04 Jan 1-5-17 What We Can Learn From NFL Coaches and Teams

Sports. I love sports. You can look at sports and learn so much about life. It’s nearing the end of the professional football season. The normal carousel of coaching vacancies has started. The usual teams have fired their coaches. San Francisco, for example, has fired their fourth coach in 4 years. Poor Buffalo let their coach go after only 2 years. New Orleans is thinking about trading their coach to another team. Now that’s something you don’t see very often – trading a coach.
I’m obviously not in the management of NFL teams, but it sure doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. It’s pretty easy to see the successful teams tend to be the ones that have had coaches for a long time and not always to hiring and firing coaches. They hire the coach and stick with him through thick and thin. Of the four teams with the best odds to win the Super Bowl, the average duration of the coach for three of those teams (New England, Green Bay, and Pittsburgh) is 12 ½ years.
Pretty much for the last 10 – 15 years, those three teams have been perennial favorites to be in the playoffs and compete for Super Bowls. In fact, those three teams alone accounted for 7 of the last 15 Super Bowl wins.
So, if I was managing an NFL team, I’d take a look at these three teams and say to myself “What makes these teams successful?” It’s pretty easy to see, it’s consistency. Take your time and hire the right person. So many of these teams go out and hire the splashy Coach that they think will be the savior of their franchise. The funny thing is, none of the coaches for New England, Green Bay, or Pittsburgh were splashy coaches. Those teams took their time and hired the person that would fit their system and their beliefs.
It’ll be interesting to watch these professional teams hire new coaches. Are they hiring coaches that will stay around for a while? Will these teams give the coaches a chance to win?
I just read a book by John C. Maxwell called Leadership 101. In it, he said that “Becoming a leader is a lot like investing successfully in the stock market. If your hope is to make a fortune in a day, you’re not going to be successful. What matters most is what you do day by day over the long haul.”
We hear all these stories about people getting rich real fast in the stock market or with a company. And it makes sense, because these are fun stories to hear and read about. But there are a lot more people who get wealthy over the long haul, by being slow and steady. As the saying goes, it’s not a sprint, it’s a marathon.
You can learn a lot by looking at these professional football teams. The Dallas Cowboys, the San Francisco 49ers, the Washington Redskins, and many other teams are sprinting. The Patriots, Packers, and Steelers are running the marathon. And those are the teams that are winning, they are going slow and steady, just like John Maxwell says.