Extra Points: The Mirror

Johnathan Robertson has made a career of buying, selling and managing businesses, of parsing balance sheets, interviewing CEOs and touring showrooms and production plants. Over three decades running money in private equity and venture capital funds in Miami, Robertson has seen it all.

"Why do some companies get more traction than others, why do some take off? What makes for a good business?" Robertson wonders. "I get that question all the time. The answer is, leadership."

Robertson, a walk-on Tar Heel running back from the early 1990s who later earned a law degree from Harvard, is addressing the Carolina football team one June evening in the Kenan Football Center. Of course, he draws a football parallel.

"Why do some teams compete and others shrink?" he asks. "Why are some so much more prepared for situational football than others? How do the best teams stay goal focused? How do some teams develop performance standards so much higher than others? How do they enforce higher standards? How do some teams just seem to will themselves to win?

"The answer to all those things is the same as in the business world—leadership."

But, Robertson says, it's a particular kind of leadership. He shows the team a graphic of a study from the Harvard Sports Analysis Collective developed through surveys and interviews with national championship teams.

"Talent by itself can get you six wins," he says. "Add great coaching and you can get to eight wins. But how do you get to 12 wins? How do you win championships?"

He pauses and glances around the room.

"The answer to that is player leadership. It's not leadership from the coaches. It comes from you guys in this room."

In other words, the answer's in the mirror.

He cites the views of Anson Dorrance, the winner of 20 national titles as the Tar Heel women's soccer coach: "The most attractive type of leadership to me is the student-athlete who is a coach on the field. I want a driving force who won't let standards slip. That's how teams with ordinary talent can win championships. Without leadership, even a team with great talent will struggle to become a champion."

Several weeks later, the 15 members of the team's Leadership Council are connected via Zoom with Joe McNamara, an ex-Marine who runs Impact, a leadership development and performance coaching consultancy based out of Bluffton, S.C., a 20-mile drive from the Marine installation at Parris Island. McNamara uses his experience in more than 100 combat deployments in Afghanistan and in mentoring leaders at Marine Corps boot camps to teach business groups and sports teams how to develop leadership and a championship culture. McNamara has been engaged with the Tar Heel Leadership Council since the spring with a half dozen or so workshops on-campus and via remote hookups.

Speaking just 10 days before the Tar Heels report for their 2022 preseason training camp, McNamara warns against the ills of complacency and tells them of a Marine getting accidentally shot in the stomach by a careless soldier "who got bored and complacent and made a stupid mistake" with his pistol. He reminds them that standards "slip an inch at a time, little things nudge you further and further away" from your goals. He cites the oft-quoted words of Vince Lombardi, that "winning is not a sometime thing, it's an all-the-time thing." He reminds them how the ill effects of the "bottom 10 percent" of any group can infect the entire team if poor attitudes and work habits are allowed to persist and fester. He stresses that the bedrocks of the team's three core values—passion, accountability and toughness—are to be protected at all costs. And he relates a prescient comment he heard recently from a colleague, a SEAL Team Six veteran, who said, "Accountability is the greatest form of compassion."

"If someone takes a play off, if he's sloppy or lazy, if you do not say something, you're failing your teammate," McNamara says. "This is your team. It will perform to the standards that you set. No one here has the desire to go 6-6 again (as the Tar Heels did in the regular season in 2021). You are carrying the weight of 6-6 on your shoulders. It's an awesome responsibility, but it gets heavy at times."

The voices and views of Robertson and McNamara are among the sparkplugs that Mack Brown and Kevin Donnalley, the program's director of leadership and engagement, have solicited and welcomed into Kenan Football Center the last six months. The bitter taste of a late-season loss at N.C. State, a bowl game defeat by South Carolina, and a final 6-7 record forced Brown to examine every element of the program. Ratcheting up the degree of precision, power and influence from the team's Leadership Council was chief among the initiatives.

"Everything I didn't like about last year, so far, I like about this year," Brown says. "I did not feel good standing here last year about where we were headed. And the expectations were sky-high. The standard was set but I didn't think our team and our staff were doing the things that we needed to do for some reason. I didn't do a good job, didn't get it changed. We've had the best spring, I think, we've ever had. The guys are hungry, they're eager, they're working so hard. And the leadership is better. We're doing a better job teaching leadership and guys are stepping up."

Robertson lettered in 1992 primarily as a special teams player and jokes that, "In my day, the best player on the team was Natrone Means. I was probably the worst." But his success in the business and philanthropic worlds gives him a perspective that resonates with today's players. He was part of the early 1990s era teams that flipped from back-to-back 1-10 seasons in 1988-89 during Brown's first tenure running the program to launching into a run of seven winning seasons in eight years. He points to the back of the Swofford Auditorium at Dwight Hollier, a linebacker from 1988-91 and now an associate athletic director at Carolina, as being one of the catalysts of the 1990-91 teams.

"There is enough talent in this room to win a championship," Robertson says. "The question is whether you'll hold each other accountable. Guys like Dwight decided this was their team. There were 10 or 12 guys who said they would not let that team fail. They decided to put off short-term gratification. They learned to call out their teammates if needed. When it's player corrected, that's when it takes off."

The Tar Heels report Thursday, July 28, and take to the field the next day for their first practice leading to their Aug. 27 opener in Kenan Stadium against Florida A&M. They'll be fueled by the dark cloud of stumbling in 2021 after being listed at No. 14 in the Associated Press preseason poll a year ago. And they'll be governed by what they've learned in the offseason about leadership. Brown and his coaches can draw up the Xs-and-Os. But the players have to be accountable, passionate and tough—and not let their amigos slide.

"Accountability is recognizing your wrongs and fixing them," linebacker Cedric Gray says. "It's not only recognizing yours but holding other people to the standards we have set as a team. We all get tired sometimes, we all slip up, we all make mistakes. As a leader, you have to hold teammates accountable. You hone in. You say, 'This is not okay, this is not our standard, we need to do better.'"

Linebacker Power Echols speaks of the "love of the grind," how he'd gladly "go to war" with his teammates. He's confident that anyone forming an opinion that the 2021 Tar Heels were a "soft team" needs to be ready to recalibrate in 2022.

"Last year was last year," he says. "We don't have to say much. I'll just say that they'll see a difference. This year is more about let's do it and show it rather than let's talk about it. The camaraderie, the vibe, it's different this year."

Certainly no one is suggesting a football game is on the same sphere of importance or life-changing reality of military engagements. But there are certainly some parallels. Football and battle require constant "debriefs"—post-action analysis of what went right and wrong. The participants in McNamara's view are always "men"—never "players" or "kids" or "student-athletes."

"There is a different expectation and responsibility as a man," McNamara says. "There aren't a lot of expectations for kids and boys."

"In the military and in football, you've got to work together as a team, work together as a unit," receiver Josh Downs says. "If someone is out of line, you cannot be Mr. Nice Guy, you can't be everyone's favorite as a leader. You have to be a good leader and be a good voice."

Downs in one conversation with McNamara said he had a "no days off" policy.

"You cannot pour into your team from an empty cup," McNamara says. "Josh's cup is certainly full. So are the cups of the other leaders on this team. They're hungry and now they understand it's on them."

McNamara will watch closely this fall to see if the Tar Heels master the accountability issue and learn to work through complex problems in the heat of moment. Shared adversity, he calls it. "Anyone can lead when it's 70 degrees and sunny," he says.

It's fixing to turn 95 muggy degrees on turf.

"I think this part can be the game-changer—fixing the leadership piece," McNamara says. "This team is incredibly talented. Can these leaders figure out how to be that heartbeat and figure out how to be that person that can lead up the chain of command, up to the coaches, but also down to their teammates? If they do that, they can be incredibly successful."

Chapel Hill writer Lee Pace enters his 33rd year writing features on the Carolina football program under the "Extra Points" banner. He is the author of "Football in a Forest" and reports from the sidelines of Tar Heel Sports Network broadcasts. Follow him at @LeePaceTweet and write him at leepace7@gmail.com

Players Mentioned

Josh Downs

Power Echols

Cedric Gray

Related Videos