REFLECTION
I’ve got a soft spot for the draft. Each year, it gets me thinking about the most important traits when it comes to building a winning team. Will each of the hungry, talented young guys coming into the league exhibit some of those traits and work out for their team? I hope so. I think every fan and front office feels that way about the players they sign each year.
Of course, history and math tell us something different. During training camp, teams can carry 90 players for 53 roster spots. By the beginning of September, decisions will have to be made. Some guys will stick, some will fall away. And we won’t know exactly who until the demands of playing this game at the highest level reveal the aspects of their character that are the most important to building a winning team: determination, competitiveness, resilience, perseverance, humility, integrity, intelligence. I don’t care if you were the last guy signed or the first guy picked, on winning teams these are the traits that are going to matter most.
Don’t tell that to some of these pundits, though. They already know what’s going to happen. They’ve crunched the Combine data and measured the immeasurables. Their deep dives and draft grades are already flying around the internet, anointing some teams’ draft classes, condemning others, certain who the blue chippers are and convinced who the busts will be. I look forward to printing out and going through some of their stories, because I need something to line my cat’s litter box.
LESSON
To be fair, critics and commentators aren’t always wrong. In my experience, they’re right often enough, just not for the reasons they think.
There’s a famous line from the writer, Neil Gaiman: “When people tell you something’s wrong or doesn’t work for them, they are almost always right. When they tell you exactly what they think is wrong and how to fix it, they are almost always wrong.” Gaiman is talking about writing, but he could just as easily have been talking about any professional sport.
Here’s what I think you need to understand when it comes to evaluating the draft. An NFL franchise is like any other business or team: it wants to build a winning culture. That culture is defined by the organization’s internal values, which are reflected in their external priorities, which are executed through the decisions they make and the actions they take. In that way, a team’s draft picks and free agent signings are a window into its culture, for better and for worse.
My Patriots teams were a perfect example of this. Our culture was built around selflessness, teamwork, and winning. We wanted champions, not stars. Everything we did was about identifying or instilling a champion’s mindset in the people who walked through our doors—whether through the draft, free agency or trade. With guys like Tedy Bruschi, Julian Edelman, Dont’a Hightower and Wes Welker to name just a few, we were long on ‘we/us’ and as short as possible on ‘me/I’.
When things are going well and everyone is aligned, it’s easy to see a team’s culture on full display like that: from draft picks and free agents, to re-signings and cuts, to coaching hires, to practice habits and playing philosophy. Everything just makes sense.
But what about when things don’t make sense?
APPLICATION
Last week, the writer Sahil Bloom published a post titled “The Mountain and the Pebble” about why people get stuck. Is it the mountain, that big, external object in your path, that’s holding you back from success, or is it the nagging pebble in your shoe, the “small, silent enemy” within? That’s his fundamental question. His answer is that more often than not, the mountain is just a distraction, and it’s the hard to identify, easy to ignore pebbles that are doing all the damage.
I think this explains a lot about teams that always struggle or underachieve. When we dominated the AFC East in New England, for instance, we were unquestionably the mountain of our division. We were sturdy and immovable, because our culture (aka, the people!) was sturdy and immovable. When you looked at the rest of the division—the Dolphins, the Bills, the Jets—we were definitely in their way, to the extent that they would have to go through us to win the division, but if you then look at each team’s fortunes over the last 5 or 6 years, after Bill and I both left, it becomes pretty clear for at least one team, the New York Jets, that the Patriots were not their biggest problem.
The Jets’ issues were more about the Jets, not the Patriots. They had god knows how many pebbles in their shoes that they’ve struggled to shake out for a long time. It has hobbled them, set them back, and sent them off course. I’m sure they’re trying to build a winning culture like everyone else. You can want to win, but if your priorities and decisions are off, it will be represented in the win and loss column at the end of the year.
In describing the impact of the pebble, Bloom mentions this phenomenon in aviation called the 1-in-60 rule. For every degree off the correct heading, you end up a mile off target for every sixty miles you fly. Fly long enough, and there’s no telling where you end up. Seattle to Miami with 1 degree of error in either direction lands you in the Bahamas or washing up on the shores of Havana.
I think that’s exactly what happens to floundering NFL teams, to wayward companies, to struggling relationships, even to countries and political parties that seem to have lost their way. They’re all aimed toward winning or profit or happiness or justice—those are their agreed upon targets—but then they get these pebbles in their shoes (maybe it’s a money problem, an emotional issue, a personality conflict, it could be a thousand things), and it affects the direction of their progress just enough that, when it goes unnoticed or uncorrected for too long, they end up wildly off target and the rest of us are left wondering: What the hell are they doing? Where are they going? The self-awareness and humility to be critical of yourself is absolutely necessary in order to self-correct before it’s too late. Don’t let that one degree off course turn into 60 miles, or worse, 600.
The good news is that the solution to almost all of your problems is entirely within your control. Next time you find yourself stuck in a negative culture, on a losing streak, or trapped in a cycle of decision making that isn’t producing the results you expected, resist the urge to look outward for the obstacle in your way (Ryan Holiday would say the obstacle IS the way). Look inward instead. Find the pebbles in your shoe, shake them out, and course correct.
When everything starts working the way it should inside the culture of your team or your company or your family, you will be surprised how quickly your priorities shift, your decisions start to reflect your values, your actions and behaviors become aligned, and your fortunes change.
