From Gloom To Glory

What happens to a team when adversity strikes early
by: Richard Scott
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Here’s a warning: like every season, this story starts with a test. You thought you were done with those when you finished college, huh? Well at least it’s a multiple choice test, so you can always make an educated guess.

Question 1: When your team slips in September and loses a game or two (or three), you:

1. Call all your coaching connections and start looking for
another job.
2. Call your realtor and put the house up for sale.
3. Barricade yourself inside your office and refuse to answer your phone so the boosters and the media can’t get to you.
4. Go back to work, stay upbeat, remain consistent, move
forward, focus on fundamentals and direct all your time and
energy on improving and preparing for the next game.

Question 2: What do West Virginia, Miami (Ohio), Auburn, Florida, Maryland, North Texas, Ole Miss, Oklahoma State, New Mexico, Marshall all have in common?

1. They all won more games than they lost in 2003.
2. They all played in bowl games at the end of the 2003 season.
3. They all survived with their head coaches intact after the 2003 season.
4. They all suffered early losses in 2003 that could have led to disaster but instead got back in on track and produced positive results.

The answer to both questions is, of course, 4. Or at least it should be. Let’s face it, when all that preseason optimism comes crashing down in the face of September struggles, it’s easy to spend the rest of the fall falling apart. Coaches start to grab bag for solutions, coaches lose confidence in the players, players lose confidence in the coaches, everyone loses confidence in each other and all that losing shows up on the field. Before you know it, the coaches have lost their jobs, and none of us wants that, right?

“It’s not easy,” says Auburn coach Tommy Tuberville. “Last year for some reason people thought we were supposed to be a top-5 team and we actually felt pretty good going into the season, but our schedule was way over our heads at times and we had to regroup a lot. We lost the first two games (to USC and Georgia Tech), our players regrouped and we reeled off five straight wins and beat two top-10 teams and then finished pretty good with a couple of wins.”

Auburn’s 8-5 finish failed to meet the high expectations that accompanied the preseason, but the Tigers did manage to beat Tennessee, Arkansas and Alabama, as well as Wisconsin in the Music City Bowl. The season could be considered a disappointment in many ways, but it’s also important to recognize the way the Tigers bounced back from an 0-2 start and consecutive losses to Ole Miss and Georgia later in the season.

“That’s one of the great things about sports: players have the opportunity to learn from success and failure,” Tuberville says. “They have to be able to handle both of them, because no matter what sport you’re in or what you’re doing after your career, you’re not always going to be as successful as you want to be. This generation is learning those lessons.

“Every one outside your team expects you to win every game, but you’ve got to teach your players that it’s almost impossible to go undefeated, so somewhere along the line you’ll probably be faced with adversity and those who can face it and overcome it will be the most successful.”

Miami (Ohio) provided a good example of learning positive lessons from early adversity last season. After spending the offseason building team chemistry and trust, the RedHawks lost 21-3 at Iowa and standout quarterback Ben Roethlisberger threw four interceptions. Granted, Iowa was the defending Big Ten champion, but the RedHawks were still “disgusted,” according to head coach, Terry Hoeppner.

“Right away, all the hard work, all the spring practice, the summer workouts on their own, the preseason practice, all those times when you’ve told them if you did, this is going to happen and then they put their trust in you as a coach – all of a sudden it didn’t work and things didn’t happen like you wanted them to happen and the other team wins the game.

“How do you respond? One of the life lessons football teaches is about how to respond, on a play-to-play basis, on a day-to-day basis, and on a week-to-week basis.”

The RedHawks responded in three significant ways. First, the team leaders stood tall and the chemistry developing over several months took hold.

“The thing you’ve got to have at that point, the thing you can’t just wish on them or develop overnight, is strong internal leadership within the team,” Hoeppner says. “The leadership we got, from throughout the team, from within the team, from the assistant coaches, from Ben, all of that made a difference. Ben, from the get-go, told the team, ‘that loss was a blip on the radar. That one’s on me. Follow me and we’ll get this thing turned around and headed back in the right direction.’”

The coaches all did their part by trying to pull together and present a united, consistent front for the players.

“It’s not an overnight thing. It’s a process,” Hoeppner says. “It requires consistency. The players know when they show up on Tuesday what we’re going to do, where we’re going to be. It tends to be a routine but to make sure it’s not a rut I like to spice things up by throwing in some variety, but there’s still a consistency to how we do things. They know who I am as a person, who the coaches are, how we’re going to react and that’s part of the trust factor.”

“As coaches we have to make sure on Tuesday and that we don’t show up being lackadaisical. We had to put our work clothes back on and we had to work hard and have fun doing it. I learned that a long time ago from my college coach. Don’t be grim about it. Have fun with it and the results will take care of themselves.”

That positive attitude rubbed off on the players during two weeks of practice before the next game at Northwestern.

“You’ve got to get them to trust you – it’s not us against them and we had to convince the players of that,” Hoeppner says. “We’re not going to cuss you, we’re not going to punish you, we’re all in this together. That helped a lot. We work out Sunday mornings and take Mondays off so by the time we came back on Tuesday they were ready to practice. They had put the Iowa game behind them.”

An open date wasn’t Hoeppner’s preference the week after a loss, but the RedHawks made the most of the opportunity by going back to work. That group decision to move forward and work hard became the third key response.

“We went back to a fundamental week and didn’t worry about playing another Big Ten team the next week,” Hoeppner says. “We got back to fundamentals, worked hard and got to feeling better about ourselves and then started working on Northwestern.

“Those two weeks of practice told a lot about the character and internal leadership of the team.”

The RedHawks won 44-10 at Northwestern and then won 41-21 at Colorado State the next week. They went on to win the MAC championship and the GMAC Bowl on their way to a 13-1 season.

“We were able to validate ourselves as a good team at Northwestern and then we put an exclamation point behind it at Colorado State,” Hoeppner says. “We answered every challenge.”

It’s possible that no Division I-A team has handled those challenges better than North Texas over the past three seasons. The Mean Green make an annual habit of playing some of the nation’s best I-A teams early in the season because the football program must shoulder the financial burden of the athletic department budget. That’s a familiar refrain for many struggling I-A teams, and the Mean Green opened with five consecutive losses in 2001, started 1-5 in 2002 and 1-3 in 2003.

“The main thing we try to do is realize the very difficult assignment we’re given and play every game with the intention of trying to put ourselves in a position to win,” coach Darrell Dickey says. “That doesn’t work every Saturday, regardless of who you’re playing, but when you’re playing Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas State, Colorado, the people we’re asked to play, you know the ball is going to have to bounce your way for you to overcome playing a tough opponent in a money game, at their place, with their officials and all the things that come with that. We don’t like to start off slow, but we have to understand what we’re being asked to do.”

Instead of being overwhelmed under the weight of that challenge, the Mean Green bounced back to go 5-7, 8-5 and 9-4, won three consecutive Sun Belt championships and earned three straight trips to the New Orleans Bowl. Granted, the Sun Belt isn’t the Big 12 yet, but the conference is a good, fair fit for North Texas and provides every conference team with a reasonable and valuable goal after a rugged non-conference schedule. Only North Texas has made the most of that opportunity in the past three years.

“A few years ago if we lost a close, heartbreaking game, it dragged on until Wednesday. If we got blown out, it dragged on until Wednesday. If we won, some of our kids were still talking about it on Wednesday,” Dickey said. “About three years ago, as our team began to mature, we made a commitment to saying, ‘look, we’re going to prepare the best we can for Texas and that’s our first game. We’re going to have the best game plan we can have. We’re going to execute it the best we can, we’re going to do everything we can to try and win the game, but once that game is over, it’s over and we have to learn to put it behind us – win, lose or draw. That game’s got to be over on Sunday and you’ve got to be able to start focusing on the game in front of you.’

“That’s what our kids have been able to do and we’ve been able to bounce back from those slow starts and win our conference all three years.”

UNT has bounced back by focusing on improving two factors: the physical and mental condition of the team.

The physical lessons were learned the hard way. The Mean Green trailed Oklahoma by only seven in the fourth quarter in 1998 and lost 35-9. In 1999 the Mean Green won at Texas Tech and beat Boise State at home early in the season but finished 3-8. In the process, the Mean Green starters took a lot of beatings.

“We played the same 11 guys on offense, the same 11 guys on defense the entire game against Oklahoma,” Dickey says. “Oklahoma was playing their reserves throughout the game and we just got worn down. We were gassed in the fourth quarter, and the next week our starters were so beat up from going the whole 60 minutes against Oklahoma.

“After that Boise game our whole team was in the training room and we were playing a bunch of guys who had never been in the training room before. As the years went by I learned that we needed to play a lot of people early in the season, develop some confidence, build some depth, and when we did that we found out we were a better team and we played better in all our games, including our conference games, because our guys didn’t get beat up as much and our physical condition was a lot better late in the season.”

The Mean Green also learned to handle those early season defeats with a more realistic and positive attitude. Dickey and his staff didn’t allow the team to settle for moral victories, but they also didn’t want their players to wallow in losses to the likes of Texas, Oklahoma and Alabama.

“We tried to point out the good things we did against the better programs in the country, even if we didn’t win,” Dickey says. “At times against Oklahoma last year we made a few plays against their top-line players. It wasn’t enough, but we were trying to bring our guys along and instead of bringing them in and being real negative we tried to show them that we can do some things and if we keep working, keep getting better, keep a positive frame of mind we’ll get better and we’ll be a better team against every team we play.”

When West Virginia players refused to accept a moral victory after a hard-fought, last-minute 22-20 loss to Miami last year, Mountaineers coach Rich Rodriguez and his coaches knew it was a good sign. The Mountaineers were 1-4 at the time, with additional losses to Wisconsin, Cincinnati and Maryland, and in desperate need of an immediate turnaround when things began to change.

“In a way the Miami game probably gave us some confidence but I was a lot more impressed after that game with the way our guys were acting in the locker room. They weren’t saying, ‘hey, we played Miami to the wire’ and all that. They were genuinely ticked off that we didn’t win that game,” Rodriguez says. “That competitiveness came out and they said, ‘hey, we can’t be giving games away. We’ve got to finish the job.’ I knew right then we’d be OK.”

Instead of making drastic changes and abandoning their overall philosophy of practice, preparation and game plan, the Mountaineer coaches instead made minor adjustments, simplifying some things and emphasizing execution and attention to detail over new tricks or gimmicks.

“Our big emphasis with our guys was that we didn’t need to panic and change everything we do. We just needed to do it better, concentrate harder, focus and do the things that we know we can do to be successful and that really helped us,” Rodriguez says. “It was important for us to point out the reasons why we do things and the reasons why they weren’t working. We made them see that it wasn’t a talent issue but more of a discipline or concentration issue.

“Three of our losses came in the fourth quarter (by a total of 11 points) so we stressed that we have to do the little extra things in practice and focus on the things that will give us an edge that will help us pull one out in the fourth quarter.”

The players, especially the leaders, bought into the message of the coaching staff and beat Rutgers 34-19 the next week. Then the Mountaineers pulled off a major win, beating Virginia 28-7, and went on to win seven consecutive games, a share of the Big East championship and a trip to the Gator Bowl.

“The most pleasing part of the turnaround was that no one in the program, the coaches or players or anybody, panicked when we had such a bad start,” Rodriguez says. “We have a saying around here for when something doesn’t go well, and it’s called ‘The Lion King’ theory from the movie. There’s a scene where the monkey hits the lion over the head and the lion says ‘what did you do that for’ and the monkey says ‘it doesn’t matter, it’s in the past.’ We try to pound ourselves over the head if we have a bad play or a bad game and then move on, because it’s in the past.”

Like West Virginia, Ole Miss wasn’t that far off when it opened 2-2, with a last-minute 24-21 win over Vanderbilt and two fourth-quarter losses to Memphis (34-24) and Texas Tech (49-45). The offense, despite the presence of quarterback Eli Manning, was sputtering at times to find its consistency, and the defense ranked last nationally in passing defense. With a trip to Florida next up on the schedule, it was time to make a move or fall back in the SEC West.

“We did what we always do: we try to come back to work the same each Monday after a ballgame, regardless of a win or a loss,” Ole Miss coach David Cutcliffe says. “We call our Mondays ‘Get Better Mondays’ and tell our players what’s expected of them and we never waver from that. We didn’t waver when we were 2-2.

“We had a big game with Florida coming and we approached that game with a positive attitude. We talked about our work ethic, about our team leadership and I think we still believed in ourselves. That was the most important thing: to maintain the belief that we could win. You’ve got to believe in what you’re doing, even when it’s being challenged.”

Cutcliffe never worried about the direction of his team partly because of his close ties to the team leaders. He makes a weekly habit of meeting with his leaders each week, giving him an opportunity to ask questions, listen and take the pulse of the team. It’s also his chance to relay the message of the coaching staff to the team through its leaders.

“Communication is always important,” Cutcliffe says. “We had good seniors and that gave us a solid, mature foundation.”

Those seniors followed through by leading Ole Miss to a 20-17 victory at Florida and a six-game winning streak that finally came to an end with a 17-14 loss to LSU, the eventual national champion. The Rebels then finished the season with victories over archrival Mississippi State and Oklahoma State in the Cotton Bowl.

All five of the coaches interviewed for this story admitted the players, especially the leaders, aren’t likely to keep listening to a coach who panics, loses his focus, grasps at far-reaching changes and starts bending or breaking under the weight of outside criticism. A confident coach with a positive attitude, they insist, has a better chance at holding his team together and helping them find the right track to a turnaround and a strong finish.

“You’ve got to have a smile on your face, you’ve got to show them you’re confident, but I also think you’ve got to talk about it,” Tuberville says. “You can’t sweep it under the rug. You’ve got to stand up and say, ‘listen guys, we’ve dug ourselves a hole here, we know what we’ve got to do but we can only control what we can control. We can’t control the media. We can’t control the fans. We can control what we do in practice and how we prepare for the next game and we can control whether we win or lose that game.’

“You’ve also got to be honest with the players. If you’re honest with them they’ll have a lot more confidence in you and the coaching staff. Last year we put a smile on our face every week when we came out to practice and we worked them just as hard and we let them know we were still committed to them and to sending the seniors out as winners.”

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