REFLECTION
I’ve played and watched an immense amount of football in my life. I’ve seen every kind of play many times over—from the most insanely acrobatic to the most impossibly athletic to the most boneheaded you can imagine. And with those boneheaded plays, I’ve heard every possible explanation for why they happened.
My foot slipped.
The ball slipped.
My arm got hit.
He missed his block.
He ran the wrong route.
I couldn’t hear the play call.
I didn’t see the signal.
The sun. The wind. The rain.
Now, whether any of these explanations were true in the moment is irrelevant, because as they say: when you’re explaining, you’re losing. And an explanation without accountability is nothing more than an excuse.
What any player should say after a mistake, at least if they aspire to be leaders who earn their teammates’ trust, is something like: "I’ve got to make that play. I made a mistake. I'm going to work as hard as I can to make sure it doesn't happen again.”
Then they need to go out and work on it with their teammates in practice. They need to say what they’re going to do, and then go out and do it. That’s the integrity piece of leadership. You can’t just pay lip service to accountability, you have to back it up with action. You have to put the interests of the team ahead of absolving yourself of responsibility for the mistake, and you need to do the work. It doesn’t matter which position you play, how many years you’ve been in the league or on your team.
Of course, this kind of leadership is expected from the quarterback position. As a quarterback, you are naturally one of the leaders of the team. At the very least, you’re the leader of the offense. In that capacity, the expectation is that you will know the most and be the most prepared. You know where everyone is supposed to be and what everyone is supposed to do.
What that means is, your teammates are always looking at you, and to you, to set the example. You are never going to sneak an excuse by your guys. They see you. They know what you’re doing. You sit in team meeting rooms together every day where all the expectations are known. They know when your excuse is bullshit and they know when it’s true. But even when you’re technically correct, what they’re really watching you do is shift the blame, and they don’t forget.
Leaders eat the humble pie. They put themselves in the shoes of their teammates. They put their teammates’ interests before their own.
That is leader behavior. No excuses. Total ownership.
LESSON
Some people are natural born leaders, others have to learn the skills of leadership and grow into the role. Regardless, the very first person each of us has to lead is ourselves—physically, mentally, and emotionally.
Physically, that means taking care of your body. Training, sleeping, eating right. The beauty of being part of a team is that you can inspire each other to do more than you can do on your own—run faster, lift more, push harder—but no one can prepare your body for the actual work other than you.
Mentally, that means being fully prepared. In football, that looks like being locked in at meetings, watching film, being focused. It means directing the offense, making the right calls, and holding the competitive mental edge for your team. You’re the one who has to have a good strategic sense for the game and be prepared to seize every opportunity to force your opponent into doing things they don’t want to do. You’ll have coaches and teachers who help a lot in this part of the process, but no one else can put your butt in that seat, put the right words in your mouth, or get you locked in with laser focus.
Emotionally, that means bringing optimism and daily competitiveness. You bring the juice that keeps your team on the right track. At the same time, you don’t get too high or too low. When you make a great play, you take your moment to celebrate, but then it’s onto the next. When things don’t go the way you planned, you don’t get lost in the what-ifs. You take control of the situation and you’re onto the next. No excuses.
The problem with excuses, especially for a leader, is that they prevent you from learning from failures and growing into the person you are capable of becoming. And if a leader can’t lead themselves to improvement, how can you expect them to lead a team there? You can’t ask others to do what you won’t do yourself. You set the example, for better and for worse.
The thing that excuses do more than anything else is that they wall you off from the pain of failure. Whenever I threw a consequential interception in a game, even if we won the game, I’d watch that play over and over again, until I wasn’t just pissed off, I was fired up. After Super Bowl losses, I’d watch the film and sit in the pain of the defeat—of all the little mistakes I made or opportunities I missed—for days, if not weeks. I wanted to feel the pain of my mistakes so acutely, so completely, that it would drive me into the film room a little earlier and keep me there a little longer. It drove me to go harder at practice, to prepare more thoroughly, and to demand more of myself and my teammates.
Over 30+ years of football, I improved more in response to the pain of failure than to any other stimulus—getting chewed out, getting coached up, getting inspired, you name it.
Nothing will make you want to work harder to be better than living in the pain of letting your teammates down in the biggest moments. Excuses insulate you from this pain, and they rob you of failure’s transformative potential. Like I said in my commencement speech to Georgetown University a few months ago, the hard choices you make on the other side of failure are like bricks in the path to the life you want to live. An excuse is a brick in the wall that stands between you and that life, between you and your fullest potential, between your team and success.
The truth is, teams that play the ‘blame game’ rarely play in the Big Game, and that’s especially true when it’s their leaders who are making the excuses.
APPLICATION
It can be easy to slip into excuse-making. For anyone. It’s always more comfortable to shift the blame than to sit in the pain of your failures. And because a good excuse looks a lot like a reasonable explanation, even the best leaders can trick themselves into shirking accountability.
I remember during week 14 in 2011, we played the Washington Redskins (at the time) on the road. We went back and forth all afternoon, never more than a one-score game from the middle of the first quarter until the middle of the fourth quarter when we drove into the red zone with a chance to make it a two-score game and put the game on ice.
On 3rd and goal, Tiquan Underwood ran an in-cut along the back line of the end zone. I saw him get open and I kind of floated the ball up there to him. As I let the ball go, his defender undercut his route, went up and picked it off.
Walking to the sideline, I was mad at myself for throwing the interception, but I found myself wanting to make excuses for the mistake. I knew it was 99% my fault. Still, sitting on the bench, I looked over at Tiquan and said, “Ti, you can’t get undercut like that!”
Our offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien was standing a few feet away. When he heard what I said, he turned around and lit into me. "What did you say? Did you fucking blame Tiquan?! That’s fucking bullshit!” We proceeded to have a full-on argument on the sideline for 30-45 seconds that Brian Hoyer and Coach Belichick had to step in the middle of to calm things down.
The reality was, I wanted to insulate myself from the personal failure because I’d just put the burden back on our defense to hold them at home. It felt good to place blame on someone else. It went against everything I stand for as a leader, but still the pull of excuse-making was there, and it was stronger than I was in that moment.
You have to resist this. You can’t let excuses win. It won’t be good for your family, for your career.
But you know what Tiquan said to me when I tried to blame the interception on him? “I got you, TB. You’re right.” He did what a leader does! He did what I should have done. No excuses. Take accountability. Act with humility. This was Tiquan’s third year in the league, his first with the Patriots. This was my twelfth! I gained so much respect for that guy as a leader in that single exchange.
Guess what Tiquan Underwood is doing today? He’s a wide receivers coach with the Texans. His ninth year as a coach in college and the pros. Of course! He’s a natural leader.
To lead effectively in whatever capacity you find yourself—boss, parent, coach, partner, etc.—it demands the kind of radical accountability that Tiquan showed on the sideline in that 2011 game. It requires that you sit with the pain of your failures—like I didn’t then, but have worked hard to do ever since—so that you can learn their most important lessons and grow into the kind of person who can lead even a great team beyond their own high expectations.
The foundation of winning is teamwork. Teamwork is built on trust and the confidence that develops when trust is continually reaffirmed by radical accountability. When you do what you say you’re going to do, it gives your teammates the confidence they need to go all out, to push, to stretch themselves. They can trust that you’ve got their backs and that you’ll be there to catch them if they fall.
Excuses undercut all of that. They are a sledgehammer to the foundation of everything you’re trying to build. Conversely, nobody inspires more confidence, trust and respect than the person who says, “I got you, I got this. I hear you, I’ll get it done.”
That’s leadership, and it’s a language every one of us can speak.
