by Tony Dungy
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I held a press conference the following day in Tampa. People might have expected me to be angry with the Glazers. I disagreed with their decision, but I truly believed that since they owned the Buccaneers, it was their decision to make. Plus, if I trust God that all things work together for good, then I have to believe it—even when it doesn’t feel good to me.
Tom Lamphere and I had spoken the evening I was fired. He reminded me of two important points. First, if I had any bitterness in my heart, it would only hurt me. While bitterness is a natural emotion, I knew I needed to pray and let God remove it so I could press on. Second, I needed to remember that this was all ultimately designed for good.
Tom reminded me of Romans 8:28 and the Old Testament story of Joseph, which both have the same message: God is in control of our future, and He’s working for our good—whether we can see it now or not. I knew what Tom was saying was true, and I remembered the story of Joseph clearly from my mom’s Sunday school lessons. Still, it was great to have someone remind me at the very moment that I needed to put my faith into practice. After talking with Tom, I was able to go out and sincerely thank the Glazers publicly for giving me the opportunity to coach their team. That attitude didn’t come from me but from the Lord, and I think it had an impact on a lot of people.
Over the next couple of days, Lauren and I spent some time with our feet up and a lot of time on our knees. I didn’t know why we were leaving the Bucs, but I knew God was closing this door for a reason. First, we needed to determine if we even wanted to remain in coaching. I wasn’t convinced that we should. I believed we had done things God’s way, or tried to, and He was moving us in another direction. My time with the Buccaneers had given me a tremendous following in the community and an ability to rally interest and enthusiasm around things that were important to me.
One of those things was the All Pro Dad organization, which I had founded with Mark Merrill and Clyde Christensen. Our original goal was to try to reach dads everywhere, whether in the city or the suburbs, married or single. Our message was simple: dads—including us—need to spend more time with their kids. In four short years, All Pro Dad had grown into a national organization that sponsored clinics—called All Pro Dad Father & Kid Experiences—in NFL cities across the country and sent daily tips via e-mail to fathers around the nation.
As Mark studied family life in the United States, he had learned that two-thirds of African American teens have absent fathers. And I had learned from visiting prisons that the most common factor among male inmates was growing up without a dad in the home. When we put those two facts together, we knew we needed to focus our attention on fathers.
Somehow, through God’s grace, it has grown in all those directions. When we started the organization, we weren’t sure exactly how to go about it—we just prayed a lot. Today, 69 percent of all the All Pro Dad breakfasts we sponsor are in Title I schools, many of which are located in inner-city locales. It has been wonderful to see those children with absent fathers bringing mentors, uncles, grandfathers, or even their absentee dads with them to the monthly breakfasts.
All Pro Dad chapters have grown from an idea in Tampa to a reality in schools everywhere around the country, from Los Angeles to the Bronx. They continue to grow today, and Truett Cathy, founder of Chick-fil-A, has even requested that every Chick-fil-A franchise in the country host an All Pro Dad monthly fathers’ breakfast.
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I had been visiting prisons with Abe Brown since 1997. Abe, a longtime coach at Blake High School in Tampa, had founded a prison ministry in 1976 after visiting one of his former players behind bars. I loved walking around Tampa with Abe. The man knows everyone in town and has probably coached half of them. He’s the only person I could walk with in Tampa and have more people know him than me. Even when I was coaching the Bucs, I knew if we were together and someone yelled, “Hey, Coach!” they were usually talking to Abe.
Abe is an unassuming, low-key guy, and yet he has made a tremendous impact on the lives of many people in Tampa, including me. He started by visiting his former player, and when he learned the man had few—if any—other visitors, Abe kept going back, in part because he felt he had failed him as a coach. As Abe kept returning, he met other guys, talked with them, and tried to help them. Over time, these visits naturally developed into a prison ministry.
In 1997, I was looking for ways to use my platform in Tampa, and Abe invited me to visit a prison with him. I was intrigued by that because I had grown up in a prison town. I knew people who worked at the prison in Jackson, and today my sister works there. Although I really wanted to join Abe at the prison, I was a little afraid of going in.
When the day arrived for our visit to Polk Correctional Institution, I was very nervous. I still carried images from my childhood of the hardened men I had always imagined who lived within the walls of the prison in Jackson. Even though I was forty-two years old, no longer a child, I still pictured prisoners as old, belligerent, and calloused. I was coming with a message that there’s always hope, based on the gospel of Jesus Christ, but I had no idea how that message—or I—would be received.
When Abe introduced me to some of the prisoners, I was shocked. Many of these “old men” looked like my sons Jamie and Eric—perhaps sixteen, seventeen, eighteen years old. And many of those who were in their thirties had actually come in as teenagers. This wasn’t at all what I had expected.
Most of the men were into football, and I found I had a common bond with them—they read the sports page and the Bible. They loved talking about the Buccaneers, but they also wanted to talk about their dreams and what they might still accomplish when they were released. They were clinging to hope and seeking encouragement. A lot of those guys still stay in touch with me today, and for years I’ve been the beneficiary of all types of talent coming out of those prisons. I’ve received sketches, paintings, poetry—any means by which the inmates could express themselves. Many of them are very talented, and Abe is always looking for ways to create the right niche for them when they get out.
As coach of the Bucs, I had only been able to make summer trips to the prisons. But now that I was suddenly out of a job, I wondered whether God might be calling me to assist Abe in his ministry. After all, the inmate population had grown significantly since 1976, when Abe made his first visit. When he first started, he could visit every prison in the state in about three days; now that was impossible.
Abe had started out as a coach, but he had expanded his reach to working with these kids for the rest of their lives, and I found that fascinating. For Abe, the most important thing was not the football skills he taught. He derived his greatest joy from watching the young men he ministered to mature and lead productive lives. I just didn’t have time during the season or through the draft to help Abe. But now . . . maybe this was what God was opening up in front of me.
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Lauren and I were still seeking direction by the middle of that week. On one of those days, Lauren came home from running an errand, saw the light blinking on the answering machine, listened to the message, and saved it. When I walked in later, she directed me to listen to the message. It was from Jim Irsay, the owner of the Indianapolis Colts. He had just fired Jim Mora, and the message seemed to be expressing his interest in having me coach the Colts. It was difficult to know for sure, though, because this was not just a voice memo—it was a mission statement.
Mr. Irsay started by saying that he did want me to be head coach and then outlined where the Colts were at that time.
“Having only moved to Indianapolis in 1984, we don’t have the long-established fan bases of Pittsburgh, Chicago, Cleveland, or other cities,” he said. “But we’re still trying to develop that base. I want an organization—and team—that emphasizes character, values, and family, and I want it to extend out into the community in a meaningful way.”
He went on to say that when he was a kid, he had been a ball boy for his dad and had watched the Steelers during the years I w
as playing. He said he aspired to be like the Rooneys and create that type of organization.
“You’re the only person I want for this job,” he said.
He concluded his fifteen-minute mission statement by saying, “Don’t worry about your salary, and don’t let your agent mess this up. I’ll pay you whatever you want. We just need to talk man to man.” Lauren looked at me, trying to read my face. Maybe God wasn’t closing the football door after all.
Jim Irsay and I spoke by phone later that day for an hour, and none of it was about football. We talked about the Colts family, about values, about community. He said he wanted to win, but he wanted to win the right way. And if we ever did win the Super Bowl, he wanted Indiana to feel a personal connection, for it to be their team and their trophy.
I’m not sure I would have been interested in coaching at all if Jim hadn’t left me that message with his ideas about my role as the new head coach of the Colts. It was exactly in line with the way I wanted to coach. In the next few days, the Carolina Panthers also contacted me. As I opened myself to that possibility, Carolina seemed like it could be a good fit as well.
While we weighed the options, Lauren and I spoke to people we respected about ministry, coaching, the Colts, and the Panthers. As usual, there was no clear voice from God—not even a muffled murmur. The people we talked to kept coming back to the same thing: follow your passion. “God has created you a certain way with certain interests and passions. Follow them.”
Both Indiana and North Carolina were good options. My warm-weather wife was probably pulling for Charlotte, but in the end, we both felt the Indianapolis Colts were a better fit for us. Jim Irsay’s phone message had touched both of us. We decided that God was continuing the football dream for the Dungys—and not just the game but also the ongoing platform and ministry opportunities. Hoping that we were still faithfully following God’s leading, we joined the Colts.
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Coming to the Colts in 2002 was significantly different from arriving in Tampa in 1996. For one thing, Jim Irsay flew Lauren and me to Indianapolis on his private jet, and then we were taken on a helicopter from the airport to the Colts facility. Even from the air, I could tell that this was no One Buc. For starters, the entire weight room was housed inside. There would be no lifting sessions on a patio.
Mr. Irsay introduced me to the press as the new head coach of the Indianapolis Colts. From the outset, he announced that we were looking to accomplish something special, on and off the field. The Glazers had always been terrific about supporting things in which I was involved, but in this case, it was as if I were supporting Jim.
I worked to instill the same basic principles we had used in Tampa: excellence in the giveaway/takeaway ratio, not committing penalties, excellence in special teams, and making—but not surrendering—big plays. Again, those aren’t novel ideas, but they are critical building blocks for playing up to our potential.
From a football standpoint, the most notable difference from Tampa was having the offensive pieces in place already. The Colts were only a year removed from going to the playoffs and had been successful before that, so we didn’t need to completely rebuild the organization as we had in Tampa. Indianapolis had plenty of veterans on offense, along with coaches I knew and respected. Tom Moore, my coach from the University of Minnesota, was the offensive coordinator. He had quarterback Peyton Manning running the same no-huddle offense he had run with me in the 1970s.
I also knew running backs coach Gene Huey and offensive line coach Howard Mudd, and I liked what they were doing on offense. I knew I wanted to change the Colts’ defensive system, however, and sell my overall vision for the team and how I hoped to accomplish success.
Sometimes a new coach’s biggest challenge is to sell a new vision, to overcome a losing mind-set. That’s what we had faced in Tampa. My challenge in Indy was partially the same. The Colts felt that their offense was good enough to win but that their defense was not. We would have to rework the defense, but I also saw ways in which the offense could do better as well. More than anything, my challenge with the Colts was to sell them on the idea that teams win championships. We needed to come together as a complete team—offense, defense, and special teams.
My key sale in seeking to bring about this paradigm shift was Peyton Manning, the focused, talented quarterback out of the University of Tennessee. I had met Peyton once before, in 1997. He and I were in Philadelphia for the Maxwell Football Club awards—he was the Collegiate Player of the Year, and I was the Professional Coach of the Year. We had shared a limo to the banquet. When I arrived in Indianapolis to coach the Colts, after the introductory press conference with Jim Irsay, Peyton came back to the facility to talk with me. I was certain that he had forgotten all about our previous meeting, but as we walked into my office together, he commented that we had met before but that I probably didn’t remember.
“I actually do,” I said.
“Me too. We shared a limo ride together. I sat in the back with you and your wife, Lauren, and you said you wished that someday you could coach me but that you figured I’d be the first or second pick, so that wouldn’t happen.” He then went on to recount the remainder of the evening, including details I had forgotten. I was amazed, and I had learned something important about Peyton—he remembers everything.
He went on. “Coach, I’m glad you’re here. I want to be coached. I want to win. I want you to treat me like any other player and teach me what I need to do because I want us to win.”
At the same time, he was concerned because he perceived that I might want to be conservative and not score points. He’d seen many Buccaneers games in which my teams scored very few points.
“I like points,” I told him. “I mainly like having more points than the other team when the game ends. What I want to teach our offense is how to avoid turning over the ball and putting our defense in a bad position. What I want to teach our defense is how to stop the other team so they get the ball back for you.
“If we’re going to win,” I continued, “you’re going to have to trust me. You’re going to have to trust that as we add defensive talent, it’s part of a strategy to build a complete team so we can win. We’re going to be one team, with all three units supporting and strengthening each other.”
Peyton nodded, but I’m not certain he really believed it. He had played four years, and most of the time, the offense had needed to score a lot of points for the Colts to win.
I kept talking about my philosophy of building a total team. “We’ve got enough talent that if we have eighty snaps on offense”—an average game will have seventy snaps for each team—“we should score forty points. If we don’t take plays away from ourselves with turnovers, not many defenses will be able to stop us. We can still play aggressively on offense; we just have to be smart. If our offense is executing well, we shouldn’t have to take chances that lead to turnovers. We’ll learn to score without turning the ball over, and we’ll learn to close out games on offense without giving the ball back to the other team.
“I’m not saying, ‘When the defense gets better, we’ll win.’ We’ll win when we start to work together as a team and not as separate units. We have to complement each other. Your job is to get us ahead and then let the defense do its work.”
I promoted this philosophy to the Colts for about a year and a half before I felt that everyone, including Peyton, really believed in it. That first year was a struggle in some ways. We went 10–6, a decent record, even though not everyone fully bought into what we were selling. But I was confident we would get there in time.
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Peyton Manning is critical to our offense because Tom Moore’s system emphasizes quarterback play. And not just quarterback play but quarterback smarts, too. We run a one-back, “check with me” system. It seems new, but it really isn’t. Much like the “new” Tampa 2 defense, the concepts have been around for a while; we’re just using them effectively in a slightly different way.
Most teams run their offense by calling a play in the huddle and then running it. To camouflage their intentions, they shift players and put men in motion, trying to create mismatches with the defense. The pressure is on the offensive coordinator to anticipate the defense and send in the right play to the huddle. The quarterback’s job is to execute what the coordinator has sent in. If the quarterback sees a defensive formation that won’t allow the called play to succeed, he can “audible”— call another play at the line of scrimmage.
Our offensive strategy is quite different. It dates back to 1973, when I was in college playing for Tom Moore. As offensive coordinator, Tom gives Peyton a “concept,” telling him whether we would rather run or pass. He also sends in four or five possible plays for Peyton to choose from. Sometimes, to help Peyton sort out what’s going on, Tom will specify in what order to think through those four or five plays. But beyond that, the pressure is on the quarterback after he gets to the line of scrimmage. Our offense lines up quickly to give the quarterback enough time to look at the defensive coverage, identify any weak spots, and select the right play. We don’t go in motion; we don’t change personnel groupings; we don’t shift—we just line up. The defense will try to disguise what they’re doing as long as possible, but eventually they have to get into a position to actually play. Once they do, Peyton dials up whichever play he feels gives us the greatest chance of success.
This system is easy to use at home because when we have the ball, our fans stay quiet enough for our offense to hear the quarterback. On the road, with the crowd making a lot of noise, it’s not so easy, which is why we came up with hand signals. Fans often think Peyton is just being theatrical, but he’s really communicating to the backs and receivers. It’s a system that has worked well for the Colts, especially once we were able to get our ultracompetitive quarterback on board with the concept of not taking unnecessary chances.