August 18, 2025

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Every week, 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.

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Those who stay will be champions

Clips from my recent interview with Joel Klatt made the rounds on social media last week. In particular, one answer I gave about the preparedness of collegiate student-athletes apparently got people talking.

What I said was that while a lot of these kids are more physically prepared than guys from my era, many are less emotionally and mentally prepared because we are sheltering them from struggle and failure. Sometimes we’re even removing them from competition itself. What makes this so frustrating to witness is that the path to greatness, excellence and self-actualization goes through adversity, and we’re redirecting these kids off of that path in the name of comfort and short-term gain.

In this week’s newsletter, we’re going to talk about walking that arduous path of adversity and how it helps turn limitations into life-changing superpowers in the process.

REFLECTION

I had a very good college career at Michigan, but it didn’t start out that way. When I arrived in Ann Arbor, I was seventh on the depth chart and redshirting my first year. The head coach who recruited me had just resigned, the quarterbacks coach left for another job, and the recruiting coordinator was gone. In practice, I was getting two or three reps at most. I had no shot at seeing the field. I had nobody on the staff or the team who knew me and would stand on the table to rally my cause. I thought I was in the worst possible place at Michigan.

But we had a mantra at Michigan, coined by Coach Schembechler, written on walls all over the facility—“Those who stay will be champions”—that really stuck with me and got me to seek out support on this stuff. One of those people was Greg Harden, a sports psychologist in the athletic department who would eventually become a close friend. He taught me to shut out the things I couldn’t control and to focus on myself. More importantly, he told me to stop worrying about only getting three reps in practice, and instead make the most out of those reps—by bringing my focus, enthusiasm, intelligence, and talent to bear on each of them.

Greg basically challenged me to compete. Which I did. Every day. When I got my three reps, I turned them into the three most important downs in the history of Michigan football, and with my energy I brought my teammates along with me.

It worked. My second year, I got more reps and made it into a couple games. My third year, I won the backup job. And then in my fourth year, I won the starting job. Though it didn’t go as smoothly as I would have liked.

That year, Michigan brought in Drew Henson, the #1 high school recruit in the country at quarterback. Then we lost our first two games, to Notre Dame on the road and Syracuse at home. I got booed off the field at the Big House after that Syracuse loss. It felt like nobody wanted me there. But those who stay will be champions, and we rattled off eight consecutive wins from there and then, in the Citrus Bowl, put 45 on Arkansas for the win.

Everything was looking up for my fifth year, but then five days before the first game Coach Carr called me into his office and told me that Drew and I were going to platoon. I’d start and play the first quarter, Drew would play the second quarter, and whoever had the hot hand would finish the game.

The news was disappointing, but there was nothing I could do about it, so I set about making the most of my opportunities. Then, after a bad home loss to Illinois, Coach Carr dispensed with the platoon, I was named permanent starting QB and we won out from there, including a victory over Ohio State and a comeback overtime win against Alabama in the Orange Bowl.

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LESSON

Here’s the thing about today: there is a particular kind of person who reads that story and thinks that I’m complaining about my college career.

Nothing could be further from the truth. I am the grateful beneficiary of every single twist and turn my five years at Michigan took. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. It taught me how to work and how to compete for real—not just for wins, but for reps, for playing time, for the respect of my teammates and the trust of my coaches.

Not being handed the starting job coming out of my redshirt year, and then everything involved with climbing up the depth chart and holding onto the job, forced me to find out what I was made of. It forced me to develop the physical, mental and emotional skillset to endure, accept and respond to any challenge, wherever it comes from. As a result, I gained a ton of self-esteem, self-confidence, and resilience.

Today, a lot of student-athletes, and the people around them who are meant to be their support system, view this kind of competition as adversity they want to avoid, so they’ll transfer multiple times for a “better fit.” But they’re missing the point. A good friend said something profound to me once: your heart has to be in it, not your ego. These kids and their parents need to understand that competition is not a judgment of ability, it’s a process that reveals character. Because competition is just another word for “putting in the work.”

When you’re putting in the work on the practice field, in the weight room, in meetings, watching tape, studying the playbook, dialing in your diet and your sleep, getting to know your teammates; these are all ways you compete in sports to be better than yesterday’s version of yourself and tomorrow’s next hot prospect. You will never know how great you can be or what you can accomplish unless you face the adversity inherent in the stiff competition and high expectations that they present every day.

Excellence isn’t just leaning on what you’re already good at and avoiding what you’re bad at; it’s also working on what you’re bad at until they become strengths. And it’s in this specific aspect of competing, of putting in the work, where you develop the superpowers that can change your life, because the benefits of working on weakness are exponential.

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APPLICATION

I was never the greatest athlete in terms of speed or straight line quickness. Lacking in that area, forced me to work harder in all aspects of the game, including foot speed. I remember in high school, we did these plyometric footwork drills, called dot drills, designed to increase agility and quickness. A lot of football players did them, and I could see their benefit, so I spray-painted the dots on the concrete in my backyard, and I went out every morning at 6am, right after I woke up, and I did those dot drills sometimes for 20 minutes straight.

Those dot drills did two things for me: first, they helped redefine what speed and quickness meant for me. They showed me that there’s more than one way to be elusive. We can’t all be Mike Vick or Patrick Mahomes. With great, nimble footwork, you can also be elusive in a confined space. For a very slow-footed high school quarterback, in the NFL I became known for my speed, quickness and agility in the pocket. I was really good at standing in there and moving my feet, avoiding the rush and then finding holes in the pocket where I could step up to deliver accurate passes. That skill, which became one of my real strengths, didn’t start when I got to the pros, it started in fifth or sixth grade doing jump rope in my backyard, and then in high school doing dot drills, when I was just trying to stay competitive. And the payoff for putting in the work didn’t come right away, but when it did the dividends were huge.

The second thing dot drills did was help me to develop an even better work ethic, that I then applied both consciously and unconsciously to things I was already good at—throwing the football, studying film, etc. You’ll be surprised, when you think you’re only working on a weakness, you’re often also enhancing a strength. Speaking of paying dividends, it’s one thing to reap the rewards of turning a weakness into a strength, but when you apply the same level of rigor and effort and intensity to improving a strength, that’s when it becomes a superpower. That’s when you go from good to great to champion.

​In my speech at my Patriots Hall of Fame induction ceremony last year, I said everyone should play football, because football is hard and life is hard. I implored anyone listening to choose hard, because of what doing hard things teaches us.

In my own way, I was channeling the words of Coach Schembechler. He coined the phrase, “those who stay will be champions,” in the late 1960s when Michigan was going through a rough period and players were leaving the program. What became a key tenet of the Michigan philosophy was initially a promise, a call to arms, and also a challenge. But I think it was even more than that.

For every person who came through the doors at Michigan and took those words to heart, it was a lesson that extended far beyond football. If you stay in the fight, if you don’t run away from adversity, if you double down when things get harder, you will know what it takes to dig down deep when it matters most and meet any test. You will learn everything you need to know about yourself in order to succeed in whatever you choose to do in this world and to ultimately win at the life you want to lead.

Those who stay WILL be champions.

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