He won three Super Bowls with three different quarterbacks.
He won three Super Bowls with three different running backs.
In his 16 years as an NFL head coach, Joe Gibbs career regular-season record was 154-94.
In the playoffs, when you are certain to face the better teams, Gibbs’ teams were 17-7, that is a .708 winning percentage.
Gibbs is a five-time NASCAR Cup Series champion as a team owner who entered the NASCAR Hall of Fame in 2020.
How in the world has Joe Gibbs been as successful in NASCAR as he was in the NFL? How do some people become such winners?
Former starting safety of Super Bowl XXVI Brad Edwards was a guest Wednesday on “The Kevin Sheehan Show” podcast, telling some stories about Coach Gibbs.
Edwards, having spent his first two seasons at Minnesota, came to Washington in 1990 and quickly caught a glimpse of Gibbs’ attention to details.
Edwards told of a Friday practice early in the 1990 season. “Joe’s Friday practices were like game-speed. He wanted everything (by Friday practices) to be precise. He wanted an exact trial run of what that game would be like.”
On a Friday practice, someone went in motion and there was a question on the defensive side, and the defensive coaches then gathered quickly to discuss the question. Edwards watched Gibbs approach the defensive coaches and heard Gibbs say, “Why do we have a question at this time?” (In other words, why don’t we coaches have this down so we are preparing our players by Friday’s practice?)
Edwards said he recalls immediately thinking, “That guy (Gibbs) is different. That attracted me, and I liked it. (Looking back) that is why he is what he is.”
Edwards then told of a story in Gibbs’s final season (1992). Gibbs had the offense run a stretch play to the left side with Gerald Riggs running the ball. Edwards was assigned to roll up on the backside of the play. Coming from the backside Edwards recalled, “I finally get to Gerald Riggs about 40 yards down the field. It was Week 13 or 14, you are beat up, you are tired. I felt like the play was pretty much over so I kinda ran by him and jogged back to the huddle. I looked up and here was Joe walking back toward the defensive huddle, which he never did. He walked past the huddle and was clearly looking at me… He is going to get on to me for running past Gerald Riggs 40 yards down the field. So, he comes by and said, ‘Hey Brad, I need to remind you we need to wrap up the running backs and receivers. This is why we do it. We need to do this right every time.’ He turned and walked off.”
Edwards said he felt then that “Gibbs was a machine who missed nothing in practice. He confronted players in a non-threatening way, but you did not want that to happen to you as a player, and it was brilliant.”
And there it is, Edwards today realizes even more that successful leaders share their vision with consistency and effort. They convey clearly and passionately to individual team members how their role fits into the picture of the team’s success.