Bo Schembechler Quotes

Those who stay will be champions

By your own soul, learn to live. If some men force you, take no heed. If some men hate you, have no care. Sing your song, dream your dreams Hope your hopes, and pray your prayers.

When your team is winning, be ready to be tough, because winning can make you soft. On the other hand, when your team is losing, stick by them. Keep believing

Not making a decision is the worst thing you can do. So long as you feel you made the right decision based on the information you had at that time, there's no need to fret about it. If it fails, you'll know what to do next time.

I figured this was the easy stuff, and if we couldn't show up on time, looking right and acting right, we weren't going to be able to do anything else.

If you do not like people, you will not take the time to get to know them, and if you don't get to know them, you will have no idea what scares them, what inspires them, what motivates them.

The team, the team, the team.

Early is on time and on time is late.

Those who stay will be Champions.

I do not believe in sitting on a problem. Because the longer you sit on that thing, the longer it'll irritate you. If you're keeping it to yourself, there's nothing the guy you're mad at can do to fix it, either, because you haven't told him why you're mad.

For God's sakes, quit worrying about your next job. Just do the best you can at the job you have now, and the offers will come. And when they do, if you have confidence in yourself you don't have to feel that you can't turn it down if it isn't quite right for you because you fear you'll never get another offer. You will. Wait for the right opportunity, and turn down all the rest. It will make all the difference.

Every day we get better, or we get worse.

You can NOT be a leader unless you like people! You’ve got to spend time with them, so you know them. You’ve got to be interested in who they are, what they do away from the job, and how they think.

You don't treat the so-called little people poorly, because we don't have any little people here! The trainers, the managers, the secretaries, the people who work in the dorms and cafeterias and classroom buildings are all professionals, and they're all important or they wouldn't be working for Michigan football.

If you want to become a great leader, you need to prepare yourself to become a great leader, and the best way to do that is to study great leaders.

If you want to be a truly great leader, you’ll develop other great leaders below you.

The one surefire way to get me not to hire you is to send me your resume, especially if you've already got a good job. I won't be interested, because in a couple years, you'll be doing the same thing to me that you're doing to your current boss: looking for a better deal.

Every coach, every executive, every leader: They all know right from wrong. Even those Enron guys. When someone uncovers a scandal in their company, I don't think they can say, "I didn't know that was going on." They're just saying they're too dumb to do their job! And if they really are too dumb, then why are they getting paid millions of dollars to do it? They know what's going on.

In times of difficulty, those brave enough to stay the course will be victors in the end.

The upset is in the mind of the favorite.

We want the Big Ten championship and we're gonna win it as a Team. They can throw out all those great backs, and great quarterbacks, and great defensive players, throughout the country and in this conference, but there's gonna be one Team that's gonna play solely as a Team. No man is more important than The Team. No coach is more important than The Team. The Team, The Team, The Team, and if we think that way, all of us, everything that you do, you take into consideration what effect does it have on my Team? Because you can go into professional football, you can go anywhere you want to play after you leave here. You will never play for a Team again. You'll play for a contract. You'll play for this. You'll play for that. You'll play for everything except the team, and think what a great thing it is to be a part of something that is, The Team. We're gonna win it. We're gonna win the championship again because we're gonna play as team, better than anybody else in this conference, we're gonna play together as a team. We're gonna believe in each other, we're not gonna criticize each other, we're not gonna talk about each other, we're gonna encourage each other. And when we play as a team, when the old season is over, you and I know, it's gonna be Michigan again, Michigan.