March 7, 2025

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The Breakdown

“Whether you think you can or you think you can’t—you’re right.” — Henry Ford

People can push you to be better, but you are your only true competition.

Mindset matters more than anything.

Numbers are valuable, but never as valuable as your intangible qualities.¹

329 players were invited to the NFL Combine in Indianapolis last week. Each player took meetings and tests, and participated in a series of drills designed to distill their athletic ability as a football player into a set of numbers that teams will use to decide whether they want to draft them in April.

My draft story is well known. I didn’t project well coming out of Michigan. Physically, I was behind the guys who were total specimens.

I couldn’t run or jump or throw like any of them. After our Orange Bowl win, I went down to Louisiana to try to close the gap with a Combine guru named Tom Shaw on speed, strength and plyometrics, but there was only so much he could do.

These were my eventual Combine numbers:

• 40-yard dash: 5.28 seconds
• Vertical jump: 24.5 inches
• Three-cone drill: 4.38 seconds
• Arm length: 32.75 inches
• Hand size: 9.38 inches

When you added them up in the spring of 2000, what you got was 199. My draft slot. You also got other numbers. 33rd pick of the 6th round. 7th quarterback selected. 7th player selected by the Patriots. 5th player selected from Michigan.

I’m a data guy. I love numbers. They play an important role at the Scouting Combine, generating a baseline for speed, size and strength. The NFL is a fast, physical league. There are so few examples of truly successful outliers that there’s value for teams in knowing at a glance whether a guy can keep up and hold up.

But my favorite thing about these numbers is that they can mean whatever you want them to mean. Your numbers can be your finest achievement, your cross to bear, or your undoing. They can be motivation for getting better or your excuse for giving up. They can be a badge of honor and a reminder of what hard work can achieve. When it comes to numbers, if you think they’re good, or you think they’re bad—you’re right.

It’s up to you.

My first real mental confrontation with my numbers and their meaning came on Day 2 of the 2000 NFL Draft when the Cleveland Browns selected Spergon Wynn with the 183rd pick in the 6th round. Spergon is a great guy who’s gone on to be very successful as an energy trader. But in 1999, his team sucked. They went 3-8 and he barely completed 50% of his passes. There’s no other way to put it: I was better. My numbers were better. I should have gone before him.

WTF?

Watching yet another quarterback come off the board, nothing made sense. If wins and accuracy and bowl games don’t count for anything, what does? It was too much for my panicked, insecure 22-year-old mind to handle, so my parents and I took a walk around the block to get some air. I let it all out. My mom and dad listened and consoled me. We wondered out loud, what now?

By the time we got back to our front door, I’d made peace with the fact that this might be it. I gave football everything I had, but now it was time to move on. There wasn’t an NFL training camp in my future, only training for a sales position at a local insurance company. I could be good at that, I decided. I could build a happy life from there. Then the phone rang, and five minutes later I became pick 199.

I spent the next 23 years redefining that number and trying to embody its true value. Today, 199 has become a symbol to me. It’s shorthand for the mindset I developed over those years to stay motivated and goal-oriented, to focus on what matters, and to work hard at getting better at all the things I care about.

More than that, though, 199 is the call to look in the mirror, not at the numbers or the competition, and to decide what kind of person you want to be, what kind of life you want to live, and what you are willing to do to make that happen. Because your competition is never other people; I wasn’t competing with Chad or Giovanni or Chris or Tee or Marc or Spergon (yeah, I still remember all their names). The real competition was Me vs Me. I was competing with the guy looking back at me in the mirror every morning. That guy had a mission, and it was my job to live up to it. 199 is the hallmark for the mindset I cultivated to meet this challenge, regardless of how others perceived me or what the numbers might have said.

The thing that should free all of us from the tyranny of numbers is that there is no metric for the intangibles: heart, passion, work ethic, the will to be great. There’s no Combine drill, no interview question, no Wonderlic test. The intangibles are invaluable precisely because they are immeasurable. You have them or you don’t. People see them or they don’t. I only know this because everything that distinguished me as an NFL quarterback was intangible and unmeasurable, and only the Patriots saw enough of them to draft me.

This phenomenon isn’t just limited to football, though. It plays out in the real world, too. The list of overlooked people with average GPAs and underwhelming SAT scores in high school, for example, who went on to win prestigious awards, create amazing art, or start billion-dollar businesses is too long to count. Many of them were misjudged because there’s no standardized test for curiosity or creativity. There’s no advanced placement class for entrepreneurship or leadership. You can’t grade these intangible qualities in any way that captures the ability or the drive of the people who possess them.

The truth is, numbers don’t lie, but they don’t tell the full story either. Only you can do that—through your choices, your actions, and your mindset. And what you will learn, the deeper into your own story you get, is that there’s an entirely different set of numbers that matter most.

For me, those numbers are 2 (my parents), 3 (my kids, and separately my sisters), 7 (championship teams), 23 (seasons in the NFL), and then one larger, indefinable number that is impossible to pin down…everyone who’s supported me along the way.

With Appreciation,

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¹ If you did want to measure your life in numbers, you could do worse than this 2015 internet classic from Tim Urban at Wait But Why.​