Written by Billy Gomila
Louisiana high school coaches were treated to words of wisdom from one of football’s preeminent statesmen, as Super Bowl Champion Tony Dungy addressed the LSU Coaches Clinic on Friday.
Dungy, who spent 31 years as a coach in the NFL, including 12 as a head coach with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and Indianapolis Colts, with him he won Super Bowl XLI in 2007. He spoke to the gathering of coaches from across Louisiana about life, leadership and, of course, his philosophy on winning football.
“My philosophy of football, everything I did, was shaped by Coach (Chuck Noll),” said Dungy. “He once told me that champions are not champions because they do extraordinary things. Champions do the ordinary things better than anybody else.”
Dungy’s NFL career began when Noll’s Pittsburgh Steelers signed him as a free agent out of the University of Minnesota in 1977. He spent two years with the team, leading the 1978 Super Bowl Champion Steelers in interceptions before getting traded to the San Francisco 49ers. He played another season before going into coaching, returning to Pittsburgh as an assistant coach in 1981. He worked with Noll’s Steelers for another eight years as a defensive backs coach and defensive coordinator. From there he worked with the Kansas City Chiefs and Minnesota Vikings before earning his first head coaching job in Tampa Bay in 1996.
“You win in football with fundamentals,” Dungy explained, noting that even with a team full of Hall-of-Famers like “Mean” Joe Greene, Mike Webster and Jack Lambert, Noll began every practice working on the very basics of the game.
“We began our day getting in our stances,” he said. “Then it was the Oklahoma Drill, and then in our team period we worked on two runs and two passes versus one defensive front and one coverage.
“This is a game of execution,” Dungy continued. “You have to take care of the little things. Talent can win you games, but the details are what will win championships.”
From there, Dungy detailed the three things he stressed for his teams as a coordinator and head coach: leading your league or conference in turnovers, having the fewest penalties in it and having sound special teams.
“Everything we do is based on protecting the football and taking it away,” he said, explaining that for his defenses it was a way of life. He favored zone coverage so that his defenders would always have their eyes on the football, and constantly had his teams work on stripping and recovering.
“We would chart all the defensive takeaways in practice,” Dungy said. “we wanted our guys thinking takeaway all of the time.”
Dungy would also allow for no more than five penalties in a given team period during his practices. Two for the offense, two for the defense and one on special teams.
“And only effort penalties,” he explained. “No pre-snap penalties and nothing after the whistle. Those plays can extend drives and cost you points.”
Dungy also noted that his teams always charted their kickoff and punt coverage effectiveness, and stressed having the most consistent kickers and punters they could find.
“Every time we kicked the ball, we wanted to be productive,” he said.
In addition to those three on-the-field points, Dungy also said that he always strived to stress two more elements as well – having fun and preparing his players to be men.
“The first three letters of fundamentals are f-u-n,” he said. “Losing isn’t any fun, and being undisciplined leads to losing. You can build those habits and have fun doing it.”
One way that Dungy tried to keep things fun for his players was a constant focus on football activities, even during offseason conditioning.
“We never ran just to run,” he explained. “We ran in our drills and we ran pass routes.”
Dungy recounted the story of his son Eric, now a wide receiver for the University of Oregon, who didn’t enjoy his first football experience while playing Pop Warner football at age nine.
“Eric wanted to play football so bad, but he just wasn’t having fun at practice,” he said. “That’s what this is all about, whether it’s in high school, college or in the NFL.”
Most importantly though, Dungy stressed that high school coaches are leaders of young men.
“It’s more important to develop men than to develop football players,” he said. “And those players will thank you later. I wanted all of my guys to develop athletically, academically, socially and spiritually.”
In his many years of evaluating college players for the NFL Draft, Dungy noted that every year he spoke to more young men that didn’t grow up with a father figure, and that a coach at some level, whether it was youth football, high school or college, had a major impact in shaping them.
“Those kids always reference a coach,” he said. “You may not think they’re listening to you when you talk about school or something like that, but they are. What you lay out, they will do for you because the thing is, kids want to play. And if you set a high standard for them, they’ll meet it to get on that field.”
Dungy added that sometimes you’ll see the impact indirectly. During his stint in Tampa, Dungy worked briefly with a young Mike Tomlin, now a Super Bowl-winning head coach himself for the Steelers. Years later, when University of Oregon Wide Receivers Coach Scott Frost visited Dungy’s home to recruit his son, he heard many of his own teachings reflected. Frost and Tomlin had worked together briefly in 2003.
“You will have an impact on people you will never even meet,” Dungy said.