Buffalo Rumblings
Trusting the process is more nuanced than it would appear on the surface.
“Culture” is a funny concept. We’ve all likely been part of good cultures before. A nuclear family, a working team, a sport team... wherever there is a group, there’s an opportunity for a good culture.
There’s also an opportunity for a bad culture. But as much as we acknowledge its existence as a concept because we have experienced it, culture remains simultaneously hard to define and yet also ubiquitously discussed in the sports world.
In the offseason, every new NFL head coach brings with him stories from the players about how “this year is different” and the team’s culture has been overhauled. I’m not proposing the idea that everyone professing such a phenomenon is lying; only that for as much as we discuss the ideas of “good culture” and “bad culture,” we don’t seem to be able to construct an effable statement on what makes culture good, despite coaches doing their best to explain it in press conferences over and over again.
Perhaps, like “obscenity” in the landmark Jacobellis v. Ohio United States Supreme Court case, “culture” is something that we could never attempt further to define, but we know it when we see it. Or maybe we can do a better job defining it.
Buffalo Bills head coach Sean McDermott made a statement that resonated throughout the sports commentary landscape after four regular-season games in 2018. The Bills were 1-3 and rookie quarterback Josh Allen was getting his feet wet in the NFL as a raw prospect who looked exactly that. McDermott issued the following quote:
“The culture to me trumps strategy. That’s what I believe in whole heartedly. It doesn’t mean we have choir boys, it means we have guys that love football and do things the right way for the most part. I understand that. We’re trying to build something that does take time, but overall, guys have to be committed to the process.
That means staying mentally tough in moments like this where we start a season 1-3 and it hasn’t always been easy. I’ve been through this before, I can tell them that. Those of us that have been around this league long enough have been through it before. If you do things the right way and continue to do things the right way, the long-term success when you make the right decisions, those things will take care of themselves.”
“Culture trumps strategy” was a hotly debated topic and the sound bite du jour after that press conference, but it’s McDermott’s clear attempt to define culture that likely carried more weight. He rejected the idea that morality is the fundamental building block of culture by overtly saying the team wasn’t looking for “choir boys,” but specifically called out players who “love football” and “do things the right way.”
Figuring out how loving football works to improve the culture of a football team seems easy enough. But what is “the...
