I used this line previously on a coach and got burned, so I’ll state off the top I hope I’m not wrong here but I also think its reuse is appropriate. Kenny Dillingham either Gets It on a fundamental, molecular level, or he is very successfully impersonating someone who does. Because every time Dillingham opens his mouth, what comes out makes radical sense.
This time around, Dillingham explained what, to him, it means to be “outcoached” at the college level, and it goes far beyond simply adding a wrinkle the opposition wasn’t prepared for or calling the right blitz at the right time.
“To me, every time we lose we get outcoached. We don’t have a GM, so every loss that we have — I’m responsible for every single person in this organization. So, it doesn’t matter if we miss a tackle, or there’s a bad scheme, or they get us schematically — it’s outcoached. That’s how I view it: the extreme ownership of I have broughten (sic) every single person into this organization. So, if we miss a tackle, or we don’t make a play, or we have a bad scheme, that all falls on me. Maybe ‘outcoached’ isn’t always the perfect term, but at the end of the day everything always falls on me. When we have failures or we don’t hit an expectation, for a multitude of reasons, it’s my fault. That’s what I mean by outcoached. Who else do I look at? Everybody’s here because of me, which means everything falls on me, and it should. Every bad thing said about our program should fall on me and not our players, because I brought them here. It’s our job to put them in the best position to succeed, and that 100 percent is on me.”
Okay, so maybe not everything that comes out of Dillingham’s mouth makes perfect sense. “Broughten” is not actually a word.
Grammar semantics aside, that 80-second soliloquy is a window into why Dillingham succeeds. It’s not that he used philosopher-level insight to redefine a term we hear every day, it’s that he takes ownership of every detail and every person within the program, and in turn every person will then take ownership over their smaller part in the overall whole.Â