Josh Chambers

Mike Tomlin says he refuses to let circumstances become excuses for his players, and says the standard must remain the same regardless of conditions

“Some I’ve heard in a variety of places. Some I’ve learned, and I’ve trained myself to. Man, our business is about capturing the attention of our audience, and our audience being players. And they’ve sat in a lot of rooms most of their lives.”

“They’ve heard coaches speak. They’ve heard all of that. And so it’s my job to deliver messaging, but not allowing it to become stale. Like, how can I teach while being entertaining?”

“And so for me, it was producing those catchphrases that they might laugh, but they remember. It resonates. ‘Don’t blink. Cut your eyelids off.’”

“I mean, I went down the rabbit hole, and there are some people who’ve done some pretty in-depth analysis. I read an analysis about that one in particular, and it made a good point. They were like, if you tell a guy who’s been in the locker room for 12 years to concentrate and focus, that’s just white noise. But if you say, ‘Don’t blink. Eyes wide open. Cut your eyelids off.’”

“And if you’re a blinker, cut your eyelids off. It’s acknowledging the fact that sometimes we blink. Sometimes the load gets a little heavy. You’re acknowledging that reality.”

“And how do you combat it? That’s been around for a long time. The standard is the standard. We allow ourselves out based on current circumstance.”

“And really, at the end of the day, man, current issues are irrelevant. Our business is winning. And so who’s available, who’s not available, weather conditions, game locations, et cetera. Like, how can I minimize variables that provide excuses for us?”

“Because if you’re gonna be great, particularly in our business, you gotta be comfortable with being uncomfortable. And so those things provide comfort. And I’ve trained myself to be resistant to comfort. And so how do I train my team to be resistant to comfort?”

“Like, our current circumstance, our issues, although they may be real and relevant, don’t matter. Because the standard is the standard. And so you just gotta train them to live that out.”

Steve Kerr says he was faking his confidence before hitting the famous shot when Michael Jordan passed him the ball for the championship in the 1997 NBA Finals

“I was faking it. I’m not kidding. I was so nervous. But I was far enough along in my career where I had learned the value of just letting it fly.”

“You can’t overthink anything. You can’t think about the repercussions. And Phil Jackson had been a great mentor for me, teaching our whole team the value of mindfulness and meditation and breathing. He used to take timeouts in crucial situations and just literally lead us in a breathing session.”

“He would just say, ‘Everybody, just deep breath.’ And we’d all take a deep breath. And no other coach was doing that. So I was definitely pretending to be more calm than I was.”

“But I do think that it is part of my personality, something I learned from my dad, to listen and to take everything in and to at least appear calm. And approach things in a relatively calm manner. And it wasn’t an easy thing for me to do because I also have a competitive rage inside me that for many years I had to fight, because I beat myself up inside. My inner voice was not that kind to me.”

“So I feel like it’s been a lifetime of trying to sort through all this stuff.”

Mike Macdonald says his life sucked for four years working under Todd Grantham, but the experience taught him valuable leadership lessons in hindsight

“I didn’t have a great relationship with Coach Richt. He was kind of this larger-than-life figure from my perspective. He’s wearing the hat at practice, he’s got the Oakleys, and his office is over there. You’ve got to schedule an appointment.”

“But what I learned from Coach Richt was this guy backed it up. So there’s a lot of coaches that maybe talk the talk, but then behind closed doors, they don’t necessarily walk the walk. And he did that. And he had ample opportunity to let his true self show, and at every single opportunity, it was like, ‘Man, this guy is the absolute real deal.’”

“And so that’s what I learned from Coach Richt and how he treated his players. Like, when you talk about loving your players, Coach Richt loves his players. He had all these opportunities for when they were out of school, so guys could come back and further their careers or in their lives as fathers and men. I thought that was really cool.”

“And then with Coach Grantham, now that I’ve left and I’ve been in that chair, I can see where he was coming from. He’s an incredibly smart person. He was trying to build an identity on defense. He had really high expectations and a really high standard about doing things.”

“And I just happened to be the touch point on those really tough conversations, man. Information needed to get out and needed to get to the players, and it needed to be right and fast. And we did a lot, and it was a blessing in disguise. Like, my life sucked for four years, but I learned a ton of football.”

“And I learned when it was good and when it wasn’t. When we were really good, we were doing schematically advantaged, really well-thought-out things that the players could execute well. When we weren’t, we were probably trying to be too ambitious in what we did and weren’t connected as much as a unit as we probably needed to be. So those are things you learn.”

“And those are some really hard thoughts about what I feel like will work or what works and what doesn’t, just in any team. And nothing better to figure out what works than SEC football, where the stakes are really high. When you win, man, it was awesome and great. When you lost, the losses were so tough because back then, before the playoffs, losses in the league were devastating.”

Mike Macdonald says he used to view leadership as a status symbol rather than an opportunity to serve others, and says he later discovered what leadership really is and how athletes want to know if you really care about them and if you can really help them

“Going into college, to me, leadership was like a title that helped me get to college. You know, it was like, ‘Hey, if I’m captain of the football team, that’s cool.’ Like, I don’t know what that means in terms of practice. If I’m going to volunteer, it was just like, ‘Oh, let’s get a résumé.’”

“I’m trying to get to the best school so I look the coolest. It wasn’t so I could go first, it was just like a status symbol. And in college, it was the same way. I did some things in college, extracurricular-wise, which I had no passion doing.”

“I was not interested in doing it, but it was like an exclusive type thing. And really, my initial interest in Leonard was along the same vein, this is something that’s going to help you get a great job, and it’s a really exclusive club. That’s the way I was thinking. And then all of a sudden, I started learning, ‘This is a service-learning operation.’”

“Like, leadership is about service and servant leadership. And that blew my mind. I’m like, ‘Yeah, right, okay, like I’m the leader, clearly.’ And so you learn it really quick when you’re sitting in front of the kids and they don’t care who you are or what’s going on.”

“They want to know, like athletes want to know, ‘Do you care about them, and can you help them?’ And I mean, that’s like the definition of service right there. And so I think they kind of inceptioned it into me about what leadership really was. And those are the same lessons that we use here in Seattle.”

“And those are just world principles that aren’t just at the University of Georgia or high school football or all the things you’re involved with at Georgia. It transcends all those things. And I think that’s really what leadership was about.”

Mike Macdonald says he walked away from a $55,000 consulting job to pursue his NFL coaching dream

“Man, I wish I could tell you I read something and became this really brave person that said, ‘I’m going to stick it out like this.’ It was a really human experience, man. You’re right, because back then you could GA for three years, and I was a student assistant for one. So I was in Athens at that point probably for eight years, working my absolute tail off for four.”

“I don’t know when the timeline hit, but I ended up interviewing for a consulting job with KPMG and being offered the job. And I signed the contract. I was going to make $55,000 a year as a probably 27-year-old first year out of college. I thought that was like a million bucks.”

“I was juiced because I was at a low point. I didn’t have someone in the building where I could look down the road and say, ‘That’s what I want my life to be like.’ Coach Richt was kind of like, it was just a lot, like yeah, it’s Coach Richt, he’s different. It’s like Coach Bowden, that’s what it felt like.”

“You see these guys moving around, working an incredible amount of hours and making great money. And it’s a great career if you can be in the same spot for a long time, but nothing felt like, ‘Man, this is the end of the road, that’s what I’m chasing.’ But I think divine intervention hit, and the opportunity in Baltimore started to show itself. This is really where I wanted to go for the last couple of years.”

“Once I learned the way the NFL worked, where it was mostly football and they treated people the right way, like the junior people, it’s like, ‘I can be mentally sane on a day-to-day basis.’ I didn’t know much about Baltimore in terms of the organization. Matter of fact, I knew very little, so it could have been any team. It was just really fortunate that it was them, and that opportunity came around.”

“And so then I decided to pivot, just go for that a hundred miles an hour. And two weeks later, I’m in a car driving to Baltimore, told my KPMG recruiter, ‘Thanks, but no thanks.’ And I remember vividly, she said, ‘Well, you can’t work for KPMG anymore.’ And I was like, ‘Okay, I think I’m going to be all right. I think there’s other companies that I could work for at some point.’”

“But again, I think that was God’s way of saying, ‘Hey, buddy, nice try, but I’ve got plans for you.’ So I think that’s what happened. It was a really human experience, man.”