a 12 win regular season, an ACC title, and a National Championship. I'd settle for a team that busts their butt, plays the game right, and works hard. (and a BCS bowl)
TED.
So - Who's TED, you ask?
Ted is Jimbo Fisher’s acronym for Toughness, Effort and Discipline, which are the three potions he says his players must swallow if the Seminoles are to become Championship contenders again.
T.E.D. is non negotiable.
Florida State lost five games by one touchdown or less last year. If one player makes one play FSU might have won three of those five games and finished with a 10-win season. If one receiver had the toughness, effort and discipline to run his route the way it is meant to be run; if one offensive lineman has the toughness, effort and discipline to maintain his weight and gain strength in the off-season so that he can make a fourth-quarter block, FSU wins ten games last year and Jimbo Fisher is not your new offensive coordinator.
That one play, Fisher reminds, comes down to one man playing with more toughness, more effort and more discipline.
More importantly, that one man making that one play comes down to a coaching staff making sure their players are doing exactly what they need to be doing every day of the year.
You don’t just rub a lantern and TED appears, Fisher says. You have to teach it and demand it and work at it every day to make TED a habit. And if the projected starter can’t develop it, a coach has to be willing to cut their losses with that player and play the one who proves he will play with those qualities. Because games can be lost on one play easier than they can be won.
So, in short, the secret is there is no secret other than just plain hard work.
The repeating theme of Jimbo Fisher's core philosophy is that there is a very slim margin of error in any league when your goal is the title. You simply must put your most dependable players on the field and demand that they give you maximum effort for 9.3 minutes.
Nine minutes and twenty seconds?
Yeah, Jimbo explains, it’s not really a 60-minute game. Each play lasts only about eight seconds and since there’s about 70 plays in a game that’s about 560 seconds or a little over nine minutes of actual playing time.
So what he asks of his players is to “give the opponent eight seconds of Hell.†Play at maximum effort for eight seconds and then spend the next 30 seconds resting and preparing emotionally to reign another eight seconds of Hell upon them.
Good stuff.