Nick Saban MISC quotes

-“If your stud makes isn’t going hard or screws up an assignment, don’t run and hide because he can run 4.4 and he’s a future 1st rounder. The best players are the guys you better confront because if the studs are doing it right, you won’t have any other problems.”
-“You can’t have a good program if you don’t work to dominate your opponent.”
-“We’re 42 hours away and for the next 42 hours I want you thinking about one thing: we’re going to beat their ass.”
-“He doesn’t obsess over national championships, he obsesses over trying to push people to be better. He thinks if he can do that, the wins will come.”
-“You don’t dominate someone the first play, you do it the 70th play. You need to sustain.”
-“Make all your decisions based on winning.” (#1 thing Saban learned from Chuck Knoll)
-“The problem with young players is that they’re so sensitive. They get upset every time you say something to them. We’re not evaluating you when we correct you, it’s called teaching.”
-“What’s going to Florida’s passion? What’s going to be LSU’s passion? Tennessee’s? Ours’? That’s what will determine what is going to happen—passion, purpose in what we want to do, what we want to accomplish.”
-Locker room sign: “Don’t Come Back Until You’ve Improved”
-“Be relentless in the pursuit of your goal and resilient in the face of bad luck and adversity.”
-“The one thing our program is based upon is finishing. Finish games. Finish your reps. Finish your running. Finish practice strong. Finish the fourth quarter.” –Alabama OL Will Vlachos
-“Don’t look at the scoreboard. Whether you’re ahead or behind shouldn’t affect how you participate.”
-“What I would like for every football team to do that we play is to sit there and say ‘I hate playing against these guys. Their effort, their toughness, relentless resiliency, go out every play and focus, play the next play, compete for 60 minutes in the game.”
-Will challenge his players by stopping practice and illustrating a playground game before asking, “Would you pick you? Would you pick you to be on your team?”
-“You must work together before you win together.”
-Chuck Daly’s 24 hour rule: both coaches and players, you celebrate or grieve only for 24 hours then you move on.
-Body language: “What are you selling?”
-3 I’s: Intelligence, Immediacy, Intensity
-“There’s a difference between wanting something and being committed to it.”
-“Practice wasn’t as bad as I acted, but it’s a good thing they *the players+ think it was.”
-“You don’t get what you want, you get what you deserve. YOU REAP WHAT YOU SOW.”
-“I think it’s an identity that we’ve always tried to create. Be aggressive, physical, play with a lot of toughness. Strike them, knock them back. Be aggressive and relentless in your style of how you play and how you compete.”
-“It was such a pivotal game because that was the first game in which our guys sensed that if they put in the buy in and do it the right way, they could accomplish significant things.”
-“Teaching is the ability to inspire learning.”

Nick Saban on Intangibles and the 4 finger salute

-“I think that intangibles are probably really important to being a good competitor and I think most people who have passion for something as important to them is what gets them to commit to something, and your mind kind of does whatever you tell it to do. So once you have the passion and the commitment, at least you’re going to be moving in the right direction when it comes to work ethic, discipline, trying to make good choices about what you do and what you don’t do. The effort, the toughness and the discipline to execute are probably the key ingredients to any sport…I think those part of your character and who you are, and I think the same ingredients would be necessary to be successful in anything.”

-“There are 3 intangibles that take no athletic ability that aids a player in being responsible for his own self-determination. Those 3 intangibles take the most time in coaching in my opinion. Those intangibles are effort, toughness, and assignment.”

-“I think the things that it takes to be successful are the same regardless, whether it’s passion, commitment, hard work, investing your time in the right things, perseverance, pride in performance, how you think in a positive and negative way, the discipline you have personally—you have to make choices in your decisions.”


FOUR FINGER SALUTE
The four-finger salute held up by UA football players at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Each finger stands for discipline, commitment, effort, and toughness. The thumb is pride.

Nick Saban on Mental Toughness

-“Mental toughness is a perserverance that you have when you can make yourself do something that you really don’t feel like doing. You don’t really feel like getting up, but you get up. You don’t feel like practicing today, but you practice. And, even in difficult circumstances and difficult surroundings, you can stay focused on what you need to stay focused on. So it really is a mental discipline to be able to stick within whatever circumstance you are in and continue to persevere at a high level and not let other circumstance affect how you perform.”
-“You make a choice in playing a play as hard as you can or not. It’s a choice- are you going to run 10 yards as fast as you can or not?”
-“I will not allow my players to put their hand on their knees or show in their faces they are tired going into the fourth quarter. If they do, they are going to get their butts whipped. If they do that, they are showing the other team they can be beat.”
-“There’s not one person in this room who feels like doing what we do EVERY SINGLE DAY he wakes up. It’s just not possible, we demand excellence and that’s hard and there will be days you wake up and you don’t feel like doing it. It’s important that you make yourself do it because it’s the path to getting what you want.”
With the help of motivational speaker Kevin Elko, Saban charged the Alabama players with task of putting together a team affirmation—a positive assertion repeated by players to keep them focused on all the small things needed to achieve the long-term goal of a national title.
 TEAM: 100% effort and accountability
 OFFENSE: Be capable of an explosive play on any given snap
 DEFENSE: Never give up an inch
-“The mental toughness training was geared toward showing players that their minds were as important to football success as their bodies.”
-“We often stated to them [Alabama football players] that you could place two athletes side by side at the pro level and the only difference between them is how they think.” –Alabama staffer
-“To wear a player down, everybody wants to play hard in the beginning of the game, it takes a long time to wear a player down, so you have to have a tremendous amount of mental toughness to be able to do that, to sustain it yourself.”
-“The difference between my first 2 Alabama teams wasn’t talent or ability, but the psychological disposition in terms of confidence and believing in themselves—knowing they could do it and FINISH it. There was an expectation that second year that if we did things a certain way, we could beat anyone in the country.”

Nick Saban on motivation

-“We’ve had to live with this loss for 365 days, and we’ll have to live with it for another 365 days if it happens again.”
-“How much capacity do you have for success? How much do you believe in yourself? What do you expect to accomplish?”
-“Big thing you worry about after success is how players will focus on process of improvement and how complacent they will be with what they accomplished.”
-“I don’t care what you did yesterday. If you’re happy with that, you have bigger problems.”
-The power of losing: “Losers are more willing to polish their techniques, to practice hard and do whatever it takes, even into the wee hours, to become the absolute best.”
-“A loss can be a thunderbolt. A tremendous negative that can serve as a turning point.”

Nick Saban on Self Discipline

-“At some point you’re going to suffer through 1 of 2 things: the pain of discipline (because it’s not always easy to be disciplined) or the pain of regret (because you’ll always be disappointed what you accomplished if you didn’t suffer the pain of discipline).”

-“Discipline is to do what you’re supposed to the way it’s supposed to be done.”

-“Everything you do, everything you have, everything you become is ultimately the result of the choices you have made. You have the power to direct your life. How will you use it? What’s your choice?”

-“You have to have discipline to do things on your own. There’s not always going to be someone to make you do it. You have to have discipline to do it yourself.”

-“There’s no easy way. I never said it would be easy. Never said football would be easy, I never said school would be easy. It’s going to be difficult—most things worth having are!”

Nick Saban on Standards

-“I think it’s important that we’re all on the same page, in terms of what we’re doing, how we’re doing it and why it’s important to do it that way. But also the standard of what we all visualize as good, acceptable, that’s going to help us improve, *and with+ growth and development.”
-“You have to challenge people to do things a certain way and it may be more than what they expect from themselves. You have to re-enforce positive performance when they do it, but you also have to confront them to do it correctly if they don’t do it that way. And there’s a balance in there.”
-“Are you defining what you expect? If I walked up to them and asked ‘what does the coach expect you to do here?’ Would he be able to answer? Is what you expect from them defined? How they act, how they dress, the 3 technique…”
-“Everybody has to be accountable to a standard and the question is ‘what is everyone doing to impact the success? What is the standard, both individually and collectively?”

Nick Saban-Four Components of Leadership

Engage: You HAVE to make it about them because they don’t see it like we do. Get over it, youth have changed.

 Inspire: Why does every coach think that everyone wants to be great? Human condition is to survive, to be average. IT IS SPECIAL TO WANT TO BE GREAT. You cannot expect your kids to want to be great. We’ve had success here at Alabama because we don’t assume people want to be great and we’ve put a system in place that makes it uncomfortable unless they’re choosing the path that will make them great. We don’t assume they will do it on their own. It’s up to us to inspire/put a system in place to make people want it.

Influence: Thoughts, Habits, Priorities. Influence these 3 (IN THAT ORDER!)

Impact: How do we impact them? How do they impact each other? Peer intervention + peer pressure.

Nick Saban on coaching

“In college, I coached everyone the same way. When I got to the pros and Art Modell would come check out my DB drills to make sure his bonus babies were playing I realized that if I couldn’t reach
Everson Wells the way I coached, it was me that needed to change because he was playing regardless-whether I was the DB coach or it was the guy they brought in after I was fired for not playing Art Modell’s bonus babies. Whether he back-pedaled the way I wanted or not, he’s going to play. You can’t coach everyone the same way. Ask yourself: ‘How can I reach him?”

Nick Saban on Culture

CULTURE:
-“We don’t have one individual on our team that can make our team great, but we can have one individual who could destroy the team chemistry by making bad decisions and destroy all the things we’re talking about.”

-“Team chemistry begins to surface in the summer. True leaders start to emerge. You start to see the core buy-in that everybody has in terms of how they go about what they do. For the first time, the responsibility becomes theirs instead of somebody else’s. You start to see what the team might be.”

-“It’s almost like you’re being brainwashed into, ‘This is how you play the game, how it has to be,” Peek said. “Those stories, those messages, and how that relates to us are reiterated by the coaches.”

-“I don’t want sheeps. I don’t want guys that need to be led.”

-“No man stands so tall as when he stoops to help someone out.”

-“He does an outstanding job of getting everybody on the same page and making sure that they understand ‘Look, you’re going to buy in or you’re going to become irrelevant.”

-“You’ve got to be responsible and accountable and be able to do your job. There’s a way you have to do it in terms of the effort, the toughness and the intangibles and dependability you have and discipline you have in carrying out your responsibility. And I, quite frankly, think when you have a critical mass of players on your team that think like that, they don’t really want other guys that don’t think that way to be out there with them.”

Nick Saban Quotes on Process

 One of my favorite coaches is Nick Saban, he is a master motivator and a guy that simply understands how to lead people.  Here are some of his quotes:

-“Focus on the process of what it takes to be successful.”
-“We’re not going to talk about what we’re going to accomplish, we’re going to talk about how we’re going to do it.”
-“We don’t talk about winning championships, we talk about being champions.”
-“I’m tired of hearing all this talk from people who don’t understand the process of hard work—like little kids in the back seat asking ‘Are we there yet?’ Get where you’re going 1 mile-marker at a time.”
-“It’s the stages you have to go through to be successful.” –Alabama OL coach J. Pendry
-“The scoreboard has nothing to do with the process. Each possession you look across at the opponent and commit yourself to dominate that person. It’s about individuals dominating the individuals they’re playing against. If you can do this…if you can focus on the one possession and wipe out the distractions…then you will be satisfied with the result.”
-“He says ‘the grind’ a lot. The things you have to do so you can do what you want to do. Like play for the national championship. All the workouts. Spring ball. All the practices, summer workouts, and things like that.” –Alabama LB E. Anders
-“Focus on the play like it has a history and a life of its own.”
-“Success doesn’t come from pie-in-the-sky thinking. It’s the result of consciously doing something each day that will add to your overall excellence.”
-“You can’t get from A to Z by passing up B.”
-There’s no mention of titles. Instead, his message has been that the way to win a championship is to concentrate on what you’re doing today, and try to build on that tomorrow.
-“It’s not the end result. Don’t think about winning the SEC Championship. Don’t think about the national championship. Think about what you needed to do in this drill, on this play, in this moment. That’s the process: Let’s think about what we can do today, the task at hand.”
-“One thing we need to do differently in motivating players and helping them be successful is not to talk about results. Our goal next year is to be a dominant football team.”
-“The process of our 2004 national title began 400 days earlier with a loss to Arkansas. Every second of that process led us to a championship.”
-“If you don’t get result-oriented with the kids, you can focus on the things in the process that are important to them being successful.”

Nick Saban process

The scoreboard has nothing to do with the process. Each possession you look across at the opponent and commit yourself to dominate that person. It’s about individuals dominating the individuals they’re playing against. If you can do this…if you can focus on the one possession and wipe out the distractions…then you will be satisfied with the result.

Quotes on The Process

I apologize for the long break I took from my blog.  I will once again be posting blog posts on a more regular basis.  My first 1 back is on some quotes that deal with taking care of the process.  Quoted are Nick Saban (Alabama), Derek Dooley (Tennessee), and Jimbo Fisher (FSU)
"Process-oriented thinking as opposed to outcome-oriented thinking: Some times you want to win so fast you don't know how to win. Our goal is to get the structure of the staff and the support and resources in place to facilitate a winning plan and get players into the structure and start affecting change now." Jimbo Fisher

"I don't think it's normal to be great. I think it's special. The human condition is to be average and to survive. And everybody assumes that everybody wants to be as good as they can be all the time, but that's not true. If that was the case, everybody would be doing fantastic out there, right? So it's special to be as good as you can be. It's special to work to reach your full potential. It's special to go do it every day, day-in and day-out and never give yourself a break."
Nick Saban

"(One) thing that's important that we do is start developing our brand of how we compete and how we play. We shouldn't ever lose sight of that. I'm talking not just schematically, but more so from an intangible standpoint -- what kind of competitive spirit we practice and play with. What's our discipline level? What's our toughness level What's our effort level on every play?"
Derek Dooley

"Everybody has got to ask themselves what they've got to do to get better, but I think the message to the team was 'Wherever you are, make a commitment to try and improve and raise the standard of how you can execute to help your unit and our team, how you can improve yourself, in terms of the effort that you give, the toughness that you play with and the ability to execute."
Nick Saban

"I would really like players to have more positive thoughts about practice, have fun in practice, look forward to how they can improve in practice, and how we can play better in games, have more positive thoughts rather than the difficulty of it all." Nick Saban

"We can all change. We can all learn. That's what separates guys -- the ability to learn and process information. We're not a very situation-smart football team. That's why we constantly put them in (situations) and educate them as to what to do." Jimbo FIsher

"I think it's important that your team become situationally smart -- trying to understand what the offense is thinking on second-and-10; playing the strengths and playing the weaknesses on third downs." Derek Dooley

"Everybody here can be replaced; coaches, players -- everybody. Stick your hand in a bucket of water and pull it out. The hole that's left is how much people will miss you, at any job."
Jimbo Fisher

"You hope the surprises are more the guys who really maybe didn't flash in shorts but now they're showing up (at practice) because of their toughness and because of their explosive power. That shows up more in pads -- especially up front in the trenches. That's really what you're looking at." Derek Dooley

My theory is if we're not coaching it, we're letting it happen." Nick Saban

Leadership Thoughts--Nick Saban

This past week I finished How Good Do You Want To Be by Nick Saban.  It is a book I really enjoyed and one that I would recommend.

One of the major themes throughout was focusing on the process instead of the results. It is not a new concept to me personally, but one that I find really interesting.  It is very easy to talk about conference championships, national tournaments, and national titles.  However, any competitive person in sports should not have to be motivated about these things.  Below I have some quotes and thoughts from the book.





-There 5 goals for the National Championship Season (At LSU)
1.Be a team-Together Everyone Accomplishes More
2.  Work to Dominate Your Opponents
3.  Positively affect our Teammates
4.Individual Responsibility for self Determination
5. Be Champions on and off the field

• It's not about having the best players--it's about being relentless in the pursuit of your goal and resilient in the face of bad luck and adversity.
• We simply focused on the process of being champions
• An opponent should never determine your level of competitive spirit (A new personal favorite of mine)
• We are responsible for what we create, not the other team.
• Do not look at the scoreboard--dominate for 60 minutes
• Champions take an attitude of dominance everywhere they go.
• Our commitment, character, conviction, and attitude allowed us to do what we needed to do as a team to achieve at the highest level.
• 3 foundations for building a championship team in sports and business: Developing a good product, knowing the competition, TEAMWORK.
• 5 core values: Discipline, commitment, Toughness, Effort, Pride
• Climb the mountain, but watch your step