of the field was Coach Nick Saban, who I had the honor of learning from while he was at LSU.  There is no one I've met that so fiercly teaches the concept of "process over result" to his team.  He is consumed with it -- thus so is his team. 

Losing to LSU earlier would have been a death nail to many other teams because their goals would've been about winning the SEC West or the SEC title and when they lost to LSU those early goals would've been over.  But at Alabama their goals will be about dominating your opponent on each possession -- has nothing to do with the score or the opponent.

Here are Coach Saban's thoughts on that after the game.

“The goal today was, ‘You control your destiny, you control what you do,’ ” Saban said. “As good as LSU was, (the game) will be determined by how we play and what we do. And I think the players really responded well to that.”