Welcome to The Competitive Edge. Every week I take one thing I have seen, in uniform or in the work I do with coaches now, and try to turn it into something you can use with your own team before the week is out. If this one earns its keep, send it to a coach who is carrying a program right now, and point them at the sign-up link below. Thank you for reading.

Friends,

Two quick notes before we get going. The last twenty editions of The Competitive Edge now live together in the newsletter archive, so if you are new here, or you have been meaning to go back for one you missed, that is the place to look. The second note is the one I care more about. These letters are better when they turn into conversations, so if something in here lands or misses, hit reply and tell me, because I read every one of those replies and several of them have changed how I teach this material.

Now to this week, and to a word I work on with almost every program I sit down with. Culture is the most used and least defined term in our profession, and if you ask ten coaches to define it you will get ten answers, most of them describing a feeling rather than something a leader can work on. The definition I use is narrower, and it is narrow on purpose.

Read that third verb again, because it can do the most damage. Rewarding a behavior is a decision you make on purpose and punishing one is the same, but tolerating a behavior does not feel like a decision at all, which is exactly why it shapes so much of what a team becomes. Your players are not weighing what you say against what you allow; they are watching what gets allowed and concluding, reasonably, that it is permitted.

Saturday handed us four scenes worth thinking about, and I want to use them as conversation pieces rather than verdicts. None of us knows what was said inside those buildings, since a coach can level a player in private and stay measured at a podium, so what reaches us is the smaller half of the story. Young people also make poor decisions sometimes.

At the Los Angeles Coliseum, a USC linebacker hit Oregon quarterback Dante Moore in the head while Moore was sliding, was ejected for targeting, and then smiled and celebrated while Moore lay on the field waiting for an ambulance. In Knoxville, a Texas defensive end put together one of the best individual games of the season, five sacks in a three-point win, and also mimed urinating on the field. Earlier in that same game a Texas running back had scored and celebrated with his own vulgar gesture. In Gainesville, after Ole Miss lost by twenty-four points and watched a perfect start come apart, quarterback Trinidad Chambliss waited on the field for Florida coach Jon Sumrall to finish a television interview so that he could shake his hand and congratulate him.

Four young men, three programs, and I am not in a position to tell you what any of those cultures are. What the scenes do give us is a place to have a conversation about three things a coach controls.

Mentors for Military Podcast EP-422 | Trust: The Foundation Audio, 53 minutes ▶  Listen to the episode

The first is who you bring into the building. Evaluation is often built to measure performance character but doesn’t always touch moral character. Work ethic, coachability and the willingness to keep going when the drill is hard all look like football. Honesty, respect and how a young man treats people when the outcome does not depend on it are harder to see at a camp. The gap sometimes shows up on national broadcasts. A program that signs a player with a deficit of moral character has invited that behavior into its locker room, and the other players know it.

The second is the expectations you have communicated, in advance. Most of us are explicit about effort and assignment and toughness, and far fewer of us are explicit about celebrations, about what happens after an ejection, or about how a team behaves when it loses a game it expected to win. Those moments arrive with adrenaline attached, which is why they must be considered beforehand. An expectation you have never said is not a standard but a preference you are holding privately while your players guess, and what they guess from is whatever they have watched go unaddressed.

The third is what you do next. Consider the coach who pulls a player, addresses a behavior, and then tells the room afterward that “the production was pretty good too.” Each half of that is defensible on its own, but together they answer the question every player was already asking, which is whether production buys lenience on conduct. Or take the coach who is asked why an ejected player is standing on his sideline and answers that it is “because he is on our football team.” I understand that instinct completely, since protecting your guys is part of the job, but the roster hears a coach explaining away the behavior rather than addressing it.

There was a fifth scene on Saturday that ran the other way. After South Carolina was beaten badly at Alabama, one of the best pass rushers in the country threw a punch at an opposing tight end that the officials never saw and then argued with his head coach on the sideline when it was time to come out. Shane Beamer suspended him the next day, said there is a standard for how they do things in that program and that this was not it, and then added the line that stood out to me: the decision was beyond the punch. He was telling his roster that this was not about the play everybody had already seen on television. The conference added a one-game suspension of its own the day after that, but the answer his players needed had already been given.

Everything in that response, though, was done after the fact. Nobody made Chambliss wait on that field in Gainesville, and no coach can script what a quarterback will do after a loss like that, which is why the roster you assemble matters more than the speech you give. What you can do is bring in the kind of person who waits anyway, and then build a program where doing it feels normal. That is why the first of the three levers reaches the furthest. Standards and responses still matter, but a staff has to do less of both when you have high character talent.

Every one of us has a version of these situations potentially brewing in our building right now. They’re in the behaviors we notice and don’t address, because addressing them would cost a period of practice and some goodwill with a player we need on game day.

That is the behavior to name. Decide what the standard is, tell your team in plain language before it comes up again, and hold the line the next time it appears. Start with your most productive player, because that is the case the rest of your roster is watching. Holding a player accountable is not punishment and it is not a verdict on who he is; it is the work of closing the gap between where he is and where the standard requires him to be. You do it because you want him to become a man who no longer needs the reminder.

Whatever you allow on game day is what you are teaching all week.

One thing to do this week. Name the behavior you have been tolerating, say the standard out loud to your team, and enforce it the next time it shows up. I’d love to hear how it goes.

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