Eraser

"As a young coach, Tom Osborne gave me a piece of advice I never forgot," a longtime offensive coordinator said. "He said, 'When times get tough -- and they will -- get out your eraser, not your pencil.'"

This is a great quote from former Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne. Granted, as a head coach, it's a lot more easier said than done. But there is a lot of wisdom in it if you take the time to process and plan for how you will handle adversity.

Chip Kelly always says "Make your tough decisions in air-conditioned rooms." You should plan your approach to adversity, stressful situations, and in-game scenarios when the pressure is on. If you do that, you can handle the heat because the stress of winning and losing isn't impacting your decision. You've figured out your approach ahead of time, now all you have to do is execute.

One of those things to think about in the off-season is how you are going to handle when your team isn't playing well. What is the best way to get your team out of a slump or change the approach to spark your group? Naturally when things aren't going well we try and do more. We change the line-up, we tweak the offense, we try a different defense. We run more sets to try and get certain people the ball, or we shorten the rotation to keep our best players on the floor longer. When we are struggling, we want to do more.

Sometimes the best approach is to do less. Maybe your team isn't executing because you are trying to do too much. You might be over-coaching them. I know I've been guilty of that before, and it took my team to teach me how to get away from that approach. Even if your team is struggling for no apparent reason, your thinking needs to be 'how can I get the most out of them?' Is it to add more stuff, to give them more to work on and think about? That's something you really have to think about.

This isn't to say that change is a bad thing. Many teams will just need a shake-up, something different to spark a fire or at least let them know that change is coming. But how you change and what you change are worth thinking about. Simplification is a form of change, even though it's not adding anything new technically. There are ways to implement change while getting your teams to think less.

Most of the time I've had a struggling team that is under-performing, it's because I've been giving them too much. Even when I thought what we were doing was simple and easy to understand, it's really how they process it that matters. And I've gone down that rabbit hole where I keep trying new things to shake my team out of it, only to dig the hole deeper. It's a very uncomfortable feeling, one where you know what you are doing isn't working but for some reason you can't stop.

I love the idea of taking out the eraser rather than the pencil. When your team is really struggling, give them less. Simplify everything and see if they start to grow. So often less is more, and a team on a bad run usually needs some room to breathe.