Anyway, apparently everyone who cares about the Dallas Cowboys is upset because they haven't really done anything during "Legal Tampering". The Cowboys are the league's most valuable franchise (which they've been for the past 15 years in a row, despite the fact that they haven't won the Super Bowl since 1996, which was also the last season that they played in the NFC Championship. It's not that they are a bad team, like say the Carolina Panthers or even the Chicago Bears. As a matter of fact, they've won 12 games each of the past three seasons and have a 98-65 W-L record since 2014! So, why are the fans upset? Why are all the talk radio hosts having a field day with the Cowboys' relative inactivity during the last couple of days? Why haven't the Cowboys won or even played in a Super Bowl? Most everyone, including some of the players on the Cowboys roster, provide a one-word answer. Culture.
I've talked a lot about the importance of organizational culture in previous posts (see most recently "Nelson's Touch" from a few weeks ago), so all of this talk about a potential problem with the culture that exists within the locker room at "America's Team" is of great interest. The superstar linebacker Micah Parsons called out the team's culture on his podcast "The Edge" following the Cowboys embarassing loss to the Green Bay Packers in the Wild Card Round of the NFL Play-offs on January 14, 2024. Parsons said, "We need to have way more accountability. I just think we let things slide too often because we know we’re good. That’s all about me. I want to change the culture. I want to change the identity of what the Cowboys are. Cut the extra stuff out, I just want people to lock in for 22 weeks. Seven months can change your life. And I’m ready."
He went on, "The talent is there. We got to have discipline and that will to win. We got to be together. And we have to have the leaders. I feel like that was the difference, and it showed. I got to step up. You got to step up. Everybody has to step up. We got to all look in this mirror. We got to deal with this one."
Earlier in the month on ESPN's First Take, Cowboys defensive end DeMarcus Lawrence suggested that one of the reasons for the team's unexpected and embarassing loss to the Packers was fatigue. He claimed, "In all honestly, I think the main thing is we was burnt out. Long season...the legs get tired." Of course, Micah Parsons had a response. On ESPN's The Stephen A. Smith Show (alson on ESPN), Parsons countered, "What I feel like, once that regular season ends and they get in playoffs, you’re supposed to get rejuvenated. Like, this is a whole new me, whole new you. We need to get ready — and that’s part of that culture stuff that I was talking about, where I want to dive into the players that we gotta change. You should never go into a game like, ‘I’m tired. I’m ready to go home.’ Because that’s exactly what’s going to happen and it did happen. I’m coming to the game like, ‘I got four more weeks left. I don’t know what y’all got, but I got four more weeks left."
Sports Talk Radio had a field day with all of this. And it all eventually got back to the Cowboys' quarterback (and supposed team leader) Dak Prescott, who said, "The culture is high, honestly. The culture is high from my standpoint. I say that in the sense that I don't know all of the talk that's been said, so I don't want to go into a good, bad or whatever. If y'all know of anybody, I'm not the one listening and I try not to."
In other words, Dak Prescott either disagrees with Micah Parsons, doesn't understand the meaning or even the importance of culture, or is just not paying attention to what is being said by his teammates in the media. Regardless of which of these is the case, it's clear to me that the Dallas Cowboys have a HUGE problem with culture in their locker room. And if they don't find some players who can bring leadership and culture (for more on how leaders such as Dak Prescott should set the tone, see The Captain Class by Sam Walker) to help address these issues, they won't be finding their way back to the Super Bowl anytime soon. Sports teams with good talent and excellent culture will beat teams with excellent talent and poor culture. As legendary Notre Dame football coach Knute Rockne said, "I play not my eleven best, but my best eleven."
Every group, team, or organization has a certain culture, often defined as a set of beliefs, norms, attitudes, and behaviors that can be summarized by the statement "the way we do things around here." Nicholas Christakis provided the best definition of culture that I've seen in his book, Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society. Christakis say, "Culture may be defined as the whole set of ideas produced by a group, ideas that are usually transmitted socially and that are capable of affecting individual behavior." In other words, the behaviors of all the individuals in a group help determine the group's culture, but just as importantly, the group's culture in turn affects the behavior of each of the individuals in the group.
As I've said numerous times in the past, having the right culture is critically important. Making sure that everyone in the group is on the proverbial same page is critically important. Culture does indeed eat strategy for lunch, and if the leaders within the Cowboys locker room don't address their culture fairly quickly, they too will get eaten for lunch.
No comments:
Post a Comment