These are interesting times for leaders — and exposing ones. The half-cocked, the loud, the phony carpers are upstaged daily by self-effacing sorts with expertise and calm certainty, who present solutions along with the problems.
Guys like Duke football coach David Cutcliffe, who just finished a staff meeting on Zoom and isn’t ashamed to confess, “I’m much better with tech than I was two weeks ago.” Cutcliffe’s mastery of virtual meetings is a point of pride given that he’s doing his grocery shopping during the “seniors-only” hours at his local store. “You never seen shopping carts move more slowly in your life,” he laughs.
Cutcliffe, 65, doesn’t have a hint of bray in his mild, Birmingham-born voice, and he’s not going to scandalize anybody with a tweet. He won’t call his team “a herd” like Mike Gundy. But perhaps nobody in college football in the past 25 years has quietly taught better leadership than Cutcliffe, at least in the judgment of the NFL, which has drafted eight of his quarterbacks, from Peyton and Eli Manning to Daniel Jones. He has become a kind of quarterback whisperer whose prodigies return to him every offseason for refreshers. “Kind of like a golfer returning to a swing coach,” Peyton says. Jones visited him for a two-week tuneup in January after his rookie season with the New York Giants. “He’s going to tell you what you don’t want to hear, going to tell you when it’s not good enough, going to coach you just as hard and treat you just like he did for four years in school, and that’s valuable to me,” Jones says.
If you had to summarize leadership in a half-sentence, maybe it’s the ability to make solid decisions amid uncertainty. “Decisions, that’s the magic and where it lives,” Cutcliffe says. There are worse ways to pass these strange times, you figure, than to call up Cutcliffe and ask whether any of his teaching to a Manning or a Jones is exportable to the rest of the world. The answer is yes; the broader outlines of his philosophy are comprehensible by anyone: Good decision-making is not just based on assertive personality, but rather it’s an acquirable skill. What Cutcliffe teaches is a methodology, how to increase your odds of being right and how to mitigate and live with the consequences when you’re wrong. Most people are uncomfortable making decisions, mainly because they are not versed in the processes that lead to good ones. But coaches and athletes are “conditioned to it,” Cutcliffe says. “You’re forced to make decisions over and over — quick ones, hard ones.”
The first prerequisite for a decision-maker is a willingness to take responsibility for their choices. Cutcliffe loves to watch his recruits order off a menu. “If they can’t make up their mind, if they say, ‘What are you having?’ — I don’t want ’em,” he says.
Cutcliffe teaches three stages of decision-making to quarterbacks. “Pre-snap, post-snap and alarm,” he says. Pre-snap is all about gathering information: “You got to decide what you think the play is,” Cutcliffe says. His quarterbacks get a comprehensive education in defensive coverages, and “you learn the value and importance of basing decisions on recognition,” Jones says. As opposed to instinct or athleticism. “There’s a ‘right’ decision based on a lot of information,” Jones says. “ … When you’re doing it for what you believe to be the right reasons, then it’s easier to correct and fix the mistake.”
The post-snap phase is about adjustment: A quarterback has to understand whether his initial decision was correct or workable — and react or make another decision accordingly using good mechanics, especially footwork. “A lot of his coaching is to get the ball out of your hand quicker,” Jones says, “and that translates to technique, to shortening your motion or your steps.”
The Mannings drilled with Cutcliffe in basic three- or five-step drops even when they were Super Bowl veterans. Peyton says, “I guess you’d ask, ‘Why would a 14-year veteran NFL quarterback need to learn how to take a snap again?’ It was doing the little things right, and if you think the little things don’t matter, that’s usually when your game begins to slide. That’s true for business, and it’s definitely true for quarterbacks.”
Depending on the play-call, Cutcliffe gives a quarterback 2.8 to 3.8 seconds to make a post-snap decision. If the ball is not gone by 3.8 seconds, then a quarterback is in the “alarm” stage. And if you’re in the “alarm” stage, “You’re bad wrong,” Cutcliffe says.
So many quarterbacks — and coaches, too, as play callers — end up making no decision at all. They hesitate or default. “You end up making a decision by indecision, and that is the worst decision you ever make,” Cutcliffe says. Decision by indecision happens “when you catch yourself flat-footed while you’re waiting for an answer. You got the ball as a quarterback, and you hold it.” Anytime you hold the ball, “You’ve already made a mistake because the decision is going to be made for you,” Cutcliffe says. “You’re going to be sacked, or force a ball, or quite likely turn it over.”
But what if you make a mistake? It’s what everyone dreads, isn’t it, whether you’re a shift manager or a sportswriter who didn’t see a big play coming and has to rewrite on deadline? What if you’re not right?
“Make a decision and do something, even if it’s wrong,” Cutcliffe says, “and then go like hell to make it right.” Any kind of commitment is better than “to half-approach it. If you’re afraid of it, you’re not going to be giving your all to what you’re going to do.”
He doesn’t allow second-guessing, either. “That’s a fan’s role,” he says.
Listening to Cutcliffe, it becomes apparent why the Mannings were two of the most decisive, quick-handed and durable quarterbacks in NFL history. And why Jones threw twice as many touchdowns as interceptions as a rookie, 24 to 12. And why they have such an unwavering trust in him. Peyton Manning has said, “He’s in my personal Hall of Fame.” Jones says, “Nothing is more important than Coach Cut.”
It also becomes apparent why leaders such as Cutcliffe, orderly explicators of simple principles, are so comforting at the moment, why they cut through the noise. As all NFL quarterbacks know, and as a million TED Talks have pointed out, information plus context plus reliable execution equals expertise. Does that seem obvious? Maybe, but the obvious never hurts in troubling and unclear times. It’s what enables good NFL quarterbacks to deliver the ball amid physical mayhem and stimulus overload. It’s what allows others in leadership roles, say governors in Ohio or New York, to make solid decisions in a state of emergency. It produces capability amid crisis. Know-how.
Like every other coach in America, Cutcliffe is having to hold together his program despite multiple unknowns, with the campus shut down and spring workouts canceled.
You think it’s tricky transitioning a company to work completely remotely? Try scheduling a team meeting by video conference, wrangling 108 anxious, scattered undergraduates from Red Bank, N.J., to Venice, Calif. The usual problems and urgencies of a football team, such as conditioning, pale. Oh, Cutcliffe and his staff send protein powder through the mail and design body-weight workouts for kids who don’t have access to gyms. But more importantly, they spend time dealing with players whose parents have been laid off, helping those families get organized, understand what government benefits they qualify for and the process of applying for them.
“They’ve lost jobs, and you can’t just ignore it,” Cutcliffe says.
It’s a separator, this coronavirus, a kind of litmus test that sorts out great executives from the naked emperors. And it begs reappraisal of the relatively unsung Cutcliffe, whose teams are always a little overmatched in the ACC yet have had five winning seasons in the past seven, including the only 10-win mark in school history, and have landed a half-dozen bowl invitations since 2012. Leadership in this strange time — or any other, you realize — is less about demandingness than it is about reassurance. 