I never want to discontinue giving kids opportunities.
I enjoyed the NFL. I respected the players. It was a great opportunity to learn a lot of things, but the challenges were a little different, and it didn’t seem that you could control your own destiny, especially in terms of how you could bring players to the team.
There’s two parts of leadership. You’ve got to be a good leader – you’ve got to be somebody that people want to emulate and care about the other people. But the other guys that you have have to accept their leadership. They have to respond to it. That’s the chemistry that you never know how that is going to happen.
You can’t allow yourself to be vulnerable.
It’s never OK to lose a game.
There needs to be a college football commissioner.
If I say I like one person, that means everybody that voted for the other person doesn’t like me. So, why would I do that?
College football is the only game in the country, of any kind, that the college game is longer than the pro game.
I think anytime you play somebody on a yearly basis, you develop a history for what they like to do.
When you play quarterback, you have to process information quickly, get the ball out of your hand to the right guy.
When you have a system, you kind of get in a routine of what’s important. And then you spend a lot more time on thinking of things that would make it better.
I think people who grow up in one particular environment, like the Alabama-Auburn game, they don’t ever get the same appreciation for the Ohio State-Michigan game or the Michigan State-Notre Dame game or the Michigan-Michigan State game, the Browns and the Steelers.
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.
I try to stay out of the spotlight.
We create a standard for how we want to do things, and everybody’s got to buy into that standard or you really can’t have any team chemistry.
George Perles at Michigan State was the first coach that gave me responsibility as far as being a coordinator. I learned a lot from that experience.
