Tony Dungy

A successful career in the NFL would seem to be a dream come true. Money, notoriety, and accolades. Tony Dungy was living that dream, coaching the perennially losing Tampa Bay Buccaneers to a regular spot in the playoffs. It seemed that everything was working out as planned, until he was fired for not winning the championship. Just what was he going to do now?

Eventually repeating the same success as head coach of the Indianapolis Colts, Dungy still battled against doubters in his abilities. Could a Super Bowl victory be the only place of redemption? Or was there another, better way, to understand the big picture of his life?

2005 Season. We’re the number one seat. We’ve got a great team—a team really without any weaknesses. We’ve got home field advantage. Everyone is saying it’s our year. We end up falling behind the Steelers in our first round game. We march back, we’ve got a chance to tie the game up and go into overtime. And Mike Vandajet is our kicker, extremely accurate guy. Never misses a big kick. He misses, and we lose by three points. Pittsburg goes on to win the Superbowl.

And now you kind of hear from everybody, “Well the Colts are never going to win one. They’ve had all of these teams that were really good. But something is missing, that window of opportunity is going to close up on them.” I can remember thinking as good of a team as we had, if we don’t’ win it now, we may never win. And I’m going to have to be okay with that.

I think you can glorify the Lord in every circumstance. How you respond to failure, and how you respond to disappointment says a lot more than how you do in successes. God has taken some unexpected things in my life, over and over. And really, I think I tried to find out if I was going to stay with Him, or if I was ever going to say, “This is too much. I’m going to go my own way.”

I started coaching when I was 25 years old. And probably by the time I had been an assistant coach for ten, eleven years, the word was getting out: This guy might be a good head coach. And I started to interview for head coaching jobs, but everybody was looking for the stereotypical coach. The guy that was going to deman perfection from his players, who was going to outwardly show emotion and everything they expected to see in a head coach. And that wasn’t me.

How much does this mean to you? How much are you prepared to sacrifice to lead this team? What’s it worth to you in life? And you know what the man wants to hear, but it’s not really what’s in your heart. I’m going to give you a lot. I believe I’m going to give you a championship, but no, the team is not going to be the most important thing to me. When I was called to interview in Tampa, I told Lauren, I’m not going to get this job. I don’t know anybody there, I don’t have any connections, and so when I got the job. I said what we want is a Super Bowl and I believe we will. I want to do it the right way. I want to do it so that our young men and it’s something our community is going to be proud of. I want to do it in such a way that we’re doing the right thing with our families and it’s going to be a win-win situation. I think it can be done and I think it can be done here.

I came down feeling like this is where God wants us. We’re going to win. Everything’s going to great because this is God’s plan, it isn’t our plan.

That’s to me one of the hardest things in life when you have an idea of the way things are going to go. What you hope for, what you dream about that you pray for. And it doesn’t come through. That’s when it’s easy to get disappointed with God. Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t it pan out the way I thought it would? It was one of the biggest disappointments of my life, because I felt like the Lord had brought me down to Tampa. And it worked out, just not the way I thought it would.

I didn’t know at the time when I got fired what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to look for something in Tampa outside of football? Or was I supposed to look for another job in another city? And Jim Esray the owner of the Colts called me and he said we’re willing to make a change in the coach of the Indianapolis Colts, and you’re the guy I want to be our coach. I believe in all of the things that you believe in, and we want to do things the right way. We want to win but win with the right kind of people. And you’re the one to lead us. And that was a message that I really needed to hear. My favorite passage in the bible is where Christ says, “What would it profit a man to gain the whole world but forfeit his soul?” In thiry-one years in the national football league, I’ve seen that a lot. So that was the thing I wanted to tell my players. Don’t put this game first. Don’t make football everything in your life. How we relate to each other, how we live, what you have in your heart for eternity, how you’re responding to the Lord, that’s the important thing. This game will take care of itself. Even though we for four or five years, had those disappointments at the end of each year, I always talked about doubting ourselves and it’s easier said than done. But, I always talked about wiping the slate clean, and starting over. Every team is a new team. Every team was going to build its own identity. I never gave up. It was never to the point where I said, “we’re not going to win this thing.” But I got to the point where if this is what God has in store, I have to be okay with it. I’ve preached that to the players/ I’ve said that winning isn’t the most important thing. I’ve got to really believe that. And it can be a bitter pill to swallow, but I’ve got to be okay with that.

I’ve been through a lot, and our slogan at that time was, “It’s our time.” Those disappointments were in the past, but now, it’s our time, and we’ve got to seize the moment. And we did that. Amazing thing in the locker room—Super bowls are so different. As soon as you win, the celebration starts, you have a ceremony out on the field. It takes maybe forty minutes to get everybody back together. Many of our players were just waiting. They said, “Coach, we’ve got to finish this one like we have every other game.” And we asked that the reporters set their cameras down and let us pray. And I was so proud of the guys for hanging in there and them saying this is what we want to do, we want to honor the Lord in this victory, and we did that. One photographer didn’t honor our wishes and took a picture of it and that picture went all over the internet—all over and it was really a great tribute to what that team had in mind in putting the Lord first—even at the Super Bowl.

Every decision I make in life, I’m going to make it through the lens of Jess Christ. I’m going to put him out there first, and my own feelings, my own thoughts, my own desires are going to be second. It’s that simple. And if we do that, then Christ promised that he would come into our lives and guide us and be our head coach and lead us to that victory, that ultimate victory.