Sympathy for an opponent or bypassing a friend to get to the top can cause subtle retreats and settling for less. It’s easy to give in to the urge to let your neighbor/your brother go first. The loss of just the slightest bit of “victory hunger” – starving for a win – can be all it takes to allow a step back, especially for human beings. (We wonder if John’s brother, Jim, subtly let his older brother outcoach him?) This was one reason the great tennis champion Jimmy Connors would never let himself get close to other players. He knew he couldn’t allow himself to feel sorry for them.

Managing guilt and failure
San Francisco quarterback Colin Kaepernick reveals another side to managing guilt – personal failure. Obviously his own worst critic, he blamed himself for the Super Bowl loss stating, “I made too many mistakes for us to win.” He was referring to his badly thrown second-quarter interception and to his three straight incompletions from the Raven five-yard line at the end of the game. He went on about his perceived errors, “They will stay with me the rest of my life” – which reveals just how harsh we can be over our imperfections. Many a person has failed to overcome their failures. As cornerbacks and relief pitchers in baseball know, “You better have a short memory.” Find a way to accept your failures and move on.

Then we had the missed holding call – by both the back judge and the side judge – on the last 49ers offensive play at the five-yard line, the third of Kaepernick’s incompletions. Replays clearly showed that cornerback Jimmy Smith had his outside arm around receiver Michael Crabtree – and had held his jersey. Former defensive back guru Brother Oliver – one of the greatest defensive coordinators in college football history – commented in a radio interview that it was unquestionably holding, that Smith had simply held the receiver “way too long.” (Perhaps not to appear too harsh Oliver went on to say that the play didn’t determine the outcome but in truth it did – it was the last 49ers pass into the end zone. Everything was riding on that play.)

Football analyst and former defensive back Herm Edwards, the former Jets coach, waived off the hold and said that you don’t get the call at that point in the game, and it was the Super Bowl. But sometimes a referee will step up and make that call – in a big game. Recall just such a final play in the 2002 national championship game between Miami and Ohio State when the referee called holding on a Miami defensive back in the end zone, an infraction which was no more blatant than Smith’s hold. Despite the referees’ usual insistence that they aren’t the ones who make the difference in the game, this referee did because he thought it was the right call, and Ohio State went on to score. Had he left the flag in his pocket, Miami wins.

Fear of criticism
Imagine if either of the two Super Bowl referees had made that holding call against Baltimore. He would have been flooded with criticism and faced a mountain of unjustified guilt, and found himself at the center of controversy. And the replay would have backed him up showing Smith holding Crabtree’s jersey – and the referee would eventually have been admired for his courage. Leaders sometimes have to stand up to make unpopular decisions.

I’m just saying that guilt entered the picture, and a referee passed on standing up. Edwards’ take means there’s an unwritten rule that – toward the end of a game – you can hold longer and you can even grab a jersey. So fear of guilt changes the rules. And as a result peer pressure takes the flag out of the hands of even the finest referees.

Taking your best shot
Then we have 49ers offensive coordinator Greg Roman who called for the pistol formation just once in the final four plays after the Ravens had difficulty all day stopping it. Did he not go with the strategy that got him there? Did he fail to take his best shot? Was he like the refs? One thing’s for sure, too often in crucial circumstances people miss taking their best shot.

If you want to know what motivates the human race you can fill in two of the first blanks with “secret guilt” and “fear of success,” and you wouldn’t be too far off too often.

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Already we have seen how Chizik’s inconsistent behavior and lack of discipline underscored the ongoing saga of his final disastrous season in 2012.  To fully appreciate how specifically Chizik predicted his Auburn squad’s dismal performance due to his discipline failures we must return to a previously mentioned speech. Because he delivered this talk to a prominent quarterback club at the peak of his success in September of 2011 (see previous article “A coach retreats from success”), the importance of his statement cannot be overstressed.  At the time his team had barely won its first two games but still boasted the longest winning streak in the country.

He provides a rich story—as his unconscious super intelligence speaks—which we can only fully appreciate in retrospect.

‘Blue’ makes a mess
You won’t believe this story. In a memorable humorous anecdote he told his audience about his kids’ new puppy named Blue. Chizik described how the new dog was peeing and pooping everywhere and that he had announced to the family that he wasn’t going to clean up Blue’s mess.  Remember, these are his thoughts which originated from his own deeper mind quick-reading him in the blink of an eye.

Get the big picture—Chizik was not going to discipline some young family “member.” In other words, he could see deep down that he was not going to bother to discipline his team even when they had accidents and made tons of mistakes.

Indeed the team and its fans would soon be blue exactly like the color of their jerseys. As though to emphasize the point, Chizik unconsciously told a similar story in his book recently released at the time in which he described his kids bringing another family pet to a practice. This dog, too, ended up pooping on the football field.

Chizik was confessing that he would soil Auburn’s long tradition on its own field, that in a nutshell the next two seasons would be “one big accident” and he would unconsciously be dogging it. The story would truly be funny if it weren’t so sad.

You can readily see how the right-brain language of imagery creates the real power in a story versus the weaker literal version from the left brain. After it’s all over Chizik can say “I didn’t meet expectations” (left brain) or he can unconsciously paint the right-brain word picture in the story of the pet puppy, Blue.

How perfectly these two canine capers fit Chizik’s behavior over his last two seasons.  The former disciplinarian became progressively undisciplined himself and failed to discipline his players. Secretly Auburn had a new coach and didn’t know it. Indeed, the second Gene Chizik had appeared.

From that point in September 2011 following his story about Blue, Chizik’s record over the remaining two years would be 9 and 14. Increasingly fans and sportswriters and even his players could see his lack of discipline. Everyone could see it except for Chizik who had a huge blind spot around the messes he continually created.

Secret passions involving success
Again he unconsciously blames the culprit success  as the reason for his disregard for discipline and his eventual retreat  into failure. Remember in the same speech he told another story in which, he said it clearly, “success meant destruction.” If you succeeded, your opponent would try and drown you (see previous article “A coach retreats from success”). The unconscious mind, as Chizik demonstrated there, sees the full power behind the killer instinct which competition secretly engenders.

Simultaneously in this story Chizik implied that, in order to win, you had to drown the person trying to drown you. Indirectly Chizik pointed to his own killer instinct which competition mobilized—drown or be drowned.  To win, you must dominate others. It’s a fixed universal idea about intense competition in the deeper mind, what we call an “archetype” of the psyche.

The passionate deeper mind is what it is.

Success goes to his head—“Winning is all about me”
To continue to understand his last two seasons, especially 2012, we turn to another key idea in the back of Gene Chizik’s mind—a concept which explains his central problem. He could not handle success and had to get out of Dodge as secretly as possible without anyone recognizing why. He had to obscure the real story with classic denial. While his failure was painful, there was a much deeper, more painful story and two more truckloads of fear. But he actually shows us how to see past his frequent denials.

In the same quarterback club speech in September 2011 as Chizik reviewed Auburn’s success, he insisted that “it is not about me.” Often to hear unconscious secret confessions we read through denials and pay attention to the key idea particularly when something goes wrong. The message now: Auburn’s success “is all about me.” The natural self-centered way imperfect human beings unconsciously look at life and try to deny it at the same time. Of course we all comprehend how such thinking originates in childhood. We try to fight it but deep down the idea lives on. Chizik’s super-intelligence had thus informed him that indeed he had experienced great success as “all about me”—that success had gone to his head

Furthermore success had seduced him into the self-idealization that he was above such a human foible.

Chizik underscores how success swells our pride and distorts our mind. The question is not can success go to our heads, it’s how much and how to recognize it. Control it. We first must own it and constantly look for its hidden effects.  It’s painful to see our heroes like this—but look we must because nobody is above their own humanity.

Chizik’s story represents the human dilemma in which we all find ourselves and it well illustrates why success can be so difficult to handle.

Yes, we are surrounded by many people who succeed, and don’t forget that not so long ago Chizik himself had been one of those success stories. We are looking at a man who got to the top of the heap. His experience on the way up that hill reveals the secret struggles less-prominent folks have as we all try to get the best out of ourselves. Humility doesn’t come easily.

Constant reinforcement for the ‘big-head’
We wonder could Gene Chizik really deny such thoughts completely—in the vast unconscious mind where we are free to expand our thinking? Think of how often he was reminded that he was the one responsible for the success. He had just won the national championship—and had achieved the greatest comeback in Iron Bowl history. He was the National Coach of the Year.  As he recounted in his book All In, along with the governor and Nick Saban at Alabama he was one of the three most prominent people in the state. And, in an attempt to educate Cam Newton about the pressures of success, he included the two quarterbacks at both schools in his top five.

Constantly catered to, being paid millions of dollars, ever reminded of just how important he was—how could he possibly escape thinking, “You know, it really is all about me?” Yet his strong denial and self-idealization reveals that Chizek suffered serious secret guilt over his ego trip. He will remind of this enormous burden at the end of his self-sabotaging journey in 2012.

A major personal clue – His deep pain
Chizik revealed a personal reason for his vulnerability to a retreat from success in that same key speech in 2011. For the only time I know of, he publicly mentioned how he came from a broken family as did his wife. They both had been severely traumatized by divorce and pledged they would not put their kids through the pain they’d felt after their parents’ separation. Whatever it took, Chizik and his wife would make their marriage work. He was putting down a crucial personal marker of unfinished business. It was a brief glimpse into his life, and he quickly closed the window. Later we will explore what this had to do with his shifting roles from a leader to an absent leader. 

Now we return to the end of the 2012 season and pick up on Chizik’s comments and mindset as his career at Auburn came to a “blue blue” end.
(To be continued.)

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I am utilizing a cutting-edge method for understanding the mind, a method developed from my experience as a psychiatrist and forensic profiler. Again we have discovered how the unconscious mind really works—how it quick-reads ourselves and situations in the blink of an eye, and then tells us about it through stories and key images. I call this the “right-brain” language of the mind, symbolic language. Think “speaking figuratively” instead of literally which I refer to as “left-brain.”

Often someone will appear to be talking about others but is really talking (“right-brain”) about themselves. We are all familiar with this common human tendency. Freud called it projection. Jesus put it more poetically with his idea that the speck we see in our neighbor’s eye can be the log in our own—the pot calling the kettle black.

We have discovered that the quick-read unconscious mind really is a super intelligence. I refer you to Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller Blink which provides a sterling example of the deeper mind in action—although he missed the specific “right-brain” language, he grasped where intuition comes into play. My earlier book, The Deeper Intelligence, clarifies how the mind speaks and reveals its secrets.

So we listen when Chizik speaks for key stories and images. This takes us back to some fascinating comments and secret predictions he made between the lines at the time his decline was just beginning.  We saw that downward spiral start unwinding through the 2011 season before accelerating through the 2012 season. We will pick up next with one of the most striking messages in his entire confession.

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While we have been focusing on Coach Gene Chizik’s precipitous decline from the top of the football world another success story presents itself from his former chief rival Nick Saban. The situation calls for a brief diversion before completing the Chizik story.

Seven days ago Saban won his third national title in four years and his fourth overall in nine years. It brings to mind a recent conversation I had about him this past October with FSU Coach Jimbo Fisher (previously the offensive coordinator on Saban’s 2003 LSU national title team).

Following a speech by Fisher, who sees sports psychology as an important part of his program, we discussed the unappreciated difficulties in climbing the heights of success — and staying there.  Fisher and I talked over how there was another level to managing success in light of our new understanding of the mind – the discovery of the brilliant quick-read super intelligence which sheds new light on the pressures of success (see article 1). Looking for every advantage he listened intently.

At the time on October 29, 2012, it was virtually a foregone conclusion that Gene Chizik would lose his job at the end of the season – and Fisher was already being mentioned as a possible successor. I pointed out to Jimbo that Chizik would be the third Auburn coach in a row over the last 20 years to follow an undefeated season with an extremely poor season not long down the road and lose his job. (Jimbo had been the quarterback coach at Auburn when Terry Bowden – the first of the three coaches — quit before he was fired in 1998.) Each coach had become dysfunctional and had major blind spots when it came to handling success.

Fisher then asked, “What about the guy on the other side of the state?” He was of course referring to Saban.  He wondered how Saban had protected himself from a major success retreat. At the time I had not really studied Saban and suggested we think about it. Then we discussed how John Wooden—the great UCLA basketball coaching legend (10 NCAA basketball national titles in 12 years) — had avoided success sabotage.

By the end of the season Saban was at the peak of his career having experienced a rare level of success with another national championship in hand. Only one of 5 coaches to win 4 national titles (Bryant, Hayes, Stagg, and Warner).

Now there was one clear way Nick Saban could avoid any further real success, history-making success. He could go to the NFL and coach. Many people would see that as a success but it would be a secret retreat. Under the circumstances it would be a step down not a step up.

Saban has a chance to be the only college coach to win three national titles in a row.  (For the record only one NFL team has won 3 championships in a row—the 1965-67 Green Bay Packers.) In addition he has a chance to surpass Bear Bryant’s all time record of six which would put him ahead of the whole pack.

Going to the NFL Saban wouldn’t have to worry about any of those records—and the unbelievable pressure that goes with them. Far more pressure than any coach appreciates consciously. The newly discovered super intelligence (see article 1) has taught us there is 90% more pressure to success than we realize because there is 90% more to our minds.

But shortly after winning his 2012 title Saban has seemingly passed the test of an NFL retreat. He declared that he has forever “closed the door” on returning to the NFL as a head coach.

It’s not like Saban hasn’t unconsciously retreated to the NFL before. Following his 2003 national title at LSU he became the Miami Dolphin’s head coach for two years. There he learned that he lacked the control he had in the college ranks – not only was parity a problem but so were drafting and salary caps. He could have foreseen these difficulties and perhaps had similar success at LSU that he’s had at Alabama without the interruption. Maybe by now he would have a fifth national title.

Saban himself can see now that building a college football dynasty has certain advantages versus the NFL. He has a better “draft position” every year with his extraordinary recruiting skills at a magnet school for attracting talent with Alabama’s long tradition, and he now has a special connection to the next league up (the NFL) which appeals to players. And he’s not handicapped by money to upgrade facilities and staffing.

Parenthetically, it’s not like great coaches can’t unconsciously retreat as they approach breaking a longstanding record. An NFL and Dallas Cowboy insider told me about former Dallas Cowboy coach Jimmy Johnson’s silly fight and split with owner Jerry Jones. Johnson had a chance to go where no NFL coach had gone—three Super Bowl titles in a row — when he allowed Jones to force him into a retreat and resigned as coach in 1994 after winning it all in 1992 and 1993.

Stay tuned. Nick Saban has passed the first hurdle of success retreat —he’s not going to the NFL. But there will be greater pressures of success to come – beyond anything he now knows.

Already he has provided one clue about success pressure: he tells us that Alabama will be the unique target of each opponent next year. In so doing he has pointed us to the Auburn-Alabama rivalry. Nobody will target Alabama more than arch-rival Auburn.

While Auburn appears down and done for a while don’t count them out when it comes to playing Alabama. Unexpectedly they came completely out of the blue in 2010 to win it all, the last team to break the Tide’s streak.

Before we return to the rest of the story on Gene Chizik’s self-induced decline, we will take a look at the special competition between Auburn and Alabama in a game that’s known as the Iron Bowl. Chizik’s 2010 victory there helped usher him rapidly down the slippery slope of success.

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