squandered opportunity after opportunity, in typical fashion. If their defense doesn’t make something happen right now, this game will effectively be over. San Diego has the ball on their own twenty-yard line, and the Chargers’ quarterback, Stan Humphries, is preparing to lead a drive that, he hopes, will put the game away. The play clock begins, and Humphries is poised to take the snap.
But Dungy isn’t looking at Humphries. Instead, he’s watching his own players align into a formation they have spent months perfecting. Traditionally, football is a game of feints and counterfeints, trick plays and misdirection. Coaches with the thickest playbooks and most complicated schemes usually win. Dungy, however, has taken the opposite approach. He isn’t interested in complication or obfuscation. When Dungy’s defensive players line up, it is obvious to everyone exactly which play they are going to use.
Dungy has opted for this approach because, in theory, he doesn’t need misdirection. He simply needs his team to be faster than everyone else. In football, milliseconds matter. So instead of teaching his players hundreds of formations, he has taught them only a handful, but they have practiced over and over until the behaviors are automatic. When his strategy works, his players can move with a speed that is impossible to overcome. [69]
But only when it works. If his players think too much or hesitate or second-guess their instincts, the system falls apart. And so far, Dungy’s players have been a mess.
This time, however, as the Bucs line up on the twenty-yard line, something is different. Take Regan Upshaw, a Buccaneer defensive end who has settled into a three-point stance on the scrimmage line. Instead of looking up and down the line, trying to absorb as much information as possible, Upshaw is looking only at the cues that Dungy taught him to focus on. First, he glances at the outside foot of the opposite lineman (his toes are back, which means he is preparing to step backward and block while the quarterback passes); next, Upshaw looks at the lineman’s shoulders (rotated slightly inward), and the space between him and the next player (a fraction narrower than expected).
Upshaw has practiced how to react to each of these cues so many times that, at this point, he doesn’t have to think about what to do. He just follows his habits.
San Diego’s quarterback approaches the line of scrimmage and glances right, then left, barks the count and takes the ball. He drops back five steps and stands tall, swiveling his head, looking for an open receiver. Three seconds have passed since the play started. The stadium’s eyes and the television cameras are on him.
So most observers fail to see what’s happening among the Buccaneers. As soon as Humphries took the snap, Upshaw sprang into action. Within the first second of the play, he darted right, across the line of scrimmage, so fast the offensive lineman couldn’t block him. Within the next second, Upshaw ran four more paces downfield, his steps a blur. In the next second, Upshaw moved three strides closer to the quarterback, his path impossible for the offensive lineman to predict.
As the play moves into its fourth second, Humphries, the San Diego quarterback, is suddenly exposed. He hesitates, sees Upshaw from the corner of his eye. And that’s when Humphries makes his mistake. He starts
Humphries spots a teammate, a rookie tight end named Brian Roche, twenty yards downfield. There’s another San Diego receiver much closer, waving his arms, calling for the ball. The short pass is the safe choice. Instead, Humphries, under pressure, performs a split-second analysis, cocks his arm, and heaves to Roche.
That hurried decision is precisely what Dungy was hoping for. As soon as the ball is in the air, a Buccaneer safety named John Lynch starts moving. Lynch’s job was straightforward: When the play started, he ran to a particular point on the field and waited for his cue. There’s enormous pressure to improvise in this situation. But Dungy has drilled Lynch until his routine is automatic. And as a result, when the ball leaves the quarterback’s hands, Lynch is standing ten yards from Roche, waiting.
As the ball spins through the air, Lynch reads his cues-the direction of the quarterback’s face mask and hands, the spacing of the receivers-and starts moving before it’s clear where the ball will land. Roche, the San Diego receiver, springs forward, but Lynch cuts around him and intercepts the pass. Before Roche can react, Lynch takes off down the field toward the Chargers’ end zone. The other Buccaneers are perfectly positioned to clear his route. Lynch runs 10, then 15, then 20, then almost 25 yards before he is finally pushed out of bounds. The entire play has taken less than ten seconds.
Two minutes later, the Bucs score a touchdown, taking the lead for the first time all game. Five minutes later, they kick a field goal. In between, Dungy’s defense shuts down each of San Diego’s comeback attempts. The Buccaneers win, 25 to 17, one of the biggest upsets of the season.
At the end of the game, Lynch and Dungy exit the field together.
“It feels like something was different out there,” Lynch says as they walk into the tunnel.
“We’re starting to believe,” Dungy replies.
II.
To understand how a coach’s focus on changing habits could remake a team, it’s necessary to look outside the world of sports. Way outside, to a dingy basement on the Lower East Side of New York City in 1934, where one of the largest and most successful attempts at wide-scale habit change was born.
Sitting in the basement was a thirty-nine-year-old alcoholic named Bill Wilson. [70] [71] Years earlier, Wilson had taken his first drink during officers’ training camp in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where he was learning to fire machine guns before getting shipped to France and World War I. Prominent families who lived near the base often invited officers to dinner, and one Sunday night, Wilson attended a party where he was served rarebit and beer. He was twenty-two years old and had never had alcohol before. The only polite thing, it seemed, was to drink the glass served to him. A few weeks later, Wilson was invited to another elegant affair. Men were in tuxedos, women were flirting. A butler came by and put a Bronx cocktail-a combination of gin, dry and sweet vermouth, and orange juice-into Wilson’s hand. He took a sip and felt, he later said, as if he had found “the elixir of life.” [72]
By the mid-1930s, back from Europe, his marriage falling apart and a fortune from selling stocks vaporized, Wilson was consuming three bottles of booze a day. On a cold November afternoon, while he was sitting in the gloom, an old drinking buddy called. Wilson invited him over and mixed a pitcher of pineapple juice and gin. [73] He poured his friend a glass.
His friend handed it back. He’d been sober for two months, he said.
Wilson was astonished. He started describing his own struggles with alcohol, including the fight he’d gotten into at a country club that had cost him his job. He had tried to quit, he said, but couldn’t manage it. He’d been to detox and had taken pills. He’d made promises to his wife and joined abstinence groups. None of it worked. How, Wilson asked, had his friend done it?
“I got religion,” the friend said. He talked about hell and temptation, sin and the devil. “Realize you are licked, admit it, and get willing to turn your life over to God.”
Wilson thought the guy was nuts. “Last summer an alcoholic crackpot; now, I suspected, a little cracked about religion,” he later wrote. When his friend left, Wilson polished off the booze and went to bed.
A month later, in December 1934, Wilson checked into the Charles B. Towns Hospital for Drug and Alcohol Addictions, an upscale Manhattan detox center. A physician started hourly infusions of a hallucinogenic drug called belladonna, then in vogue for the treatment of alcoholism. Wilson floated in and out of consciousness on a bed in a small room.
Then, in an episode that has been described at millions of meetings in cafeterias, union halls, and church basements, Wilson began writhing in agony. For days, he hallucinated. The withdrawal pains made it feel as if insects were crawling across his skin. He was so nauseous he could hardly move, but the pain was too intense to stay still. “If there is a God, let Him show Himself!” Wilson yelled to his empty room. “I am ready to do anything. Anything!” At that moment, he later wrote, a white light filled his room, the pain ceased, and he felt as if he were on a mountaintop, “and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing. [74] And then it burst upon me that I was a free man. Slowly the ecstasy subsided. I lay on the bed, but now for a time I was in another world, a new world of consciousness.”
