| Team Winning Thoughts |
| By: Mark Dantonio - Michigan State Univ.
Originally Published in: Nike 2015 Coach of the Year Clinics Football Manual - by Earl Browning Provided by: Nike Coach of the Year
I will start out with a just a few minutes on some basic goals and philosophy just as if you were a recruit coming to our school. Next I will go over the 10 steps I think are important as you try to pursue a championship. I will finish up with some things on tackling instruction. I was recently talking with a good friend of my by the name of Luke Fickell who is at Ohio State. We were talking about tackling and he brought up Pete Carroll from the Seahawks and some of the things he was doing as it concerns teaching tackling. I will talk about that later. We have been at Michigan State for eight years and these are some of the things we have been able to accomplish. • 53-14 Record in the Last 5 years • 7th Winningest Program in America • 42-12 Senior Record Over 4 years • Back-to-Back Top 5 Finishes • 4 Straight Bowl Wins (2 BCS) • 11+ Wins 4 of 5 Years • Big 10 Champions Twice • 2015 Cotton Bowl Champions How did we get here? PROGRAM GOALS #1 - Lifelong Relationships If you are in coaching it is because you want to impact young people. You want to build those lifelong relationships. You do that in three ways. First you want to have a commitment to the player. We ask an awful lot of commitment from them to us. We have to be committed to them and to do that we have to be able to communicate with them. Next we have to be able to build trust. We have to be there for them not only in the good times, but also through trying times, disappointments, sacrifices, and discipline. #2 - We Want to Graduate our Players and Help Them Become Self-Sufficient Men Most of the coaches in here today are High School Coaches. You should want to help them graduate and qualify to attend college somewhere. It might be at a Junior College somewhere and it may or not be while playing football. You should want to help them become self-sufficient and help them come full circle. #3 - Win... Success I am not naive to the fact that you have got to win. As I said this is our ninth year at Michigan State. If we didn't win I would not be here today. #4 - Positive Impact — Givers not Takers We want our players to have that attitude. When they go through our program as they become seniors they should have the feeling they should be leading the younger guys by pushing them to become better. The further you go up the leadership ladder the more you have to be a giver. To go up you have to give up. Spartan Plan for Success —"It Is About People" • Choices / Morals / Spiritual • Family (Trust) • Discipline & Maturity / Fight Complacency • Resources (Football, Academic, Social) º You º Coach º Chemistry • Find the Truth We want to help them make good choices through morals and their spiritual side. Faith is important to me. I do not want them to lose their commitment to their faith while in our program. There is going to be a part of their family that is going to be very important to them. We have to make sure that person is involved in our little circle of coaches. player. and family. That little circle has to solve problems that come up or are created. Just last week I sat down with a player and his two parents to discuss how we can overcome some problems and move forward. It is very important to do that. The more disciplined you are and the more mature you are the better you are able to overcome problems. There is no doubt about that. You have to fight complacency. We have a beautiful place at Michigan State. We have a fantastic facility. The first few times you walk through there you think, wow look at this and look at that! At some point in time that goes right out of your sight. You no longer see that and what you see are the people who are around you. We have to change things up and keep things fresh for them. You have resources that you can make available to the player whether it is you. their position coach. your academic people. and even others. You have to make sure your players are able to utilize those resources by building a chemistry or bond with the player. Not just player-to-coach but also player-to-player. It has to be two-way communication. You have to be able to create that dynamic. The X's and O's mean nothing without the relationship. I truly believe that. I have seen it happen over and over again. You have to be able to find the truth. You have to find out who is the best left tackle. We have to find out who is going to class. We have to find out who we can trust. Maybe most importantly we have to find out who the best leader is. You have to be able to find those things out. There is no question in my mind, it is about the people. STEPS TO A CHAMPIONSHIP These are the 10 things we like to try and do. During the season we will go through a discussion to make sure we are doing all of these things. We may only have to focus on the one that for that season needs to be addressed. #1 - It Starts with our Belief • It starts with effort. discipline. and maturity • We must always be honest with ourselves • We must feel we have earned the right to be the best. We have earned the jersey • We have to make the decision this is what we want by our work ethic, will. and toughness • Everyone must bring value to remain passionate and fully engaged • The option is ours to COMMIT TO A DREAM. We are on a MISSION. First off it starts with Belief. We give our guys a shield when they come into the program. On one side it has Commitment. Communication, and Trust written on it. On the other side it has Effort, Toughness, and Knowledge written on it. It starts with the belief. Everybody in our program Must Bring Value. A player has to bring value or he is not going to feel good about himself. That includes player 116 out of 116. To do that he has to stay fully engaged. Often you have three types of guys. Fully en-gaged, partially engaged, and not engaged. The not engaged person does not make eye contact. gets out of work, and has no commitment. This can go for coaches too. You as a coach have to bring value to them so they feel engaged. I do not care where it is in your program you have to give people a job to do and you have to make them accountable for that job. Player 116 is in if he can bring value. The option is ours to commit to a dream. I tell our guys to dream big. #2 - Step by Step Plan • No one fantasizes about all the drill work in practice or staying late at the office, but that is where everything starts. • Our ability to win a championship will be based on what we do every day. • We must have a day-to-day plan that is written down and followed. • We must recognize our weaknesses and confront them. • Our small successes will lead us to our larger successes. • We must constantly push ourselves, it won't always be fun. • We must constantly critique ourselves and stay on the cutting edge regarding concepts, fundamentals, and teaching mechanics. • We must constantly remind ourselves that if we STAY THE COURSE, there will be a big pay-off at the end. You must adjust and you must have a daily plan that is written down and followed. It includes offense, defense. special teams, when and what you are practicing, and all of the different things that go into building champions. You have to be on the cutting edge and you must stay the course but just as importantly you must adjust. #3 - Maintain a Positive Approach • We are constantly surrounded by cynical people... that is our society. Cut loose the cynics. • If we are not positive, we inhibit our chance at success. • OUR SENIORS must have their best year. • Being able to look at things positively will enhance our chances. • The more trying the times, the more positive we have to be to weather the storms • We must develop the attitude of doing the best we can today. Forget what happened Yesterday. • WE MUST BE FRESH AND ENTHUSIASTIC Coach George Perles was the Michigan State coach back in the 1980's. He was a great coach. The first thing he said to me when I came to Michigan State was you have to be able to walk into the facility after things have gone badly and make sure the secretaries are straight and that everybody in your program is good and feels good about themselves. When you have lost a tough game it is your job as a coach. It is your job to make sure you can adjust and move forward. Sometimes you have to change things up for the sake of changes so your players feel like things are fresh. You cannot go out and do the same drill the same way every single day, even though repetition is what you have to be able to do to get better at something. #4 - Develop Good Habits • We all have habits, the key is to develop habits that give us a chance at winning a championship. • We must base our habits on proper technique, then master the art of repetition so our habits become second nature. The only way we can develop good habits is by being organized. • There must be a purpose to each day and everything we do. • Being organized gives us the structure that we all need. • We must confront the brutal facts of our current reality and remain positive. • If we are not organized, we will not be as focused as we need to be. • We want to eliminate distractions and wasted energy. • We want to always take the attitude that there is no such thing as being over-prepared. We must be prepared both mentally and physically for the challenge of being the best. It is important to develop and have good habits in practice, in summer practice, and throughout the work week. Habits have to become second nature. You have to master the art of repetition. There are four stages to learning which came from Morton Andersen, the kicker. That guy is unbelievable. He is a Michigan State graduate. One time when we were talking he explained to me the four stages of learning. • You don't know what you don't know. You do not know how to do something and you can't. That is unconscious incompetence. • You know what to do but still can't do it. You are conscious of what to do but still cannot do it. That is conscious incompetence. • If you can focus on what is being asked of you, you can do what is being asked of you. That would be conscious competence. • You can do it because it is a habit. That is unconscious competence. This is the stage we are all trying to get to. That is being able to do something without even thinking about it. This is what comes from habit. You can do something just like that. #5 - Our Team Must Feel We Care About Them • We must be able to interact with our team in a meaningful way. • It all starts by listening to what they have to say. • We don't have to be right all of the time. If we take the approach that we are always right, players and coaches will not communicate their feelings at times. • Our goal is to develop good lines of communication within our team. • Sometimes they will want to know why they are being asked to do things. We should let them know. • We should confront any problems immediately because if they are not dealt with, they invariable get worse. • We are trying to create allies, not enemies; Trust must be earned by all involved. Communications, Relationships and Trust are so important to your success. Trust has to be earned and can very easily be broken. #6 - Use Our Veteran Players as Team Leaders! • Our veteran players that we know and trust must be used as resources / pick our eagles with patience. • We make a mistake if we don't use our veteran players as role models for what we want and expect. • The easiest way for a young player to learn is to view a player that has made the journey before him. • Identify the traits in our veteran players that have enabled them to have success in the Big Ten over a period of time. It is a mistake not to use veteran players. • What traits do we admire as coaches? What traits do we feel give us the best chance of winning a championship? • We must take advantage of the lessons we learned during our journey last year / before: What contributed to our success? What contributed to our failure? We call the players who are our leaders and part of our Unity Council our Eagles. Your leaders are found one person at a time. If I were to ask you to give me your top 12 leaders. by the time you get to six or seven you are guessing at who might be a good leader. We pick our leaders two at a time. We try to find 12. The 12 act as our Unity Council. I meet with the Council so we can get things on the table. Sometimes I bring them together even when I do not have anything to bring up, but I may feel they need to spend some time together and talk amongst themselves. It gives them a chance to talk about the program and what needs to happen. We started this about five years ago. It is not a coincidence that five years ago we started having success. We elect the Unity Council four times a year. First is after our winter workouts. It takes us about six days to find those twelve. We have each player vote for two guys and they put their name on their ballot so we know who they voted for. Because the freshmen do not know a lot of the guys we weight the voting by having freshman vote for one and the others vote for two players. From our 12 selected comes our two captains. The easiest way for a young player to learn is to learn from a player who has done it before. #7 - Deal With Pressure • In the Big Ten pressure is always going to be there in some form. Pressure in and by itself is neutral. • It is how we choose to view it that determines whether it is good or bad. Use it to our advantage then it is good pressure, Let it control us then it becomes bad pressure or stress. • Pressure Itself is not the enemy. Stress is the enemy. • Pressure is an ally when we have properly prepared for it. • Pressure makes you more focused. more motivated, creates discipline, and can bring out the best in you. • Stress makes you feel anxious, afraid to fail, creates doubt, it works against you and brings out the worst in all of us. • The better prepared we are, the better we will handle the pressure. Pressure will become our ally and drive us toward the championship. • Stress appears if you are cutting corners and attempting to take short-cuts in preparation. It appears when you are not prepared and focused on your job. • We must find a way to take advantage of our high expectation level. Everyone must understand what is expected. We have to take every day and do the best we are capable of that day. • We must establish a higher standard than our opponents. We must do little things they won't do. FIND AND MOVE THE INCHES. We found out in 2012 that we lost by inches. We lost five games by a total of 13 points. Some were on the last play of the game. It was tough. You have to find the inches. When we tore out the old field and put in a new field they found a big boulder underneath. We took that boulder and put it in a corner. Every week a group of position players took turns putting ropes around it to pull and move the boulder a few inches. That gave them a physical sign that you have to be able to move the program and things that are larger than you. You have to be able to inch forward and make progress. Sometimes it does not matter how far you go but it is important to see progress in the direction you are going. Our program is like a ship. You are not going to be able to make sharp turns or our people are going to fall off the ship. You have to be able to gradually turn it. We have tried to do that by finding the inches that move the program. Pressure in and of itself is neutral. If you use pressure well it makes you focus. have a great attention to detail, and helps you prepare. If you have a big game coming up you know you are going to watch film on Monday. If you have a test coming up, you know you are going to study in order to prepare for that test. We are going to isolate our problem and address that problem as best we can. When we use pressure to our advantage it is good pressure. If you start to stress about things, stress becomes the enemy. We cannot get down or overstressed because it is not good for any of us. It is not good for the people that are following you and it definitely is not good for you. Stress is the enemy, pressure is not. #8 - Be Consistent and Persistent • A lot of teams can be great for a day, a week, or a month. Our season is a marathon, not a sprint. Some teams are successful early, and then fade into oblivion. • We must develop the attitude of going above and beyond. Make it part of our personality as a team. • The foundation of our team must be based on consistent good habits over a long period of time. • We must raise our bar to new heights then establish a method to reach those heights. Human Nature. • We must earn the jersey. We must prove that we can be consistent and persistent over a long period of time. • We must strive for daily successes and compete against ourselves. • We must never fall into a comfort zone and do just enough to get by. • We must have the courage to stick to the plan and stay the course. • Preparation and organization helps in sticking to the plan. They act as a lighthouse when we are navigating through stormy waters. I coached with Jim Tressel. Coach Tressel always talked about November. He talked about how you play down the stretch. Can you do it every single day? Championships are built on 1000 invisible mornings. You have to be persistent if you are a coach or playing this game. You cannot get into a comfort zone. #9 - Be Prepared for Adversity • We know adversity will come. The key will be how we respond to it. • The first step in overcoming adversity is each man accepting his role in it. We can never point fingers and blame other people. • The best way to combat adversity is to stick to our organized plan of attack. Repetition and consistency are staples of our plan. • Change for the sake of change is very disruptive, it creates doubt and uncertainty. It breeds inconsistency. • We cannot lose faith in our plan. Losing teams doubt themselves and begin to experiment. We must always stick to what we believe in. • Whenever we fail we must: º Examine why we fail º Accept the responsibility º Re-dedicate ourselves º Put it behind us and move forward º Never wallow in defeat • Our focus has to be on what we need to do, not what is standing in our way. You have to be able to handle adversity. One of the greatest things we have done at Michigan State is handle adversity. I cannot remember losing two games in-a-row. If you can handle adversity, your players can handle adversity. Even if you lose seven games in-a-row, be persistent. #10 - Handling Success Will Be Our Biggest Challenge • What most people see in the Spartans is the product, not the process. • The process is a long and grueling one. • We must pay a high price to win a championship. • For every ten teams that can handle adversity, there is only one that can handle success. • Success can build a level of contentment in all of us. We have to be careful not to relax in the after glow. • We must always remember the methods we have used to win or we will lose the discipline that it has taken to get there. • We must prepare for our competition. They are going to prepare harder for us this year. They will come after us with the same hunger and drive that we have gone after them. • We can never feel that the journey is over and we have arrived. If we ever feel that way, we have already begun to slide. • We must keep setting a higher standard. We must continue to raise the bar. We must refuse to be satisfied. This must separate us from the others. • We must always remember not to take the poison pill of success. • To win a championship, we must stay prepared, hungry, and driven. Our attitude becomes contagious! People do not see the hard work and overcoming challenges, they see the product. They do not understand the process and how we got there. Many of you are in the same situation. They do not understand what you do. For every team that handles adversity, only one can handle success. That is a true statistic. One out of ten can have success and then repeat with the same type of win loss record. Every year we have a mantra. We used the phrase, "It starts here" this past year. You need something every year that your guys can talk about and rally around. Find something relevant to you and your team that you can pin your season on. Put it on a t-shirt or something. If you win the championship you can put it on your ring. Those are the ten steps we have used and have gone with. I do believe you take one of those and really focus on it with your team. Whenever there is a breakdown. everyone has to be kicked back on the path to be successful. Let me get into tackling. I was very intrigued by this because I am a defensive coach by trade. Coach Fickell told me to watch the instructional video on tackling by Pete Carroll. I worked five years with Nick Saban and we always felt we did a great job of teaching tackling. Coach Fickell also said they went through their tape and found they were already tackling like that. I had my video guys cut up the last portion of all of our plays for this past year and we found the same thing. All of the things that Pete Carroll was teaching about tackling, we were already tackling like that without even teaching it. Sometimes you get a revelation that if you teach things in a certain ways we can be even better. We have put together this quick tape for this clinic and for our players as well. Michigan State plays and drills incorporate the ideas presented in Coach Pete Carroll's instructional video along with a few additional concepts and ideas. These ideas came from Pete Carroll's research into why rugby players had far fewer concussions relative to American football and yet rugby players were not wearing helmets. After watching the tape, personally I am thinking about going to Australia to get some of those dudes. They knock the stuffing out of people. When you see the teaching part of the video for the first time you think, boy I hope we tackle better than that. Once you see the results of it and watch your own video it starts to make a lot of sense. Get on the computer and lookup Pete Carroll instructional video. You can YouTube it. These are not my terms and I am not taking credit for this. I am just using the ideas to help improve what we are doing and adding our spin to it so it fits best into our system and teachings. I think tackling is an art. It is not a science. Yes there is physics to it but I think in the end it is an art. The ball carrier is going to go here or there and there are a lot of variables involved. Some you control and some are out of your control. You cannot control how the running back or the receiver is coming at you every single time. The angle, the leverage, and your speed is going to be different. Still we can have some basic premises we can practice and work with. The first idea is the -Profile Tackle." It could also be called the perfect tackle. In the Profile Tackle we want to attack the near pectoral. Some of these concepts were a little bit different than what I initially thought. We watched our own players tackle and we saw exactly the same things that were shown in the Seahawks video. I clicked through an entire season of probably 900 plus tackles. I was on a mission. We could tag every one of those tackles into categories with our computer. We were able to name every single type of tackle. Getting back to the Profile Tackle. you want to attack the near pectoral. We want to go with the same leg. same shoulder. The reason you want to use the same leg and same shoulder is because that is what generates power, that snap and pop. What I was always taught and what I have always taught was to hit with the near leg near shoulder. Now it isn't necessarily the near leg near shoulder; it is the same leg, and same shoulder. It doesn't matter which side the head is on. This is relative to concussions as well. In a truly perfect tackle we want to get our head across. What we found was that this doesn't happen very often at all. In a course of 900 or so plays. that doesn't happen very often. The next thing in a Profile tackle is to wrap him up. I think it is more beneficial to wrap with the arms driving up along with the body from a squat position. rather than wrapping with the arms coming from an outside position. The head should be up. We want to drive our feet for five steps. Drive for five. Run your feet. Don't go dead on your feet. The "Hawk Tackle" rule starts with eyes through the thighs. Next we wrap and squeeze. We want to drive for five when necessary. A "Hawk Roll Tackle" starts the same with eyes through the thighs, wrap, and squeeze. Now we incorporate the roll. The "Strike Zone Tackle" basically refers to the defenseless player such as a receiver. You are not going for the head and you are not going down low. The hitting area is essentially the strike zone of a baseball player. When watch some of these clips you start to see how physical the game really is. With just watching the end of the play you are not focused on coverage, or who missed their assignment. You are focused on the sheer physicality of it. When we start to incorporate the teaching part of the Profile tackle on the football field we start in the fit position. We start with the near leg and near shoulder up. We are in a squat position with our face on or near our partners shoulder. From that position we explode up and try to drive up through him and give him a little shock. We are just shooting our hips, almost like a jump ball. The next progression starts with one foot back. We have our foot in a bucket where we have to dip and step up to get to the fit position. We want to shoot our hands up as we explode our hips and roll up. Again we are looking for the step and the shoulder pop from the same side. Next we fire to fit from a few yards back. We start face-to-face and then backpedal a few feet and then come up to get into the fit position. We are not trying to haul-off and hit the guy, we are just trying to execute our fit but a little bit faster. We are looking for the roll up trying to generate power and pop using the same leg and same shoulder. The partner isn't jumping up. He should see the power and the lift as he pops him up. In the next progression of our drill we line up and repeat the same process but versus three guys, one after the other. We back pedal fit, hit and lift, back pedal fit, hit and lift the next guy who is lined up a yard or two from the first partner, then again with the third partner. The partners have to take it, but we are not trying to kill them. The next tackle is the Hawk Tackle which is a big emphasis in the video. In this type of tackle we are not up as high on the ball carrier. It is not a perfect tackle. The teaching points are eyes to the thighs, wrap, and squeeze. It does not matter where the head is. There is nothing that says the head has to be in front. I have coached for 30 years and we have always said to get your head across. The arms and hands are wrapping and squeezing down low. When we teach it on the field we start from a kneeling position on one leg. The partner is up on two feet with a mat behind him to fall back on. We place our head on the outside of the partner's thigh and wrap our hands around. On the signal we basically have a two leg take down just like in wrestling. On the signal we progress to where we place our head and shoot our hands, wrap, and make the take down. We are still in a kneeling position. When reviewing our tape we would see this type of tackle play after play after play. The Hawk Roll Tackle is very similar. We want eyes to the thighs, wrap, and then roll at the end. We have never taught the roll but it shows up time and time again on our game film. That is my point. We have never taught this in the past. To drill it, which we have just done for the first time, we start on two knees in a Hawk Tackle Placement and on the sound lift him and then roll with our partner. You cannot teach this in a live drill. You have to teach this in a controlled drill. After watching our film, every one of our tackles fit into these categories. That is the beauty of it. You can communicate to your guys by utilizing the terminology and once you have taught it they will understand what you are talking about. We added a couple of categories to fit what we teach. The game of football is played in space much more that it was in the past. You cannot zero in on guys, so guys are using new ways to get the ball carrier on the ground. To be able to define that is a big positive for defensive guys going forward. This is what I got out of it and I wanted to share that with you. I want to thank you for having Michigan State down here. If there is anything we can do for you please do not hesitate to ask. Go Green! |
Team Winning Thoughts