KSU alum and current Alabama head coach Nick Saban defines mental toughness as follows:
"I think mental toughness is a perseverance that you have when you can make yourself do something that you really don't feel like doing. In other words, you don't really feel like getting up, but you get up. You don't feel like practicing today, but you practice. You don't feel like focusing today, but you focus. And, even in difficult circumstances and difficult surroundings, you can stay focused on what you need to stay focused on. So, it really is a mental discipline to be able to stick with in whatever circumstance you are in and continue to persevere at a high level and not let some other circumstance affect how you perform."
"But it's how you affect being a good competitor," he said. "You can't be a good competitor if you can't overcome adversity. You can't overcome adversity if you don't have mental toughness. So, it's the same as physical toughness except it's how you think, not how you physically do something."
In the same press conference that Saban was asked to define mental toughness, a question was asked for him to recall his most meaningful game when he was at Kent State and Saban singled out a game against Bowling Green.
"Bowling Green had a really good team, one of the better games we played as a team," Saban said. "We had to play at Bowling Green, and Don Nehlen was the coach there then, and they had a really good program. It was the year we won a championship, which we weren't really supposed to be all that good. We beat them up at Bowling Green, which doesn't sound like a big game relative to Alabama and Florida or Alabama and Georgia or Alabama and Auburn. But in the Mid-American Conference, that was a big game and a big win for us, and really put us in the position where we had a chance to win a championship, which we went on and did as a team."
Saban also vividly recalled the last game of his last regular season, even though he did not play because of an injury.
"We played Miami at Miami (Ohio), and Jack Lambert was the middle linebacker," Saban said of the Kent State star. "We got in kind of a seven dime and somewhat of the same goal-line defense we play now. And they had a guy named (Bob) Hitchens, who played in the NFL and was a tailback. They completed a pass down to the 1-yard line. And it was like, I don't know what the score was for sure, maybe 21-17 or something, and they needed a touchdown to win. They went four plays in a row where they wanted the lead. He tried to jump over and Lambert was a middle 'backer and he knocked him back every time. And they went for it on fourth down, and I sort of remember that game probably because that won the championship for us."
So if Kent State was not really supposed to be all that good the year the Flashes won the MAC championship, one can make the argument that KSU won it more on mental toughness than on pure talent.
But how do you develop mental toughness and can that be the determining factor in making the current team more competitive than last year's team?
Mental toughness is developed every day in practice and during weight training and conditioning throughout the year. Of course all teams practice and lift weights but the difference between average teams and championship teams is the ability to work through pain. Whether weight lifting or practicing in hot, humid conditions, you have to get to the point of pain because it doesn't do any good in developing mental toughness until you get to the point of pain. The whole idea in developing mental toughness is when you are in competition with someone else and you hit the pain barrier, you should welcome it because that means your opponent is experiencing pain and to the degree that you are better able to work right through the pain than they can enables you to defeat them.
In 1972, both Bowling Green and Miami might have been more talented than Kent State but the Flashes had more mental toughness which was the deciding factor in winning the conference championship.
The margin of defeat in Kent's six MAC setbacks last season was 10 points or less. The Golden Flashes were in position to tie or take the lead in all of those games in the fourth quarter.
"We know how close we were in a lot of games,'' senior defensive lineman Nate Terhune said at MAC Media Day last week. "This year, we have to finish."
With fall football camp beginning this week, how well the Flashes finish games this season may come down to the team's ability to work through pain during adversity. If last year's 27-24 season-ending victory over arch-rival Akron is any indication of the team's developing mental toughness, expect to see a more competitive team this year despite its last place MAC East finish in the Mid-American Conference football media poll.
http://www.al.com/sports/index.ssf/2011/08/video_nick_sabans_press_confer.html
