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Offseason Episode 6: What We Learned · The Heisman Hopefuls Podcast

• 0:16
  SPEAKER_09: Welcome back to the Heisman Trophy Podcast.
• 0:18
  SPEAKER_09: I'm your host, Chris Houston.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_09: You know, last December I watched Fernando Mendoza take a snap with the national title on the line and turn what seemed like a long shot play into a really remarkable, title-clenching 12-yard touchdown run.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_09: Now, I've studied the Heisman Trophy for most of my life, and I recently argued that it's the greatest individual play a Heisman winner's ever seen.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_09: But what stayed with me wasn't the play itself, it was the question that lingered underneath it.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_09: Think of the stage.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_09: 100,000 people screaming, a season and a legacy in the balance, and yet he looked calm.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_09: And the question that gnawed at me was why him?
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_09: What separates the athlete who rises in that moment from the thousands of talented athletes who don't?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_09: So that question became the focus of the podcast this offseason.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_09: I took it to the coach who developed Mendoza, Kurt Signetti, and to Lincoln Riley, who coached three Heisman Trophy winners.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_09: I took it to Olympic gold medalists like Joey Cheek, Christi Yamaguchi, and Quincy Watts.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_09: I talked to a sports neurologist and a writer who spent years inside neuroscience labs.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_09: I talked to a journalist who interviews the best performers in the world about their habits.
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_09: We had on a former five-star quarterback who lived the question and came out the other side with scars.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_09: And we talked to a kid who's living it right now.
• 1:35
  SPEAKER_09: So this episode is the end result of what I found.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_09: Now, fair warning.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_09: The answer is not one thing, it's kind of a stack of things.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_09: And the deeper you go, the stranger and more encouraging it gets.
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_09: Nobody wins Olympic gold without physical hardware.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_09: And nobody I talked to pretended otherwise.
• 2:03
  SPEAKER_09: Joey Cheek, the speed skater, won gold in the 500 meters in Turin.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_09: And when he lists what he was born with, it sounds like a spec sheet.
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_07: There are two other physical attributes that I know because we measured them, but I had um really good uh type one sprint fibers, and it wasn't until like we started getting genetic testing that we start to see like, oh, that's that's you know it's a very small percentage of European descended folks have this sprint gene.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_07: So I'm I was I was at a 37-inch vertical when I was in high school and uh a V2 Max that was like quite high.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_07: So there was a number of things that all aligned.
• 2:45
  unknown: Yeah.
• 2:45
  SPEAKER_07: But in terms of like challenges, because of course it always seems like, oh, of course you won medals, you had all these things.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_07: I was probably the weakest physical guy on the team, like in terms of just pure weight.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_07: So when you look at the guys in the weight room, like I was never strongest.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_07: I was really high strength to weight, but never that strong.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_09: Rare sprint fibers, a 37-inch vertical in high school, and yet he was the weakest man on the team.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_09: Now hold on to that thought because it's the first crack in the idea that these athletes are just born with it.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_09: Quincy Watts is the second crack in this concept.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_09: Two goals in Barcelona, a world record in the four by four hundred meters that still stands today.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_09: He'll tell you God gave him the DNA, but ask him what his event actually demands, and he doesn't talk about talent.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_09: He talks about the toll that it takes on the body and the mind.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_01: The best way to describe it, imagine you giving everything you have, everything you have, and you know you can't take another step, right?
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: But then you look up and you have to run another hundred meters, right?
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_09: Yeah.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_01: Imagine running to the point you cannot take another step.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: But then you look up and that's when the fight begins.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_01: And that's a really great way to describe the 400.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: Because when you when you look up and you feel you don't have anything left, there's another 100 meters to go, and you have to run a hundred meters with everything you have.
• 4:00
  SPEAKER_01: And um, that's a perfect way to describe it.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: It's not a fun race, uh, but it's one of the toughest races in track and field.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: You're in the pain business, and and then once you accept that you're in the pain business, there's success.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_01: In the 400, if you don't accept you're in the pain business, it's gonna be a lot of pain.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_09: The pain business.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_09: Every guest had a version of it.
• 4:16
  SPEAKER_09: The physical hardware, your body, it buys you a ticket, it doesn't buy you the race.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_09: So if it's not the muscles, what is it?
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_09: Writer Zack Skonbrunn spent years in neuroscience labs answering exactly that.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_09: His book is called The Performance Cortex, and his conclusion flips the way most of us watch sports.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_08: It it became clearer and clear to me that actually the root of great athletes and the and uh what what is actually the bigger contributor to skill and and talent as we you know as we know it is not it's not the muscles, it's not the strength, it's really their ability to process information uh really, really quickly.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_08: It's their decision making, it's their it's their memory for for schemes and their recognition of uh things that are unfolding in in front of them and how it relates to what they have memorized in their playbooks or or from their uh from what their coaches have told them.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_08: Uh it's their, as you mentioned, their ability to handle uh pressure in pressure situations.
• 5:16
  SPEAKER_08: And and uh ultimately it comes, it's it's the signals, it's the multitude of signals that are being sent from the brain to those muscles to coordinate uh a large number of muscles and joints and and and ligaments and uh and branches of limbs, um, all in coordination and and syncopation.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_08: Those are the things that are uh defining uh of great athletes more than um you know just the the size and the strength, the measurables that we uh you know that we that we have that we hold the the the uh the NFL scouting combine to measure.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_08: Uh it's the other stuff that's going on underneath the hood.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_09: Processing, recognition, decision speed, the brain running the play before the body does.
• 6:02
  SPEAKER_09: And here's the part I love.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_09: Zach argues that we've been insulting these people for decades.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_08: The cognitive demands that are required of an athlete to perform at that highest level are just as impressive as a chess player, right?
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_08: Chess grandmaster trying to perform.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_08: It's it's a different arena, it's a different skill.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_08: But what they what athletes are able to do uh is is a form of athletic intelligence.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_08: And the the the greatest ones, the LeBron James, the Tom Brady's, yeah, they're geniuses.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_08: I mean, they really are.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_08: And just because they can't explain why, um that's unfair to uh to consider them dumb.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_08: Uh, I think that we have to reinterpret what dumb actually means.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_09: Dr.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_09: Stephanie Alessi LaRosa runs one of the few sports neurology programs in the country.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_09: I asked her to name the secret sauce, the structure in the brain, the gene, the anything.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_09: She wouldn't because the science won't.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_09: What she did tell me is where the remaining separation lives.
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_04: Honestly, I think the biggest um the best next area in terms of like being being that full package does come from the sports psychology.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_04: Because that mental toughness, that ability to be resilient in a situation where it's not gonna take them down or they have that ability, you know, they have that ability to push through and set up.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_04: I think that that is, you know, really the next the next place that that takes athletes to that next level.
• 7:35
  SPEAKER_04: I I think that that's really a huge part of it.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_04: Because everyone can train.
• 7:40
  SPEAKER_04: Everyone can train, everyone can have the best, you know, you get some people, right?
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_04: If you get the best coach, you get all these other things that are top, top, top, top, top.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_04: You know, you know, you come from a great program, you've got all the resources, whatever.
• 7:50
  SPEAKER_04: So, but the difference I think comes from a lot of that sports psychology.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_04: Um, and you know, and certainly there's, you know, genetics and maybe some other things.
• 8:00
  SPEAKER_04: And again, the childhood uh adverse events, stuff like that, I think are all part of it, part of the story.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_04: But um, yeah, I think the sports psychology part doesn't really get enough uh enough mention because it I think that's huge.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_04: If they can visualize where they want to be and they can, you know, have that mental toughness and sort of that resiliency about what what they're doing and how to push through and you know when it's appropriate, all of those things.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_04: When they have that, I think that's what really gets them there.
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_09: So everyone can train, everyone can buy the same weight room.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_09: The hardware and even the reps are increasingly the bare minimum required, which pushes the question up one more level from what these athletes have to work with to what they end up doing every single day.
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_09: Quincy Watts spent his first three years at USC injured and underachieving.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_09: He was a 10-3 100 meter sprinter out of Taft High School in the LA area, but his hamstrings kept betraying him every spring at USC.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_09: Then, before his senior year, he sat down and he held a meeting with himself.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_09: And what came out of that meeting is the single clearest answer that I got all offseason.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_01: I had to sit down with myself and I said, okay, well, wait a minute.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_01: If I can do this, if I can get second with no fall base, what can I do if I put my mind to it?
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: Right, so at that point I had uh very spiritual.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: I had a talk with God and and and uh I made some really um check some boxes with God that uh I take advantage of my my the talent that He had given me and in doing that I came with some boxes that I needed to change.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_01: And for me, the number one thing was um I decided to get to be I decided to give everything I had to be all in and to operate with excellence and not be comfortable anymore.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: I was an athlete that was very comfortable being able to score high and compete at the highest level with not giving everything I had.
• 10:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I reversed that.
• 10:08
  SPEAKER_01: I I I I operate with excellence every day my uh my senior year.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_09: Twelve months later, he was Olympic champion.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_09: Thirty years later, as a national championship coach, he's watched the same fork in the road decide hundreds of careers.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_09: Talent shows up on both paths, only one path keeps it.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: And checking all the boxes, right?
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_01: And choosing excellence every day, choosing excellence every day, right?
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_01: Every day over being comfortable and choosing excellence every day on well, I can do that tomorrow.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_01: Choosing excellence over there, well, I no no no no no.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: There is no tomorrow.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_01: Excellence, right?
• 10:46
  SPEAKER_01: Winning doesn't care.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_01: Winnie winning doesn't care if you're sick, winning doesn't care if you don't feel like doing it, right?
• 10:53
  SPEAKER_01: But excellence every day and building a great foundation, I've known is is the separation, and it's the separator between the great ones and the ones who missed the boat.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_09: Joey Cheek says the same thing from a colder angle, and his version stings because it indicts almost everyone.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_07: I actually think almost everyone knows what they do well and don't do well already.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_07: If you've done any sport for any length of time, you actually know what you aren't doing well.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_07: And so the trick is finding what are the things that fix the things you don't do well and then drilling those.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_07: And most people don't have the discipline to do it.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_07: Like I it's wild.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_07: People know you're like, hey, why didn't you skate well in that race?
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_07: Why didn't you do whatever?
• 11:30
  SPEAKER_07: They they usually will know I did this or I whatever did that.
• 11:34
  SPEAKER_07: And you go, well, why'd you do that?
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_07: And they're like, I don't know.
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_07: And so finding that cue to fix that, and then religiously drilling it.
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_07: Like that was all I thought about.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_07: I had a note card with three things that I looked at every day.
• 11:46
  SPEAKER_07: That's all I worked on for four years straight.
• 11:48
  SPEAKER_09: A note card, three cues, four years.
• 11:51
  SPEAKER_09: Most athletes know their weaknesses.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_09: Almost none had the discipline to drill the fix until it's automatic.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_09: Christy Yamaguchi, who was rising at four in the morning by sixth grade, heard it from her coach as a plain statement of fact.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_05: It's always preparation, right?
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_05: It's always being ready for the moment and um mentally, physically, like when we talked earlier.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_05: And um Yeah, I I think it's putting the time in.
• 12:17
  SPEAKER_05: I mean, my coach, Christine S always told us, her students, there's no secret to success.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_05: At least in sport.
• 12:25
  SPEAKER_05: Like it's plain and simple hard work.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_05: Like it's it will you will see results if you put the work in.
• 12:32
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, I always took that to heart.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_05: And I always felt like, okay, I am gonna put as much work in as I can, work as hard as I can, and be satisfied with that when I get to competition.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_05: And, you know, I can see what my competitors, how they trained, I can see what their tendencies were in practice, and sometimes that gave me more confidence because I'm like, Yeah, they're not gonna make it.
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_05: Yeah, right.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_05: And I'm like, uh I'm not sure they're as ready as they think they are.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_09: Notice what she slipped in there.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_09: She scouted her rivals' practice habits, not their jumps, their habits.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_09: And it told her who was actually ready.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_09: The work isn't just preparation, it's intelligence.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_09: Yes, but the offseason started with the moment, so it has to answer for the moment.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_09: All the hardware and all the discipline still has to survive 30 seconds when the whole world is watching.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_09: Joey Cheek 30 seconds before his gold medal race.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_07: And I just thought for that moment, especially in the 30 seconds when the starter's about to give the gun, it feels like the entire world just stops.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_07: And that was the purest moment.
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_07: And it's honestly that is a dragon that I'm still chasing to this day and probably will my entire life.
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_07: Like the combination of being the best you've ever been at something, being the best at your thing in the world on the day that the whole world is watching, uh, it's incredible.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_09: So it's it's a heck of a rush.
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_09: Quincy Watts, same stage, opposite nervous system.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_09: In the staging area before the 400-meter final in Barcelona, the biggest race of his life, he did something I still can't quite believe.
• 14:23
  SPEAKER_01: I remember just meditating, and I was on my back, I was on my backpack, and I was meditating, going through my breathing, meditating my routine.
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_01: I already knew I already knew I knew what I needed to do.
• 14:33
  SPEAKER_01: I already knew it was over.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: I I was the Olympic champion.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_01: I just kept meditating.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: And then you know, you have some thoughts that come in.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then through meditation, what kind of thoughts?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: You honor those thoughts.
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: You you have thoughts that come in like, wow, it's like uh the stadium is packed, and are you really?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, okay, yes, the stadium is packed.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_09: TV, camera in your face.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_01: I breathe it in, I breathe that out, right?
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_01: Where in your in your your quarterfinal, you didn't feel you didn't have the best race in your quarterfinal.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, right?
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't have my best race in my quarterfinal, but then I say I come with the positive thoughts.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: But in my semifinals, I made that correction and I set an Olympic record.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, so so you breathe in, you honor those, you honor the positive thoughts, and you also honor the negative thoughts.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: And and in doing that, but you just you, you know, you you you blow those negative thoughts out, right?
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: And you keep having self-affirmation about all the positive things and why you're here and what and then I look at I always look at positive corrections.
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_01: I never look at uh uh negative things.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_01: Uh and and although they're gonna come in, although they're gonna be different energies that try to pull you off of your game and try to pull you away from your goal and try to pull you away for the present moment of being present because the opportunity is now.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Um I always go to positive corrections, okay, and I always look at what I can do uh in this particular race in this particular moment.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: What's the correction here?
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_01: And as I'm meditating, I fell asleep.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: I fell asleep.
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_01: Uh I remember one official she called, okay, men's 400.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And I woke up and uh, you know, I woke up and I had a very uh great sense of calm.
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_09: He fell asleep before an Olympic final.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_09: That's not an absence of pressure, that's a mind so thoroughly rehearsed that there was nothing left to fear.
• 16:20
  SPEAKER_09: Kurt Signetti watched the same machinery inside Fernando Mendoza all season.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_09: Iowa, Oregon, that Penn State drive.
• 16:28
  SPEAKER_09: And when I asked him what it actually is, he stripped the mystery right out of it.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_06: Well, ability to play your best when the pressure's on.
• 16:36
  SPEAKER_06: Um when you're fully prepared, you have that ability.
• 16:38
  SPEAKER_06: And when you buy into the process of playing one play at a time, six seconds of play, playing every play like it's nothing, nothing, you're not affected by the circumstances of the game.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_06: Except that, you know, he's stepping up because he knows this is my time, it's crunch time, they need me, and he's got confidence he can make the plays.
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_06: And he could make them with his arm or his legs, uh, which was a huge plus.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_06: So I just think that uh, you know, there's some guys that play that position when the chips are down, uh, they play their best football, and that's what separates probably the great quarterbacks of all time from the guys that just had great statistics.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_09: Preparation converts pressure into permission.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_09: And Lincoln Riley, the only active coach with three Heisman winners, adds the ingredient underneath the preparation because the quarterback position, he says, is the loneliest job in sports.
• 17:30
  SPEAKER_11: You gotta have an elite confidence and self-belief.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_11: Um, you have to have that.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_11: And if you don't, you're gonna get challenged at some point.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_11: You know, something's not gonna go your way.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_11: It's so competitive at this level.
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_11: And all three of those guys have instances where, you know, they could have backed away from it or let their confidence wane.
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_11: And playing, I know we're obviously talking about quarterbacks here, and that's I know it's been the majority of the winners.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_11: I mean, playing that position is a lonely position.
• 17:58
  SPEAKER_11: I mean, it is lonely.
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_11: Everybody watching a game, whether they're rooting for you, rooting against you, or just watching the game, everybody watches what the quarterback does.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_11: Even people that don't even have a clue about football.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_11: They watch the quarterback, they watch the quarterback.
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_11: They're gonna see their successes, but their failures are gonna be on display for everybody as well.
• 18:15
  SPEAKER_11: And so you really have to believe in yourself and you really have to have a true confidence about you.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_11: And I think that's that's something I think that is a little hard to teach.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_09: Hard to teach.
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_09: But, and this became the hinge of the whole offseason, maybe not impossible to learn.
• 18:30
  SPEAKER_09: Christi Yamaguchi watched the favorite, Ilya Malin and finished eighth in Milan, while Alicia Liu skated with joy and won.
• 18:38
  SPEAKER_09: Her verdict on what sport actually crowns.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_05: I think that is the thrill and the heartbreak of sport, right?
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_05: It's competition.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_05: And the winner isn't necessarily always the best person or the best team.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_05: It's the ones who can compete under the pressure and to do the best in that moment.
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_09: So the winner is not always the best.
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_09: The winner is the best in the moment.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_09: And sometimes, and Joey Cheek made me sit with this, not even that.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_07: And as I've gotten older, I've seen people who were too good that just one dumb bad thing happened, and you go, that was not their that was bad luck.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_07: And we don't like that as people because we like to think we have enough control, and if you just will it and want it and try hard enough, you can overcome bad luck, but sometimes it's just bad luck.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_09: That's the asterisk on everything in this episode.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_09: And honesty demands we leave it in.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_09: You can stack every advantage and still lose to a bad bounce.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_09: The great ones aren't the ones luck never touches, they're the ones built to survive it.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_09: But somewhere in these interviews, I realized the model itself is changing.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_09: And Max Brown is the perfect witness because he lived the old model to its breaking point.
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_09: Number one quarterback in America out of high school, mamba mentality all the way down.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_09: And by his own account, it cost him.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_02: And when I reflect on my athletic career, which did not end successfully, I was the number one quarterback in the country coming out of high school, but did not have a successful college career, relatively speaking.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_02: I when I reflect, I'm I'm like, man, I wish I was able to turn off more.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_02: I wish I wasn't so intense all the time.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_02: I wish, you know, I didn't feel the need to stay an extra hour after every practice to make sure I was getting extra work in.
• 20:53
  SPEAKER_02: And then, oh, by the way, as I get older and you know, I'm removing myself from my sport, you know, again, 31 years old.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_02: There's like nine, I have like nine former teammates still in the NFL.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_02: Are those nine guys the hardest workers when I was at USC in Pitt?
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_02: Not necessarily.
• 21:08
  SPEAKER_02: They weren't slappies by any means, but the common theme with a lot of those guys or all those guys, different personalities, they all had fun.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_02: They all showed up to practice and played football.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_02: They didn't work football.
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_02: And uh you, you know, you mentioned Scotty Scheffler, and then the observation happened when Scotty and Nikola Jokic really um went to the peak of the sports world and call it 2021 or so.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_02: I was like, that is the polar opposite of the Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant.
• 21:36
  SPEAKER_02: And yet they're the best players in their sport.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_02: And not to make this super long winded, but I think it's especially relevant in the digital age that we're in, where every single time you open up your phone, you know, I'm getting fed sports content.
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_02: So when you're living it as an athlete, there really is no off switch.
• 21:53
  SPEAKER_02: You're constantly having to consume your sport.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_02: And so the take here is I think it's a it's a superpower.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's a benefit, it's a skill for athletes to be able to turn off and remove themselves from their sport.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_02: Um, rather than again, being all football all the time 24-7.
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's that can be a recipe to like I'm not saying don't work hard, but I can I it can be a recipe for um literally not playing your sport as well because you lose the fun and the the the joy aspect of it.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_09: The guys who made it played football.
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_09: He worked football.
• 22:29
  SPEAKER_09: At least Devlin has heard that lesson from the other direction.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_09: She interviews the world's best performers about their metal habits for the athletics peak vertical, from Michael Phelps to Formula One drivers.
• 22:40
  SPEAKER_09: I asked her after hundreds of these conversations, what surprised her the most?
• 22:44
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, I think what surprised me the most is that you can develop some of this stuff.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_03: Like I said earlier, like I I just feel like I went my whole life as an athlete thinking, like, oh darn, like I I'm not a confident person, and that's just like a thing that stinks, and I'm just gonna have to work around that.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: And I think it was probably the most surprising to realize that like I can develop all this stuff.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I think the most surprising habit I think it was surprising to see how many habits are the same for these athletes.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_03: Like, I think the whole conversation I have done a lot of interviews and I have talked to a lot of athletes, and a lot of the same stuff comes up.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_03: So it is surprising to see that like when you really dive into it, a lot of them are doing the same thing.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_09: So confidence is a skill, the mental edge, the thing we've mythologized as wiring, as bloodline, as destiny turns out to be substantially trainable.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_09: Routines, resets, self-talk, visualization, the same tools over and over, from golfers to boxers to Olympic legends.
• 23:39
  SPEAKER_09: And if you want proof that the next generation already knows it, meet Davis Wilson, 17 years old, the top pitcher in California for 2027, committed to Vanderbilt.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_09: He played every sport his town offered, chose baseball after a family summit, and on the mound, he already carries a reset routine that half the pros that at least covers would recognize.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_10: And those were some of the things that I took into this season was the the mental resets when I'm on the mound.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_10: For me, it's take my hat off, swipe the rubber of the mound, and look at the flagpole and take a big deep breath in.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_10: It's things like that that I was kind of picked up on on my visits.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_10: And I would say that those were the the biggest factors that have played into my success this year.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_09: Hat off, swipe the rubber, find the flagpole, breathe.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_09: A 17-year-old with a note card of his own, just like Joey Cheeks, four-year discipline, but arriving a decade earlier in the pipeline.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_09: That's the sea change.
• 24:38
  SPEAKER_09: And it's why Monty Burke's biography of Pete Carroll reads less like history and more like prophecy.
• 24:44
  SPEAKER_09: Because 20 years ago, one coach built a dynasty on the idea everyone else is only now accepting.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_12: I would bet that it was somewhere between a dozen and two dozen players told me without me really asking that what he did, and coaches did this too, that what Pete did at that during those use USC years was to make the game fun again.
• 25:01
  SPEAKER_12: Like they had been through, you know, it was fun when they first started playing shirts and skins in their backyard.
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_12: Very fun.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_12: It was fun when they played in middle school, starting to get a little less fun in high school and a lot less fun towards the end of their high school career, you know, because these coaches were yelling at them and berating them, and you got to do this, you got to do this.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_12: And all of a sudden they come to USC, and here's a guy who's doing, you know, pulling pranks, who's goofing off, who's trying to jump over the pile at on fourth down, and like no one catches him, and he, you know, he tries to do like an Eddie Veteran and have the crowd catch him and no one catches him and he lands one on his back, you know.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_12: And there's one guy, Marcel Allman, was like, you know, he was so goofy.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_12: But but when your coach is doing that and having fun, you can't help but have fun.
• 25:37
  SPEAKER_09: Fun with a purpose.
• 25:39
  SPEAKER_09: Psychology wearing a smile.
• 25:41
  SPEAKER_09: Sneaky Pete was 30 years early.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_09: Okay, so what separates all these athletes?
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_09: There's not one thing, it's a stack.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_09: At the bottom, there's the hardware, the fibers, the frame, the arm, the fast twitch, all that stuff.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_09: You don't choose it, and without it, the conversation never starts.
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_09: Above that, there's the software, the brain that reads the field faster than yours or mine, built through thousands of reps in the right environment.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_09: Not magic, but mileage.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_09: Above that, there's the choice, excellence over comfort, every day, when winning doesn't care how you feel.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_09: Most athletes know exactly what they need to fix.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_09: The great ones are the tiny few who drill it until the gun going off changes nothing.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_09: Above that, there's the trained mind, the meditation, the reset, the self-belief, sturdy enough to carry the loneliest position in sports through its worst Saturday.
• 26:41
  SPEAKER_09: And overall of it, two things nobody controls, and one thing that everybody can.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_09: There's luck, which is real and humbling, and the reason we should hold our judgments of eighth place a little more gently.
• 26:53
  SPEAKER_09: And then there's joy, which turns out not to be a reward for greatness, but a fundamental part of it.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_09: And then there's the learnable part, which is the finding I didn't expect.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_09: The mental edge is not a birthright.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_09: Confidence is a skill.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_09: Calm is a practice.
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_09: There's a 17-year-old in Fresno who already knows the routine.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_09: Talent is issued, but separation is built.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_09: Fernando Mendoza's idol growing up was Tom Brady, and his coach told me something I keep turning over in my mind.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_09: Maybe he's a unicorn.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_09: Or maybe he's a unicorn that leads others down his path.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_09: After this offseason, I'd bet on the path.
• 27:34
  SPEAKER_09: I'm Chris Houston, and this has been the Heisman Trophy Podcast.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_09: Thanks for spending the off season with us.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_09: The season, mercifully, is almost here.