Welcome to The Competitive Edge Newsletter, where we tackle a variety of topics for coaches, executives, and leaders everywhere. The goal is to get better, just a little bit better, every day. If you know a leader who’s looking to grow, pass this along and point them to the sign-up link below.

Friends,

Thank you for joining me again this week. If you’re new here, you can catch up to previous newsletters in the archive. There is one in particular worth pulling up next to this week’s. It is called The Decision You Make Before the Decision, and the argument there was that you decide your values on the ordinary days, long before the moment that tests them. This week is what that looks like when that test shows up.

College football is at the midpoint of its season, give or take a week, which is where a particular conversation gets louder and louder. Pat Forde and his partners close a segment of their podcast each week by asking which coach is getting fired. It is tongue in cheek, and everybody involved knows it. It is also a fair description of what the sport sounds like from the middle of October onward, and the conversation isn’t just happening on the podcast. It runs on message boards, on talk radio, on television panels, and in parts of a coach’s own building.

Underneath the noise, though, is a question that every coach in a season going sideways has to answer for himself: How do you know when to stick with the plan and when to change it?

There is no rule for this, however, and it is part art and part science. And a coach can’t decide based on one result. Two coaches this month show you why. What you need instead is a way to take stock of the season while you are still in it, on a schedule you set rather than the one the results keep setting for you.

Mike Norvell started this season as one of the most discussed names on the hot seat list, after two disappointing seasons at Florida State, and the question in August was less whether he would be fired than how the buyout would get paid. Then his team beat Virginia by thirty-one, and the conversation softened into maybe he has this turned around. Then they went to Louisville on Friday night and lost by twenty-four, and the conversation came straight back.

Lincoln Riley has been living in a different version of the same thing. Every resource at USC and never quite the result, and after a home loss to Oregon in late September the calls started up again. Two weeks later he won at Penn State in front of the largest crowd in that stadium’s history and woke up at six and one. Now the question has flipped to whether anybody was ever right about him in the first place.

Nothing about either program changed in those two weeks. What changed was the verdict, and the verdict gets reissued every weekend.

That matters more than it looks like it does, because it creates a genuine problem for a coach in the middle of a season that is not going the way he planned. The pressure to change something arrives weekly. The thing it is pressuring him to change takes years to build. Those two clocks do not run at the same speed, and a coach who sets his watch by the faster one will spend his fall tearing up work that was never given enough time to show anything.

The opposite failure is just as real, though. If you are not getting the results you want, something about the inputs probably has to change. Waiting it out is not patience when nothing is being assessed. It is just waiting.

What I encourage coaches to do at about this point in a season is run a review while the season is still going. It is not a postmortem, because you do not have the luxury of one, and it is not a reinvention either. It is an honest look, taken in stride, at what the first half of the season has told you, with the narrow aim of finding small changes that produce better results in the second half. A bye week is the natural place for it, because you have a little more room to act on what you find.

What is working, and do we know why it is working? The second half of that question is the one that matters. Anything you cannot explain, you cannot repeat on purpose, and a fair amount of what is working right now is working by accident.

What is working better than we expected? Few ask this one. Unexpected success is information too, and it usually means something you believed about your team, or about your opponents, was wrong in a direction that you can use.

What is not working? That is the easy question, and the one everybody shows up ready to answer. Make people be specific about it. Not playing well is not an answer.

What is working, but not as well as we expected? This is the hardest category by a wide margin, because it looks identical from the outside whether it needs more time or needs to be abandoned.

Where do we double down? Something in that first half deserves more investment than it is currently getting, and finding it is usually more valuable than finding the thing to cut.

Where do we adjust, and what do we walk away from? Adjusting means a change to how something is being executed. Walking away means admitting that something you chose is not going to work, which is a different and considerably harder act.

One rule governs all six: You can change the what and the how. You do not touch the who.

Your purpose, your values, your identity, the standards you stood up in front of the team and named in August: none of that is in the scope of a midseason review, no matter how the season is going. Those are the things you measure the adjustments against. A coach who starts rewriting who his program is in week seven is not adjusting, he is telling his team that none of it was ever real. When the pressure is highest, go back to the why, make your changes in the what and the how, and leave the who alone.

Put the review on the calendar and put it on your bye week if you still have one. Give it enough time to be effective, bring your coordinators, and answer the four diagnostic questions before you decide what to change. Then send me what you find. I would like to know which of the four was hardest to answer honestly, because I have a guess.

Next week on the blog I am going further into the question underneath all of this, which is how you tell the difference between a plan that is being executed badly and a plan that was wrong to begin with. There is a body of military design work on exactly that problem, and it translates very well to an athletics program.

If this was useful, forward it to a coach in the middle of a hard season, and if somebody forwarded it to you, you can subscribe at ianpalmerleadership.com/newsletter.