What does your team do better than anyone else?

Win the short-yardage battles, the third and threes, the fourth's and ones,we treat it as our most important special team and we feel that ties in all aspect of physical and mental toughness on both sides of the ball. We preach from the first day of the off season through our last game in the playoffs that even if King Kong and Godzilla were on the other side of the ball we will not be denied that yard.

one rule - get out of your comfort zone & be uncomfortable.

you can't control how hard the other guy works - but you can control how hard you work. this is why we say "control what you can control & don't worry about the other guy." therefore, you won't find us saying things like "we're gonna out work them." in reality, we don't know what they're doing and, frankly, don't care.

we stress that it's not about being better than the other guy, it's about being better than you were yesterday. "be the best you can be"

for the past several years, we have really taken this to heart. our kids understand that you can't compete against the opponent until you learn how to compete against yourself. this allows us - in our opinion - to maximize our potential more so that we could if we focused on a mantra of "out work the other guy."

Why change?  I think this would only be effective if you have a very limited scope.  If you do new ones, I don't think you will validly be able to focus on the old ones.  The kids aren't stupid, they know they can't do EVERYTHING better than anyone else.  

Nice post coach.

Many years ago I used to discuss tangible goals w/ my teams, such as number of wins, play offs, conference title, etc.

After a couple of tough years at my current school I finally realized the best goal I could set was to try and coach my kids to play to the absolute best of their abilities week in and week out. No real number of wins set or anything like that. Just simply play to our absolute total potential every Friday night and the wins and losses will take care of themselves.

That is now our goal each and every season. It's very freeing actually. Takes pressure off of staff and kids. One of the best things from a philosophical stance I have ever done.

Also, an impossible goal to meet. But getting close usually means your doing things well. Much better approach for us. 

Coach I totally understand your point. And I agree yeah it could have been a possible bad thing if this kid had checked. That year was our first year trying to revive a program that at that point was coming off the longest losing streak in the state. We did some pretty crazy things to inspire kids. Some worked really well like before the 1st game lighting the previous years schedule on fire and burning it in the opponents guest locker room. Then others like the facebook thing probably bordered on crossing the line. We have since changed some of our tactics due to growing and learning. But still always send the wreath from the cross town rival.

Along those lines, we were really good at giving up 40+ points on a regular basis last year where I was. Probably the best in our conference. In fact, I think that there was only one game where we didn't give up more than 40.