Written by Bart Doan at Bloguin
In all enterprises, if one doesn’t define the culture one wants, one does not control the culture he gets.
“Culture” in sports and really, in anything, is a buzzword. It’s some all-encompassing catch-all when things go rotten: “Well, they don’t have the right culture” or the “cultural fit isn’t there.” It’s a fairly good way of diagnosing failure without knowing what’s actually going on but sounding like you do.
The reason it becomes so easy to use as the backbone of an argument is that culture is important. It will exist whether you create and define it or not, and it can be infectious to the point where it can carry your success or doom you to failure.
For Jim McElwain and the Florida Gator football team, the culture created has been immediate, bought into, and fruitful.
It’s difficult after five games to really say, “THIS … THIS is working out,” but at some point it’s worth realizing that something good is happening, and the payoff could be great a whole lot quicker than people would have assumed about three months ago.
Think about this juxtaposition: the Texas Longhorns job opens a year later than it did, and Charlie Strong is very possibly the first interview candidate at Florida, maybe to the point where he goes back there. Strong is a perfect example of how difficult it is to change “culture” at a place, whereas McElwain is a representative of how easy it can be.
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