Packers Coach Quotes

As the legendary Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi used to say, you have to know your fundamentals to play a good game.

Dobias taught his players the line famously attributed to legendary Green Bay Packers head coach Vince Lombardi: “I taught them that winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing,” Dobias said. “Donald picked right up on this. He would tell his teammates, ‘We’re out here for a purpose. To win.’ He always had to be number one, in everything. He was a conniver even then. A real pain in the ass. He would do anything to win

J.I. Packer says that we have "conformed to the modern spirit: the spirit, that is, that spawns great thoughts of man and leaves room for only small thoughts of God." We have "allowed God to become remote." Christians who don't have an expanding, deepening knowledge of God are like players who have no coach, no rule book, no game schedule, no playing field, no training program. They are depending on one thing to win - uniforms.

Hall of Fame football coach John Madden, in a documentary about Vince Lombardi, told a story about how, as a young assistant coach, he attended a coaching clinic where Lombardi spoke about one play: the power sweep, a running play that he made famous with the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s. Lombardi held the audience spellbound as he described that one play for eight hours. Madden said, “I went in there cocky, thinking I knew everything there was to know about football, and he spent eight hours talking about this one play. . . . I realized then that I actually knew nothing about football.

When Lombardi joined the Green Bay Packers in 1959, the team had gone eleven straight seasons without a winning record, and after winning only one of twelve games the previous year, the team fired Lombardi’s predecessor. Upon arriving at training camp as their new head coach, Lombardi made an immediate and indelible first impression on Bart Starr, a struggling third-string, fourth-year quarterback. After leading the players to a meeting room, Lombardi waited in front of a portable blackboard as the players sat down. He picked up a piece of chalk and began to speak. “Gentlemen,” he said, “we have a great deal of ground to cover. We’re going to do things a lot differently than they’ve been done here before . . . [We’re] going to relentlessly chase perfection, knowing full well we will not catch it, because perfection is not attainable. But we are going to relentlessly chase it because, in the process, we will catch excellence.”6 He paused and stared, his eyes moving from player to player. The room was silent. “I’m not remotely interested in being just good,” he said with an intensity that startled them all.

When I look back from our technology work to the coaching of Vince Lombardi, I see in his approach to football the same pursuit of clarity and perfection that we sought in our effort to make products at Apple. With his single-minded emphasis on the Power Sweep, and with the success the Packers enjoyed as a result, Vince Lombardi was the Steve Jobs of football coaches. Lombardi connected his words and his team’s actions in football by focusing on one simple play, while at Apple, with our single-minded emphasis on never making the browser slower, we connected our words and actions in software by focusing on one simple rule.

Finch’s tour de force was not yet over. ‘Chair, it’s 6:30pm. The last flight to Sydney leaves in about 35 minutes. We have been here since three o’clock.’ Australia has a cottage industry in ex-government staffers whose role is solely to coach company executives for these parliamentary hearings. The first thing inculcated into witnesses is that they’re on the MPs’ turf and are governed by their rules. ‘You can’t just walk out like it’s a play you don’t like,’ says one regular consultant. The other universal rule: never, ever be a smartarse; it worked once for Kerry Packer and then literally never again. ‘I guess you’re delayed, Mr Finch, at the discretion of the committee,’ McKenzie said. ‘I beg your pardon?’ ‘We’ve still got questions, and we will be pursuing them until we’re finished.’ As Simon Birmingham put it to me later, ‘There’s often one moment when hours of disciplined effort by those around you is undone, where you lose the room in an instant. [Finch] worrying about the time of the last flight was that moment.’ ‘I’ve never seen anyone express the arrogance that Finch expressed on that day,’ says Tony Sheldon. ‘To say, “You’re all wasting my time, I’ve got better things to do, I’m catching my flight” showed so little respect to the Australian public.’ The committee excused Goyder, Hudson and Finch at 6:40pm. Theirs was a long drive back to Sydney.