I guess I’m motivated by the fear of failure to some degree and knowing what can happen when you don’t do things the way you need to do them to have success.
I enjoyed the NFL. I respected the players. It was a great opportunity to learn a lot of things, but the challenges were a little different, and it didn’t seem that you could control your own destiny, especially in terms of how you could bring players to the team.
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.
But the other guys that you have have to accept their leadership. They have to respond to it. That’s the chemistry that you never know how that is going to happen.
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.
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.
When you have the ability to affect other people and be somebody that somebody wants to emulate, care enough to help somebody else for their benefit, that’s what makes you a good teammate, and that’s what everybody’s looking for.
I said as soon as we had a playoff, we were going to minimize the importance of all the other bowl games. I’m not saying it’s good or bad; it kind of is what it is.
