The Cowboys And 49ers Show Why You Hire For Attitude And Train For Skills

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 NFL and NBC spared no expense and fielded their dream teams of camera people and announcers and filled television land with opinions on the game’s profound implications for the postseason. The teams also featured a couple of quarterbacks, Sam Darnold for San Francisco and Trey Lance for Dallas, who had been top-three draft picks out of college, a pair of blue chippers if ever there were some. But Sunday night both were watching their teams going up against each other. Watching being the operative word.

And that was the irony of the game and the basis of this week’s lesson: both Darnold and Lance were sitting on the bench as backups. The starters in this pivotal contest were Brock Purdy for the 49ers, a player who was drafted dead last in his draft year and thus earned the designation of “Mr. Irrelevant,” a perverse “honor” that goes to each year’s last draft pick. We wrote a while back on Purdy’s honorary award here.

Lining up under the Cowboy’s center was fourth-round pick Dak Prescott who has endured an up and down year thus far but has his coach’s and, more important, Cowboy’s legendary owner Jerry Jones’ support.

“Dak Prescott is a quarterback that can get us to the Super Bowl and that’s the way that’s going to be,” Jones said in the aftermath of watching his team get routed 42-10 by San Francisco, a game in which Prescott threw for 153 yards and three interceptions, while being sacked three times. “I want to be real clear: Dak’s very capable of taking this team be where we want it to go," Jones said during the radio interview. "We should recognize that we had a very bad outing. And San Francisco had a very good outing.”

Sounds like Mr. Jones sees something enduring in Prescott and worth investing in despite some setbacks. What we don’t know is what the Cowboys and 49ers saw in Prescott and Purdy that they didn’t see in Lance and Darnold. It’s safe to say that Lance and Darnold had the skills the coaches craved. It’s a cinch that at the NFL combine they out-jumped, out-ran, out-passed and out-sprinted other quarterbacks. But the combine doesn’t measure some of the most important things that determine success, such as heart and character. It doesn’t measure how well you bond with your teammates or express emotions such as frustration or anger.

One of the most important quarterback skills in the pros is the ability to “read” defenses quickly and adjust your offense almost instantaneously. Again, this is not a skill that the usual means of credentialing, including the college game, itself, can always accurately reveal.

Leaders invest a lot of time and effort in recruiting and talent spotting, but sometimes we just plain blow it. The Dallas-San Francisco game reminds us that for all the scouting in the world, we need to remember that one of the hardest things to measure is what’s going on between the ears. There is nothing to suggest that blue-chip backups like Lance and Darnold have any serious character flaws; that’s not the point. But they clearly couldn’t master some of the tactical and leadership requirements needed to be starters in the pros.

As a Tallahassee resident and proud supporter of Florida State University, I often meet with recruiters from big companies who are recruiting FSU students. I’ve known a lot of FSU students over the years and have spoken to the undergraduate business classes, so I remind the recruiters that the old truism about hiring for attitude and training for competence is a good one.

Look beyond GPA in evaluating future talent, I tell them. Look at how well they listen when someone else is talking as measured by how, or whether, they act on what was said. What kinds of questions do they ask? Above all, look for early signs of something leadership thinker John Maxwell calls “me” versus “we” leadership. A leader needs to master both — you have to achieve excellence before you can teach or model it.

Look for that mindset the 49ers’ Purdy displayed after the game, in which he threw four touchdown passes, when he said, “Right now it feels like everyone is on a mission… everyone is really detailed in what they do and the play calls are great. All I've got to do is go out there and do my job and that's it. Go play ball. Obviously, we feel good with where we're at, but there are still areas where we can get better.”

Nothing grandiose or falsely modest there. Just the right stuff between the ears coming from a guy who has the chance to do something very cool: go from being the former Mr. Irrelevant to the now and forever Mr. Super Bowl winner.