Leading Teams and Making New Mistakes

Two ?of the things that interest me are team leadership and Notre Dame football, but I seldom think of them simultaneously. This past weekend brought them together for me.

?Every year in college football, top teams schedule what are known as “cupcake games,” contests against schools with smaller budgets, rosters full of lower-rated players, and less experienced or successful coaching staffs that typically result in easy wins. For example, this past weekend, USC beat Utah State by 48 points, LSU beat Nicholls by 23 points, and Georgia beat Tennessee Tech by 48-3.? The power teams schedule these cupcake games to provide an opportunity to get game experience with a low risk of losing, and the lower ranked schools generally go home with a hefty paycheck to boost their athletic budget.

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Every once in a while, however, these “automatic” wins turn into embarrassing losses for the home team. That was the case Saturday when the 5th ranked Fighting Irish of Notre Dame fell to unranked Northern Illinois, 16-14. As a fan, I was naturally disappointed. As a student of leadership, I was intrigued. How did it happen, and can this loss help my Irish? A loss or a setback is an opportunity to learn. That’s what we mean by the growth mindset.

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I was also intrigued because in 2022, Notre Dame suffered a similar embarrassment in a cupcake game against Marshall University, losing 26-21. I asked myself, how is it that this can happen to Notre Dame twice in three years when other power schools go decades without experiencing similar losses? ?Different opponents, different personnel but the same shocking result.

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The first thing I look at is leadership. What leadership characteristics can lead to such spectacular failures? ?How could a coach who was humiliated by an upset loss in 2022 fail to take the steps necessary to avoid a repeat performance in 2024? Was it an entirely new set of forces or a repetition of past patterns?

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So I read the transcript of Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman’s press conference from last Saturday and he seemed to lay out all the steps that I, as a leadership coach, would recommend: debrief the performance, examine the preparation, take accountability, perform root cause analysis, etc. I experienced some confusion; if the coach knows how to correct poor team performance, how could he experience it again so soon after 2022? I also experienced some déjà vu; I sensed that I had heard the same man say the same words, but that didn’t seem possible. To put my suspicions to rest, I found Coach Freeman’s press conference following the Marshall loss in 2022 to see if there were any similarities to what he said last week. I’ll let you be the judge.

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Let’s look at just one example: tackling. Coach Freeman identified it as a problem in 2022 and again two years later in 2024!

Tackling is a skill, a technique. It can be learned and so presumably it can be taught (if it can’t, why are schools paying coaches to do just that?) When team members don’t perform a skill-based task, there’s a limited set of potential root causes:

1.????? They don’t know they’re supposed to do it

2.????? They don’t think it’s important, they have no incentive

3.????? They don’t know how to do it

4.????? There are obstacles to performing it (and I don’t mean opposing players. If that were the case ?it wouldn’t happen against the least talented opponents)

5.????? They don’t have feedback to know if they’re doing it well or not

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If Coach Freeman hasn’t solved the tackling problem in two years, he probably isn’t taking the right actions to solve it.

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And if he can’t solve an uncomplicated issue like tackling, that’s been a football fundamental for over 100 years, what are the chances he can fix the intangibles like attitude, state-of-mind, and engagement?

Time To Make New Mistakes

It’s great to ask questions about what went wrong. But even more important than asking is:

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·???????? Getting answers

·???????? Taking action based on those answers

·???????? Evaluating the impact of those actions

·???????? Reinforcing the effective actions and discarding those that don’t work to try something different

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If you’re asking the same questions and exploring the same root causes after two years, you’re not getting the right answers or you’re not acting on the answers you get. If you’re seeing the same mistakes leading to the same bad outcomes on a regular basis, it’s not bad luck; it’s a failure to confront what’s wrong with the system you’re using. You have to try a new approach. Working harder at the same things the led to failure the first time never works,