Chip Kelly vs. Doug Pederson: Why You Should Embrace Boring | RE/MAX Ready

This month, the Philadelphia Eagles held a ring ceremony in celebration of their historic Super Bowl win. What did head coach Doug Pederson have to say?

That it was time to “put [the championship] to bed.” In other words, enough celebrating. Let’s start looking toward to the next season.

Pederson has never been known for showiness. If anything, he has a reputation for being understated. He’s never been the “exciting” sort of coach that, say, Chip Kelly embodied.

If Chip Kelly was the sexy, exciting pick for head coach, Doug Pederson was the boring one. And though Pederson was the one to win the Super Bowl, consider how differently we received these two coaches.

We embraced Kelly with great excitement.

Kelly came to the Eagles with big plans to launch a brand new culture. As fans, we welcomed this high-powered coach and his impressive accolades, hopeful that his innovations would turn the Eagles into champs.

But we all know what happened. While Kelly has my respect for sticking to his system to the end, it turned out it wasn’t a very good fit for the players. I’ve written before about how while Kelly could talk the talk, he couldn’t walk the walk in terms of connecting with his team.

The sexy pick was essentially a failure.

Meanwhile, when Doug Pederson was selected as head coach, he faced a huge backlash.

Doug Pederson was called “the worst head coaching hire” of the NFL’s offseason that year. Though funny in retrospect, the backlash makes sense when you consider Pederson’s résumé leading up to the Eagles: just eight years prior, he’d been coaching high school.

He did not have the accolades, the system or the flashiness that Eagles fans had come to expect.

What he did have, however, was old-fashioned team building.

Pederson took the Eagles to the Championship by doing the plain hard work of building a relationship with his team.

Getting to know your players, and connecting with them, isn’t fancy or showy. It’s not the stuff of groundbreaking coaching philosophy. But it works.

Pederson listens to his players’ instincts about which plays to run. He keeps a leadership council among the players and consults them about prospective additions to the team. To put it simply, he talks to his players and cares about them.

In contrast, Chip Kelly was known to walk past his players robotically if he met them off the field.

If Chip Kelly talked the talk, Doug Pederson walks the walk of creating a cohesive, high-chemistry culture.

What’s the point of all this? As real estate agents, you’re going to be tempted to choose flashy over boring a lot.

Lead-generation websites are a great example. Maybe you’ve already been hit with promotions saying you can pay a monthly fee for guaranteed leads.

As you think about all the boring, mundane work you usually have to do to generate leads—networking, marketing, and so on—the idea of this exciting new service is tempting.

But if the Eagles have taught us anything, it’s that the sexy pick isn’t always the right one. More often, the right pick is the one that sticks to the boring stuff.

Online services might boost your leads 20%, but they won’t eliminate the hard work of building your business.

That takes putting in the hours.

In the end, be wary of anything that promises to solve all your problems while neglecting the fundamentals.

Any sexy new service that proposes to eliminate the fundamentals should be received with caution.

Because in the end, the boring stuff is what will win you the Super Bowl.

Photo: Governor Tom Wolf, Flickr Creative Commons

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Matt Mittman and Eric Rehling are the owners of RE/MAX Ready in Conshohocken, PA. See articles from them about diversifying your workweek, creating the best possible offer for your client, the importance of inefficient communication, the Eagles, thriving during your busy season, magic wands, perfecting your customers’ experience, good training, measuring profitability, routines, taking the right kinds of risks, real experience of being a real estate agent, communication styles, building an audience, and more.