My wife goes to Birmingham five times a week. My mom lives in Birmingham now after moving from Myrtle Beach. It’s not just the job. A lot of people don’t get that. My life is here.
I feel like I’ve been very blessed to have some great mentors through the years, starting with Don James, who was my college coach, who really inspired me to want to be a coach, which is not something that I really had in mind.
We all have anxiety about things. We all have little insecurities, but eventually you have to face your fears if you want to be successful, and everybody has some fear of failure.
There’s two parts of leadership. You’ve got to be a good leader – you’ve got to be somebody that people want to emulate and care about the other people.
I don’t want people to think I’m not happy when we win – I am. But there’s a difference between being happy for the feeling of accomplishing something and being overjoyed and feeling, ‘This is it – we conquered the world.’ We didn’t. We just won a game.
It’s been our goal as a program to always give our players the best opportunity to be successful, whether it’s personally, academically, or athletically.
I’ll write an authorized book because there’s only one expert on my life, and guess who that is… me. And there won’t be any misinformation. There won’t be any false statements.
There needs to be somebody that looks out for what’s best for the game, not what’s best for the Big 10 or what’s best for the SEC or what’s best for Jim Harbaugh, but what’s best for the game of college football – the integrity of the game, the coaches, the players, and the people that play it.
You can control your own destiny a little bit better in college. It’s hard to control all the variables, especially with the salary cap and things like that, in pro football.
