Bronco Mendenhall stepped away from football for a season and a half. Moved to Montana. Built a ranch. Raised horses.
And without meaning to, he started running an experiment on himself. Every time someone reached out, he noted who it was and why. Former players, coaches, administrators, boosters, church, family. He wasn’t trying to prove anything. He just wanted to know who showed up.
Over ninety percent of it came from former players. And out of all those messages, only one mentioned a game or a score. Every other one was about a moment. Something they overcame. Something that changed them.
That’s the story underneath everything Coach Mendenhall does, and it’s the centerpiece of this episode of THE DAWN, a limited series presented by the Pac-12 and Y-Option.
Coach Mendenhall is the fourth winningest active coach in college football, twenty years in, four programs, over a hundred players sent to the NFL, most of them three star recruits or less. And he’ll tell you the wins were never the point. He says it constantly. Culture precedes performance. He means it literally, not as a slogan.
His first team meeting at every stop starts the same way. He tells the room this will be the highest performing football team in school history academically, and it starts now. They usually think they got the wrong coach. Twice now, it’s been true by the end of the semester.
There’s a theory he leans on, that the brain signals us to quit around sixty percent of our real capacity, purely to protect itself. Coach Mendenhall’s entire program lives in the other forty. Not through fear. Through belief, and through asking more of people than they thought they had.
Now he’s bringing all of that into a brand new conference, in a state that can’t get enough football, with a program built on earning everything and given nothing.
Much love and stay steady,
Yogi
THE DAWN debuted July 1 across the Pac-12’s YouTube and Pac-12 Insider, the league’s 24/7 FAST channel. The series culminates with a finale featuring never-before-seen behind-the-scenes content from the building of this new league. It drops in August, right before the season kicks off.
