A Standard of Winning
When tennis great Roger Federer was asked about how he sustained his level of play through twenty Grand Slam victories, he didn’t hesitate to explain.
“First, I loved the sport and developed a routine that worked for me,” he recalled. “I’d make my wife coffee in the mornings, then I’d wake my kids, make them breakfast, take them to school and go to train for two or three hours. I’d have lunch with my wife, go back to train, pick up my kids from school, have dinner with them, and do the same the next day.”
While it all sounded pretty simple, Federer was outlining the standard he had set for himself, the discipline he had to stick to it and, not insignificantly, the talent he had to execute it at the highest level.
Assembling a team with a high level of talent is the job of the General Manager, the Director of football operations, the Head Coach and his staff. The coach is also responsible for setting the expectations of conduct and performance. But it’s the players themselves who are responsible for setting the standard. And enforcing it. There have been plenty of talented teams who couldn’t get out of their own way, or different individuals or faction had their own agenda and consequently, they lost.
Winning teams have a set of expectations but also a standard that players buy into. For the Jaguars, James Gladstone, Tony Boselli and Liam Coen have been responsible for assembling the roster. But they’ve taken it a step further, requiring the players, as Boselli says, to have “Duval DNA.”
And that’s not complicated. Do the right thing, be a good teammate, maximize your talent and do whatever you can to help the team win. When the team brought Jacobi Myers and Dennis Gardek in, they brought Duval DNA with them, helping set, and raise the standard of performance and professionalism when you join the Black and Teal.
“It raises the standard and the way that the guys operate on a day-to-day
basis becomes that standard,” Coen said this week. “Every day when you wake up and come in the building, those standards the way we operate, the It way we meet, walk through, practice, and then obviously go out and compete on Sundays, there just becomes a standard of the way that we do things. And then when we don’t meet the standard, whether it’s in a meeting or a walkthrough or a practice, it gets addressed.”
I remember talking to Eric Curry, a former number one pick who signed with the Jaguars in the late ‘90’s and asking him what the difference was in the Jaguars locker room.
“This team wants to win,” he said with a smile. When I asked doesn’t every team? “Oh no. A lot of guys want to play and make money, winning is secondary. You can tell on this team though. It’s like in college. These guys want to win games.”
Without identifying it, those Jaguars had Duval DNA. Look through the history of the Jaguars and those guys are easy to identify: Boselli, John Jurkovic, Paul Poslusny, Lonnie Marts, Tom McManus, Fred Taylor, Jimmy Smith, Keenan McCardell. You could see it in how they practiced, how they prepared and how they played.
“We’ve got a standard that we know is there and we know it works,” Trevor Lawrence said at the end of training camp. “From the locker room to the practice field, when one of your teammates isn’t getting there, you can give him a little nudge and tell him to pick it up.”
That’s not something we might have heard from Lawrence in his first five years in the league but here in year six, he received every vote possible from the offense as a team captain. He knows that’s a big responsibility.
“The position has something to do with it,” he said of his spot as the starting quarterback. “But bringing some of the guys along to how we do things, what we know that works for us to win games, that’s all of our responsibility.”
Coen seemed to name just about every starter as a leader and a player who sets and adheres to the standard when talking about who’s responsibility that is. Hainsey, Cleveland, Myers, Washington, Thomas, Strange, Allen, Tuten, Rodrigues, Abdullah. He couldn’t say enough about how they approach the work.
“And Trevor, obviously being the core principle of it all offensively,” he added. Coen ticked off defensive players like Armstead, Walker, Foye, Gardek, Murry, Johnson, and Brown as understanding what it takes as a team mindset to win in the NFL.
“I’ve been very pleased with the leadership on our team over the last year,” he continued, clearly excited about the players Duval DNA. “And more so like you said, who’s holding the standard? I don’t have to walk in the locker room or call the captains up or the leaders on this team up all the time and say, ‘Hey guys, like we need more, I need more from you.”
While the Jaguars have twenty new players on the roster, the starting lineup is generally intact from last year’s thirteen win team. Tuten has plenty of experience at running back and they’ll have one different starter on the offensive line. Defensively, Ventrell Miller is back as a starter at linebacker and Eric Murray is now ensconced in the starting lineup at safety. The team is full of young, experienced players, now with high expectations.
Can they stick to the standard? Fulfill those expectations? Last year it took them ten games to figure that out. This year they won’t have the luxury of sneaking up on anybody. But their window to win is open. Finding guys willing to jump through it, together, will be the key.
