March 31, 2025

Every Monday, I sit down to reflect on the events of the week, extract their lessons, and gameplan how to apply those lessons toward greatness and growth. It’s a system that has always worked for me, it can work for you too. Welcome to The 199!

For the second year in a row, after a handful of years with massive early round upsets, we’ve had another very chalky men’s NCAA basketball tournament. All but four of the sixteen 1-4 seeds made it to the Sweet Sixteen. All the 1-seeds and three of the 2-seeds made it to the Elite 8. And for only the second time in history, all four 1-seeds made it to the Final Four.

I have no idea what, if anything, this says about the state of college basketball or the impact of things like NIL, but it made me think a lot about the demands of sustained greatness and what it takes to get better when things don’t break your way.

REFLECTION

I played in a lot of the biggest games of other people’s seasons. When we really got it going around 2003 and the Patriots went into juggernaut mode, we were circled on everybody’s schedule. Teams didn’t just get up for us, they got down to business scheming against us.

We got everybody’s best. I definitely remember a few seasons where I thought to myself, “why can’t we get the shitty Jets team this time, or the shitty Dolphins team?” But that’s what it’s like when you reach the mountaintop and you manage to stay there for a long time. There are no weeks off. It’s not easy. You can’t think of it as the burden of being the best, though. You have to wear it like a badge of honor. Even if the badge is shaped like a target and you are the bullseye at the center of it.

That said, you can’t allow the energy level and competitiveness of the opponent in front of you to dictate whether, or how hard, you dig in. That always has to come from within. In those years when we were loaded on defense or stacked at the offensive skill positions, I probably didn’t need to be better for us to win. But I never thought about getting better or achieving greatness—at a team or individual level—relative to the standings in any particular season. I thought about it compared to Joe Montana’s 49ers teams, who I idolized growing up, and Peyton Manning, who was a #1 overall pick, a savant, and my peer in the AFC. I would not have been anywhere as good of a quarterback as I ended up becoming if it weren’t for my internal drive to achieve a Montana-like legacy and to meet or exceed the standard set by Peyton every drive, every game, every season for a decade-plus

LESSON

Greatness can’t be context-dependent. It won’t come from singular, exceptional achievement. In fact, I would say greatness has to be a way of life in which high achievement is neither singular nor exceptional, but regular and consistent. Greatness has to become a process that involves getting your body and your mind in the right place so you can achieve at the highest level in everything you do, over and over again, on and off the field, every day. Fundamentally, greatness is about doing the right things, the hard things, consistently and reliably, and doing it not just in the big game, but in every game. The next game. The last game. The game of life.

This doesn’t mean you will always win. If anything, it guarantees you will fail fairly often, because to do everything I’m talking about, to put yourself in a position to make greatness possible, means to push the limits. And when you push the limits, the limits push back.

APPLICATION

These past two Mondays, a bunch of 18–21-year-old kids headed back to class all around the country, having played in the biggest games of their lives. Every one of those young men found their limits in one way or another. Some pushed through them, others had their limits push back…hard.

In the space of three days, the #3 Texas Tech Red Raiders had it both ways. In the Sweet Sixteen on Thursday, they were down 13 points to #10 Arkansas with less than 5 minutes to play, then dug deep and found a way to claw back and win in overtime. Two days later, in the Elite 8, they were up by 9 on #1 Florida with less than three minutes to go and then maybe the bright lights got a little too bright and they lost by five.

Here’s the thing about those games: the win over Arkansas isn’t proof of greatness, because it’s only one game. But it hints at what is possible, at the potential that lies within each of the guys on that Texas Tech roster. Conversely, the loss to Florida is not an indictment of their potential either.

What it is…is a test.

Will they do what it takes to break through the barrier next time? Will they continue to push the limits of what they’re capable of—in their hoop game, in their school work, in their relationships? Will they let this loss deflate them and rob them of self-esteem and self-confidence? Or will they accept the lessons that this difficult, very public failure is trying to teach them, and then rise to the challenge of doing the work necessary to come out on top next time, and the time after that, and the time after that?

We grow in the dark. This is literally true. We recover and build muscle while we sleep. It’s also metaphorically true. Personal growth, mastery, greatness—these things happen when no one is watching. They don’t happen in public, in sold-out arenas with millions of people watching at home. They happen when the arena is dark, when the only one there to judge your effort and your performance is you.

This is true for sports, for business, for the arts, for parenthood. To be great, and to stay great, at any of them you have to do all the right things and the hard things that no one pays to see, and you have to do them every day.

You can fake it. You can try to hack the process. You can play to the level of your competition and call yourself a “game time player.” You can go with your gut and hero ball the all-hands meeting at work. You can be the actor who prefers to find the magic in the moment instead of knowing all your lines. You can be the cool dad in front of all your kids' friends. And it can work…for a while. But eventually, you will find the limits of this strategy, and the limits will push back.