Post by phantom on Dec 10, 2005 12:44:24 GMT -6
I found this at espn.com in their coverage of Cosebreakers. As a coach and longtime Packers fan I found this interesting.
Bill Curry
(Ed note: Vince Lombardi was on Red Blaik's staff at Army at the time of the scandal, and he is depicted in "CodeBreakers.")
Vince Lombardi's greatest genius was the capacity to utilize the inherent leadership on his team. His teams, that I played on, were blessed with uncommon leaders: men like Willie Davis, Bart Starr, Herb Adderley, Willie Wood, Bob Skoronski, Forrest Gregg, Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston don't come along very often all on one team. It was unbelievable.
Lombardi had what he called the "war council." There was no publicity about this, but it was understood in our locker room that you never aired out any of our dirty laundry, ever. What you did was you went to the war council if you thought Lombardi was being too hard or he was driving you crazy. If the council thought it was worthy of merit, then they would take it to him. If they didn't, they would tell you to suck it up and take it. The war council had a lot of power and nobody ever knew about that.
To me, that's what separated Lombardi from a lot of the other great coaches and the reason he could maintain consistency. Anybody can keep the hammer down all the time, but you also have to know when to relent. The team could come together and go to the war council and say, "You have to tell him to back off. He's killing us." And Lombardi would do it. The next two weeks or so he would be different. And when he judged it was time to, as he called it, pull out the whip again, he would. But the discipline really was imposed as much from within as it was from Lombardi.
I guarantee you [Patriots coach] Bill Belichick has a way of doing that or he wouldn't have maintained what he has at New England. I guarantee you [USC coach] Pete Carroll has some system of communicating with his players. You just can't keep winning like the Trojans unless you do.
It's not as organized as a chain of command. The war council was a circumvention of the normal chain of command. It didn't go through the assistant coaches. It gave the players the chance to speak directly to the commanding officer [head coach]. It literally bypassed the chain of command to say, "Coach, we think this or that," and most of the time he listened.
ESPN analyst Bill Curry played college football at Georgia Tech. He played in the NFL from 1965 to 1974. He coached college football from 1980 to 1996 at Georgia Tech, Alabama and Kentucky.
Bill Curry
(Ed note: Vince Lombardi was on Red Blaik's staff at Army at the time of the scandal, and he is depicted in "CodeBreakers.")
Vince Lombardi's greatest genius was the capacity to utilize the inherent leadership on his team. His teams, that I played on, were blessed with uncommon leaders: men like Willie Davis, Bart Starr, Herb Adderley, Willie Wood, Bob Skoronski, Forrest Gregg, Jerry Kramer and Fuzzy Thurston don't come along very often all on one team. It was unbelievable.
Lombardi had what he called the "war council." There was no publicity about this, but it was understood in our locker room that you never aired out any of our dirty laundry, ever. What you did was you went to the war council if you thought Lombardi was being too hard or he was driving you crazy. If the council thought it was worthy of merit, then they would take it to him. If they didn't, they would tell you to suck it up and take it. The war council had a lot of power and nobody ever knew about that.
To me, that's what separated Lombardi from a lot of the other great coaches and the reason he could maintain consistency. Anybody can keep the hammer down all the time, but you also have to know when to relent. The team could come together and go to the war council and say, "You have to tell him to back off. He's killing us." And Lombardi would do it. The next two weeks or so he would be different. And when he judged it was time to, as he called it, pull out the whip again, he would. But the discipline really was imposed as much from within as it was from Lombardi.
I guarantee you [Patriots coach] Bill Belichick has a way of doing that or he wouldn't have maintained what he has at New England. I guarantee you [USC coach] Pete Carroll has some system of communicating with his players. You just can't keep winning like the Trojans unless you do.
It's not as organized as a chain of command. The war council was a circumvention of the normal chain of command. It didn't go through the assistant coaches. It gave the players the chance to speak directly to the commanding officer [head coach]. It literally bypassed the chain of command to say, "Coach, we think this or that," and most of the time he listened.
ESPN analyst Bill Curry played college football at Georgia Tech. He played in the NFL from 1965 to 1974. He coached college football from 1980 to 1996 at Georgia Tech, Alabama and Kentucky.