LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Most coaches who start a season 0-3 and finally get a victory take a deep breath. Chris Redman took a deep look.
The Louisville Kings had just beaten Houston for their first win of the season. The losing streak was over. The pressure had eased. The expansion franchise finally had proof that it was moving in the right direction.
Louisville | Kentucky | Indiana | Eric Crawford
Everybody saw progress. Redman saw a problem.
"It just didn't feel like a win," he said this week.
That's an unusual sentence.
Most people question failure. The rare ones question success.
Redman didn't like what he saw. So he acted.
He moved on from quarterback Jason Bean, who had just put up big numbers. He waived former Kentucky and NFL running back Benny Snell. He reshaped parts of the roster and handed the offense to Chandler Rogers.
Six victories in the next seven games later, the Kings are headed to the United Bowl to play for a league championship.
The football story is interesting. The human story is more interesting.
Because what Redman did is one of the hardest things in sports, business, politics or life. He distrusted evidence that flattered him. A scoreboard had just told him he was right. He wasn't sure he believed it.
The closest sports comparison I could think of came from a much bigger stage.
In 1997, Tiger Woods won the Masters by 12 shots. He was 21 years old. It remains the largest margin of victory in tournament history. Most people would've framed the scorecard.
Tiger tore up his swing.
Watching tape of that historic victory, Woods saw flaws that hadn't hurt him yet but eventually would. He told coach Butch Harmon he didn't want a tune-up.
He wanted a total remodel. For a while, it looked crazy. Tiger won only once in 1998.
Then he won seven of the next 11 majors.
Everybody else saw the victory. Tiger saw the warning signs hidden inside it.
That's the same instinct Redman is talking about. Different sport. Same mental process.
Nick Saban built an empire on a version of the same idea. He called praise "rat poison."
After one Alabama victory that generated more compliments than he liked, Saban exploded.
"All that stuff you write about how good we are. All that stuff they hear on ESPN. It's like poison."
The point wasn't that Alabama wasn't good.
The point was that success can make people stop paying attention. Success can convince you that every decision was correct. That every weakness has disappeared. That the future is guaranteed because the present feels comfortable. That success was all skill and no luck.
The poison and the cure are related. The poison is believing the flattering evidence. The cure is questioning it.
Of course, this instinct isn't magic. Sometimes the warning signs aren't really warning signs at all.
Sir Alex Ferguson spent decades rebuilding Manchester United championship teams before age and complacency could catch them.
Then he sold star defender Jaap Stam while United was still winning.
Ferguson later called it one of the biggest mistakes of his career. Sometimes the flaw you think you see isn't there. Sometimes the warning light is a faulty sensor.
That's what makes the skill so rare. It's not enough to distrust success. You have to be right about it.
That's the part nobody knows in real time. Not Tiger. Not Saban. Not Ferguson. And certainly not Chris Redman.
When the Kings beat Houston, nobody knew whether Redman's instincts were brilliant or reckless. He saw something in that victory that bothered him.
"I had something in my gut saying that, you know, it's time to switch things up big time," Redman said.
He trusted it.
And he changed the course of the Kings' season while everybody else was celebrating. They've lost just one game since.
Maybe that's why the story stayed with me.
Failure announces itself. Success whispers.
The Louisville Kings are playing for a championship because their coach thought a victory sounded suspicious.
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