10. The biggest gap between Alabama and everyone else occurred before the free market of NIL. Take from that what you will 👀

9. Beware the hidden graveyard. A million teams copied the mythical 4th quarter program and sucked. Alabama themselves abandoned it and still curb stomped everyone and won a natty. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg famously dropped out of school and made hundreds of billions of dollars. But they were extremely ruthless, high IQ individuals with deep pockets and outrageously strong personal networks. You are not Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg, stay in school. You are also not Nick Saban. You don't have his money, access to talent, support stuff, or organisational culture. That's the real driver of championships. Have those things in place, you can do whatever fitness work you like.

8. When people say something is scary or stressful, what they're really saying is they lack confidence. There is no rational reason to lack confidence or be afraid when you are are absolutely certain of the outcome. What is confidence? An indisputable body of evidence of previous success in similar conditions. Whatever task or set of conditions mentally broke you, water it down until you CAN do it. Keep doing it again and again until you can do it in your sleep. Now turn up the intensity and keep repeating that process until eventually you're training at the same or a higher level of intensity than you're experiencing in competition. How could you help but expect success and feel confident (and therefore appear tough) when you've already done something just as difficult in training 1000 times before? It took 3 years for Saban to win a conference or national title at Alabama. It wasn't the 4th quarter stuff that built the mental ability to do so. It was their youngest guys having played and demonstrated success to themselves for 30+ games in front of ~100,000 people.

7. Did you ever notice how nobody questions the mental toughness of the winners? People only ever question the mental toughness of the losers. But I've met plenty of basket case winners, and I've met some very tough losers. People mistake winning for toughness and losing for weakness. The assumption is that because teams can close out a tight game they MUST be mentally tough or vice versa. True mental toughness IMO is minimizing the difference between how good you CAN play on your best day and how you play when you're under the most intense psychological stress. Your ceiling might suck, but if you get every drop out of yourself under the bright lights, you're tough regardless of the result. Comparatively, you might have all the talent in the world and still be able to win, because you're still better than the other guy even after a big stress related drop. Nick Saban took already talented players and pushed the performance ceiling MUCH higher because he is a master of technical and tactical development for football. Who is to say what was performance versus what was mental toughness? Based on the jump to the NFL for Alabama players, probably more the former than the latter.

6. Understand the difference between what builds toughness and what expresses toughness. I've been fortunate enough to spend time around, train with, and speak to a number of soldiers who work at the highest levels of special forces. A commonality is that they all believed that all the callisthenics, cold water, sleep deprivation, and abuse DIDN'T build toughness. It just revealed who didn't want to be there. The military doesn't want to spend millions of dollars training a soldier who isn't already tough, who doesn't want to be there with every drop of their being. The hell week type activities are to weed out who is not going to be a sound investment of those resources. Once they've selected their candidates, how do they turn them into elite fighters? Scaled and progressive exposure to the exact same thing that it is they'll be doing in their job: gun in hand, execute skills, make decisions, communicate, maintain composure under psychological pressure. One guy told me they started so slowly in the kill house that they were penalised for not walking heel to toe on every single step. But eventually they earned the right to run.

5. It's a fact that all stimuli that don't break you, with sufficient exposure, become desensitizing.... Throw someone out of a plane on their first skydive, their heart rate will be near max. Put them back on the plane and throw them out again, their HR will be a little bit less. Keep doing it again and again. Eventually, their heart rate will barely budge. Same task, same individual, but the stress is gone because they are desensitized, they know what to expect, they've survived it so many times before. If your athletes crumble under intense psychological pressure, its possible they lack the familiarity of those bright lights. They haven't built those mental calluses yet. Build mental calluses the same way you build physical calluses- regular exposure to stuff that rubs up against you. No amount of emotionless exercise against zero competition with no skill or decision making can help you build familiarity with the intense competition of sport.

4. Mental toughness is situation specific. Two stories to back up that statement: 1. I was once talking to a professional MMA fighter after a muay thai session. When he found out that I'd coached pro rugby athletes he said "Wow, those guys are tough, you'd never catch me on a rugby pitch". 2. A golf coach I worked with played a round with a Navy SEAL. He confessed to my colleague that he fell to pieces on the green and he had no idea how the golf coach maintained his composure. Whatever it is you want to be mentally tough for, you build that toughness by doing the exact same thing in training. The less similar the training task, the less likely it is you're going to transfer to competition. Football requires athletes to execute tactical schemes and technical skills against live opposition, at speed, under intense physical and emotional stress. Ask yourself: are wall sits, pushing a sled, running, callisthenics or any other off-season bullshit preparing you for that arena?

3. Mental toughness is a term so nebulous as to be useless. Is the ability to tolerate pain high intensity exercise a feature of mental toughness? Sure. Is the ability to do boring, repetitive stuff and control your emotions and impulses also a feature of mental toughness? Everyone would say yes. Let's take a look at Jonny Hendricks- NCAA champion wrestler, UFC champion, professional fighter and now cop. Is he mentally tough? Everyone would say yes. He was also notorious for not being able to control his eating and stick to a diet in camp, and missed weight numerous times throughout his career. Everyone would agree that is not mentally tough. How can the same guy be mentally tough and weak at the same time? Because it's a nebulous umbrella term we use to describe a bunch of different qualities. What does 4th quarter bullshit style training tax? Maybe pain tolerance at a push, but nothing much else. I would hazard a guess that if you can make it all to the way to Alabama in a collision sport like football, an all the youth and highschool training up to that point, you're OK with pain. The game naturally filters those kids out. My experience and the media circus around football would would suggest there are much bigger problems with the emotional control, cognitive focus, lifestyle habits, communication etc aspects of mental toughness than the ability to deal with physical discomfort. There are HOF players who lacked the emotional control to not murder family members or put down drugs and alcohol. There are very good pro and college players who can tolerate high levels of suffering but who crumble under bright lights. If you think running 110s fixes all that, good luck.

2. Focus on what makes you tired. Whatever it is that most fatigues you in your sport and position is what you should focus on in conditioning, especially in high intensity as this is where mechanical efficiencies, pacing strategies and psychological comfort/exposure can be found. What makes football athletes tired? Sprinting, changing direction, collision and contact efforts against heavy, live, resisting bodies. Closer to the line demands more of the latter and less of the former. Further from the line demands more of the former and less of the latter. Repeat sub-maximal efforts with little or no changes of direction against bodyweight resistance only does not tally with sport or positional demands. Run hill sprints, play agility games and races, wrestle, push sleds.

10 reasons the 4th quarter was a bullshit and not a driver of Nick Saban or Alabama's success: 1. Football is typically 5s of very high intensity effort, followed by 30s of recovery, for ~6 plays. Then you get a long break of several minutes. That's tough on your alactic and aerobic energy pathways. You train these with very high intensity, short duration efforts and more sustained, lower intensity, easy to recover from efforts respectively. Training to sustain plays much longer than football, with less rest than football, for much higher volumes than football probably isn't making you better at football. That would be like running repeat 800s if your goal is to win the 100m. Will you occasionally have to prepare for worst case scenarios like back to back 3 and outs? Or goal line to goal line drives? Yes, but there's been one 20 play drive in the NFL this century. The more you prepare for a worst case scenario that simply won't occur, the more you detract from a typical case scenario that WILL occur. Do you always need to train in a highly specific fashion that looks like the sport to improve performance? No, but living in the middle zone of intensity detracts form the development of the other 2 systems and should be limited to a few weeks per year, not several months of off-season which is your best opportunity to develop underlying physical qualities. Want proof it can be done? @MattRheaPhD is on record saying there's basically zero conditioning component to football (not sure I would go that far but anyway) and he was part of the undefeated national championship staff.... AT ALABAMA. The common denominator is everything else that made them a great organisation (chiefly the coach, staff, roster and money).