Week One of the college football season is in the books, and Virginia and Delaware are off to solid starts. As Delaware and Virginia prepare to meet on September 26, I find myself thinking less about their offenses, defenses, and the possible final score than about the two Hall of Fame coaches whose legacies of team culture continue to shape both programs.
In part two, I suggested that Coach Tubby Raymond and Coach George Welsh shared one defining characteristic. Both knew exactly what they wanted their football programs to become and persistently built systems designed to produce those outcomes.
Over time, however, I came to appreciate that aligned systems were never the final objective. The ultimate objective was culture. More specifically, organizational maturity.
By the time I played for and later coached for Coach Raymond, Delaware football had reached a level of organizational maturity that no leader could simply demand. It had been built intentionally over nearly two decades through thousands of decisions, all pointing in the same direction. The systems mattered, but what they ultimately produced was something far more valuable than efficiency or consistency.
They produced ownership.
Coach Raymond reminded us of that every spring. “Football is a 365-day avocation. Joining the team is more than picking up your uniform.”
As a young player, I interpreted those words as a challenge to work harder every day. By graduation, I realized he was talking about something much deeper. Joining Delaware football meant accepting responsibility for preserving a culture generations of players had built before us. Every practice, workout, classroom decision, and offseason choice either strengthened that culture or weakened it. Wearing the Delaware uniform carried an obligation that extended well beyond Saturdays in the fall.
That philosophy influenced every aspect of the program, including one many people probably never considered.
Neither Delaware nor Virginia housed football players in athletic dormitories. Most of us had another football player as a roommate, but we lived alongside the rest of the student body in residence halls and apartments. We weren’t isolated from campus life, and we weren’t protected from it.
Looking back, I don’t believe that was an accident.
Both Coach Raymond and Coach Welsh understood that responsibility grows through experience rather than insulation. Players learned to make decisions as members of a university community while remaining accountable to the standards of the football program. Whether in the classroom, dining hall, residence hall, community, or on the football field, we represented something larger than ourselves.
Years later, after Coach Raymond earned his 300th victory, he was asked what all those years of Delaware football meant to him. His answer had nothing to do with the Wing-T, national championships, or the hundreds of games he had won.
“It wasn’t the wins. It wasn’t the championships. It was the togetherness.”
I included that statement in Part 1 because it captured what Coach Raymond valued most. What I didn’t explain was where that togetherness came from.
It came, in large part, from doing hard things together.
Players Do Hard Things
Football gives you plenty of opportunities. Calling it a contact sport doesn’t adequately describe what happens on the field. Football is a collision sport. Everyone who plays long enough gets hurt, and some players get injured. One of the first important lessons a football player learns is the difference between the two. An injury can prevent you from playing. Pain usually doesn’t.
Playing hurt is hard. You wake up sore, go to class sore, walk into the training room sore, and then put your pads back on that afternoon knowing you are going to hit and get hit again. The next morning, you get up and do it again.
Over time, something happens when you repeatedly do those things alongside the same people. You practice, condition, and lift together. You get yelled at, knocked down, and recover together. You see one another tired, hurting, disappointed, frustrated, and under pressure. You learn who keeps doing his job when he is hurt, who responds when circumstances become difficult, and who places his responsibility to the team ahead of his own goals. Eventually, you know whom you can trust.
That trust has very little to do with status. Talent will get you recruited. Talent will put you on the field. Exceptional talent might even put you in the NFL. But none of those things necessarily make you a teammate. It didn’t matter whether you were an All-American or a scout-team player. If you consistently did what you were supposed to do, particularly when doing it was hard, and earned the trust of your teammates, you joined the team.
Not everyone did.
At Delaware, there was even a name for players who suddenly disappeared from the program: the “I-95 Fly.” The University of Delaware campus sits alongside I-95, and occasionally a player would decide he had had enough, pack his belongings, and head home. Virginia lost players as well.
It would be easy to say those players weren’t tough enough, but I don’t think that accurately explains what happened. Many were physically tough and exceptionally talented. The more important distinction was that they were unwilling to adhere consistently to the systems Coach Raymond or Coach Welsh required. They might have been on the roster, but they hadn’t joined the team.
The relationships among those who did lasted much longer than four or five years of college football. Decades later, many of us remain connected by bonds that are difficult to describe simply as friendships. We had learned who would keep going and, more importantly, who would be there when someone else needed him. Some describe it as a brotherhood.
Organizational Maturity
I had the unusual opportunity to experience that process at two very different stages.
When I played and later coached at Delaware, I experienced a mature culture. When I coached at Virginia, I was part of one being built.
The difference showed up in the programs’ goals. At Delaware, making the postseason playoffs was the minimum expectation. We expected to compete for a national championship. At Virginia, reaching a bowl game represented an enormous breakthrough.
The difference showed up in player behavior, too.
At Delaware, very little beyond practice was mandatory. We didn’t have a mandatory training table or mandatory offseason workouts. Coaches didn’t have to tell us to eat together, train together, or lift before or after practice during the season. We did those things because we knew they mattered, even when they were hard.
Perhaps nothing illustrated that ownership better than preseason camp. Our first practice started at 6:55 in the morning, but no coach stayed with us to make sure we got out of bed, went to bed, or stayed out of town.
At 6:00 a.m., our team captain walked through the residence hall carrying a baseball bat and gave every door two loud cracks before continuing down the hall. Those cracks weren’t really a wake-up call. They were a warning that practice was less than an hour away.
If the bat actually woke you up, chances were you weren’t going to make it through preseason. You were probably destined to become part of the I-95 Fly.
The players who were going to make it were already awake. We knew what had to happen before 6:55. We had to get to the fieldhouse, get dressed, get taped, and be ready to practice. There was no bus service during preseason, so players with cars made sure everyone had a ride.
No coach needed to supervise the process because the team supervised itself.
An even more revealing example had been established before I arrived. During the early 1970s, an incident involving football players occurred at a bar. The response didn’t come from Coach Raymond or his staff. The players themselves decided that Delaware football players would stay out of bars during the season because another incident could damage the program.
Future teams continued to honor the rule. By the time I arrived, nobody needed to explain why. It was simply part of joining the team.
Before one of Delaware’s national championship games, a reporter asked Coach Raymond what time curfew was for the players.
“If we needed a curfew, we wouldn’t be here,” he replied.
The preseason mornings, voluntary workouts, player-created bar rule, and national championship non-curfew all reflected the same thing: responsibility for protecting the program had increasingly moved to the players themselves.
That is organizational maturity.
Virginia was at a different stage. Coach Welsh and his staff still needed to provide more external reinforcement while they established expectations. Part of my job, for example, was to attend breakfast once a week to make sure the freshmen got up early enough to eat. I was also assigned several players whose class attendance I was supposed to monitor. I checked on them twice. Once they realized someone was paying attention, they kept going to class.
That may sound like a small thing, but anyone who has played college football understands that getting out of bed for an 8:00 a.m. class can be difficult when your body hurts from yesterday’s practice and another practice is waiting that afternoon, especially for freshmen. The expectation was that you got up and went anyway.
As those behaviors repeated, they became habits, and habits became expectations. Coach Welsh was building what he built at the Naval Academy and what Coach Raymond had already built.
Doing Hard Things Shows Up
Eventually, doing hard things together becomes visible on Saturdays.
During Coach Welsh’s second season in 1983, Virginia opened with four consecutive victories before experiencing some of the inconsistency that accompanies a developing program. Late in the season, however, we faced North Carolina, arguably the most talented team in the ACC that year. A victory would guarantee Virginia a winning season, and when we won, Virginia ultimately finished 6–5, producing only the third winning season in the program’s previous thirty-one years.
More importantly, the players were accumulating evidence that Coach Welsh’s systems were working.
A year later, that confidence was tested under considerably greater pressure.
We traveled to Blacksburg to play Virginia Tech after losing to them 48–0 the previous season, the most lopsided result in the history of the rivalry. Now we were returning before a hostile sellout crowd with the memory of that loss still fresh. The game remained close, the pressure never disappeared, and nothing was secure until the final whistle.
A few weeks later, we traveled to Morgantown to play West Virginia. West Virginia was ranked sixth in the country and expected an Orange Bowl invitation after our game. Before kickoff, their fans were throwing oranges onto the field in anticipation. The stadium was sold out, loud, and hostile, and once again every possession mattered because the outcome remained uncertain until the end.
We won both games.
Today, when coaches ask me the best way to build team cohesion, I answer without hesitation: “Win on the road.”
Winning close games before hostile sellout crowds requires players to keep executing as fatigue accumulates, concentration becomes harder, the crowd gets louder, mistakes become more consequential, and the scoreboard provides no assurance that everything will turn out the way you want. There is nowhere to hide from uncertainty in a close football game.
By late November, something even more revealing had happened at Virginia.
We played Maryland at home the day after Thanksgiving in the final game of the regular season. Nobody—and I mean nobody—would have predicted before the season that the Virginia-Maryland game would determine the ACC championship.
Except, by then, us.
We certainly hadn’t expected it when the season began, and there was even less reason to imagine it after Clemson came into Scott Stadium and beat us 55–0. But by the time Maryland arrived in Charlottesville, we weren’t surprised to be playing for the ACC championship.
The season had changed our expectations. We had beaten good teams in close games, won on the road, won in hostile environments, and learned we could perform even as the pressure persisted. Playing for a conference championship no longer felt improbable. We believed we belonged there, and we fully expected to win.
The Maryland game turned into one of those wonderfully crazy games in which neither defense could stop the other offense. The teams combined for more than 1,100 yards, and every possession seemed capable of deciding the championship.
We lost.
That matters because doing hard things together doesn’t guarantee that you win every time. Sometimes the more revealing test comes after the scoreboard fails to validate everything you have been working for. Losing is hard.
Between the Maryland game and the Peach Bowl, the assistant coaches were allowed to go on the road to recruit, secure commitments, and lock down campus visits from prospective student-athletes. The team was holding light workouts, with only the training staff, strength-and-conditioning staff, and graduate assistants present.
Before the first workout, however, I noticed something that stopped me.
The captains and seniors had taken over. They organized their position groups, made sure everyone knew what to do, and then coordinated a brief team workout. Nobody had told them to assume that responsibility. They simply recognized what the team needed and did it.
I remember thinking, “This would not have happened last year. It wouldn’t even have happened at the beginning of this season.”
Then another thought occurred to me: “The Delaware guys would do this.”
Earlier in Coach Welsh’s tenure, coaches still needed to monitor breakfast, check class attendance, and reinforce behaviors that had not yet become habitual. Now the players were assuming responsibility themselves.
I had seen that at Delaware. Now I was watching it emerge at Virginia.
The timing could hardly have been more important. We had just lost an opportunity to win the ACC championship, but the season wasn’t over. Virginia had earned its first bowl invitation in school history, and Purdue was waiting in Atlanta.
The Peach Bowl would be the biggest game in the history of Virginia football.
Purdue gave us another close game. Nothing was comfortable or secure, and the pressure remained until the final whistle.
This time, we won.
Virginia finished 8–2–2, won the first bowl game in school history, and finished ranked in the Top 20. The original goal had been to receive a bowl invitation. By Thanksgiving, we were playing for an ACC championship. A few weeks later, we won the Peach Bowl.
Virginia’s expectations were changing because the team was changing.
Coaches Do Hard Things Too
The players weren’t the only people doing hard things together. The coaches did too, although the difficulty usually took a different form.
Coaches couldn’t eliminate the collisions, soreness, pressure, or uncertainty that came with playing football. What they could do was build better systems for preparing players to handle them. That was one of the most important lessons I learned from both Coach Raymond and Coach Welsh:
Better Coaches = Better Systems.
Those systems began with recruiting.
Before my first recruiting trip for Delaware, Coach Raymond gave me advice that has stayed with me throughout my career.
“Don’t pay attention to the all-star teams. Watch the film. Watch them play. Recruit athletes who can play here.”
At first, I thought he was teaching me how to evaluate talent. Soon, I realized he was teaching me something more important. Recruiting wasn’t simply about accumulating the best athletes available. It was about identifying players who could succeed within the systems and standards of Delaware football.
On one of my first trips, I visited Seton Hall Prep in New Jersey to evaluate a fullback and quarterback. After watching several game films, it was clear the fullback was out of our reach; he eventually signed with Tennessee. The quarterback was a good athlete, but he didn’t merit a scholarship.
Before returning the films to Seton Hall Prep’s legendary coach, Tony Verducci, Sr., another player caught my attention: the tailback.
I asked to see his transcripts. Coach Verducci looked surprised but took me to the guidance office. His grades showed he could gain admission to Delaware, so I asked to speak with him. Coach Verducci brought him out of class, and for about ten minutes I explained why he could play football for the University of Delaware.
I brought the film back to Newark, where Coach Ted Kempski and Coach Raymond reviewed it. I continued recruiting the tailback for two more weeks, and although other schools eventually became interested, Delaware had been first. Coach Kempski told me to offer him a scholarship.
His name was Gil Knight, and he became a three-year starter for Delaware.
Awards, rankings, statistics, and all-star teams provide convenient evidence that someone else thought a player was good. Coach Raymond wanted us to do our own work. We had to watch the film, understand what our system required, and make our own judgment.
The same philosophy extended to preparation.
Coach Raymond and his assistants believed games were won in the summer, long before the players took the field in the fall. During the offseason, each offensive assistant prepared comprehensive scouting books on three or four opponents. Those books represented months of film study and analysis and became the foundation for the game plans we developed during the season.
Delaware wasn’t merely preparing more than its opponents. We were pushing learning upstream.
By game week, much of the difficult analytical work had already been completed. Coaches could revisit assumptions made during the summer, compare them with what the opponent was doing now, and refine the plan instead of starting from scratch.
Assistant coaches took tremendous pride when one of their scouting books contributed to a victory. What happened when a game plan failed, however, revealed even more.
The assistant coach responsible for that opponent returned to his scouting book and examined his own work. What tendency had he overlooked? Which assumption had proved incorrect? What had the opponent changed? What information had he missed?
It is much easier after a loss to explain why someone else failed than to examine your own mistakes. Players can miss assignments, quarterbacks can make poor decisions, receivers can drop passes, and officials can make calls you disagree with. All of those things may be true, but none of them improves your coaching.
Examining your own work does.
Each assistant coach was responsible for improving his part of the program because everyone understood that strengthening one part strengthened the whole. Accountability wasn’t something Coach Raymond simply imposed. The staff owned it.
Hard Work Wasn’t Measured in Hours
That approach produced another characteristic of Coach Raymond’s program that was unusual in college football.
College football coaches are legendary for their hours. Eighty-hour workweeks are hardly unusual during the season, and in some programs the amount of time someone remains in the football office becomes an informal measure of commitment.
That wasn’t how Coach Raymond viewed the job.
At Delaware, we worked late on Sunday and Monday nights. The remainder of the week, once practice and the necessary work were finished, we went home.
Coach Raymond didn’t expect less preparation. He expected extraordinary preparation. Much of the work, however, had already taken place during the offseason. The scouting books had been built, and the strategizing had begun, allowing us to refine our preparation during game week rather than manufacture urgency because we had failed to prepare earlier.
Games may have been played in the fall, but much of the work required to win them had been completed during the summer.
When I coached under Coach Welsh at Virginia, I recognized the same philosophy. We worked longer hours, but Coach Welsh had little interest in coaches staying in the office simply to demonstrate how committed they were. The work had to accomplish something.
Neither Coach Raymond nor Coach Welsh confused effort with effectiveness. Doing hard things didn’t mean doing unnecessary things, and working longer didn’t automatically mean working better.
Better coaches build better systems.
When Leadership Becomes Culture
Looking back, I understand Coach Raymond’s comment about togetherness differently than I did when I first heard it.
The wins and championships mattered. Anyone who played or coached for Coach Raymond and Coach Welsh understood that winning mattered enormously. Those outcomes, however, also reflected something being built beneath the scoreboard.
At Delaware, I was part of a culture generations of players and coaches had already built. At Virginia, I watched Coach Welsh begin building one. The goals and amount of supervision differed because the programs were at different stages, but the progression was similar. Leaders established systems, people learned to operate within them, and eventually they assumed responsibility for sustaining them. Culture change comes last.
That is when leadership becomes culture.
Coach Raymond’s “togetherness,” however, points to something that lasts even longer.
College football lasts four or five years for most players. The relationships it creates can last forty or fifty years because we didn’t simply spend time together. We did hard things together. We saw one another hurt, exhausted, disappointed, uncertain, and under pressure, and we learned who would continue doing his job when nobody could guarantee the outcome.
It didn’t matter whether you were an All-American or a scout-team player. If you earned the trust of the people around you, you became something that lasted much longer than your place on the depth chart.
You became a teammate.
As Delaware and Virginia prepare to meet for the first time on September 26, I see generations of those teammates connected to two Hall of Fame coaches who understood that their responsibility extended far beyond game planning and winning games. Coach Raymond and Coach Welsh built systems that enabled people to accomplish difficult things together, and in doing so, they created cultures in which people learned to rely on, depend on, and trust one another.
Forty or fifty years later, the scores fade, the statistics become harder to remember, and even championships become stories we tell about another time in our lives.
The teammates remain.
Perhaps that is why, after 300 victories, Coach Raymond didn’t talk about the wins. He talked about the togetherness.