Here are some more words of wisdom from Vince Lombardi in "Run to Daylight:"
"In football, as in anything else, if you alter your personality just to accomplish something, you're not being true. You're being dishonest. But I've seen coaches who, seeing that someone had success with something, immediately tried to take it for themselves. It didn't work because it didn't fit them. It didn't express their personalities."
"They call it coaching, but it is teaching. You do not just tell them it's so, but you show them the reasons why it's so and you repeat and repeat until they are convinced, until they know."
"(The sweep) is our number one play, our lead play, that 49-Sweep, with the left halfback carrying to the right, or that 28-Sweep, with the fullback carrying to the left. It is our bread-and-butter, top-priority play, the one we have to make go and the one our opponents know they must stop."
"I am not for long practice sessions but I am for an hour or an hour and a half that is meticulously organized and intense, and this, too, is something that I got from Earl Blaik and brought away from West Point."
"We've already had six fumbles in just three games, where last year we had none at this time, but there's nothing you can do about fumbles except scream, and while statistics are interesting, they're all in the past."
"Once a game is won and in the bank, I would rather not look at the movies. No matter how good we look on the field, I can find so many things wrong in the pictures."
"For a Sunday game, mental sharpness has to start coming on Wednesday or, at the latest, by Thursday."
"… I wonder sometimes if perhaps I transmit to my team the anxiety I feel going into a game. Up to this season, no team I have ever been associated with has ever beaten the Colts in Baltimore. Twice the Giants lost to them there and three times they've beaten us there. Does my team absorb a sense of insecurity from me?"
"It is 10 minutes to game time, and these three minutes that will follow, with just the squad members alone in the dressing room, is something I started when I first came here in 1959. I was reaching for anything then, any method or device that would give them a feeling of oneness, of dependence upon one another and of strength to be derived from their unity, so I told the captains before each game this period would belong solely to the players."
