Each week I put down one honest thing about leading, usually something I learned the hard way and would rather have learned another way. If this one is useful, please pass it on. Forward it to a coach, a colleague, or anyone carrying a team right now, and send them the sign-up link below while you are at it. Almost everyone reading this arrived because somebody thought of them, and that is the only way it grows.

Friends,

This Saturday is the first opening weekend of college football since college coaching legend Lou Holtz passed away this March. He died at eighty-nine, after 249 wins, a national championship at Notre Dame in 1988, and five decades of turning programs around that other people had given up on.

He will get remembered this fall mostly for the one-liners, because he was very funny and because that is the easiest part of him to put in a highlight package. I want to spend the next three weeks on the harder question: whether anything he taught still works in a sport he would barely recognize. And if you do not coach, stay with me, because the answer turns out not to be about football at all.

Start with the thing he built everything else on. Holtz believed every person you lead is quietly asking you three questions from the first day. Can I trust you? Are you committed to being excellent? Do you care about me? He thought that if you answered those three, most of the rest would take care of itself.

I have a stake in this one. I was a student at Notre Dame while he was there, and I heard him speak in person three or four times. Not as a player. As one more person in a room, with no claim on him and no expectation that he would ever know my name.

Those talks ran fifteen or thirty minutes apiece. In each of them, I found I had answered his three questions about him without anyone asking me to. I believed what he said. I trusted him completely. And I came away certain he cared about the people sitting in front of him, which is not a small thing to pull off with an audience you will never see again.

If he could do that to a student in a folding chair in half an hour, I can only imagine what four years of it did to the men who played for him.

Everything about how a player gets to you and how long he stays has changed. Trust, hope, cohesion, and excellence have not. That is what this series is about.

Now the honest objection, because it deserves to be made properly.

Holtz coached men who would be in his building for four years. That’s over. The portal window has collapsed into a single stretch in early January; revenue sharing is in its second year at roughly 21.5 million per school; and every deal on your roster gets repriced annually. Rosters do not develop anymore so much as they reassemble.

So a head coach can look at deep personal investment in one player and see a bad use of the scarcest thing he has. Why pour eighteen months into a young man who may be gone by February? That is not cynicism. It is a rational read of the incentives, and I routinely hear a version of it from good coaches. I hear the same calculation from executives about people who will be recruited away inside two years, in almost the same words.

Here is my answer, and it works for a program, a department, or a company. Write down every competitive advantage you have, then mark the ones a wealthier rival could match by this time next year.

Facilities can be matched with a donor in eighteen months. The scheme can be matched because your coordinator is one good season away from being somebody else’s hire. And compensation, the newest advantage, is the most matchable of all. Whatever you put in front of a player, a program with more money can put more.

There is one item on that list with no market price.

Trust is the exception, because it is not something you give someone. It is a record, built one hard conversation at a time. It cannot be frontloaded ahead of a deadline, it does not show up in a filing, and it does not transfer. It is the only thing you have that a richer competitor cannot buy away from you, and that is as true in an office as it is in a locker room.

The three questions did not get less important when the portal opened. They became the last thing you own.

What did change is the clock, and every coach feels it every January. What gets missed is what follows from it.

In 1988, a player had four years to work out whether he trusted his head coach. In 2026 he decides in about three weeks. A transfer who showed up in June has a working answer to all three questions before the first game, and that answer will matter more in January than his snap count or his next number.

So here is the part I have been building toward. If you lead a staff, a department, or a crew, you have this same problem in different clothes. People arrive already deciding whether to stay, and a new hire forms a durable read on you inside the first month. A competitor can match your salary, your title, and your flexibility. What they cannot match is a leader who has already shown what he does when the honest answer is the expensive one. Trust runs on a timeline no matter who you lead, and everyone’s timeline has gotten shorter.

Trust used to accumulate on its own. Four years in a building will do that, whether anyone plans for it or not, which is why many programs never had to think about it. On a three-week clock, it either gets built on purpose or it does not get built at all.

One thing to do this week, before your opener. Ask every coach on your staff to write down privately how the players in their room would answer those three questions about them. Not how they hope those players would answer. How they really would. Then ask each coach for the specific thing he did in the last thirty days that earned it.

Most staffs find the same thing. They can name the answer they want but cannot name the evidence. That gap is your culture, and it can be measured in about twenty minutes.

Next week, identity. What his players still say about that program decades later, why they all reach for the same three words, and what it takes to build something a player who arrived in June can already say out loud.