Dawgs Have Championship Ingredients
January 07, 2018 | Football, The Frierson Files
By John Frierson
UGA Staff Writer
ATLANTA — With the Georgia Bulldogs fresh off a pulse-pounding, double-overtime win over Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl last Monday, I asked myself a simple question on the flight home from Los Angeles the next morning: What is it that makes a championship team a championship team?
Talent is critical, sure, but there has to be a lot more than that. So, in the days before Monday night's meeting with Alabama for the College Football Playoff national championship, I went looking for answers. I didn't have to look far.
This week I talked to four Georgia coaching legends: Suzanne Yoculan Leebern (gymnastics, 10 NCAA championships), Jack Bauerle (women's swimming and diving, seven NCAA titles) and Manuel Diaz (men's tennis, four NCAA titles) — a combined 21 NCAA championships between them — as well as Vince Dooley, coach of the Bulldogs' last national championship football team, in 1980.
Bauerle and Diaz are still going strong and still chasing championships. Bauerle's squad won the program's seventh NCAA title in 2016, and sent a lot of swimmers to the Rio Olympics, and Diaz's Bulldogs have reached the NCAA semifinals the past two seasons. Yoculan Leebern retired in 2009 after winning her 10th NCAA title, and fifth in a row, but she's now back as a volunteer assistant, working under the greatest Gymdog of them all, first-year coach Courtney Kupets Carter.
Dooley retired from coaching in 1988 and retired as athletic director in 2004, but he's still around football plenty, including regularly attending coach Kirby Smart's Monday news conference.
All four coaches know about winning and about building championship teams. Interviewed separately, all four touched on a lot of the same things, like leadership, culture, confidence and perseverance.
"What we saw [at the Rose Bowl] on Monday: leadership," Bauerle said. "The very best teams I've ever had, I've had very few meetings — the seniors sort of took over. I think it's really evident that the leadership on this [football] team is outstanding and a gigantic thing."
Bauerle was referring to the Bulldogs rallying from 31-14 down late in the first half to win, 54-48, in the second overtime. It tested Georgia's leadership, its confidence and its perseverance, and the Bulldogs passed.
"Everybody's got talent," Diaz said, "it's all about toughness and grit and culture and leadership."
Not long after she retired, Yoculan Leebern sat down and wrote out the key ingredients, "the common threads" to all 10 of her NCAA team titles. First, she said, was having a unified vision: "You see it, you say it, you do it." It's a mantra all of her teams heard, and lived.
The most important of all, she said, is to "not be distracted by your mistakes." Competitors are human and mistakes will be happen, but what separates the champions from the really good, she said, is often how teams and athletes respond to those mistakes.
"I think that's where most teams really falter: they fumble the ball, they fall off the beam, and the team reacts to that; the next competitor reacts to that or the next play the team reacts to that and then you start playing tight," Yoculan Leebern said.
After Oklahoma returned Sony Michel's fourth-quarter fumble for a touchdown and a 45-38 lead with 6:52 remaining, the Bulldogs didn't fold. They made clutch plays in the final minutes and forced overtime with a late touchdown.
Odds are, Georgia will face more adversity against an excellent Alabama team.
"I always tell our athletes, they have to be prepared for something to go wrong," Bauerle said. "This is a 60-minute game, we have a three-day NCAAs, and you're going to have a place where you're going to fail at some point during that game, and it's how they handle that. There is never a perfect game.
"Something's going to go astray and you're going to have to deal with it, and how you deal with that is going to be instrumental in whether they win or not."
You know which teams handle adversity well? Teams with great leadership, teams that are tight-knit and teams with a deeply ingrained culture.
"Certainly one of the key ingredients, more so in football than maybe in the other sports, is team unity," Dooley said. "Being able to work together and have great respect and appreciation for your teammates, and we've seen classic examples of that this year."
Two of Dooley's examples were the tight bond between senior running backs Nick Chubb and Michel, two guys that put egos aside to be great together, and how quarterback Jacob Eason has handled losing his starting job to Jake Fromm after Eason was injured in the season opener.
"[Eason] being a complete team man," Dooley said, "I think that is a vital factor in the success of the team."
Yoculan Leebern put it another way: "Team members being able to accept the different roles that they might have. Fromm is our quarterback and how's Eason handling that, what's his role and how's that playing into everything? The people that are not playing, they're ready to go if there's a problem; those people's attitude and confidence in the people on the field, their whole aura, their mentality, really affects the players that are on the field. Accepting your role, whatever that is, that everybody embraces their role, that's really important."
Dooley said his most close-knit team was the 1980 bunch that went 12-0 and beat Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl.
"They were close in school and they're still close," Dooley said.
 Now you might wonder, wouldn't a championship-winning team naturally be closer than most? Could be, but maybe it's that closeness that helped them become champions.
Part of the closeness of championship teams comes from each team's culture and respect for every member. A team loaded with talent that doesn't get along great, sooner or later cracks will show — often when the pressure is at its highest.
"For me, the one most important thing is your culture," Diaz said. "Some years you have more talent than others and sometimes other teams have more talent, but we've won plenty of championships without the most talented team, because of the mindset and the culture of our program.
"That's something you have to work on a daily basis. It's something that becomes part of each and every one of our players. Every one of our coaches exudes that, and that's something we make a priority."
We've all heard Smart and the other football players talk about chopping wood and keeping the main thing the main thing. Those lines are about distilling everything down to its simplest form, about dealing with the task at hand and moving on to the next one.
Senior linebacker Lorenzo Carter said Smart, who won four national championships while working under Nick Saban at Alabama, has talked to the team about what it takes to be great, to be a champion.
"There's one way to do it. If you want to be a champion, you've got to do things a certain way. And basically he told us that we have to do it, we don't have a choice," Carter said before the Rose Bowl.
There's no choice, Carter said, because there are no shortcuts to greatness.
"You can say you have a choice to stay in bed or hit the snooze button, but if you're trying to be great, that's an illusion. You don't really have a choice, you've got to do it," he said.
Along with everything else, Bauerle said, teams need "this strong belief that you have a shot." Championship teams, to earn the title, must believe it without a shadow of a doubt.
Junior wide receiver Terry Godwin said the team does believe — and has for a while now.
"We knew this summer or spring, ... we knew that this team was going to be special," he said. "We knew that we had a chance and a feeling that we were going to be here, and it's all coming true."
Now comes the final test of all that belief and culture, leadership and perseverance, a 60-minute test against a championship program. It's a test Georgia has all the ingredients to pass with flying colors.
UGA Staff Writer
ATLANTA — With the Georgia Bulldogs fresh off a pulse-pounding, double-overtime win over Oklahoma in the Rose Bowl last Monday, I asked myself a simple question on the flight home from Los Angeles the next morning: What is it that makes a championship team a championship team?
Talent is critical, sure, but there has to be a lot more than that. So, in the days before Monday night's meeting with Alabama for the College Football Playoff national championship, I went looking for answers. I didn't have to look far.
This week I talked to four Georgia coaching legends: Suzanne Yoculan Leebern (gymnastics, 10 NCAA championships), Jack Bauerle (women's swimming and diving, seven NCAA titles) and Manuel Diaz (men's tennis, four NCAA titles) — a combined 21 NCAA championships between them — as well as Vince Dooley, coach of the Bulldogs' last national championship football team, in 1980.
Bauerle and Diaz are still going strong and still chasing championships. Bauerle's squad won the program's seventh NCAA title in 2016, and sent a lot of swimmers to the Rio Olympics, and Diaz's Bulldogs have reached the NCAA semifinals the past two seasons. Yoculan Leebern retired in 2009 after winning her 10th NCAA title, and fifth in a row, but she's now back as a volunteer assistant, working under the greatest Gymdog of them all, first-year coach Courtney Kupets Carter.
Dooley retired from coaching in 1988 and retired as athletic director in 2004, but he's still around football plenty, including regularly attending coach Kirby Smart's Monday news conference.
All four coaches know about winning and about building championship teams. Interviewed separately, all four touched on a lot of the same things, like leadership, culture, confidence and perseverance.
"What we saw [at the Rose Bowl] on Monday: leadership," Bauerle said. "The very best teams I've ever had, I've had very few meetings — the seniors sort of took over. I think it's really evident that the leadership on this [football] team is outstanding and a gigantic thing."
Bauerle was referring to the Bulldogs rallying from 31-14 down late in the first half to win, 54-48, in the second overtime. It tested Georgia's leadership, its confidence and its perseverance, and the Bulldogs passed.
"Everybody's got talent," Diaz said, "it's all about toughness and grit and culture and leadership."
Not long after she retired, Yoculan Leebern sat down and wrote out the key ingredients, "the common threads" to all 10 of her NCAA team titles. First, she said, was having a unified vision: "You see it, you say it, you do it." It's a mantra all of her teams heard, and lived.
The most important of all, she said, is to "not be distracted by your mistakes." Competitors are human and mistakes will be happen, but what separates the champions from the really good, she said, is often how teams and athletes respond to those mistakes.
"I think that's where most teams really falter: they fumble the ball, they fall off the beam, and the team reacts to that; the next competitor reacts to that or the next play the team reacts to that and then you start playing tight," Yoculan Leebern said.
After Oklahoma returned Sony Michel's fourth-quarter fumble for a touchdown and a 45-38 lead with 6:52 remaining, the Bulldogs didn't fold. They made clutch plays in the final minutes and forced overtime with a late touchdown.
Odds are, Georgia will face more adversity against an excellent Alabama team.
"I always tell our athletes, they have to be prepared for something to go wrong," Bauerle said. "This is a 60-minute game, we have a three-day NCAAs, and you're going to have a place where you're going to fail at some point during that game, and it's how they handle that. There is never a perfect game.
"Something's going to go astray and you're going to have to deal with it, and how you deal with that is going to be instrumental in whether they win or not."
You know which teams handle adversity well? Teams with great leadership, teams that are tight-knit and teams with a deeply ingrained culture.
"Certainly one of the key ingredients, more so in football than maybe in the other sports, is team unity," Dooley said. "Being able to work together and have great respect and appreciation for your teammates, and we've seen classic examples of that this year."
Two of Dooley's examples were the tight bond between senior running backs Nick Chubb and Michel, two guys that put egos aside to be great together, and how quarterback Jacob Eason has handled losing his starting job to Jake Fromm after Eason was injured in the season opener.
"[Eason] being a complete team man," Dooley said, "I think that is a vital factor in the success of the team."
Yoculan Leebern put it another way: "Team members being able to accept the different roles that they might have. Fromm is our quarterback and how's Eason handling that, what's his role and how's that playing into everything? The people that are not playing, they're ready to go if there's a problem; those people's attitude and confidence in the people on the field, their whole aura, their mentality, really affects the players that are on the field. Accepting your role, whatever that is, that everybody embraces their role, that's really important."
Dooley said his most close-knit team was the 1980 bunch that went 12-0 and beat Notre Dame in the Sugar Bowl.
"They were close in school and they're still close," Dooley said.
 Now you might wonder, wouldn't a championship-winning team naturally be closer than most? Could be, but maybe it's that closeness that helped them become champions.
Part of the closeness of championship teams comes from each team's culture and respect for every member. A team loaded with talent that doesn't get along great, sooner or later cracks will show — often when the pressure is at its highest.
"For me, the one most important thing is your culture," Diaz said. "Some years you have more talent than others and sometimes other teams have more talent, but we've won plenty of championships without the most talented team, because of the mindset and the culture of our program.
"That's something you have to work on a daily basis. It's something that becomes part of each and every one of our players. Every one of our coaches exudes that, and that's something we make a priority."
We've all heard Smart and the other football players talk about chopping wood and keeping the main thing the main thing. Those lines are about distilling everything down to its simplest form, about dealing with the task at hand and moving on to the next one.
Senior linebacker Lorenzo Carter said Smart, who won four national championships while working under Nick Saban at Alabama, has talked to the team about what it takes to be great, to be a champion.
"There's one way to do it. If you want to be a champion, you've got to do things a certain way. And basically he told us that we have to do it, we don't have a choice," Carter said before the Rose Bowl.
There's no choice, Carter said, because there are no shortcuts to greatness.
"You can say you have a choice to stay in bed or hit the snooze button, but if you're trying to be great, that's an illusion. You don't really have a choice, you've got to do it," he said.
Along with everything else, Bauerle said, teams need "this strong belief that you have a shot." Championship teams, to earn the title, must believe it without a shadow of a doubt.
Junior wide receiver Terry Godwin said the team does believe — and has for a while now.
"We knew this summer or spring, ... we knew that this team was going to be special," he said. "We knew that we had a chance and a feeling that we were going to be here, and it's all coming true."
Now comes the final test of all that belief and culture, leadership and perseverance, a 60-minute test against a championship program. It's a test Georgia has all the ingredients to pass with flying colors.
John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files. He's also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.
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