#18 Momentous Football
Happy Football Season! Enjoy these momentous moments from the history of the great game of football.
Steve Steele
8/31/20266 min read
I'll be honest with you. I've spent most of this blog talking about moments I've witnessed firsthand. Personal stories from a program and a life I know deeply, because I have lived it.
But Momentous Moments don't belong to one program, one sport, or one level of the game. It shows up everywhere football (and sports) are played. Some of the clearest illustrations of what a moment can do to a person, a team, and even a culture have happened on the biggest stages in the sport's history.
This week, I want to step back from Pierre, South Dakota and look at the game from a wider lens. If you pay attention, football has been teaching us about momentous leadership for over a century and the lessons are worth examining.
The Immaculate Reception — December 23, 1972
Before this play, the Pittsburgh Steelers were, by most accounts, a franchise defined by futility. From their founding in 1933 to 1971, the team had posted just seven winning records and no playoff victories. As one longtime broadcaster described them: "hapless, helpless and hopeless."
Then came December 23rd, 1972. With seconds left in an AFC Divisional Playoff against the Raiders, quarterback Terry Bradshaw threw a desperate pass that was deflected in the air. Rookie running back Franco Harris caught it just before it hit the ground and ran it in for the game-winning score. The play would become known as the Immaculate Reception and eventually voted the greatest play in NFL history.
But what strikes me most about that moment is not the play itself, but what it started. That one deflected pass, caught by a rookie who had no business being the hero of that game, launched one of the most dominant dynasties in professional football history. Four Super Bowls in six years. A city that had been starved for something to believe in suddenly had everything.
On the 50th anniversary of the play, Pittsburghers recalled how it boosted morale during the collapse of the steel industry and has served as a cultural rallying point ever since. That is the compound effect of a single momentous moment played out over fifty years. One catch completely changed one city. Generations of people can tell you exactly where they were when it happened.
The leadership lesson here is one I come back to constantly: you rarely know, in the moment you're in, that it will become the moment. Franco Harris was just a rookie doing his job hustling on a play most of his teammates had already given up on. He kept moving when everyone else stopped. And because he did, fifty years of meaning followed.
Keep moving. You never know which play is the one.
Pat Tillman — May 2002
This one isn't about a play. It's about a decision.
In 2002, Pat Tillman left a successful football career with the Arizona Cardinals to join the U.S. Army. As an All-Pro Safety, he walked away from a $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist. He had everything professional football could offer. And he gave it up quietly, without a press conference, and without asking for recognition.
In May of 2002, Tillman walked into the office of then-coach Dave McGinnis, pulled up a chair and said, "Mac, we have to talk." Tillman and his brother Kevin were going to join the Army Rangers. He never said a word about his decision publicly. "It was his wish that this not be something that would draw a lot of attention," McGinnis said.
Read that again. He walked away from millions of dollars and asked for no attention in return.
Tillman said of his decision: "Sports embodied many of the qualities I deem meaningful. However, these last few years, and especially after recent events, I've come to appreciate just how shallow and insignificant my role is. It's no longer important."
He was killed April 22, 2004 in a firefight near the Pakistan border as he was leading his team to help comrades caught in an ambush. He was 27 years old.
I don't bring up Pat Tillman lightly, and I won't pretend to fully understand the depth of what his sacrifice means. But in the context of Momentous Leadership, his story asks a question that I think every leader eventually has to sit with: what are you willing to give up for the people you serve?
Coaching has a high cost. Anyone who has done it at any serious level knows what it takes from your family, your time, your mental and emotional reserves. Those aren't remotely comparable to what Tillman gave. But the principle underneath it is that real leadership requires real sacrifice. And the most meaningful sacrifices are often made quietly and without an audience.
His friend Chad Schwartz said at his memorial: "Pat wanted to be known as more than a professional athlete. He wanted to be an inspiration. He wanted to change people and to change his country for the better."
He did. And he still does.
Malcolm Butler — February 1, 2015
If you needed to design a story that proves the entire thesis of this blog, you would write Malcolm Butler's life.
A kid from Mississippi with nothing but a dream plays one year of high school football, fights off demons, works at a fast-food restaurant, toils at a small college in the South, then somehow emerges from obscurity to make the NFL as an undrafted free agent. He was only a couple of years removed from working a job at Popeyes when he made the game-clinching interception with 20 seconds left in Super Bowl XLIX.
But here's the part of the story that doesn't get told enough: only a few days before his improbable Super Bowl-saving interception, Malcolm Butler struggled in practice defending the exact same play. Bill Belichick lit into the undrafted rookie cornerback after New England's scout-team offense beat him all too easily. The coaching staff had identified that Seattle would likely run this exact route near the goal line in a critical situation, and they drilled it relentlessly. Butler got it wrong in practice. He got it right when it mattered most.
Not only was one of the heroes of Super Bowl XLIX a little-known player out of Division II West Alabama, but he also wasn't even part of the team's original championship game plan. He entered the game in the second half as a coaching adjustment. He was on the field for 18 defensive snaps. The last one changed his life.
This is the Five-Minute Rule in its most dramatic form. Five years of grinding in fast-food jobs, small schools, practice squads, and being nobody all compressed into one moment on a goal line. And the moment didn't find Butler by accident. It found him because he had done the preparation, stayed present even when his coaches were disappointed in him, and was ready when his number was called.
"People forget that Malcolm was an undrafted free agent rookie who spent half the season on the practice squad. He wasn't a seasoned vet. He didn't have the blue-chip pedigree of a first round pick."
He didn't need the pedigree. He needed the preparation and the presence. Both were there when the moment arrived.
The moment doesn't make the player. The player, prepared and present, makes the moment.
What These Stories Share
Three very different stories. A deflected pass in Pittsburgh in 1972. A soldier's quiet decision in an office in Arizona in 2002. A goal-line interception in Glendale in 2015. They don't have much in common on the surface.
But look closer, and all three are really about the same thing:
Showing up fully when it matters, without knowing in advance that it will matter.
Franco Harris didn't know that play would become the greatest in NFL history. He just kept running when everyone else stopped. Pat Tillman didn't know what his sacrifice would mean to generations of people he would never meet. He just knew what was right and did it quietly. Malcolm Butler didn't know he would become a folk hero. He just stayed in the game, stayed prepared, and made the play his coaches had taught him to make.
Momentous Leadership at its core is exactly this: you cannot always engineer the defining moment. But you can be present, prepared, and paying attention so that when the moment arrives, you're already there.
The play is already in the room. The question is whether you'll be ready when it comes to you.
PARTING THOUGHTS
Franco Harris was the only person still running full speed when the ball was in the air. Think about the last time something in your program or organization felt like a lost cause. Were you still running, or had you mentally already moved on?
Pat Tillman walked away from millions of dollars and asked for no recognition in return. What does the quietness of his sacrifice say about the difference between leading for an audience and leading from conviction? Which one describes you on your hardest days?
Malcolm Butler got it wrong in practice and right in the Super Bowl because he stayed in the work and didn't let the failure in practice become the story he told himself about his ability. What failure from your recent past are you still letting define your ceiling?
All three of these moments were built in obscurity before they ever happened in public. What are you doing right now, when nobody is watching, that will make you ready when your moment arrives?