I recently had the opportunity to spend 24 hours inside the Kansas football program — sitting in on meetings, watching workouts, observing how the players and coaches operate, and getting a firsthand look at the culture they’re building.
At the end of that experience, I had 36 minutes with the entire team.
What follows is the transcript of that talk, shared essentially as it was delivered.
We covered what it means to behave like a champion before you become one, why discipline matters more than motivation, how process and progress drive performance, and the specific behaviors that win — and lose — football games.
We also talked about the difference between waiting and preparing, how confidence is earned, why adversity is inevitable, and why the fourth quarter doesn’t create you — it reveals what you’ve already built.
While this message was delivered to a college football team, very little of it is actually about football.
It’s about standards. Preparation. Toughness. Accountability. Leadership. And consistently doing the things that give you the best chance to perform at your highest level when it matters most.
Here’s the conversation.
So I’m incredibly grateful to have spent the last 24 hours observing you guys, and sitting in on meetings, and watching you guys work out.
And there’s a few things that are blatantly obvious to me.
First and foremost, as you guys know, you are elite-level football players. I also hope you know and you recognize you have an elite-level coaching staff, you have an elite-level facility, you have elite-level resources, and you play for an elite-level university.
And I know that that’s been said to you before, but make sure you understand the difference between playing at Kansas and playing for Kansas.
Now, the fact that you all are so elite makes me fairly confident and have the humility in knowing that everything I’m about to share with you guys, you’ve probably heard before. In fact, several of the things I’m going to share with you, I’ve heard your coaches say in the last 24 hours.
But I’m going to tell you guys the same thing that I tell my three teenage children, that I tell every single elite athlete that I’ve had an opportunity to work with, and that I tell myself on a daily basis, and that is repetition is not punishment.
Repetition is the oldest and most effective form of learning and skill acquisition on the planet, and that will never change.
So if I say something today and you have heard it before, there’s a reason for that. It’s because it’s true, it’s because it’s important, it’s because it’s valuable, and it’s because it works.
And if you want to get better at anything, and if you want anything to remain sticky, then the key is repetition, repetition, repetition.
And I’m also a huge believer in the old adage that a man never walks through the same river twice, because the river’s always different and the man’s always different, which means my goal today is I hope that I say something today, even if you’ve heard it before, I hope I say it in a way that lands a little bit differently with you, and maybe the light bulb finally goes off.
So I’m going to thank you in advance for your attention, for your presence, and for locking in, and for making sure that you guys listen with your eyes.
We hear with our ears, but we listen with our eyes.
Now, I have a few phrases written down on some papers here to help make sure that I’m guiding this talk and being really efficient with it.
Behave like a champion now.
Before you can become a champion, you have to act like a champion. You have to behave like a champion. You have to show up like a champion, but you have to do it every single day.
You have to do it on the field. You have to do it off the field.
See, behaving like a champion is not something you have the luxury of doing when you feel like it, or when you want to, or when it’s convenient. It has to be something that you do on and off the field in every area of your life every single day.
See, excellence is not a switch that we turn on and off.
Excellence has to be a switch that is permanently on.
And when you make excellence your standard, again, in every area of your life, when you make excellence your standard, that now becomes the foundation to which everything in your life is built.
And this goes far beyond just the game of football. But excellence needs to be the foundation.
And once you make excellence your foundation, then we can switch gears to start to emphasize three other key components to being excellent in everything that we do.
The first of those will be discipline.
The second of those will be process.
And the third will be progress.
Discipline
Probably a word you’ve heard ever since you were this big, but I don’t know that very many people take the time to define it.
So here’s how I’m going to define discipline for you:
Discipline is making a decision in the moment that is most aligned with the goals that you’ve set or most aligned with the man that you’re trying to become.
Which means you need to make every single decision in the moment to be congruent and parallel and in harmony with what it is that you all are trying to achieve, both individually and collectively, with the man that you’re trying to become.
And every time you make a decision that is in alignment with the person you’re trying to become or the goals that you all have set, then that is a disciplined decision.
And the goal is to get as many of you making as many disciplined decisions as consistently as possible.
See, I’m a huge believer that motivation is highly over-indexed and highly over-glorified in our world today, especially on social media.
See, the problem is motivation is a feeling.
Discipline is a decision.
We don’t control our feelings. We do control our decisions.
Which means even for those of you that skew towards being highly motivated individuals, and I put myself in that class, we’re not motivated every moment of every single day of our lives.
So if we rely on that as fuel, then we become inconsistent.
So we can’t control whether or not we feel motivated every single day. Even for those of you that are super elite, there will be days you don’t feel like practicing. You don’t feel like lifting weights. You don’t feel like going into a film session.
But it doesn’t really matter how you feel.
All that matters is how you behave.
And if you are disciplined, then you will make the decision to give your best effort in that practice, in that weight room, or in that film session.
So we decide whether or not we make disciplined decisions. So that means you’re in control.
You’re not in control of whether you feel motivated.
You are in control of the decisions that you make.
Process
The second of those key pillars is process. Certainly a word that you guys have heard, again, probably since you were little.
I understand that you have chosen a vocation and you have chosen a sport that heavily relies on outcomes.
I mean, let’s be honest. The name of the game is to win. And I want you guys to do everything in your power to win.
But we can’t get too caught up in outcomes because we don’t have control over outcomes.
If you had full control over the outcomes, then you would easily go 12 and 0 because everybody in this room wants to win every single game.
I know that.
But guess what? So do the guys in the other jerseys. They want the exact same thing that you want.
So it’s not a matter of wanting to win. That has nothing to do with it. I know that you want to win.
The matter is who is going to pay attention to the process and stick to the process to give themselves the best chance to win.
The best analogy I can think of is if you were ever tasked with building a brick wall, don’t focus on the wall.
Focus on the bricks.
Because if you can lay each and every brick exactly where it needs to go, guess what? The wall will take care of itself.
You don’t have to worry about the wall. You set each and every brick exactly where it needs to go and the wall will take care of itself.
Which means when you obsess relentlessly over the process, the scoreboard will take care of itself.
And that’s the process.
Progress
And then the third pillar is progress.
It’s making sure that you, individually and collectively, are a little bit better today than you were yesterday. And that you will be a little bit better tomorrow than you were today.
So you guys have to understand, you need to have short-term urgency blended with long-term patience.
I’ll say that again because it’s vital:
You have to have short-term urgency and long-term patience.
Now, right now, when I’m saying long-term, I’m actually talking about the finite confines of this season. I’m not talking long-term like your entire life or decades, although this still applies.
But I’m talking about the confines of this season.
I want you all playing the best football that you’re capable of in September.
But you know what I really want?
You to be playing the best football you’re capable of, even better football in December and in January.
So you guys have to realize, if you stick to the process, you won’t be fully cooked as a program until December or January.
And that’s a good thing.
So I want you being the best you’re capable of now, but you have to respect the process enough to know that if you incrementally, systematically, and progressively get better, you will be a better football player and you will be a better football team in December than you will be in September.
And that needs to be the goal.
So we have to make sure that we are paying attention to progress.
Now, once we do those three pillars, then you guys give yourselves the best chance to make winning the natural byproduct of that.
Again, we don’t control winning.
We do control the process and the progress and the discipline decisions which give us that best chance.
Before you worry about winning, you have to stop doing what loses.
Before we even concern ourselves with winning, you have to be aware of and you have to do everything in your power to eliminate or reduce what loses.
Now, I come from a heavily basketball background, so I do not have the football acumen or IQ that anyone in this room has, but I’m going to do the best I can to speak your language, even though basketball is the sport that I know.
But I’ve watched enough football to know what loses on the football field.
Penalties lose football games.
Turnovers lose football games.
Missed assignments, missed blocks, missed tackles, missed field goals, dropped passes.
On the field, in the micro, those are the things that lose football games.
Now, let’s be honest. Football is not a game of perfection. Life is not a game of perfection. Those things are going to happen. That is a part of playing this game.
But if you can drastically reduce the occurrence of those happening, you give yourself a better chance to win.
But let’s zoom out and look at the macro.
You know what loses football games in the macro?
Selfishness. Entitlement. Arrogance. Lack of toughness. Lack of effort. Lack of execution. And making decisions that are silent, soft, and stupid.
Those things will lose football games.
So once again, collectively, if you guys can do everything in your power to reduce the occurrence of those things, and in fact, do the opposite of those things.
You know what wins football games?
Selflessness. Humility. Hunger. Mental toughness. Physical toughness. Perfect execution and precision.
So those are the things that we need to continually focus on.
And as I said before, you can’t just focus on them when you feel like it, when you want to, when it’s convenient, when you feel fresh.
You have to focus on those things every single day.
And it’s not enough for you to focus on that as an individual.
You need to look to your right and to your left and make sure the guy on your right and the guy on your left is just as committed to doing those things as you are.
So that you guys start to hold each other accountable and police each other.
Football is a we game. It’s not a me game.
If you want to play a me game, play golf or tennis or wrestle or box. Just mano y mano.
But you guys haven’t signed up for that. You guys have signed up to play a team game.
Which means one of the most important qualities you can have is being a great teammate.
And I know that sounds cliche. And again, I know this stuff you’ve heard since you were little.
But I hope it sinks in differently.
My definition of a great teammate is being the teammate you’d want to play with.
Being a teammate that you love to play with, but would hate to play against.
That’s a great teammate.
A great teammate is someone that’s selfless. Someone that supports, encourages, pushes the other guys. That it’s not about them, it’s about the group.
You don’t have control over whether or not you’re the fastest guy in the room, the strongest guy in the room, the most talented guy in the room.
You don’t have full control over that.
You have absolute control over whether or not you’re the best teammate in the room.
And I don’t care if you’re a future NFL first rounder or you’re a walk-on. You have the ability to be the best teammate in the room.
And I would highly encourage every single one of you to make that commitment.
And I’ll tell you this right now. If you do happen to have the potential to be an NFL first rounder and you are an exceptional teammate, you’re what Hall of Famers are made of.
You’re gonna make a whole lot of money playing this game.
But don’t ever sell short the fact that being a great teammate, being a great locker room guy, that those things matter.
There is a huge difference between waiting and preparing.
The overwhelming majority of human beings just wait for things to happen.
The elite prepare for things to happen.
Do you wait for practice to start or do you prepare for practice to start?
Do you wait to go see Matt in the weight room or do you prepare mentally and physically and emotionally to go to the weight room?
Do you wait for film session or are you doing things to prepare for the film session?
When you learn the difference between waiting and preparing, it’s a huge separator.
It’s a game changer.
You’ve got to finish.
Finishing is a habit.
Everyone in the world starts stuff. That doesn’t make you special.
Only the elite finish.
I want you to finish reps in the weight room. Finish workouts. Finish plays on the practice field. Finish practices. Finish film sessions.
What does finishing a film session mean?
It means you’re just as alert and present and focused in minute 15 as you were in minute one.
Anyone can pay attention for one minute.
Can you be locked in for 15 minutes or 20 minutes or however long your film sessions are?
Learn how to finish.
And when you learn how to finish in the small things, then you condition yourself to finish in the big things.
Because ultimately, the goal is to be able to finish games, to finish seasons, to finish in the fourth quarter.
But that doesn’t just magically happen.
You have to consistently condition yourself to do these things.
So there’s a checklist. And this is for players and coaches.
If every single person in this room can check off everything I’m about to say, every workout, every practice, every film session, and every game, you guys are going to be really happy at the end of this season.
I can’t guarantee it. I can’t promise it.
But I’ve done this long enough to know.
If you do what I’m about to ask you to do, and you can check this off at the end of every practice, workout, film session, and game, you guys are going to be very happy come January.
Was I early?
I’m not asking if you’re on time. You better be on time. But I believe in being early.
I have old school values.
I think if you’re on time, you’re late.
Was I early?
Was I prepared?
Did I give my best effort?
Did I have my best attitude?
Was I coachable?
Was I a great teammate?
Did I get better?
Did I make us better?
Every single person in this room, if you can check every one of those things off with every single team activity you have, the only byproduct even possible is to win, and to win at a very high level.
So that’s how we behave like a champion now.
Make plays when it matters most.
Everything I just shared is true and I hope helpful.
But let’s be honest, at the end of the day, football comes down to execution.
You have to be able to make plays.
And you have to be able to make plays when they matter most.
But here’s what you need to understand:
In order to make plays when it matters most, you got to make plays when it matters least.
If you want to make plays when the stakes are high, you have to make plays when the stakes are low.
If you want to make plays when everyone is watching, then you got to make plays when no one is watching.
See, these things need to become habitual.
This just needs to be the way that you do things.
Again, the same way I don’t want excellence to be a switch you turn on and off, I don’t want execution and precision to be a switch you turn on and off.
These can’t be negotiable.
Your feelings are irrelevant.
You have to condition yourself to have a high standard of excellence and to execute as precisely as possible in your role and your assignment every single day.
See, the best teams are at their best when the best is required.
But that does not happen magically.
It happens through conditioning.
It happens through intentionality and being purposeful.
The fourth quarter doesn’t create you.
You know what the fourth quarter does?
It reveals you or exposes you.
The fourth quarter is not when you build habits.
The fourth quarter reveals the habits that you already have.
See, you’re not in the fourth quarter going to magically ascend to some level of performance that you’ve never had before.
You’re going to sink to the level of your training.
You’re going to sink to the level of your toughness.
You’re going to sink to the level of your preparation.
So the higher you can raise the floor, then the more potential you have in the fourth quarter.
And that goes back to what we were talking about before, the ability to finish.
Playing well, playing hard, playing smart for three and a half quarters is not good enough at your level.
For many of you, that was good enough at the high school level because you guys are unbelievably talented, incredibly athletic.
For many of you, many of the things that I just shared with you, you could get away with in high school.
You can get away with having less than perfect footwork in high school because you are physically superior to the guy lined up across from you.
That ain’t the case anymore.
And for those of you that aspire to get paid to play this game and start playing on Sundays instead of Saturdays, it definitely will not be the case.
So it’s vital that we are conditioning ourselves now in every single thing that we do so that these things are revealed in the fourth quarter.
Confidence is earned.
Confidence is not something you’re born with.
It’s not in your genetic code.
Confidence is not even something your coaches can give to you.
Now your coaches can, and I know they do. They support you. They love you. They challenge you. They encourage you. They push you.
But your coaches cannot give you confidence individually or collectively.
Confidence has to come from within.
But here’s the beautiful part:
You’re in control of that.
Because confidence is earned.
Confidence is created.
Confidence is built.
But it’s also not a permanent fixture.
Confidence will ebb and flow.
Every single human being on the planet, even the most elite athletes, will have moments where they feel a little rattled, feel a little shook, where their confidence is wavering.
That’s part of the human condition. No one is immune to it.
But there are things we can do to increase our confidence.
The first thing you do is make disciplined decisions consistently.
You start making disciplined decisions consistently in every single area of your life, and your confidence will build.
I can promise you that.
Confidence also comes from demonstrated performance.
Certainly that demonstrated performance needs to be on the practice field, needs to be in the weight room.
You need to build your competence by having the confidence of knowing, hey, I know how to run this play. I know how to make this block or this tackle.
You have to do those things over and over.
But a good portion of your confidence will come during the unseen hours.
The hours when no one’s watching.
TV cameras aren’t rolling. The cheerleaders aren’t dancing. No one’s looking.
The only person there is you.
And you can build and strengthen that confidence by improving your demonstrated performance during those unseen hours.
The reason Steph Curry is the greatest shooter to ever play the game of basketball is because in empty gyms, he has seen that ball go through the basket more than any person that’s ever walked the earth.
It’s cause and effect.
It’s not accidental.
So if you want to get better at something, then you have to see yourself doing it and being competent at it.
And that’s what we do during the unseen hours.
That’s what we do during practice.
That’s what we do before and after practice.
The next way we build confidence is you learn how to keep the promises you make to yourself.
I would hope that you keep your word to your teammates and to your family and to your coaches.
But I sincerely hope you learn how to keep your word to yourself.
If you say you’re going to do something and you do it, your confidence increases.
If you say you’re going to do something and you don’t do it, your confidence decreases.
You can fool everyone in this world, but you can’t fool yourself.
The man in the mirror.
So make sure you’re keeping the promises you make to yourself.
And the last way that we build confidence, and arguably the most important, is that little voice in your head.
How you talk to yourself.
And if any of you are sitting here now thinking, I don’t have a little voice in my head, who do you think just said that?
Yeah, it’s the little voice in your head.
We’ve all got it.
We all talk to ourselves and I could make a pretty compelling argument that the conversation you have with yourself in quiet is the most important conversation you’ll ever have in your life.
Now, I want you to hold yourself to an incredibly high standard.
However, I want you to learn how to talk to yourself in a way that is empowering, in a way that shows belief, in a way that you’re supporting and you’re encouraging yourself.
See, one of the reasons you guys are in this room is because you’re probably incredibly competitive.
You’re unbelievably driven and those are great qualities.
We want to throw gasoline on those.
But usually what goes hand in hand in that is sometimes that voice in our head, we can be very critical to ourselves.
We can beat ourselves up after we miss a play or drop a pass or whatever it may be.
And no one’s saying that we want those things to happen.
No one’s even saying those things are okay.
But what we’re saying is after you make a mistake like that, how do you talk to yourself?
If you beat yourself up, your confidence will erode.
If you empower yourself and you say, man, I can’t believe I dropped that pass. That ain’t going to happen again. That’s not like me. I’m the best receiver in there.
Then your confidence will improve.
You have to learn how to talk to yourself the way that I hope you would talk to a teammate or the way that I hope a teammate would talk to you.
And that’s how we build our confidence.
And the beautiful thing about confidence is it’s circular.
Once you start doing these things and building your confidence, then it starts to grow.
And then your belief starts to grow.
And then you become almost bulletproof.
And that’s the very first step to having that next play mentality.
Find your edge.
It’s all about separation.
Well, first and foremost, I hope you make your preparation your separation.
Again, you don’t control whether or not you’re the most talented team in the country.
You don’t have control over that.
You know what you do control?
Are you the most prepared team in the country?
You don’t control whether you’re the most talented player at your position, even in this room.
But you absolutely control whether you’re the most prepared person in your position.
Make your preparation your separation.
After two, five, and seven seasons, there’s a chance some people are gonna sleep on you this year.
There’s a good chance you guys are gonna be underdogs.
And I hope you relish that opportunity.
I hope you love that.
Because honestly, it doesn’t matter what anyone outside of this room right now thinks about you.
All that matters is what you guys think about yourself.
You don’t control preseason rankings.
You don’t control what people on social media say.
You certainly don’t control what the talking heads on ESPN or any of the sports shows say.
You have no control over that.
So we learn how to disregard that, and we put all of our focus on the things we have control over.
You control your effort.
You control your attitude.
You control your preparation.
You control your toughness.
You control your conditioning.
Your edge is all about doubling down on the things you have control over.
And for you guys individually, taking something that you’re really good at and making that skillset great.
Some of you take something that you’re great at and make it world-class.
Take the things that you’re already good or great at and learn how to level those up.
That, my friends, is how you get an edge.
Adversity is coming.
Tough days are coming.
There are very few guarantees in life, but here is one that is absolutely foolproof:
Adversity is coming.
Now, adversity comes in small doses.
It comes in large doses.
Adversity can be a whole lot of different things, but no one is immune to adversity.
So you have to know it’s coming.
The only question is:
How are you going to respond to it?
I already gave you guys the list of things that lose football games.
And even though every single one of us is in full agreement and we all know those things, those things are still going to happen.
There’s still going to be missed assignments, missed tackles, dropped passes.
That is part of playing the game of football.
Now, we’re going to try to reduce them as much as possible.
But in addition to reducing them, if we have the humility to acknowledge that they’re still going to happen anyway, then the only question is, how do you respond to that?
How do you respond when things don’t go your way?
