One powerful reason I had a very good feeling about the 2014 team as the season progressed was that our alignment was better than it had been since I arrived at Ohio State.

In order to achieve elite performance, alignment is essential. When a team is aligned, everyone understands and is fully committed to the team’s purpose, culture, and strategy. In an aligned organization, every employee—from the executive suite to the loading dock—understands not only the strategies and goals of the business, but also how their individual contribution matters. An aligned organization gets things done faster and with better results and is more agile and responsive to the competitive environment. Alignment is a key ingredient to elite performance because without it the best strategy in the world cannot be executed.

For Ohio State football, all Nine Units must be operating at maximum capacity and must be in alignment. And it starts with the unit leaders.

In physics, the principle of inertia dictates that objects in motion tend to stay in motion unless acted upon by sufficient energy. This principle holds true for objects that are not in motion as well. Objects at rest tend to stay at rest. Inertia also applies to teams. It requires sufficient energy to get a group of players, and a group of units, to align around a common culture in pursuit of a common goal and to execute a common strategy.

That energy is called leadership.

Each player and each unit is moving in a particular direction. The task of a leader is to provide a center of gravity that exerts a pull—attraction and energy—that aligns the trajectory of every player and every unit. In other words, it’s leadership that gets every player and every unit on the team going in the same direction.

It’s physics.

It’s a nonnegotiable law of nature.

For us to be Nine Strong and operate at maximum capacity requires the right amount of leadership energy. It’s a balance. On one end of the spectrum, if a leader exerts too much energy, too much gravitational pull, he impairs developmental momentum and slows down his players. These are the command-and-control leaders who try to micromanage everything. They are heavy-handed and harsh in the way they deal with players. Often, they create a culture of fear. As a result, they disconnect, discourage, and demotivate players.

On the other end of the spectrum, when a leader exerts too little energy, too little gravitational pull, the players spin off in all kinds of directions. These are the laissez-faire leaders. They don’t demand enough. Their standards are not clear, and they don’t hold their players accountable. They are lenient and soft. They want to be buddies or friends with players. They allow an undisciplined culture.

On either end of the spectrum—too controlling or too permissive—you lose alignment, performance suffers, and we are no longer Nine Units Strong.

As I’ve shared already in this book, we invest heavily in training our unit leaders and our players on how to lead. We don’t leave it to chance. In addition to the training sessions we hold, we are constantly talking about leadership. And please understand, these are purposeful conversations that focus on the impact of leadership on our culture and the performance of our team.

Here’s how you get alignment:

You’d be surprised how rare it is for teams to be in alignment. In twenty-nine years of coaching, I’ve been a part of five teams—coaches, players, and support staff—that have been fully aligned. Twenty-four of them were not, and in each instance, the team underperformed because of it. People’s lives were affected as well. I learned that lesson as a young man and have never forgotten it.

I was on Earle Bruce’s staff at Colorado State for three years, from 1990 through 1992. By the last year, at age twenty-seven, I was making $25,000 per year, with one baby girl already here and Shelley six months pregnant with another. Everything was great until a couple of coaches on Coach Bruce’s staff began to undermine him, running to the athletic director, spreading rumors about the program being out of control. It was nasty. And it was wrong. I won’t pretend to be neutral on this because Coach Bruce has not just been a life-changing mentor to me, he is a good and honorable man who is practically a second father to me. He did not deserve this—to be betrayed by people to whom he’d given an opportunity. The result was that we were all fired, and I spent two anxious months scrambling to get a job and trying to figure out how I was going to provide for my family.

Ultimately, I was retained by the new coach Colorado State brought in, Sonny Lubick, and then three years later, got hired by Lou Holtz to join his staff at Notre Dame, a dream job for a football-loving Catholic, but I’ve never forgotten the wreckage that was caused at Colorado State because the staff wasn’t in alignment and because of the disloyalty I witnessed. To this day, I regret that I didn’t do more to stop it. I love Earle Bruce, and yet I didn’t have the courage to confront these guys.

I’m so committed to never going through anything like that again that all these years later, I have a conversation with my coaches and their spouses before every season, and let them know that to me disloyalty is insubordination, and if you are insubordinate you are gone. It’s not “Oops, sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it.” It’s “Pack your bags and get out of here.”

I don’t have any hard data to back this up, but I’d guess that alignment problems result in many more lost football games than any shortage of talent does. Leading up to the 2014 season, I asked my unit leaders how many times they have ever been on a staff that was fully aligned, a team with Nine Units Strong.

They all replied, “None.”

I got an unwanted reminder of that once when I hired two offensive assistants who didn’t really believe in what we were doing with the spread offense. Don’t get me wrong: they were knowledgeable coaches with impressive résumés. I fault me for hiring them because even though they were good football guys, they were not a good fit for our system. I allowed myself to be so caught up with where they’d been and what they’d done that I didn’t listen to my own instincts.

Week after week, these guys wanted to inject things into our system that wouldn’t fit. They would lobby to put in concepts that were too complex and didn’t have any carryover or relationship to our system.

It was a constant headache for me. The low point happened when we were preparing for a rivalry game and a chance to defend an undefeated regular season. I was walking out to practice with my one of my offensive players on Wednesday before the game.

He looked at me as we were walking.

“You know, if we put in this play I think it would make things better,” he said.

“What did you say?”

“I think this play would work against that defense.”

We were about to practice and I didn’t want to get into a big thing with him, but all I could think was, “Wow, we have a major alignment problem here. Instead of talking about our offense in the meeting room, they’re filling his head and talking about what they want to do and not what we’re going to do.”

Usually I let my coaches go home after Wednesday practices to get some family time, but not this week. We all went upstairs for about three hours and put together the game plan. We won the game easily, but the pain from the headache didn’t go away the whole year.

I wound up spending hours and hours each week in the offensive meeting rooms making sure they weren’t straying from our core offensive system, and leaving me with serious concerns about how our offense was going to perform on Saturday. How could I not be concerned, when the coaches most closely involved didn’t believe in it? How much genuine enthusiasm is there going to be in the teaching? All the time I spent dealing with this was time I couldn’t spend keeping an eye on the bigger picture and leading my team.

Bill Belichick has often told me, “Always bring in people who can enhance what you do without changing the basics of it.” Sometimes, of course, you need to blow something up and start over, the way we did with our secondary in 2014, but that wasn’t the case here. We were looking for enhancement while remaining true to our core. That’s the point I want to underscore. Bring in people who believe in what you are doing and will help you make it better.

The perfect example was when we hired Tom Herman from Iowa State as offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach. Tom wasn’t the biggest name out there, and if the media and OSU fans knew about the people who wanted that job, they probably would’ve told me I’d lost my mind. But Tom did some great things at Iowa State, plus he’s got a ton of expertise in the up-tempo offense. Right away, I could tell how smart and charismatic he was. During the interview I handed him our playbook.

“Study this. I’ll be back in one hour. Teach it to me,” I told him.

When I returned, he basically taught me the whole offense.

Being challenged is great. I challenge our players and staff on a daily basis, and I want them to challenge me if they think something can be improved. One of the core messages I hope you take away from this book is that the constant pursuit of knowledge and improvement, striving to make yourself better today than you were yesterday, is not merely an indispensable tenet for leaders to follow, but one of the great joys of life. It is a pursuit that motivates me every day to be a better husband, a better father, a better Christian, a better friend, and a better football coach.

The lessons learned have made me more vigilant than ever about the people who are around me. I’ve had some phenomenal assistants over the years, but I have to say that the 2014 staff at Ohio State—coaches and support personnel—was one of the best. They are profoundly loyal and passionate about getting to Nine Units Strong. They are skilled and dedicated teachers who embrace our core values and work their tails off to be the best. Even as I wrote this chapter, Brian Voltolini, our director of operations, was visiting Champaign, Illinois, Indianapolis, and Oklahoma City to scout out hotel options for the 2016 season. There are specific things we look for in a hotel—meeting-room space, privacy, and menu planning are three of the main concerns—and Brian wanted to do all the reconnaissance himself. In fact, he wouldn’t have it any other way. Overkill? Some might say that, but I don’t like surprises. In football and every other business, so many small things go into a smooth operation, and all of those small things contribute to your alignment. When we have a road game, the operational details that Brian manages would boggle your mind. He coordinates with the OSU travel department to plan departure details and food service en route. We have to give the charter company information on our gross weight (players and cargo) and have a seating plan on board to make sure the weight is evenly distributed. (The starting offensive and defensive linemen get first class; they need the extra room). We have police escorts for our buses on every leg of the trip, both in Columbus and wherever we are going. Amy Nicol, my assistant, flies a day ahead of time to make sure everything is squared away in the hotel we’re traveling to, from the menus to the meeting rooms where we do our walk-throughs.

Not long ago I was recruiting a blue-chip player who was coveted by just about everybody, but in the course of conducting our due diligence, I learned some things that called into question his practice habits as well as some of his off-the-field decision-making. I like gifted players as much as the next coach, but I had enough doubts about how hard this kid would be willing to work and how committed he would be to our core beliefs that I decided to back off.

This is not an exact science, by any means. Some kids go through rough patches and then mature a little later. Others have rough patches that wind up lasting their entire lives. As I’ve gone through my own maturation process as a coach and leader, I’ve tried to become more and more judicious about seeking out only those kids I think will have the best chance to stay aligned with what we teach and how we train.

Otherwise, you run the risk of not only wasting a scholarship, but setting yourself up for four years of headaches that you don’t need.

Coaching legend Nick Aliotti confirmed for me the power of alignment. I’ve known Nick for close to twenty-five years, most of which he has spent as the defensive coordinator for the University of Oregon. When I took my leave from coaching and toured programs around the country, Oregon was one of my stops. I was at one of Chip Kelly’s practices, standing with Nick, a very successful and well-respected coach who is as old school as you can get—just a rough, tough throwback football coach. Chip had music from The Lion King blaring the morning I was there. He had a DJ at practice. I have never played music at practice, ever. That is not the message I want to send. We’re not there to listen to music. We’re there to play football and get better.

I mentioned something along those lines to Nick, and he stopped me.

“You know what, Urban? This is the only way to do it,” he said.

I couldn’t believe what I’d just heard. I must’ve misunderstood. I asked Nick to repeat himself.

“It’s the only way to do it,” he said again.

I knew right then why Chip Kelly was so successful. It was not this space-age offense. It wasn’t the color of the uniforms or even the music he played at practice. It was his uncanny gift for making everybody around him believe that what he’s doing is the best—for getting everybody totally buying in and aligned. I mean, he had Nick Aliotti, Mr. Old School, sold on blasting music at practice. There’s not a chance in the world that Nick thought this was the only way to do it five years earlier. Chip convinced him that it was. I left there with my respect for the importance of alignment affirmed.

Chapter Seven: The Necessity of Alignment Playbook