FAILURE: THE BEST TEACHER THERE IS
I have no doubt that failure is the best teacher there is. It’s blunt, unforgiving, and pulls no punches. And, in my case, one particular example of failure happened on one of the biggest stages you can imagine.
In 2015, Clemson compiled an undefeated 12–0 regular season and a No. 1 ranking in the polls. In the ACC Championship Game against No. 10 North Carolina, I threw for 289 yards and three touchdowns and ran for two more. Most important, we won the game, claiming the ACC Championship for the first time since 2011. On an individual level, I was also named the ACC Championship Game MVP.
We moved on to the College Football Playoff, selected as the No. 1 seed. In our first game of the tournament, we beat Oklahoma 37–17 in the Orange Bowl. I threw for 187 yards and a touchdown and ran for 145 yards and another touchdown.
Next up was the ultimate challenge: the championship game against powerhouse Alabama. Between my passing and rushing yards—478 in total—I set the record for most total yards in national championship game history. But even though I threw for 405 yards and four touchdowns, we lost the game 45–40.
Special teams were a challenge for us all night in that particular game. Perhaps the most obvious example was Kenyan Drake’s 95-yard touchdown on a kickoff return. At the time, it pushed Alabama to a double-digit lead. Making matters worse were Alabama’s onside kick that led to a touchdown as well as a missed field goal by us. We had needed a complete game from all parts of our team, and we simply didn’t deliver.
Still, honors and awards for me followed the national championship. I finished third that year in the voting for the Heisman Trophy, the most prestigious award in college sports. I won the Davey O’Brien Award, presented annually to the best college quarterback. I was also named the 2015 ACC Player of the Year and ACC Offensive Player of the Year.
All the awards and accolades were great, but I was devastated by the loss in the championship game. In a way, losing out on a national championship was more wrenching than it would have been if we’d never even gotten close to that point. I was deeply conflicted. I was getting all this praise for how I had played—and I knew I had played well—but all the praise in the world rings hollow when it’s overshadowed by defeat. I wrestled with a flood of emotions for days on end.
I WAS GETTING ALL THIS PRAISE FOR HOW I HAD PLAYED—AND I KNEW I HAD PLAYED WELL—BUT ALL THE PRAISE IN THE WORLD RINGS HOLLOW WHEN IT’S OVERSHADOWED BY DEFEAT.
But the Alabama game taught me another lesson that’s critical for being an effective servant leader. As I came to understand in the painful days following that devastating loss, losing is a far better teacher than winning. Granted, we all want to win, and winning makes you and those around you feel great. Everyone’s happy when they’re winning. You love everyone and everything.
But losing forces introspection—not only about what contributed to the loss but about what you personally can change to achieve success moving forward. And when you look inside yourself, that serves as a model for others to do the same. Losing is never fun, but, ultimately, everyone benefits if you approach it as an opportunity to learn and grow.
Looked at another way, losing makes you a student, whether you want to be one or not. If you don’t study what went wrong, what you could have done differently, then it’s obvious that you never cared much about the outcome in the first place. I’ve never met a single athlete who could just shrug off a loss without thinking about why it happened.
Losing, I’ve come to learn, also presents challenging leadership obstacles. For one thing, you first have to get over your own disappointment. Then it’s up to you to help those around you do the same—to encourage them to learn everything they can from the experience while leaving much of the sting behind. Finally, as a leader, you have to point the way to rebound from failure.
Over the weeks that followed the Alabama loss, my teammates and I reviewed the game in exhausting detail. We looked at film of every play repeatedly, with attention to how each and every player on the field performed. We all wanted to see any sign, any hint of what might have gone wrong.
WHEN YOU COME UP SHORT IN ANYTHING YOU TRY TO ACHIEVE, BE AS METICULOUS AS YOU POSSIBLY CAN BE IN STUDYING HOW YOU FAILED TO ACHIEVE SUCCESS.
That’s a leadership lesson I’ve carried with me. When you come up short in anything you try to achieve, be as meticulous as you possibly can be in studying how you failed to achieve success. It can be humbling and even painful, but it’s the best way to stop history from repeating itself.
That’s how I knew what I needed to do going into my junior year.
My junior—and last—year as a student-athlete at Clemson was everything I had worked so hard to achieve. We had a great season, and after routing the powerhouse Ohio State Buckeyes 31–0 in the semifinal national playoff game, we once again faced off against Alabama. Since we had tangled with them before and come up short, we knew full well what we were up against. Many football analysts had said that, at their peak, the 2016 Alabama team’s defense was one of the greatest in college football history. As quarterback and one of the on-field leaders on offense, I knew we all had to bring our very best effort.
While the game was tense and competitive throughout, things began to look bleak for us in the third quarter. The Crimson Tide were up by ten points—24–14. Under Coach Nick Saban’s leadership, Alabama was known for finishing strong. If they were ahead by double digits at this point in the game, they were extremely likely to win. In other words, they didn’t make a habit of losing as the clock ticked down. We knew that from the game a year prior when Alabama simply built too big a lead for us to overcome.
I had to step up.
The lead changed hands three times in the fourth quarter. It began when I found wide receiver Mike Williams open for a 4-yard touchdown barely a minute into the final fifteen to trim Alabama’s lead to 24–21. Then, with a little more than four minutes left in the game, we seized our first lead when running back Wayne Gallman scored from a yard out.
Still, we knew Alabama was far from finished. The Crimson Tide moved down the field with a combination of efficiency and creative play calling. In a bit of razzle-dazzle, receiver ArDarius Stewart took a backward pass from quarterback Jalen Hurts and fired a strike to tight end O. J. Howard for 24 yards. Hurts broke loose the next play, escaping from a collapsing pocket and slipping past and through defenders for a 30-yard touchdown run to make the score 31–28 in favor of Alabama. Once again, the Alabama players showed that they rose to the occasion in crunch time.
There was 2:07 left on the clock.
You’ve probably heard about athletes and others who experience a remarkable level of calm and focus when everything around them is deafeningly loud and chaotic. The speed with which things occur seems to slow down dramatically. That’s precisely how I felt when we got the ball back with the national championship on the line. In fact, I was so focused that I remembered what quarterback Vince Young said to his University of Texas teammates just before their last-second touchdown that defeated Southern California in the 2005 season championship game: “Let’s be legendary.”
That’s what I said to my teammates as we huddled up. I felt this truth to my core. Three words that meant one thing: all the work, all the sacrifice, and all the dedication came down to just these few seconds. What happened was up to us—not just one person but everyone involved with the team.
I completed passes to Williams and tight end Jordan Leggett, both of whom made fantastic catches for large gains. But however much we had moved the ball, time was edging away. We were at first and goal with just fourteen seconds left.
We caught a break with a pass interference call on Alabama that placed the ball at the 2-yard line with six seconds remaining. In that moment, I thought that if we couldn’t push the ball in, we were certainly close enough for a game-tying kick and overtime.
But my teammates and I were determined to be legendary. And, again, I really couldn’t hear the crowd roaring in the background. I felt at peace and knew what I was going to do.
Being legendary didn’t mean settling for a field goal.
BEING LEGENDARY DIDN’T MEAN SETTLING FOR A FIELD GOAL.
Amid the tangle of bodies that collided after the ball was snapped, receiver Hunter Renfrow managed to slip past the defense. I took the snap, rolled right, and tossed the ball to Renfrow as lightly as though we were playing catch in the backyard.
It was one of the easier throws I’d made all night, but we were national champions as a result. For just the second time in Clemson football history, we stood at the top of the heap.
Overall, I ended up throwing for 420 yards and three touchdowns, good enough to be named the game’s MVP. Every bit as satisfying was that, in two games against Alabama, I threw for a total of 825 yards and accounted for eight touchdowns. In the fourth quarter alone, I completed twelve of eighteen passes for 130 yards and two touchdowns. From a team perspective, our twenty-one points were the most fourth-quarter points scored against the Crimson Tide the entire season.
It’s difficult to express the emotions and experience of winning that national title. Naturally, our success was a culmination of grinding it out day in and day out, remaining focused, and, as I experienced in the title game itself, finding a sense of peace and balance when everything around us was noise and chaos.
It also showed the value of revisiting failure. By breaking down every aspect and element of the game we lost to Alabama the year before, our team was able to retool our game plan to take advantage of what we identified as Alabama’s few vulnerable points. The painstaking effort had truly paid off.
I think we all learned another lesson from that first loss that helped us in the rematch. Simply put, the past is past. Move on when you’ve gotten everything you can out of an experience. Study it and go to school on it, but don’t dwell on failure. If you’re looking back all the time, it’s impossible to see what you have in front of you. I know we as a team benefited from a forward-looking mindset. As for me, during those final seconds, the last thing I had on my mind was coming up short again.
SIMPLY PUT, THE PAST IS PAST. MOVE ON WHEN YOU’VE GOTTEN EVERYTHING YOU CAN OUT OF AN EXPERIENCE. STUDY IT AND GO TO SCHOOL ON IT, BUT DON’T DWELL ON FAILURE.
On an individual level, I became the first player since 2004 to win the Davey O’Brien Award in consecutive seasons. I also won the Johnny Unitas Golden Arm Award, given to a junior or senior college quarterback. While the award celebrates on-field performance, it also emphasizes character, scholastic achievement, and qualities of leadership. For me, that made the award much more than just a measure of athletic success.
But there were individual disappointments as well. Once again, I was one of the five finalists for the Heisman Trophy. Once again, I came up empty, with Louisville quarterback Lamar Jackson receiving the coveted award. I was disappointed but very happy for Lamar. He deserved it as much as anyone.
But, as I’ve stressed before, though personal achievements are fine and good, nothing comes close to the value of success as a team. A servant leader looks past individual success to consider the group as a whole. And, here, there were no disappointments.
I was learning to prioritize my leadership goals. While I didn’t win certain individual awards, our team’s national championship was of far greater importance to me. Failure was teaching me another valuable lesson: losing happens to everyone, but the sting doesn’t hold on forever if you learn from the loss and get right back to work—becoming all the more prepared, both mentally and physically.
PASS IT ON
• How did you react the last time you failed at something that mattered a great deal to you? You were probably upset, but did you get caught up in your emotions? Did you do anything besides get angry and frustrated? Or did those emotions lead you to something constructive, something that you could do to better prepare yourself for success in the future?
• As a developing servant leader, consider how others impacted by that failure reacted to it. Was their reaction similar to yours? If so, did you do anything about that reaction or merely join in?
YOUR CHALLENGE
The next time you have to deal with a failure or setback, reevaluate your reaction. It’s okay to be angry or frustrated, but instead of getting caught up in those emotions, make a conscious effort to focus on what you can gain from the experience that may prove useful moving forward. Review the events that led up to what occurred. Could you have changed anything that happened? Could you have prepared in a different manner? If it’s helpful—and it probably will be—write down any ideas that occur to you. Bear your thoughts in mind the next time you encounter a similar situation or challenge.