In Football, You Are ‘Born Again’ Each Week
It’s too hard to win football games and there’s too much to focus on each week to be upset by what happened last week. Chad Kanoff speaks on the importance of making each week it's own.
“Each morning we are born again, it’s what we do today that matters most.” -Buddha
In football, you are ‘born again’ each week, rather than each day. Embracing this philosophy will make you a much better player, particularly in a weird spring football season with lots of distractions.
In the NFL you watch the previous game Monday morning, and then in the afternoon, move on to watching film for the next week. When you wake up Tuesday morning, there should be no thought of what happened in the week prior, and really no discussion of it other than making adjustments from mistakes that caused you to not run perfect plays in the week prior. If you lost by 60, won by 60, played the best game of your life, if you lost a nail biter because your coach called a stupid play, your friend dropped an easy pass, or your kicker missed a field goal, come Tuesday, all of those woulda coulda shoulda or reveling in how good you are thoughts should be completely gone.
For a high school player with a typical Friday night game, that means by Sunday, there should be no thought of the previous week. It’s too hard to win football games and there’s too much to focus on each week to be upset by what happened last week; on the flip side, it’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking you’re so great when you win big and not preparing for an opponent adequately. As one of my high school head coaches, Scot Ruggles, used to say, ‘Winning masks all problems.’ Make an effort to improve your weaknesses and make adjustments even when you win. And also make sure you treat each week the same regardless of the previous game’s outcome, and make sure that you treat each opponent with a deadly seriousness. Nick Saban is famous for talking up every opponent they play and then grinding his staff through 100+ hour weeks even when they play schools you’ve never heard of. There’s a reason you almost never hear of Alabama getting upset by one of those schools.
The goal is to go 1-0 every single week. Some weeks you succeed in that goal, some weeks you don’t. But the teams that stay present and work hard will end up on the winning side more often than not.