A head coach’s primary objective is to orchestrate the overall mentality of his team. Great teams commonly display an air of confidence that separates them from others. They have earned the right to be confident through their hard work and success. The best teams utilize that confidence to share a feeling where they not only expect to win, they know they are going to win. That knowing is what allows a team to play in the absence of fear. That concept was the main objective and the ultimate focus throughout my nine years at USC and will also be now in Seattle.
When everything comes together for highly successful teams, they know they are going to win before they step out onto the field. This knowing is the most powerful state of mind for any team, and this is precisely what we set out to capture every season at USC. In my time as a coach I’ve learned that possibly the greatest detractor from high performance is fear: fear that you are not prepared, fear that you are in over your head, fear that you are not worthy, and ultimately, fear of failure. If you can eliminate that fear—not through arrogance or just wishing difficulties away, but through hard work and preparation—you will put yourself in an incredibly powerful position to take on the challenges you face.
I am a firm believer in the idea that more often than not, people will live up to the expectations you set for them, and when it comes to our players, we set those expectations extremely high from their first day in the program—often even well beyond what the player himself thinks he can achieve—and we make sure they know it. High expectations are one of the most powerful tools we have. But we also understand that, if those expectations are unrealistic, inappropriate for the individual player in question, or so overwhelming and long term that players don’t have the opportunity to enjoy smaller accomplishments along the way, then we are just setting our players up to fail.
Ideally, we want to create an atmosphere or a culture where our players can perform in the absence of fear. It is my job to orchestrate this “knowing we are going to win” mentality. Achieving that means finding ways to prove to players that they can rely on themselves and their teammates to perform at the highest level in the face of any challenge—even losing.
While the Win Forever philosophy sounds great when things are going well, what happens when things go wrong? How do you Win Forever given that everyone loses sometimes? The reality is that, no matter how well you practice, how fully you develop your philosophy, or how effectively you recruit, you will lose now and then. What separates those who have a true Win Forever outlook from those who don’t is the ability to approach that challenge of losing with the same competitive spirit with which they approach everything else. When I say that “everything counts” or that every challenge in life is a chance to compete, I mean it. I don’t mean “everything except losing.” Personally, I hate to lose more than almost anything. What I hate even more is learning the hard way. I want that for the other guy. But in reality we can learn tremendously from our losses and our mistakes, though that is tough to admit.
Those setbacks, challenges, and hardships have been learning experiences, and I have learned to respect and appreciate them. In their own way, what they have taught me was as much a part of our Rose Bowl victories and national championships at USC as anything else I have picked up along the way.
In fact, it was in our most difficult moments at USC that I leaned on the Win Forever approach the most. We have had our share of disappointments, but few more dramatic than at the end of the 2005 season, when we faced the University of Texas in the BCS national championship game. We were twenty-six seconds away from winning an unprecedented third straight national title.
The Longhorns’ quarterback, Vince Young, had delivered a superhuman effort all night, and we knew that he was sure to save his best for last. The game had gone back and forth all night. We had our offense, led by Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, Steve Smith, Dwayne Jarrett, and LenDale White, performing at a high level—they even set a Rose Bowl record with 574 total yards of offense. But Texas also had a high-powered machine and kept the score close throughout the game.
Up 38–33 with 4:03 remaining, we needed a couple first downs to clinch a victory. We had practiced this situation numerous times and were confident that we could operate our “four-minute offense” and win the game. After all, moments like this were what we were all about as a team. After a short run by LenDale and a completion from Matt to Dwayne, we had one of the two necessary first downs to clinch the BCS championship. On first down we gave the ball back to LenDale for a three-yard gain, which got us to midfield. After an incompletion and another short run by LenDale, we were faced with fourth and two.
We were confident with our play call for this fourth and two situation, “27 Power Quad.” LenDale had run it all season long with near-perfect success. He took the handoff and as he was forced to cut back, a Texas defensive lineman made a great play to take away his running lane. We were stopped inches short of the first down marker, giving the ball back to Texas.
As Young and his offense jogged onto the field with 2:13 left in the game, down 38–33, I knew our defense would have to make a play, as Young was performing in the proverbial “zone,” with no sign of slowing down. He started by completing a pass for minus two yards, followed by an incompletion on second down. On third and twelve from the Texas forty-two-yard line, he completed a pass to Quan Cosby for seven yards, short of a first down. However, we were called for a facemask penalty, keeping the Longhorns drive alive.
Young completed a pass to Brian Carter for nine yards, ran for seven, and completed another pass for seventeen yards, moving his team to our thirteen-yard line with the clock winding down. We were calling all sorts of defenses as we pressured two linebackers on one snap, played coverage on the next, and brought a corner blitz on another, but Young kept at it. On first down, he threw an incomplete pass. On second, he ran for five yards, and on third and five from our eight-yard line he threw another incompletion out of the end zone to stop the clock. And there we were, fourth and five with only twenty-six seconds remaining.
The 93,986 fans were standing up—half screaming and half holding their breath. It was as magnificent a setting as any competitor could ask to be a part of. We decided to bring our two inside linebackers on a blitz and play man coverage. As Young dropped back, he went through his progression and stepped up in the pocket, avoiding our pressure. He took off to his right and we had no chance to catch him as he raced to the end zone for the game-winning touchdown. That superhuman effort, which totaled 267 yards passing, plus 200 yards rushing on nineteen carries, for a total of 467 yards by one player, was a Rose Bowl record. As a result, Vince Young earned the game’s MVP award.
As I entered the locker room following the game, I was racing to think of what I would tell the players. We had just had our thirty-four-game winning streak snapped and had fallen short of a third straight national championship. I decided to tell the truth:
Men, we came within nineteen seconds of winning a third consecutive national title—nineteen seconds! To put in all of the work we put in, there is no way that nineteen seconds can define us as winners or losers. We’ve always said that for someone to beat us we either have to turn it over a number of times and give the game away or they have to play out of their minds, and tonight, number ten had one of the greatest single game performances in the history of college football, and still, we were only nineteen seconds away from winning! Give Texas all the credit in the world, but you’re still champions. Nineteen seconds will never define you.
While I did not want to take anything away from Texas, as they were the superior team that night, I wanted our players to still feel like champions. It had been a historic season and one that our entire program should have been proud of. We were not going to let nineteen seconds define us. Because of the character of our players, and because they knew from experience that it is possible to play to your full potential and still not walk away with the win, we would not let that one loss define us.
Certainly we had other tough losses at USC. What is truly remarkable is how our players and coaches responded in every situation. By returning to the truth of who we were and by looking forward to the challenge of our next opponent, we were able to be incredibly resilient, in spite of any adversity. We never dragged the past along with us, because the past is not a place where we can compete. I think it is in part because we refused to do that in victory that we were so successful in moving on from a defeat. Instead, we focused on recapturing the essence of who we knew ourselves to be and on controlling what was directly in front of us, and then hit the practice field with the intention of getting better the very next day. We never allowed the disappointment of losing to diminish the attitude and energy we needed to bring every day.
When you have gotten to a place where you are as ready to embrace the learning opportunities given to you by the games you lose as to embrace the ones given to you by the games you win, then you are ready for all potential outcomes. That state of mind, when you are truly competing for the sake of performance alone, is when you are performing in the absence of fear, and I promise you that an organization that can get to that mind-set will succeed—will win—not just for a game or a season but from that moment onward.