Three-Time National Championship Coach Urban Meyer Loves A Deep Bench

As the head football coach of the Florida Gators from 2005 to 2010 and the Ohio State Buckeyes from 2012 to 2018, Urban Meyer won three national championships and established himself as one of only three coaches, along with Pop Warner and Nick Saban, to win a major college football national championship at two universities. But as he shared in this episode of Corporate Competitor Podcast with special guest host John C. Maxwell, when you build a strong, supportive culture, you attract people who want to be part of that culture so badly they will give up opportunities elsewhere to join your team.

“At Ohio State, we had the best A to Z program in the country,” averred Meyer, who says the school prepared athletes intellectually as well as athletically. “That’s why we could depend on our third-string quarterback to help us win the championship. We had a deep bench.”

It’s easy to assume that people who achieve greatness in their profession have always been successful, but the hard-driving Meyer, himself, has adjusted as he learned a lesson or two about coaching from his experiences on two championship teams. At the University of Florida, his skill at building an extraordinary team was plain to see in their 2008 national title, but so was the fact that his players seemed to have lost their joy in the game, as had Meyer himself. Competing had caused Meyer to lose sight of the importance of balancing work, family, and faith. He had some serious health scares that forced him out of the game for a year.

At Ohio State, he built a similarly dominant Buckeye team to his old Gator one, winning his third national championship in 2014. But this team played within an entirely different culture, replacing fear with trust, camaraderie, and even... love. “When I was a psychology major at Ohio State, I learned that love is the most powerful motivator there is,” Meyer explained. “More than fear, hate or survival, love is what makes a soldier take the risks and make the sacrifices he does.” Meyer’s OSU team called it “combat motivation,” and it was a rare thing in football, said Meyer.

But extreme camaraderie wasn’t the only thing separating the 2014 Buckeyes from the rest of the pack. The more mundane, but equally impactful, difference came from Meyer’s system of developing complete people rather than just football players. The system showed its merit when Cardale Jones, OSU’s third-string quarterback, played in the national championship game after injuries knocked out the first- and second-string quarterbacks.

Meyer’s tips for building a deep bench will help any business leader seeking to strengthen his or her team. Here are some highlights: 

• Develop a culture of learning: As a leader, complacency is your worst enemy. Meyer combats it by constantly learning and adapting to changes in the game, the players, and coaching itself. And he inculcates this mindset in his team by developing leaders as well as athletes. “There’s an old saying that average leaders have a quote, good leaders have a plan and great leaders have a system,” noted Meyer. In addition to learning football systems, Meyer’s teams receive 6-8 weeks of leadership training every year.
• Respect your predecessors: Every new leader wants to prove himself to his new team. Doing so by bad-mouthing a predecessor, even one who really did stink, doesn’t hold water on a team built on respect. Meyer has zero-tolerance for backstabbing directed at his predecessors. “I've always made a point of keeping members of the previous staff,” he said. “Nobody admires Coach Jim Tressel more than I do, so when I went to Ohio State, why not keep Luke Fickell and other coaches and learn from them, respect them, embrace them and then go do my job?” 
• Stay “above the line”: Meyer and his staff teach their teams to think before they act, not necessarily a common trait in the general population and certainly among football players. This means confronting adversity and other threats not with impulsive, “below-the-line” reactions but with reasonable “above-the-line” behavior. Summed up Meyer, “This begins by acknowledging that while we can’t control what happens to us all the time, we can control how we respond.” 
• Build trust, not fear: The biggest difference between Meyer’s Florida and Ohio teams involved the way he motivated his players. “I used to say the job of a leader is to set the standard and demand all live up to that. I disagree with that completely now,” said Meyer, who now coaches the NFL’s Jacksonville Jaguars. “Over the last few years, I’ve come to believe the job of a leader is to earn your team’s trust. And then you set a standard while equipping and inspiring them so they can achieve the standard.”

And this year, trust is what Meyer wants from the top pick in the NFL Draft, Trevor Lawerence, who quarterbacked Clemson to a National Championship as a freshman and went 52-2 in his three years as a Tiger. 

Meyer believes Super Bowls may be won or lost on such routine decisions as how we have responded when we were feeling tired, bored or angry about something. “Those feelings are natural. It’s up to you to decide whether to whine, complain or lash out, or work harder to become a better teammate.”