Empower Your Audience

This last week we watched the NFL Combine, the annual job fair that draws college football players to interviews wearing shorts and t-shirts and carrying gym bags rather than briefcases. For a solid week, they took turns running, jumping, sprinting, lifting, throwing and catching, and were measured by every possible means, all in the hope of getting included in the NFL Draft, which will take place this year on April 25-27 in Detroit.

I watched the great NFC Championship game between the San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions, which San Francisco won 34-31, with complete fascination. By the end of the game, two numbers stood out to me as the most instructive of all: 77 and seven.

Patrick Mahomes of the Kansas City Chiefs and Josh Allen of the Buffalo Bills are the new Tom Brady and Peyton Manning. They are two quarterbacks who are the unquestioned field leaders of their respective teams and improve each other every time they meet.

Their record against one another, alone, proves the point: prior to Sunday’s game, the quarterbacks faced each other six times, splitting those games 3-3 and scoring close to the same number of points as each over the course of rivalry. Sunday marked the seventh time they’ve played against each other and the third time in the playoffs. Mahomes’ Chiefs won all three playoff games, so Mahomes would arguably be considered the more successful of the two, yet nobody could deny they demonstrate a model rivalry.

The beginning of a new year offers the opportunity to reflect on the topic of change and how it relates to leadership. Big-time college sports have never been more driven by change than it is at the moment and, when reading so many on the internet, the change is driving people to say the most distasteful things!

More than a decade ago, I had a speaking engagement at Chevron that was part of a whole day devoted to leadership development, one in which I happily participated. One of our activities was to break into small groups and draw on a sheet of paper our vision of what a “Clear Leader” looked like.

On January 1, we can all look forward to tuning in to the College Football Playoffs to watch Alabama, Michigan, Texas and Washington duke it out on the field. And when the horns sound and sidelines erupt in the expectation of making the National Championship game, we can look over to Simon Cowell in the judge’s booth to see which teams he gives a thumbs up to, determining who moves on to the title game.

In professional football, cadence refers to all of the verbal signals delivered by the quarterback before the start of the play. They include numbers, colors and other coded words quarterbacks call out to tell the offensive players to get ready for a specific play, which includes the snap count. While the quarterback uses the huddle to communicate the play, often he will have to change it at the line of scrimmage, which is called an audible.

We’re taught at an early age to appreciate what we have and not waste our lives wishing for greener pastures. However, sometimes the grass – or Astroturf – really is greener on the other side. It certainly must seem so to a couple of quarterbacks named Matthew Stafford and Jared Goff.

Sunday night’s NFL contest was billed (sorry Buffalo) as the biggest game of the weekend and one of, if not the, biggest games of the NFL season when the unbeaten San Francisco 49ers played the 3-1 Dallas Cowboys in a game many believed would be a preview of the National Football Conference championship game.

The king is dead. Long live the king, right? Not so fast, tennis fans. After the brilliant and charismatic Spaniard Carlos Alcaraz defeated one of the three kings of tennis, Novak Djokovic, at Wimbledon, many were quick to anoint a new ruler in the men’s game. Alcaraz certainly seems to have everything it takes to assume the Purple once worn by Djokovic, Federer and Nadal.