Teaching And The Super Bowl

Kansas City coach Brendan Daly…all this guy does now is go to the Super Bowl. Tonight will be his 6th, he has four rings.

Back before all that when he was coaching the Vikings and Rams, Brendan Daly and his brother Tim (TNTP and Ed Navigator) and I did some work on teaching and coaching and transferable lessons.

Here’s something from TIME and we did an event at Harvard GSE with then-Ravens cornerback Domonique Foxworth.

Since then Brendan has coached for New England for a while and now the Chiefs, so he keeps turning up in Super Bowls.

At the Harvard event Brendan walked through some teach the skill then apply the skill work with a player. He showed practice video of the method and then game video of it being applied on a Sunday. It was a new player in the league at the time, former UVA standout Chris Long doing the learning, but you didn’t know that until you saw it run in the game jersey.

There are also some cultural lessons, too. Comfort with transparency and constant feedback for instance. Brendan, who coaches defense, worked his way up by helping struggling defenses improve. That gets you respect. In too many schools what gets you respect is teaching AP or gifted, not dropout recovery or 9th-grade remedial math or English, where the stakes are often highest for kids.

He started out as a high school teacher and football coach.

2 Replies to “Teaching And The Super Bowl”

  1. 1. Love Brendan!

    2. “what gets you respect is teaching AP or gifted, not dropout recovery or 9th-grade remedial math or English.”

    Great point. Soldiers and surgeons are respected for tougher assignments.

  2. Another interesting dynamic Mike is with military leaders – did they do new things, complicated things, or plow new ground or just take over existing structures and systems and run them well? The former seems better preparation for transferable skills to places where people just don’t snap to and do what you want.

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