Knute Rockne quotes:
Most men, when they think they are thinking, are merely rearranging their prejudices.
I've found that prayers work best when you have big players.
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Vince Lombardi quotes:
Football is a great deal like life in that it teaches that work, sacrifice, perseverance, competitive drive, selflessness and respect for authority is the price that each and every one of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
Success is like anything worthwhile. It has a price. You have to pay the price to win and you have to pay the price to get to the point where success is possible. Most important, you must pay the price to stay there.
I’ve never known a man worth his salt who, in the long run, deep down in his heart, didn’t appreciate the grind, the discipline.
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.
There’s only one way to succeed in anything, and that is to give it everything. I do, and I demand that my players do.
The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather in a lack of will.
You never win a game unless you beat the guy in front of you. The score on the board doesn’t mean a thing. That’s for the fans. You’ve got to win the war with the man in front of you. You’ve got to get your man.
Leaders are made, they are not born. They are made by hard effort, which is the price which all of us must pay to achieve any goal that is worthwhile.
I firmly believe that any man’s finest hours – his greatest fulfillment of all that he holds dear – is that moment when he has worked his heart out in good cause and lies exhausted on the field of battle – victorious.
The spirit, the will to win and the will to excel - these are the things what will endure and these are the qualities that are so much more important than any of the events themselves.
They call it coaching but it is teaching. You do not just tell them. You show them the reasons.
Teams do not go physically flat, they go mentally stale.
Mental toughness is many things and rather difficult to explain. Its qualities are sacrifice and self-denial. Also, most importantly, it is combined with a perfectly disciplined will that refuses to give in. It’s a state of mind – you could call it ‘character in action.’
Winning is a habit. Watch your thoughts, they become your beliefs. Watch your beliefs, they become your words. Watch your words, they become your actions. Watch your actions, they become your habits. Watch your habits, they become your character.
The harder you work, the harder it is to surrender.
If it doesn’t matter who wins or loses, then why do they keep score?
Winning is not a sometime thing…it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while…you don’t do the right thing once in a while…you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit.
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Bear Bryant quotes:
If anything goes bad, I did it. If anything goes semi-good, we did it. If anything goes real good, you did it. That's all it takes to get people to win football games.
In a crisis, don't hide behind anything or anybody. They're going to find you anyway.
Find your own picture, your own self in anything that goes bad. It's awfully easy to mouth off at your staff or chew out players, but if it's bad, and you’re the head coach, you're responsible. If we have an intercepted pass, I threw it. I'm the head coach. If we get a punt blocked, I caused it. A bad practice, a bad game, it's up to the head coach to assume his responsibility.
I can reach a kid who doesn't have any ability as long as he doesn't know it.
The one that makes you proud is the one who isn't good enough to play, but it means so much to him, he puts so much into it, that he plays anyway. I have had a lot of those, and I can coach them better than most.
Sacrifice. Work. Self-descipline. I teach these things, and my boys don't forget them when they leave.
If you want to coach you have three rules to follow to win. One, surround yourself with people who can't live without football. I've had a lot of them. Two, be able to recognize winners. They come in all forms. And, three, have a plan for everything. A plan for practice, a plan for the game. A plan for being ahead, and a plan for being behind 20-0 at half, with your quarterback hurt and the phones dead, with it raining cats and dogs and no rain gear because the equipment man left it at home.
I don't hire anybody not brighter than I am. If they're not smarter than me, I don't need them.
But it's still a coach's game. Make no mistake. You start at the top. If you don't have a good one at the top, you don't have a cut dog's chance. If you do, the rest falls into place. You have to have good assistants, and a lot of things, but first you have to have the chairman of the board.
In life, you'll have your back up against the wall many times. You might as well get used to it.
You never know how a horse will pull until you hook him to a heavy load.
If a man is a quitter, I'd rather find out in practice than in a game. I ask for all a player has so I'll know later what I can expect.
I have always tried to teach my players to be fighters. When I say that, I don't mean put up your dukes and get in a fistfight over something. I'm talking about facing adversity in your life. There is not a person alive who isn't going to have some awfully bad days in their lives. I tell my players that what I mean by fighting is when your house burns down, and your wife runs off with the drummer, and you've lost your job and all the odds are against you. What are you going to do? Most people just lay down and quit. Well, I want my people to fight back.
At Alabama our players do not win Heisman Trophies - our teams win national championships.
I'm just a simple plowhand from Arkansas, but I have learned over the years how to hold a team together. How to lift some men up, how to calm others down, until finally they've got one heartbeat, together, a team.
The old lessons - work, self-discipline, sacrifice, teamwork, fighting to achieve - aren't being taught by many people other than football coaches these days. The football coach has a captive audience and can teach these lessons because the communication lines between himself and his players are more wide open than between kids and parents. We better teach these lessons or else the country's future population will be made up of a majority of crooks, drug addicts, or people on relief.
The same things win today that have always won, and they will win years from now. The only difference is the losers have a whole new bunch of excuses why they don’t win or can’t win.
I'll put you through hell, but at the end of it all we'll be champions.
It's not the will to win that matters - everyone has that. It's the will to prepare to win that matters.
If you believe in yourself and have dedication and pride - and never quit - you'll be a winner. The price of victory is high but so are the rewards.
