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Originally Posted by Ron Rivera on Andy Reid
One of the things you gotta give Andy credit for is the way he does things. It’s almost like it’s right out of Bill Walsh’s book, Finding the Winning Edge. When I was first with Andy, he encouraged me to go get it, so I read the book. And by reading the book, one of the things I learned off it was that everything we did with Andy was in the book. So I started seeing why—in the book, there are great explanations of why Bill Walsh did everything that he did. … He trusts you. So by empowering you and giving you trust, you really do feel like, wow, ‘This is mine, he’s given us an opportunity to take a true stake in what we do.’
One thing he always did with us, when we had to do our reviews from the game, we all did it together in the same room, and you had to sign your name to it. You had to put your grades up in front of everybody. And every now and then, you had to explain why you graded your players like you did. I’m an eternally optimistic person. So one time, we’re grading, and my grades are a little higher than everybody’s. And we had won the game.
So after we got done, Andy said, ‘Ron, can you stay?’ I said, ‘Sure.’ So I stayed in the room and he starts talking about the grades, everybody’s grades. And we’d won this game like 35-7, I can’t remember who we beat. And Andy was smiling—‘You ever notice anything about the grades up here?’ I said, ‘I don’t know what you’re getting at, coach.’ Andy say, ‘Well, you see everyone’s grades, you notice yours are a little high?’ So I said, ‘Coach, we won the game 35-7.’ I’m looking at our offensive line, and nobody graded better than a 2.0, and a 2.0 was a backup player that you’re looking to replace—3.0 was a solid starter who did a great job, 3.5 was a guy playing Pro Bowl-caliber football, 4.0 was an All-Pro.
And I said, ‘Coach, I’m just looking at these grades and saying how can we win a game by so much and have so many low grades?” He said, ‘OK, I get it.’ And what I took, he didn’t judge me. He just asked me what I thought about it. And from that, it made me realize, I’m a positive guy, I look at things from a positive perspective—we had to do something right if we won 35-7. And he was that way too.
I remember asking Andy, ‘You know, you never fire anybody. Why?’ He said, ‘Ron, two things. First of all, I hired you. If I think something’s not going well, I’m gonna work with you, I’m gonna train you and give you every opportunity to succeed. If I don’t do that, it’s on me, it’s my fault.’ So he gave us this book on teaching, it’s a little book on teaching. And in it, there are little things about the progression of learning, the progression of teaching, you teach everything from the core, from the base. Like a tree, everything grows up, you’ve got a firm foundation and then it branches out. That’s how I look at coaching, from having read that book.
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