Beating Goliath: My Story of Football and Faith

INTRODUCTION

People like to say I changed football, from the Texas high school ranks all the way to college and up through the National Football League, by installing the spread offense at a small high school in the 1990s and then winning big.

Some people say that’s a good thing. Some people say that’s bad. Ask me and I’ll tell you I had absolutely no intention of trying to change football. All I was trying to do was win.

But let me also say this: It didn’t start with some football formation or offensive system. It started the moment I closed a door and a bunch of young men committed themselves to becoming something better than they had ever been.

Let me also say that this book is not simply about football. Yes, that’s the subject matter because that’s what I coach. It’s my business and, more importantly, it’s what I love to do. But I hope people understand the larger message in what I’m trying to convey. This book is about how to change your life, or your business, and become successful. It’s about how to change your approach, perhaps in the face of tragedy or difficult circumstances, or even when things appear to be going well. That is part of what motivates me each day.

The past twenty-five years of my career as a coach have been a series of overhaul projects. Starting at Stephenville High School, then at the University of Houston and now at Baylor University, the young men and fellow coaches I have worked with have managed to go from about as low a point as you could imagine to becoming champions, perennial contenders, and, in the case of one very fine young man I had the pleasure to coach, a Heisman Trophy–winning quarterback.

Even though most colleges didn’t think Robert Griffin III could even be a quarterback. But that’s another story for later on.

While I believe there are moments every day in which coaches can inspire and get people to change their lives, one moment does stand out among the rest in helping turn the corner early on.

Or, as some people might view it, it was the start of turning Stephenville High School from David to Goliath.

I had just been hired as the head coach at Stephenville for the spring semester of 1988 when I introduced a new workout program. We started with weight lifting, which most schools around the country weren’t doing at that point, but that was just part of what we did. I also added a little something from my past. Like my father back in his day as a coach, I had the players at Stephenville working on the overhead ladder.

You probably remember this apparatus from elementary school, a lot of people call them monkey bars, but I prefer overhead ladder. We also had a set of parallel bars and climbing rope, all located in this room about forty yards long and thirty yards wide that adjoined the weight room at the high school. So on days when we didn’t lift, the players would climb across the overhead ladder, jog to the end of the building, work the parallel bars, and then repeat that three or four times before doing some sprints or rope work.

To me, this was the most effective way of building upper-body strength. I’ve always been a big proponent of upper-body strength in football, since the first thing you have to be able to do in football is defend yourself.

This workout became an integral part of what we did at Stephenville, and people around the state took notice. But the first day we worked the overhead ladder and parallel bars, it wasn’t pretty. We did the drills during the class period just before lunch, with roughly seventy players. The vast majority of them struggled.

Really struggled. Many of them left the workout with blisters the size of nickels and dimes on their hands and even a little blood trickling out from the raw, exposed skin. When those young men went to class that afternoon, they could barely hold their pencils and pens between the soreness and the pain.

That night, after the players got home and told their parents about the workout and showed off their wounds, the phone at my house started ringing off the hook. This was the spring, the parents who called told me. It wasn’t time for heavy work like this.

I listened politely to the parents and didn’t get defensive. I explained I was trying to get their sons in better physical condition so they don’t get hurt playing the game. I said, Do you want him looking pretty and getting hurt, or do you want him tough and physical to where he can protect himself?

Along those lines, there was another time I remember talking to a dad outside the door right after one of the midday workouts. He was saying, Hey, my son’s hands are bleeding, what are you doing? I said, Well, we’re trying to get him physically fit to play a physical sport. I appreciate your input. I’ve had a few mothers complain, but never a dad. He never said anything after that.

But back to the story of that first workout. While I understood the complaints, I knew that the folks at Stephenville wanted something more. I also knew the enormity of my task. This high school hadn’t made the playoffs since 1952. There were plenty of reasons for that, but I wasn’t interested in reasons, excuses, or explanations. Neither were the people at Stephenville.

In Texas, where football is king, this school was a long way from any kind of coronation. I had been hired to change the culture of the football program in a town of eighteen thousand people, located about an hour southwest of Fort Worth. One way or another, I was going to do it.

In any situation where people haven’t been successful, the first thing you have to do is teach people or help people understand that they are worthy, that they can win. There’s a process you have to go through to have an opportunity to make that happen. That’s true for everybody involved in any venture. Whether it’s a barbershop, a coffee shop, or a beauty shop, you have to take the whole town through the process. Everywhere you go, you’ve got to change the way people feel, the way they act, and what they expect. It’s about what you expect to get and what’s going to be delivered.

For the players on a football team—or any sport, for that matter—it always starts with mental toughness. You can be a physically gifted person, but if you’re not tough on the inside, then you’re not going to be able to sustain and fight on when things are not going your way.

My approach has always been to start with the mind and then the body will follow. The only way I have ever been able to survive is to be mentally tough, to persevere, and to sustain. I was teaching those young men at Stephenville that we were going to have an identity. We were going to be a tough-minded football team, on and off the field. That was going to be the approach in everything we did. How do you get tough? You get your mind to lead your body, and then it all comes together at the same time. The people who don’t want to do it will separate themselves from the process if their mind and body can’t do it. You have to figure out if the pleasure is worth the pain.

In this case, if that meant some ugly blisters and sore hands to start, well, we could find a solution for that. But I wasn’t about to back off on the work that had to be done. I especially wasn’t going to back off on the first day of doing those drills in my first couple of months on the job.

But I didn’t say that when the parents called that night after seeing their sons with blistered hands. I was going to deliver my message a different way. I let them know when the next workout session was going to be and I invited them to come by if they were concerned.

All the while, in the back of my mind I was thinking, Hey, sometimes you just gotta let Johnny go. You have to let him experience some things on his own. You teach your kids how to handle the world and then you let them do it. You have to do that or else they never really learn. But I never said that to the parents. I was just going to see what happened the next day.

That day, as the players gathered for the workouts in the big room, I’m sure a bunch of them expected me to change things up. Some of them knew their parents had called the night before and complained. I was pretty sure they thought the overhead bars would be a thing of the past.

Instead I marched into room with a cardboard box, headed toward the oversized door on the side of the big room—one of those roll-up warehouse doors about sixteen feet wide by about sixteen feet tall, big enough that you could drive a truck through. I pulled the chain to lift the door and suddenly the players saw roughly twenty parents on the other side. I threw the box down in front of the door and then gave everybody involved a short speech. I don’t even really remember it. I’m not much for speeches. It’s what you do, not what you say.

But it went something like this: Inside that box are gloves to protect your hands. You have a choice to make right now. You can walk out that door and choose not to deal with the pain, or you can grab a set of gloves and get to work. But I’m not changing what we need to do if we’re going to turn this program around.

After I said my piece, some of the boys walked out the door. Most of them stayed, though, either grabbing the gloves or deciding to tough it out without them. I didn’t give an ultimatum. If any of those boys who walked out changed their minds later, I would have taken them back. I understand that young people sometimes make emotional choices they regret. It’s up to us as adults to guide them.

When the last boy who wanted to leave had walked out, I pulled the chain again to close the door. I didn’t say anything negative about the young men who left, and I didn’t congratulate those who had stayed.

At that moment, the only sound that mattered was that heavy door hitting the ground.

I’ve never been one to literally shut the door on somebody, but sometimes in life you have to make decisions and go with what you feel is right. We were going to move on because we weren’t sacrificing a whole lot if people did quit. It’s not like there was a lot of talent there at the time. It’s not like we were saying, Hey, we’re going to take this nine-win team and all of a sudden turn it into a four-win team.

Not only was Stephenville historically bad, it had hit a low point. The team was 2–18 the previous two seasons, including 0–10 in 1986. So again, it’s not like I was stepping out on a ledge and sacrificing anything. We were going to fight and battle with whoever showed up. And whatever we did was at least going to be in a different mentality than what had been happening prior, just because of what our guys were going to go through and how they were going to approach the game.

If you stayed, you were committed to the process. If you stayed, you ended up being part of one of the great rebirths in Texas high school sports history. If you stayed, you were part of something that some people say changed the face of football, all the way from Stephenville to the fields of the NFL.

Again, that was never part of my wildest imagination. I never expected that more than twenty-five years later Texas football, at both the high school and college level, would change so significantly. I never thought that because of my decision to play a certain style of football, that all these years later the NFL would be taken over by quarterbacks from the state of Texas such as Drew Brees, Robert Griffin III, Nick Foles, Andrew Luck, and Matthew Stafford.

When it comes to all of that, I’m truly the Accidental Innovator. If the players at Stephenville had been better suited to play a different type of football, I might have never been a part of this concept of changing the game.

And to be clear, I’m not going to sit here and tell you I came up with all these ideas that have helped revolutionize the game. While a lot of my ideas are different, it’s not like I’m the first coach to ever come up with the spread offense. Whether it was Sid Gillman and his vertical attack, or Mouse Davis with his run-and-shoot, or even some ideas on the running game I borrowed from my college coach, Bill Yeoman, some version of everything I have designed or called or coached can be found somewhere else.

Now that I’m at Baylor, we may be doing it a little differently, a little more suited to what we are, if you will, but the foundation of the spread offense and the hurry-up can be found somewhere else.

The fact that Texas is now the hotbed of quarterbacks around the country is an after-effect of the things I did first at Stephenville, then at the University of Houston, and now at Baylor. What made it happen was the commitment, dedication, and success of the boys I started to coach back in 1988. None of this happens unless they buy in, grab the gloves, and start working on that overhead ladder or the parallel bars and help turn Stephenville into a championship team that other schools and coaches eventually wanted to emulate.

The simple truth about human behavior is that nobody wants to copy some ordinary program. They want to follow people and programs who have achieved something great. Stephenville became great and not just because of me.

This wouldn’t have occurred if those young men had all walked out that door. Instead, they put aside the pain. They had the willingness to follow my instructions and then buy into my ideas about how we should be throwing the ball instead of dutifully running it in accordance with long-standing Texas tradition.

Instead, those boys did what was necessary to change the culture of the program. They stood up and became David, who was willing to take on Goliath. They did what it took to overcome what had held that school back for thirty-six years. In the process, they laid the groundwork for the school to go on and win four state championships over the next twelve years while I was the head coach. They became Goliath, the giant few others wanted to play.

I admire their willingness to overcome their circumstances because that’s what I’ve done my entire adult life. You have to get past the pain. Whether it’s the physical pain of hanging from an overhead ladder or running through the heat of a Texas summer day, or dealing with the shock of losing your parents, you have to find a way to get past the suffering.

This has been the theme of my life ever since October 16, 1976. That’s the day when I lost my parents and my aunt in a car crash. They were killed in a head-on collision with a truck outside Newcastle, Texas, on the way to see me play that day against Southern Methodist University. It was going to be a special experience for all of us, the first time I had ever played in the Cotton Bowl, the historic stadium in Dallas.

I spent the game listening and looking for my parents, expecting them to be in the stands. Only at the end of the game did I find out what had happened. For many people, this would have left a hole in their soul that would be impossible to fix. There were a couple of ways I could have gone at the time. I could have returned to my little hometown of Rule, Texas, with all of seven hundred people and not much future, and become an alcoholic. I could have ended up feeling sorry for myself, thinking about how hard my life had become because I lost my parents.

Or, I could look at the fact that I was still here. I was still around to live a full and vital life, to make everything my parents had helped me become worth something. I could wake up every day knowing that my life was still here and still wonderful.

Or, I could pack it in.

Well, if you’ve ever seen our Baylor teams play, you know I’m not much for packing in anything. Even as tragedy hit me again late in 2013 when I lost my older brother, my only sibling and last really close family member, Eddie, in a freak accident, I have never been someone to back down from the challenges of life. I don’t live in fear. I don’t accept the idea that there’s a bad day in life.

Or, as I like to say, every day is a great day.

It’s a simple philosophy. I’m not much for the complex. It may shock people who know even the smallest bit about football, but we don’t have a playbook at Baylor. You hear that stuff about coaches who have a thousand plays in a big binder or loaded on an iPad. Not us. But I’ll explain more about that later.

I’m also not much for playing the hand you’re dealt. I believe in self-determination. You can win with a bad hand, you just have to come up with a plan for how to do it. You have to find a way to even out the odds. That’s what we did when I got to Stephenville. It’s what I have continued to do after I got to Baylor, a program that was so down and out when I got there that my own daughter wondered whether I had lost my mind by taking the job.

Make no mistake, this is not some simple book about football. This is not a treatise on how to run the spread offense or how to incorporate the veer running game into that attack. Sure, I’ll talk about football as a vehicle to share my story. Football is, after all, my