Using Failure To Propel The UVA Cavaliers To The NCAA Championship

Everyone who loves college basketball knows the story. The first #1 seed in the history of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament to lose to a #16 seed. Ever – in the history of the tournament. The year: 2018. The University of Virginia Cavaliers, having come off a regular season ACC Championship, the ACC Tournament Championship, and being seeded the top one seed in the whole tournament … lost to UMBC. It wasn’t just a failure. It was an epic failure. And it happened to 18- to 21-year-old young men. There were death threats (presumably from bettors who were unhappy). And there was the return to a campus with heads hung low.

This is the type of failure from which many do not recover. It can define you. And it can change the course of your life.

But Coach Tony Bennett did not let it. And the players did not let it. They went on to win the 2019 NCAA basketball championship.

I’ve been publishing a series based on insight from the author of Chasing Failure: How Falling Short Sets You Up For Success (e.g., Why Failure is the Secret to Success and other articles are listed at the bottom). Ryan Leak, before becoming an author, speaker, and pastor, failed in his attempt to become an NBA player. Today, he counsels people in business, sports, and his ministry on how to leverage failure to achieve greatness.

Because I love basketball—and in particular, Coach Tony Bennett’s UVA Cavaliers—and followed nearly every word spoken and printed before and after the painful loss, I asked Leak to comment on the key quote that Coach Bennett used to help propel the Virginia Cavaliers to national champions. The way that Coach Bennett reframed failure and used the loss as fuel to propel the team forward is the storyline that movies are made of.

For young marketers who have never failed in an epic way, you most likely will. It happens. And it is our choice regarding how to use the failure. The below Bennett quote and insight from Leak can help you reframe mistakes and failures and use them as fuel to set you on a path to new heights.

Bennett Quote and Insight

At the beginning of the 2018-19 season, after the epic loss, Coach Bennett used a quote that he would say over and over throughout the season: “If you learn to use it right, the adversity, it will buy you a ticket to a place you couldn’t have gone any other way.” This quote, which Coach Bennett originally heard in a Ted Talk, reframed the concept of failure into one that centered on “adversity”. It is a simple word change, but adversity feels like it is meant to be tackled, an opportunity for future greatness. Failure seems permanent. By repeating this quote over and over, Coach Bennett kept saying that the prior year’s loss could be a beautiful gift – if they chose to see it and use it as such.

Leak indicates that: “A lot of the champions that you see—from Lebron James, Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, to Steph Curry—most of them had a playoff loss that just stuck with them. I would make the argument that if they didn’t experience that, they wouldn’t have become who they are. Michael Jordan had first round exits his first three seasons in the league. I remember Kobe Bryant airballed in the Utah Jazz series twice, maybe three times and that really stuck with him. If you look at championship ball clubs, I always like to look at their year before. Because usually what you’ll find is some sort of adversity that really made them who they are.

I think adversity can defeat us or it can be used to propel us forward. But I think that’s a choice. You can’t always control your circumstances, but you can control how you think about your circumstances. That’s a choice.

The key is to learn from mistakes, adversity, and failure. The point of Coach Bennett’s quote is that you have to use the learning – you don’t make the same mistake twice. You study the mistake. You come up with a different plan. Pro athletes often embrace the horrible feeling of loss to propel them to new heights. The feeling of loss is used as motivation and energy to push them to work harder, think harder, and do better. And the quote mentioned focuses on using the adversity as the mechanism for growth, motivation, and superior performance.

What I particularly appreciate about Coach Bennett’s quote is that it completely aligns with the notion of my book … that failure actually sets you up for something that is otherwise unattainable. Failure is the lesson. It is your education. It helps you learn what not to do and points you in a better direction. And it is part of the human condition—so using it for good seems like a far better solution than being afraid of it.”

So what does this have to do with marketing? Leak indicates that there are three ways that marketers can take advantage of adversity. First, “You have to take notes. Some of us are so busy living, that we don’t pause to reflect on our past. ‘What worked there? Where did I come alive at that last job? Where did I feel bogged down?’ Sports teams watch game footage and say: ‘This is what we need to do differently: We have to rebound the basketball, we have to play better defense, we have to win the 50-50 balls.’ I think people need to reflect on their past and take really good notes and ask ‘How can I get better in the future?’. You can either get better or get bitter.”

Second, Leak suggests that adversity can “shift your perspective. Sometimes when we experience adversity, we have this psychological battle that says: ‘Something is wrong’. I don’t think that it is, I think something good is happening to you. I think we need adversity. I think people experience adversity and think that it’s fatal, that it’s over. No, it’s one bump in the road, but you need to keep going on that journey.”

Finally, marketers can remind themselves that “victory doesn’t taste nearly as good without it. You won’t appreciate the mountaintop if you haven’t spent some time in the valley. Ask any team that has ever been on a winning streak and then lost that first game. Every interview, their superstar will say something like, ‘This is good for us, we needed this. It was getting too easy, we need adversity.’  Your most competitive athletes in the world welcome adversity, they’re looking for it.” And marketers can too!

Join the Discussion: @KimWhitler

For more insight from Ryan Leak: Why Failure is the Secret to Success; 5 Ways to Turn Failure into Success; How Executives Can Use Failure to Achieve Success; The Ryan Leak Story; Why Students Should Chase Failure

Thanks to Liam Nolan, a second year at the University of Virginia, who helped take notes and prepare this article.