Sitting here this afternoon, looking out at an amazing crowd of business majors, getting ready to start your careers, I realized something: sports was a very strange way to make a living.
I was paid to play a game. People screamed at me all the time. They gambled on my performance and celebrated all my failures.
One way that sports is a lot like business, though, is that when you do it long enough, your life gets defined by numbers.
23: that was the number of pro seasons I played
7: those were the Super Bowl wins
3: those were the Super Bowl losses.
Here’s another number for you: 99.7
What does that number make you think of?
It’s an A+. I didn’t get many of those.
It’s a low grade fever, maybe.
It’s also virtual certainty.
If something has a 99.7 percent chance of happening, the outcome is a foregone conclusion…
Well, let me take you back to February 5th, 2017. Super Bowl 51. Patriots versus Falcons. There’s 6 minutes left in the 3rd quarter, we’re losing 28-3, and it’s 4th down at midfield.
At that moment, the Falcons had a 99.7% chance of winning.
It was not exactly how I thought things would go when I woke up that morning. But this sometimes happens. You’ll see. You’re going to THINK that you’re better than your competition. You’re gonna work really hard…and it’s still not gonna go the way you want. You’re gonna find yourself on the short end of that 99.7%, wondering just how you got there.
My Patriots team got there by fumbling the second play of the second quarter, and then right before halftime SOMEBODY threw a devastating pick six. (It’s not important who threw it; the point is, it was thrown. Let’s move on.)
This Falcons team was young, with a new coach. We were the veteran team with the Hall of Fame coach. We’d been there before. But experience or reputation only takes you so far. And it’s true beyond sports. History is LITTERED with mature businesses who took their competition for granted, then got disrupted by ambitious young entrepreneurs.
Remember Blockbuster? Kodak? Nokia? Blackberry?...Exactly.
The point is: nothing is guaranteed.
We were the favorites going into the game. And now, down 25 points, we were the underdogs and I found myself on the bench staring blankly at the ground in deep thought.
With fate seemingly already decided, I was asking myself, what can I do to get us back in the game?
I had to trust my ability and harness whatever optimism I still had. Even if it was just .3%. I had to draw on all of my experience, and all the lessons I’d learned from overcoming years of fear and doubt.
And the question I have for you today is: how much doubt and fear have you faced in your own life?
College can be a bit of a cocoon sometimes, so maybe you haven’t found the limits of your ability or the boundaries of your comfort zone just yet, and you don’t know what’s possible on the other side of them. Trust me when I tell you, overcoming fear and doubt in the face of those challenges is where you’re going to gain the confidence to make your best choices when things aren’t going the way you want.
When the odds are stacked against you, when you are facing your own 28-3 moment–AND BELIEVE ME IT’S COMING–you will have a choice to make: to quit, or to fight your ass off. The choice seems obvious, but that’s easier said than done. Why expend all that energy fighting, when it’s virtually certain you’ll lose? Why not quit, and live to fight another day?
Well, sometimes there ISN’T another day. Super Bowl 51, there was no other day. That was it. With a lot of the most important moments in your lives, when you have a chance to do something truly special…it’s going to be the same way. You may only get one chance to impress your boss and land a promotion. To close the deal, or not.
So what then?
You better have prepared yourself IN ADVANCE to deal with the adversity you’re going to face in order to give yourself the best chance to succeed.
Down by 25, in the biggest game of my life, do you think I just stumbled randomly into my decision to keep fighting?
The previous 25 years of my life had prepared me for this moment. Just as you have been meeting the daily challenge of being a student, I had been meeting the challenge of being a football player every day, just for a CHANCE to do something special.
The whole reason I went to Michigan was the idea of taking my abilities to an elite program and seeing if I could compete with the best. A lot of you made a similar choice coming to Georgetown, and will make it again, going out on your own, or in jobs with great institutions like Deloitte or Goldman or Google. These places will challenge you to be your best. And you better be prepared.
I fought hard to go to Michigan. I fought even harder to stay there, competing against guys who were just as good as me, if not better. I didn’t get a chance to start until my fourth year. It was tough. It had me questioning whether I was at the right school. Maybe Michigan was too tough?
Where you choose to work might also seem too hard for you. You’ll be up against people from equally great schools who are just as smart and talented as you, and want it as much as you do. You’ll be asked to do things you’ve never done before. To work long hours, harder than you ever have, with people you might not like–like guys from Duke.
But what makes it too hard is exactly the thing that makes it the perfect place for you, because it will offer you the greatest opportunity of all: the opportunity to face your fears and doubts, and develop the skills and abilities necessary to overcome any obstacle you’ll face on the path to being successful in life.
And this is the key: you don’t quit and you don’t make excuses. Every hard choice is a brick in the path toward the life you want. But every excuse is a brick in the wall that will stand in your way.
When the opportunity to do something special presents itself, the people most prepared to meet the challenge will be the ones who’ve made the most hard choices. Who’ve faced adversity and overcome it. They won’t have won all their fights. But they never quit.
I stayed at Michigan. Then I got chosen in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft. My numbers were unimpressive. If there was a 99.7% chance of anything, it’s that I’d be behind the counter at Ben’s Chili Bowl before I was behind center in an NFL game. And who knows, that could have been fun too. Who doesn’t love chili dogs? The point is: no one could ever have imagined that I would end my career with seven World Championships. Maybe because none of those people knew that I would never, ever quit.
Which brings me back to Super Bowl 51. On that sideline, down 28-3. With a choice.
Our team had worked too hard. We'd come too far. I said to myself, and excuse me for saying this, I'm taking you inside my helmet in one of the biggest moments of my life.
I said to myself, “Don't be a little bitch. Go out there and fight your ass off. Whether you win or lose, fight to the end.”
At that moment, we had no idea what the outcome of that game would be. But the one thing I have learned through sports is that the only time you’re sure to lose is when you quit.
In life, in work–you're going to get knocked down a lot. How are you going to navigate those moments? Are you going to push through the self-doubt? Are you going to face the fear? Will you work relentlessly to the very end, even when the outcome is virtually certain?
I hope you do. Because THIS is the prep work for the bigger opportunities to come. The whole point of doing hard things is to build resilience and the skills to overcome adversity. It’s to teach you how to find your own pathways to success. This is where you get the self-confidence to overcome your next biggest challenge.
And you do it, the same way you overcome a 25-point deficit. One decision at a time. One play at a time.
Understanding this served me well on every step of my journey. Including that step into the huddle on 4th down with the outcome of Super Bowl 51 99.7% guaranteed that we would lose.
We called a play. A little square out to Danny Amendola. Danny went undrafted out of Texas Tech. He was cut by three NFL teams before he came to us. He wasn’t the tallest or the fastest, but he had a HUGE heart and played his best in the biggest moments. I hope you find colleagues like Danny. Having business school friends is great, don’t get me wrong, but sometimes you need a kid from a glorified community college (sorry, Lubbock) who can bail your ass out of any jam. If you want to achieve great things, surround yourself with people like him.
Danny snatched that ball out of the air and took it up the sideline for a first down. Seven plays later, we were in the endzone. 28-9.
99.7% chance of losing just went down to 98.9%. Hurray.
Now it was the defense’s turn, and they forced Atlanta to punt.
Now it’s the fourth quarter. We go 72 yards, just for a field goal. We’re now losing 28-12.
Three plays later. BOOM. Our defense comes up with a huge turnover and we recover the Matt Ryan fumble at the Atlanta 25. With just under six minutes left I hit Danny again, this time for a touchdown.
The odds of Atlanta winning: now 92.1%.
Thirty minutes earlier, I was thinking “don’t be a bitch.” Now, I’m thinking, “LOCK IN. LASER FOCUS. WE GOT THIS.”
Kicking the ball back to Atlanta with 5:56 to play, we had the answers to the problems that the Falcons presented…as long as we didn’t run out of time. We just had to run the right plays, move fast, and execute.
We had to make good choices.
My career was filled with challenges and choices–with small opportunities to show people, including myself, what I was capable of. My hope is that you’ve already had a few of these moments, as well. I hope you have already begun to try hard things with long odds. I hope your failures have forced you to find new pathways to success. I hope they force you out of your comfort zone and show you the boundaries in your life that are there to be broken through.
My challenge to all of you is to always keep fighting.
Because the truth is, the way you overcome a 99.7% chance of losing in the biggest moments of your life, is to harness the confidence you’ve built and the lessons you’ve learned from a lifetime of failing at things you care about. Everything you’ve been through up to this point in your life has been trial and error. It’s been preparation for your next big challenge. YOUR 28-3 moment.
Down by 8, we got the ball back with 3:30 left to play. The game was still very much in Atlanta’s favor, and I understood victory was very unlikely, even in the moment. I’m an optimist, but I can also do math. I didn’t go to Georgetown, but I knew the numbers were not on our side.
96.5% chance of losing, still.
But then, we put together the drive of our lives. Everyone contributed. Chris Hogan, undrafted, played lacrosse in college, ran a perfect route and converted a huge third down. Malcolm Mitchell, another fourth rounder, tripped over his own feet, fell down, still managed to catch the ball and get up in time to convert the next first down. On the very next play, Julian Edelman, a 7th rounder, a converted quarterback, who did everything asked of him for three years before he ever saw the field at wide receiver, made the single most amazing catch I’ve ever seen. All three of these guys had a chip on their shoulder, with something to prove. And boy, did they prove it.
When we scored with less than a minute to go and converted the 2-point try to tie the game, the win probability finally flipped. 53% US.
In overtime, we marched down the field. At the Atlanta 2 yard line, I flipped the ball out to James White. A fourth round pick who didn’t play his first year. James was as tough and as resilient as they come. Wherever you’re headed next in your life, find someone like James to be friends with. You’re going to need gladiators like him along the way. He barreled through half of a deflated Falcons defense to put the ball in the endzone and secure our fifth Super Bowl title.
What, ninety minutes earlier, was set to go down as the worst defeat of my life—the most embarrassing game I ever played in—turned into the most memorable victory of my NFL career.
Now odds are, your 28-3 moment won't end with a trophy or a parade. It may not even end in victory. But that’s not really the point. These are all just momentary tests, where failure isn’t final, only quitting is. The choice to fight is an opportunity to succeed, yes. But it’s also your chance to grow. To show everyone that while you may be beatable, you are unbreakable.
Sometimes in life, you have to put the numbers aside and ignore the odds. You have to make the tough choice. You have to try your best and fight your hardest to win. Because the only thing worse than losing the biggest game of your life is losing respect for yourself along the way.
Watch the full speech here:
