Mike Macdonald explains why not playing in the NFL actually helped him become a better coach, and says it forced him to lead with honesty instead of pretending he had all the answers “Because it’s like, who am I going to kid here? I can’t do what you guys do. And so I think that’s where it starts. And then you’re a young coach, so it’s also an acknowledgement to say, ‘Hey, look, I feel very strongly about some things. There’s a lot of things I also acknowledge I don’t know yet because we haven’t experienced these things, and I don’t have the skins on the wall to say, “Look, I know what’s going on here.”’ “I believe I know what it takes, and I’m going to try to create a compelling vision that we want to create, and a pathway and principles that we can go by to get there. But if we really believe in this culture of growth and 12 is one, well, I’m in this thing and our coaches are in this thing with our players. “There’s coaches in our league and coaches in history that, deservedly so, come in and say, ‘Hey, look, this is how we’re going to do business. Here’s your book. We’re going to go to page July, August, whatever, and this is what we do, this is how we do business, and this is what’s going to win.’ And it’s worked like that. But if I did that, that wouldn’t be authentic. “So my thing is, ‘Hey, look, I’m learning with you guys in this journey.’ It’s more fun that way, and it takes the edge off. We’re going to give it everything we have because we decided we’re going to try to do it this way. If we don’t get the results we wanted, let’s go back and see what we can improve on process-wise to yield better results. “And you just keep doing that. That’s an honest process. But you’ve got to keep it real with them. If we fall short, which we’ve done plenty of times from the coaching staff, or if there are things that aren’t up to the vision and the standard of how we said we were going to be, we’ve got to be the first ones to show that we’re willing to grow from that because that’s what you expect from your players.”