The benches

Growing up an Arizona Wildcats fan, as well as a Cowboys fan (we will come back to that later), when I was a kid our teams at the U of A were all over the board. Baseball was awesome. Football had up and down years. Basketball was terrible. The 1982-83 season was particularly bad. Four wins, 24 losses. A dumpster fire at best. The coach was fired after one year, and then it happened.

Lute Olson arrived.

Over the next 24 years leading the Wildcat basketball program, Coach Olson won 589 games, took them to 23 straight NCAA Tournaments, four Final 4 appearances, won a national championship, and dozens of players went on to the NBA. Before he passed several years ago, I was blessed to spend a decent amount of time with Coach “O.” I once asked him about the turnaround and how he approached it, taking over such a bad program and nearly overnight turning them into a national powerhouse. His answer?.....

“The benches.”

As he went on to explain, when you take over a program like that with a losing culture, you have to change things up. Sometimes in a drastic manner. When Coach got to Tucson, he had the court painted a different color, changed the uniforms, updated the locker room, and even changed which bench the team sat on during games.

While these all sound like small things, changing the way things are done usually alters how the players (or your work team) look at things. When you are used to losing all the time you get conditioned to expecting the worst to happen. By changing the lens through which the players looked at things, they didn’t see what they had seen before. They were looking at a new reality where winning was possible. The rest as they say, is history.

I was reminded of the benches story today while watching our beloved Cowboys pull off a wild overtime victory against the New York Giants. Since the retirement of Troy Aikman and the departure of Emmett Smith some 30 years ago, the Cowboys ALWAYS lost close games. They would have a bad penalty, let the clock run out trying to get the field goal unit on the field, run out of time outs when they needed them at the end, fumble a snap on a short game winning field goal. You name it, they found ways to lose those types of games with regularity.

Not today. Today the fought back. Three separate times. And in the end they walked the game off with a game winning field goal in overtime. What was different with today’s game than in years past?

New head coach.

What did he change when he walked into AT&T Stadium for his first home game coaching the Cowboys?

The benches.

Will the Cowboys make another Superbowl run on my lifetime? I have no idea, however the players I saw on the sideline today looked different. When things got iffy, no arguments amongst the players. No drama. No screaming coaches. Calm, cool, and collected. And in the end, when it came down to one play here and one play there, they made the plays that the Cowboys used to stumble through.

You may not be a Division I basketball coach or an NFL head coach. Whatever game you are playing and that you are the leader within, if your team has a culture of losing, what “benches” can you change?

Look for places to change the game. Give your team their best opportunity to win. After all, that is the coach’s primary job, to put your team in the position to “win” the game they are playing.