COLUMBUS, Ohio — As fan impatience and searing playoff losses mounted, Tony Dungy never lost faith in the words of his old Steelers coach Chuck Noll.
It was the mid-2000s and Dungy was trying to transform a Colts team with Peyton Manning into a Super Bowl champion. The coach had turned around the Buccaneers in his previous stop before Jon Gruden replaced him in 2002 and won a title with a club that Dungy had built.
In that era, Dungy and Bill Cowher were facing a similar challenge. How to transition a perennially good team into a great one. Each was haunted by a string of postseason failures. The Colts couldn’t get past Tom Brady and the Patriots. Then came a 14-2 season in 2005 that was tripped up by Ben Roethlisberger and the most memorable quarterback tackle in playoff history, leading Cowher to his lone Lombardi Trophy.
Every season brings changes in personnel, but as the pressure and criticism grew, Dungy stayed the course thanks in part to what he learned from Noll as a safety on the Steelers’ title-winning squad in 1978.
“Chuck would say, ‘Champions don’t do extraordinary things, they do the ordinary things better than anybody else,’ ” Dungy recalled. “It’s something that always stuck with me, and I never forgot it. That was the mindset we needed. Yes, you are going to need great players to make those signature plays, but being great is about day-in-and-day-out paying attention to details and little things, and doing the regular things so well that they become second nature. That always shows up on the biggest stages.”
As the Steelers look to make one more deep playoff run with Roethlisberger, they must contend not only with the Chiefs, but two up-and-coming teams in the Browns and Bills, who also are trying to reach the next level. The Steelers gave Buffalo a reminder last week of how difficult it can be playing with a target on your back, rallying for a 23-16 opening win. The Browns, meanwhile, blew a 12-point halftime lead in Kansas City with four crucial mistakes at winning time.
“There are no magic wands,” said Dungy, who finally led the Colts to a Super Bowl in the 2006 season. “You are going to have failures along the way, and all you can do is keep playing and keep improving and getting mentally stronger as you stay the course.”
There are few tasks in pro sports more agonizing and fraught with peril than trying to morph a contender into a champion. Think of Bum Phillips and the Oilers in the late 1970s. Think of Marty Schottenheimer and the Browns in the 1980s. Think of Jim Leyland and the Pirates in the early 1990s. Think of the Flyers any time since 1975 with their staggering six losses in Stanley Cup Final appearances.
Some coaches and general managers say it’s easier to rebuild a franchise than to take a rebuilt franchise the final few steps to a ring ceremony. That’s because there’s no one proven way to raise banners. Sometimes, it is relying on bedrock principles to get teams through adversity. Sometimes, it’s drafting a quarterback like Roethlisberger to deliver a championship for Cowher. Sometimes, it’s swinging late-season trades to add difference-makers such as Ron Francis and Rick Tocchet the way the Penguins did in back-to-back Cup runs in the 1990s.
One thing they all agree on: With expectation comes pressure.
“You have to block out the noise,” Dungy said. “That’s what you have to do and sometimes that’s hard because people around you get impatient. Everybody has suggestions on what you should do. ‘Oh, you need to get this player, or change that.’ The owner sometimes gets impatient. The fans get impatient. It’s not easy.”
As the Browns prepared for a new season in hopes of building on last year, coach Kevin Stefanski sought the counsel of a pair of Hall of Famers. He was searching for advice on how to improve a winning culture and team chemistry, according to the Akron Beacon-Journal.
Stefanski reached out to Dungy and Cowher.
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“We don’t have great schools principally because we have good schools. We don’t have great government, principally because we have good government. Few people attain great lives, in large part because it is just so easy to settle for a good life. The vast majority of companies never become great, precisely because the vast majority become quite good, and that is their main problem.”
— from James Collins’ book, “Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . And Others Don’t”
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John Tortorella and Mike Sullivan,
In the early 2000s, longtime NHL coach John Tortorella read the Collins book and one sentence, he said, struck him “like a thunderbolt.”
Good is the enemy of great.
Tortorella took the quote and hung it on a sign in every NHL locker room where he coached. He led the Lightning to a Cup title in 2004, guided the Rangers to the conference finals in 2012 and made a franchise-record four straight playoff appearances with the Blue Jackets from 2017-2020. Tortorella also has courted controversy at every stop because of his demanding style, blunt public demeanor and confrontational nature.
The second-winningest American-born coach knows no other way.
“You are so much more under a microscope when you're a good team trying to get to that next level,” said Tortorella, who will serve as an ESPN analyst this season. “I think it’s much harder to go from good to great than from being bad to good because you are getting to that elite level and not many teams can get there.”
It’s at this crucial juncture, Tortorella said, where coaches and organizations must have uncomfortable conversations with players and their teams. It’s not enough to win individual awards, earn big contracts and become playoff contenders.
“Sometimes, it’s just too f***ing hard for players, and I mean that — they give in,” Tortorella said. “They put in all that time into being a really good player and a really good organization, and then it’s just too f***ing hard to get to the next level, and they end up being really good players who make good money throughout their careers, but they don’t challenge themselves to get to that next level to be a championship-caliber team and a championship-caliber player.”
Tortorella’s approach is two-fold — organizational decision-makers must communicate regularly on a shared vision for the team and players must be held accountable as a group, not as individuals.
Early in his career, the coach had squabbles with star players in Tampa Bay such as Vincent Lecavalier, Brad Richards and Martin St. Louis. As he got older, Tortorella relied less on one-on-one meetings and aired all grievances in a team setting. One famous meeting with the Blue Jackets in the spring of 2019 set them on a course to the franchise’s first playoff-round victory — a stunning four-game sweep of the Presidents Trophy-winning Lightning.
“You have to have it all out in front of everybody,” he said. “You can have a one-on-one meeting, and that player tells the room something totally different than what happened in the meeting. You are coaching the whole group. It has to be right on the table in front of everybody.”
Tortorella admits that what it takes to evolve from good to great is “a broad concept,” and that many factors play into a team’s success or failure. What is non-negotiable in his view is the need to constantly challenge the organization and its players to strive for collective greatness.
After leading the Steelers to three Super Bowl appearances in a six-year stretch, Roethlisberger — the missing piece in 2005 — hasn’t been back to the Super Bowl since the 2010 season. It’s produced a decade of frustration for a fan base that nevertheless saw the Steelers qualify for the playoffs seven times in that span. It’s been the same for Aaron Rodgers and the Packers, who haven’t been back to the Super Bowl since beating the Steelers in 2010.
“It’s the same in all sports,” said Tortorella, a two-time Jack Adams Award winner. “You can’t just settle for being good because it gets in the way of being great. Most teams have a limited window. Once you build a good foundation, you have to sacrifice to take that next step. . . . It’s about your preparation, it’s about being a good teammate, about how you handle situational play. This goes for all sports. When you have some failures in trying to get to the next level, or get back to a championship level, how do you respond to the failures? It’s a huge question an organization has to constantly ask itself.”
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Tony Dungy and Ben Roethlisberger.
Former receiver Steve Smith greeted the question with a pregnant pause during Tuesday afternoon’s NFL Network conference call. Smith analyses football the way he played it — in your face and unapologetic.
But when Smith was asked how his Panthers went from 1-15 in 2001 to a three-point Super Bowl loss two years later, he didn’t respond with a series of hot takes.
“It’s so hard to sit here and say we made it because of these five things,” Smith said. “It’s all different every year. . . . We can write the stories and say how things should be, but the good Lord puts certain things in us at the right time and we can’t predict it and we can’t always duplicate it. What I did in 2003 isn’t really tangible to what’s going on in 2021.”
Translation: There’s no easy way to explain how a franchise transitions from good to great. It’s often much simpler to catalog why a club perennially struggles: Lack of talent, poor drafting, bad coaching, incompetent or miserly ownership.
When it comes to following up regular-season success with a championship parade, the equation becomes trickier. Most organizations aren’t fortunate enough to draft a generational talent like Brady or Sidney Crosby, whose brilliance and leadership keep title windows propped open for more than a decade.
Former left tackle Joe Thomas won 10 games as a Browns rookie in 2007. The future Hall of Famer never again played on a team with a winning record before retiring after the 2017 season. However, Thomas possesses one of the game’s sharpest minds, and has seen what it takes to build winners.
He believes there’s no substitute for big-game experience. It helped teams coached by Dungy and Cowher eventually capture titles. Thomas, who works with Smith on Thursday Night NFL Network telecasts, believes the Browns’ 2020 playoff loss and 2021 season-opening loss to the Chiefs will prove beneficial.
“Continually being in those situations allows you to be more cool under pressure,” Thomas said. “That was part of the Patriots’ success as to why they were so good for so long. Yeah, they were a really good team, but when they got in those big moments they had been there so many times before that they didn’t get tight and they didn’t let the moment get too big for them.”
Thomas and Smith agree that sometimes it comes down to factors beyond a team’s control — a key injury or remarkable stoke of good fortune.
The Colts finally overcame the Patriots in the 2006 AFC title game thanks in part to the rarest of mistakes — New England getting caught with 12 men in the huddle on a fourth-quarter drive that could have salted away a win. Given a reprieve, Indianapolis drove 80 yards and scored a touchdown on its final possession for a 38-34 victory.
“All (the Patriots) had to do was hold onto the ball, and we’re not going to get it back,” Dungy said. “They would have been going back to the Super Bowl and we would have been going home. Sometimes, it’s just the smallest things.”
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Baker Mayfield in Cleveland in 2019.
Stefanski wasted no time in getting to the point as he spoke with Cowher this summer. His Browns had upset the Steelers, 48-37, at Heinz Field in January for their first playoff win since 1994, but Stefanski understood he couldn’t put that in a trophy case.
“The first (question he asked) was, ‘How do you come off a playoff year and all of a sudden re-establish yourself?’” Cowher said during a recent NFL on CBS Media Day video conference. “I said, ‘Listen, you don’t forget where you came from. You have to remember how you got there.’ Kevin Stefanski is about building a culture. The biggest thing right now is the foundation he wants to build, he’s keeping people accountable. No one’s bigger than team. It isn’t about how many touches I get here, how many touches I get there. He takes it one game at a time until they really accomplish something.”
Stefanski went a step further with Dungy — he invited him to Cleveland last month to address his team. The two coaches have a mutual friend in Bills defensive coordinator Leslie Frazier.
Dungy’s message to the Browns was simple, direct and bereft of magic wands.
“That it is not about talent or wanting it more because everybody has talent at this level and everybody wants to win it all,” Browns quarterback Baker Mayfield told reporters. “It is about outworking (opponents), doing your job at the highest level possible, doing that as a team and coming together.”
Dungy said it was difficult to be in the presence of the Browns because of his Steelers roots, but he believes they pose a legitimate threat in the AFC this season.
“Cleveland might have a better team than Kansas City, and they played better football for 3 1/2 quarters Sunday,” Dungy said. “But then, you had the mistakes at the wrong time ... and you lose a game after getting almost (460) yards of offense and totally dominating it.”
The Browns and Bills did something the Steelers were unable to accomplish last season — win playoff games and face the Chiefs in a high-stakes matchup at Arrowhead Stadium.
But as Stefanski acknowledged in his summer chats with the two Hall-of-Fame coaches, the Browns are now being held to a different standard. Same with the Bills. After years of losing, the expectation is no longer to just reach the postseason. It’s time to shed the skin of a good team for the appearance of a great one.
How will they react in such a crucible?
“It can be mental, especially when you have guys who haven’t been there,” Dungy said. “I bristle at the idea that you have to do something different or you have to get a certain guy to put you over the top. It’s being able to play at a high level all the time to become a champion. The really good teams I’ve been around judge themselves and perform against their standard. You hear Mike Tomlin say it all the time — the standard is the standard. It’s not about the teams you have to knock off. You have to set a championship standard and work that way all the time and play that way all the time.”
The Browns and Bills are trying to get to that level. Tomlin, Roethlisberger and the Steelers are trying to get back to it.
