Chris Petersen reflects on the busyness, the imbalance, and the ‘out of control’ recruiting grind of college football
from The Athletic (https://theathletic.com to subscribe)
Chris Petersen, in 14 seasons as a head coach, went 147-38, and that included five top-10 seasons and nine in the top 20. Petersen spent three decades in coaching before he stunned many when he decided to step down as coach at Washington a little more than a year ago. Petersen sat down with The Athleticto share his perspective on, among many other things, why he decided to walk away from coaching; what he’s been doing since; and what he’s learned about work-life balance in college football.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What has been your journey since you announced you were stepping down at Washington?
Chris Petersen: The first thing is, you step out of it, and then COVID-19 hits. I’m getting a bunch of phone calls, people saying, ‘This is brilliant! How did you know? This is the perfect time to get out.’ I’m thinking, wait a minute. Everybody’s coaching from home, and if you do have games, there’s going to be no fans, I can probably do this … jokingly. I was like — ooof! — that was another lucky decision that I made, because that obviously upended everything, and just where I was mentally, when I said at my news conference why I was getting out of this, is because I just need to figure some things out, and I need to figure out why I wasn’t enjoying it like I needed to enjoy it.
I knew I wasn’t operating at my best, and that’s always going to affect your team, for sure. Before COVID, I really had some plans to travel and vacation with my wife, and also go see some people and talk to a bunch of coaches and leaders and just learn more. Then, you get locked down. But in hindsight, I’d say that was probably a blessing for me, because it really did just slow me down. I still was able to read a lot and talk to a lot of people and reflect and figure some things out.
If there is such a thing for a football coach — I feel like there kind of is, and some people are better at compartmentalizing where they are in the calendar — but I felt like you were different. Were you in a much better place mentally in the offseasons because you can kind of search and ponder and experience some of those things that you’re probably looking for? Or is it just still football clouding everything?
I think in the offseason, things do slow down a bit so that you can catch your breath and have a chance to think about your program and your staff and your players. I always liked that part of the season. Just trying to figure out how to tweak things and how to make things better. When you get into the season, you’re in such a tight schedule; it’s just one thing to the next. It’s very hard to have philosophical or big changes during the season. It’s just tweaking here and there. I probably like the offseason better, but the problem with coaching in college football is there’s just no downtime. When you are in the offseason, recruiting has ramped up so dramatically that you just always feel like you’re behind. There’s always another guy somebody wants you to talk to. And then you got 120 guys, so there’s always a bunch of issues going on with your team. It’s just a different set of problems.
Just looking back on things, you just get hung up on stuff that doesn’t really matter in the big scheme of things. It matters at that moment, but really, it’s just not going to matter. There are so many coaches that are trying to try to fix things and control things and are trying to get things as good as they can. But there’s just so much that’s truly out of your control, and you got to be able to let go. I thought one of the things that I learned … something that I needed to really come to grips with, and then figure out how to do that better, just controlling the controllables better. It’s messages that we preach to our players that I didn’t do well enough.
You seem to be one of the most curious people and well-read in terms of football coaches. But hearing what you said about school, there feels a disconnect there.
I just wasn’t learning. The disconnect was that I couldn’t see what I was going to really do with some of this school learning. Had I known that I was going to get into coaching, heck, I would have tried to get a Ph.D. in psychology. But I wasn’t thinking I was going to coach so I took that off the table. Then, I’m thinking, ‘Well, I like the human mind and how I help people interact and the unpredictability, and trying to figure that all out. But I just couldn’t connect the dots into it, like a vision for my life. For Built For Life (Petersen’s off-field program at Washington), that is really hard work, coming up with what you think this thing is going to look like for you down the road. It’s always changing, but at least to get you started, I think you have to be involved with some different things.
My dad was a coach and I’m thinking, ‘I am not doing it.’ I’m not going to let 18- to 22-year-olds control happiness. That’s how I thought about it. I didn’t think about what I was doing for them and the teaching component and actually helping them do some things that maybe I struggled with. You’re right, there is a disconnect, and really going through it, I wasn’t this curious about things (then). That’s what it’s all about, and along the line, it’s just all about learning. (Now) I’m just always curious how people do things in a successful way, and why that works for them.
Photo: James Snook / USA Today
When we talked before, we talked about the words happy and happiness. You had said you were happy a lot but that wasn’t exactly what you were looking for. As you take a step back and go, OK, all this stuff is going right and life’s going by fast, what is the thing that you feel like you weren’t really able to savor, or take advantage of, or missing out on?
Balance. I’ve had a couple of different definitions of success and I’m always curious what people think about what success is to them. But I had one that was, success is to be able to control the quality and balance of your life. I really believed in that, and I would be so frustrated that I knew that that was true to me, and I wasn’t living that. I wasn’t able to live it in this job because, even when I would come home at night, my mind was 1,000 miles away trying to fix things back at the office.
That’s what I worry about in college football to this day. The recruiting part is out of control. So many coaches I’ve talked to said that because of COVID (restrictions) it’s actually been great in terms of recruiting (because recruiting has slowed down). It’s recharged them, even though Zoom has worn them out. So, how do we create this balance in college football?
Regarding recruiting. There are some head coaches who aren’t like ‘stop and smell the roses’ guys with how they are wired. To some degree, those guys are setting the bar; it’s almost like you’re running a race where they are sprinting all the time and you have to try to keep pace. At your alma mater (UC Davis), I’m guessing Dan Hawkins is not dealing with the same frenetic recruiting. Would you maybe have found what your heart is looking for if it was not at a place where recruiting was like this?
That’s a great question. Can that even be done in an arena like this? You hear about all the guys in pro football, and every coach in there will tell you that it’s a better quality of life in terms of the whole calendar. The season is the same, but once you’re out of the season, way different. The things about that really inspired me and touched my heart, the Built For Life type things, where you’re helping the kids, you’re probably not doing that in NFL. That was one of the reasons that I just did not gravitate towards the NFL. I think it is a tough arena to create balance in, but it always comes back to us as individuals to make our life better. I could have done some things to build better mental skills.
In a podcast with Brock Huard, you referenced a passage from a book (Anthony de Mello’s “The Way To Love”) about the people who are on the bus and the shades are all down. They are basically missing out. The metaphors are pretty powerful. I hear that and I’m like, looking down at my phone. When I wake up in the morning, I look at Twitter, and Twitter isn’t always this way but it’s often toxic stuff. It just has a tendency to put you in a bad place. And yet many of us feel compelled to keep checking it. I think about that in regards to how precious time really is. One of my biggest fears is waking up and realizing I’m 73 years old and wondering where did the time go.
No question. Or look back and say, uh-oh, I did this all wrong. That was the thing that I was coming to grips with. You could go and win a lot of games, compete for championships and do good work, but at the end of the day, you feel like, where did my life go? I didn’t do this the right way, and there’s a better way to do this. I kept feeling that and was having a hard time getting clarity with it.
When I first came to Washington … that would have been about eight years ago now. I think everybody is starting to, you know, eight years ago, (notice) there’s so much more anxiety and depression in our young kids. The high schools are feeling it. The colleges are feeling it. Everybody is like, what is going on? Our quality of life is going up. Then you hear about all the social media and the effect that it has. That’s where they’re living. I just was having a hard time wrapping my brain around that because I was never a social media guy. The only social media I’ve ever been on was because of recruiting, because of football, my job. I started paying attention to Twitter and those types of things, only for recruiting because you can get so much good information about the kids that you’re recruiting.
We’d say, the recruits tell you who they are. Just believe them. I’d look at that, and I did that for a year or so, and it finally dawned on me: Every time I got off that thing, I felt bad. I thought, OK, I get it now. These kids are living on this, and it does make you feel bad. I know it’s the world we live in, but too much of anything is always going to be a bad thing. Twitter is toxic. I don’t think it helps you at all. You have to be so careful of what you’re looking at there. The second thing is, the way I’ve come to make sense of this is, in the coaching world, we have these scoreboards. You have society scoreboard, and it’s about wins. It’s about money. It’s about fame. It’s about promotion. It’s about status. It’s about approval. It’s about rank. That’s the world we live in. That’s what you’re getting reinforced for every day in the arena we live in. It can (be) pretty powerful but it wears off quickly in terms of fulfillment. But you got to win, or you get a new job or more recruits and all that kind of stuff. And that scoreboard continually gets big and blown up. But on the other hand, we have this personal scoreboard that some of us are only kind of aware of; the ones that are probably more adjusted and healthy, understand what this is all about, and that’s our personal scoreboard. It’s about relationships with your family, your colleagues, your friends. It’s about your purpose in life. It’s about your values. It’s about living authentically. It’s about growing. It’s about balance. It’s about fitness, physical and mental. Those are just some of the elements that are on a personal scoreboard and that’s all intrinsic. That’s the stuff that’s really going to drive and fulfill a person. But it’s so hard to fight that battle in the arena that is the sporting world of college athletics. I felt that and it just, it really bothered me.
That’s where I come back to the balance. It’s not that other stuff is all bad, but those are the things that come back to the words we talked about. That’s about happiness. I know we’re talking semantics here — like brief moments of pleasure, that’s all it is. You get a new house? Great. That lasts about two months and you’re going, OK, now what? The other thing is about fulfillment and joy. It’s about creating awareness in your life, and where you’re spending your time, on what’s going to really bring fulfillment versus the happiness thing.
I have kind of a football story that is relevant (to this). A few years ago, I visited Toledo and Jason Candle had a leadership meeting I sat in on. He asked the 10 players in there to write down the definition of how they define discipline. I decided I’m gonna do this exercise in my head. My definition was different than all the ones I heard, not saying that it was the wrong or right answer, but to me, discipline is the ability to know something that you have to do is challenging or difficult, and having the willingness to make sure you do it, or know you have to avoid doing it or you don’t do it. I wonder if the things that you’re wired for, maybe some other coaches just are oblivious to. Do you buy that if you don’t find yourself fixating or going down mental rabbit holes, it can be a lot healthier because you don’t bring that stress on?
I go back to that discipline thing, because I love that word. That’s such an important word in our lives and programs. I would say it’s all how you frame everything. Discipline, in a lot of ways, can be such a negative word to the kids or people in general, because it’s the work you know you need to do that is usually tough, grinding, boring detail work, and doing the things you need to do that are going to help you down the road. Discipline to me, done right, is an investment in your future. I think it’s how you package that. I love talking about that word, because that’s one of the keys to life, like you’re saying, don’t go there. Cut that out of your life, and do more of this and having the discipline to do that when you see that is going to make me better in the future.
But when we go back to all this stuff — society scoreboard, personal scoreboard — the one thing that I’ve really learned is that you can never get enough of what you don’t really need in life. It’s like eating junk food. Just creating awareness, and then you got to build skill. That’s the thing that I like about the time that I’ve had to reflect, and have a lot more awareness, whether it’s the parable of life from de Mello’s book and that bus. Then, it becomes, how do you put a game plan together for yourself? I can never remember my dreams. My wife remembers every one. Every morning she goes, ‘You’re not gonna believe what I dreamed about last night,’ and I’m like, ‘I can’t remember any of mine.’ But, there is one dream that I had a bunch of times over the last eight or 10 years. It would be that we forgot to game plan. I would be so panicked in this dream. We’d be at the stadium, and we’d all be looking around, ‘Who’s got the game plan?’ Then everybody would go, ‘We forgot the game plan this week. How did we forget the game plan?’ Everybody would be like, ‘I don’t know.’ What were we doing all week? Nobody can make sense about how we forgot this. I’d wake up and be so panicked for about eight seconds. Then I would feel so great the rest of the day thinking, well, at least we didn’t forget the game plan.
I think about that, about how important a game plan is in coaches’ lives. Well, who has a game plan for their life? Nobody that I know of actually puts it down on paper and is going to work to build skill in how they want their life to be. What’s the purpose? What are you all about? What’s your purpose? Why are you here? Why are you doing what you’re doing? What are the values you want to live by when your life gets really hard? What are the principles you stand by? How do you want to be as a dad? How do you want to be as a husband? At least it’s a game plan to fight for. Game plans never go according to plan, but at least it gives you a fighting chance and then you adjust and go. We’re all just wired for the struggle. That’s just how we’re made and it goes back to evolution. It’s fight or flight. It’s survival of the fittest. We’re way more wired to be selfish than for the greater good of others but the paradox is, it gives us so much more joy when we are about others.
You had an enormous amount of success at Boise State and then you left for Washington, a more high-profile job in a bigger city. When you made that move, did you think, change is going to invigorate me? And maybe it did for a short term, but ultimately you’re going to end up coming back to the same place, no?
One hundred percent. Here’s how crazy this is. I can’t stand the words ‘burned out.’ I kept hearing that about me and Washington: ‘He’s burned out.’ I just took that as I didn’t work as hard, let things slide. Right or wrong, that’s just how I always looked at that word. But I never worked so hard, trying to figure it out but you are probably going down this path that you’re not at your best. Because you’re working harder than you should be. You need to be resting up. You need to be thinking a different way. You start, as you said, going down these rabbit holes. At Boise, same thing. When you win all these games, and at the end of it, I just can’t make sense of it. I’m frustrated. Anxious. A little bit confused — why am I not enjoying this more? Because we’re basically doing everything we can do there, and this doesn’t feel like it should feel.
My wife is the smartest person I know, and if I would listen to her more on a daily basis, I’d be a way better person for it. She’s been telling me: ‘Listen, you need to figure something out. You either need to take a new job, get out of this business, get a new mindset, something.’ So here was my logic: OK, I know if I go to another school, like in the Pac-12, or go to Washington, my football life is not going to get easier — I know that, but what I’m thinking is, I need a new set of problems. I’ve been battling these problems over here for a long time, and that’s probably why I’m cynical and frustrated and all these things. How crazy is that logic? When I look back at it right now, my solution for feeling better was trading one set of problems for different problems — and that’s going to make me happy? All that does is, you’re numb for a while because you’re so busy creating your way of doing things.
If you’d left Boise State and took a Division II or III job where recruiting is not so manic, do you think you would have found a better work-life balance?
Knowing how I’m wired, or was wired, I just know how I would be anywhere. There’s always the next thing to solve and conquer, and how can we do it better? How do we need to learn from our mistakes? The easy answer is, oh, yeah, the recruiting stuff is just not the same and I’d have more chance to whatever, but what I’ve learned is, it’s just our response to things and setting ourselves up. So I could go to a situation that on paper looks better, and I probably would have, somehow, created the same problems for myself. I think at a place like Washington and those types of jobs, it can bring it to a head a little bit faster. The other problem is in these jobs, you can’t ever take a sabbatical. The grind continues to grow, and so you can’t ever truly get recharged and refocused. That’s part of the plan, I think; you need to put together for yourself is, I have to get recharged and refocused all the time. That’s gonna make me a much better leader, a much better coach and a much better person.
You have an interesting platform right now because by wins and losses, you were a wildly successful head coach. You could obviously go speak at all sorts of places because you would have the appeal. You’re very thoughtful on issues in ways honestly, and I’m saying this, in ways that many of your colleagues or former peers or colleagues aren’t. But where do you get the satisfaction, the fulfillment, going forward, where you could get a head coaching job tomorrow, but where do you find what you need, where you can impact people, and get all the things that you feel like your soul is looking for?
I think I can. I feel like I’ve got my Ph.D. in the School of Hard Knocks. I’m just a hardhead sometimes. I just learned the hard way. … It’s like, OK, I understand things a lot better now. Here’s one of the things that’s so crazy. I halfway put a talk together. I call it the ‘Illusions of Achievement of the Things that I’ve Learned,’ but here’s the thing. I go through all this stuff, right? I step away, because I have to get clarity, and I’ve been saying that even at Boise, but I don’t step away for clarity; I just take another job. I just get kind of blinded by all the new problems, and you just go, and then here it comes again.
At the end of my time in Washington, I know that I cannot solve this problem unless I step away. That was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make in my life. You’re scared to make the decisions. It takes a lot of guts. It would have been easier for me to stay and just somehow try to figure it out on the fly. But I just knew in my heart, I wasn’t going to be able to do that. I had to make this decision to step away from all these kids and this staff that I’ve been with for so long, and how is that going to affect them? But I felt like (if) I didn’t, it was going to affect them in a negative way because I wasn’t heading in the right direction to help them.
My first thing after I get some clarity is, why didn’t somebody tell me this? That’s how I see my role moving forward. Maybe I can just share some of that and help people. But here’s the crazy thing. When I decided, ‘OK, I’m gonna coach and I’m not going to be a psychologist. I’m going to go coach at UC Davis.’ I finished my Master’s and I’m coaching there along the way. Then, I’m thinking that this is more me than the other thing. I think OK, if I’m going to coach, I need to leave UC Davis and my coaches there, and I call them game-changing coaches. They were so far ahead of their time 30 years ago — Jim Sochor, Bob Foster and Bob Biggs and all those guys that stayed there forever — how they treated us, using the platform of football. I got it being around those guys. But, here was my mindset: If I’m gonna do this — coach football—I need to leave Davis. I don’t want to stay at Davis my whole career for these guys. Paul Hackett was the gold standard at Davis. My coaches were like, ‘Paul Hackett, Paul Hackett, Paul Hackett,’ and I’m thinking, ‘I want to be Paul Hackett.’
They make the connection and I go talk to Paul Hackett at Pittsburgh. Here’s the irony. Paul Hackett is a Davis guy that played for these coaches, probably 20 years before I did. He had ’em on the younger end, I have these coaches when they’re on the older end. I do the interview with him, and we’re talking and he goes, ‘So tell me, why do you want to leave Davis?’ I said, ‘Well, Coach, I decided that I want to get into coaching. I want to be the best of the best. Iron sharpens iron, and I want to get in the fast lane, and I want to try to compete for national championships.’ Something along those lines. He looks at me, and Paul Hackett had been around, he’d been in the NFL and with Bill Walsh. He goes, ‘You’re going to be leaving the best place that you’re going to ever coach in your career in terms of the balance and quality of life that you can have, and how you can win there, the kids you can recruit there and living in Davis, California.’ He goes, ‘I’ve been around, and it’ll never be better.’ I looked at him because I didn’t even really know what he was talking about, and I said, ‘Yeah, I don’t care about that.’ He just laughed and shook his head. ‘You’re just like the rest of us. ‘
So I was told this. I always think back, like, why didn’t somebody tell me? But he told me. I just didn’t have the perspective to put this thing together, and it went in one ear and out the other.
So what are you doing with all that competitive juice and fire?
I’m still figuring out exactly where this new lane will be for me. I talked to a bunch of coaches. I do some consulting and am tied into the Foster School of Business (at Washington). COVID-19 has put a little bit of a wrench on that, but Zooming into classes and giving a presentation here and there, those types of things. At the end of the day, it’s gonna come down to some sort of teaching and helping others from the things that I’ve been through, that I’ve been so hardheaded on for so long. When I have these conversations with certain people that I think I might be able to help, and we get into it, I always leave those conversations feeling really good about things. It feels like that’s a good lane to be in. You’re helping people, you’re teaching people some things that maybe they can use a thing here or there for their own to help themselves.
One of the mistakes that I made is that I didn’t get somebody that could help me that’s not in the fight every day. That’s another crazy thing about this coaching thing and game planning. We’re into game plans, yet we don’t game plan for ourselves. The other thing is, all we do is coach everybody else up, but yet most of us don’t have somebody that can really help coach us in this really tough, competitive arena. You’re gonna need a lot of help to be at your best in this thing with all the forces that are pushing and pulling on you. My wife knew it better than me, I knew it. I didn’t work hard enough on finding that person that could maybe help me along the way better. What I tell young people is, ‘Listen, I’m going to tell you some stuff there’s not going to make sense to you right now but maybe this story — some of it’s intriguing to you and down the road, you remember part of it, and you can connect the dots a lot faster than I did.’
Something that dawned on me, regarding your Hackett story, goes back to when I first became a parent. I’m walking the stroller around the neighborhood. Not sleeping well. Every once in a while, I would walk by somebody and they’d make small talk about having a baby. I remember this one particular guy, gray hair, 60. He was walking two dogs. He said, I remember when I was you, it felt like yesterday, and my kids just moved out of the house. And now I got the dogs. He goes, enjoy it. It goes fast. I heard that from like 19 people. It provided a definite awareness of like, I better savor this because I know this is going to go fast. So let’s savor every moment. I think that perspective has helped a lot.
Your point is great. You heard that message 19 times, right? So you get it. You hear the message and you believe it because you’re hearing it so much, but it’s hard to truly understand it because you haven’t been through that. My thing with that is, if you get a message, a strong enough message, or it’s messaged in the right way, you’ll go, ‘OK, I get this. I believe this even though I don’t totally feel it or understand right now.’ Then you can work to build skill. To me, you enjoying this time with your kids, it’s life. That’s hard to always enjoy that time. But if you believe it, and then your perspective changes. … Your whole perspective changes and your mentality changes. You actually build skill, (like), OK, now I’m home with my kids and I am going to lock in and be present with these guys. You have to build skill in your life, just like, as coaches, that’s all we’re trying to do with our players.
I think it’s no different in life. You have to work to build skill and that’s why I come back to awareness, a game plan. Now go work on it. I know a lot of this stuff sounds corny, but it’s true. It’s the busyness of life. We put too much on our plate, and we keep taking more and more on in our life that’s really not gonna matter. But actually, it does matter. It’s going to matter the wrong way.