As coaches, we usually have plenty of changes from one year to the next. Sometimes it seems like it's at one position. Sometimes it's across the board. But this is really a part of every year that we have in coaching in the NFL.
There's a lot of learning that goes on based on the mistakes that we may make in practice, and our guys do a great job of trying to digest that information and be ready to go when we use it during the course of the game.
The players on the team are the reason why we win. You don't have to treat them all identically; they're not going to be all the same. Your ability to lead and motivate those guys differently is important.
Practice is tough. We try to purposely make it difficult on our players on whatever it is that we're trying to do during the week to get ready for that opponent so that we see the most difficult looks, so that we make our players aware of the things that could certainly impact the game in a negative fashion.
People cried nepotism every time I was on the field. But I played for a lot of coaches before I played for my father, and I started for everybody. He wasn't the first person who all the sudden put me in the starting lineup.
Our players know that we try to come in each week and put ourselves in the best position to have a chance to win, and sometimes that means some people playing more than others; sometimes it means using different personnel groupings in different weeks.
Of all the things people have taught me regarding life lessons or anything that would benefit me, I don't think anything helped me learn more about life than football. You go through so many different things: adversity, how to handle adversity, how to handle success, how to lead, how to be a teammate, how to communicate.
I think you always try to put the offense in the best position to make good plays, which usually requires us to move multiple people around and give them an opportunity to impact a game in a lot of different ways.
I think there is a lot of experiences you have in coaching, and if you learn from the experiences as you go through them, whether it's as a coordinator or position coach, a quality-control coach, a head coach, whatever it might be, and you learn from those mistakes you make.
I think any player at any position their rookie year, they're trying to figure out how to process all the information we give them, how to process what the defense is doing and then actually physically play the game and the position that they're playing.
Everybody out here has to get better and has to rep and has to learn and has to make mistakes, make plays, do good things, do bad things and learn from them.
