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MORGANTOWN, W.Va. (òòò½ÊÓƵ News) òòò½ÊÓƵ” Naturally, it is the football knowledge that is being dished out from center stage that draws the interest of Big 12 followers from Morgantown to Lubbock, from Manhattan in Kansas and Manhattan in New York.

But if you are willing to look at what is offered up through a different lens, you will find that coaches' wisdom that fits all of our personal lives.

Football is often spoken of as being a war played out in a stadium, complete with bombs and blitzes, but football also offers up powerful life lessons. All coaches agree that the teams that win are the teams with character, morality, brotherhood and trust.

Let's start with Dave Aranda, the Baylor coach who will try to defend the title he surprisingly won last season.

A year ago, his team was picked to finish eighth in the preseason poll and wound up on top. When asked about it, he revealed the message he had for his team after that poll came out:

"To get where you're going, you have to start where you are."

Perhaps Neal Brown of West Virginia should listen and adopt the philosophy, for his team was picked eighth in this year's poll.

Aranda is a deep thinker and doesn't allow his life to be spelled out with X's and O's. He believes what you are is what you are and understanding that can help you in any walk of life, especially football.

"Just the strengths and the power that comes with living fully who you are and not trying to be anybody else and knowing that you're enough, I think that's such a strong thing, and I think football is a great vehicle for that," he said.

He has an interesting approach in thinking of his players.

"I always look at people before I look at players," he said.

That comes from a book named "The Four Pivots" by Shawn Ginwright that he read, a book about social change. It's really good. I think.

"There's some points in there where he talks about going from transactional to transformational, and he talks about going from a lens to a mirror, where we're all kind of trained to critique and label and look out, but the hardest look is looking in the mirror. òòò½ÊÓƵ they say, the mirror doesn't lie."

Matt Campbell, of Iowa State, a coach who thinks deeply and who took over a program that was struggling, said he found his starting point in trust, something you can work into your life, be it with the family and the kids or with your coworkers.

"We said at the beginning that we were going to build our program on trust," Campbell revealed. "I know that's a very simple word. I think it's really hard to have and build. Trust in college football has to roll from player to player, player to coach, coach to coach and coach back to player.

"I think the loyalty and consistency of our players and our coaches to stay the course on that value system has really given us the ability to work through hard times and work through success equally with the same mentality and the same focus of trying to just become the best version of ourselves that we can be."

Everyone in life or sports faces adversity.

Mike Gundy, who is now the longest tenured coach in the Big 12 at Oklahoma State, has had consistent success but he had had to fight through the losses.

"Like any game, when the clock expires and the other team has more points than us, it's always difficult," he said. "The stage gets bigger, you play in New Year's Day bowls, play in championship games. Any time you're in that situation, you have one team that has the thrill of victory and the other team has disappointment.

"It never goes away. Still to this day at times when I wake up in the middle of the night, games such as a championship game will come across my mind, more so than even games where we had a lot of success for whatever reason."

We would wager it is same for all of you, the disappointments stay with you longer than the successes and it's a good thing, for it drives you to get better rather than to be content.

Luckily for Gundy, he doesn't face a lot of adversity. It is in part because of the approach he has created at the school where he once was quarterback.

"We don't really get out of our box much at Oklahoma State," he said. "We have a culture and a philosophy and a system we believe in. We believe in being tough. We believe in being mentally and physically tough across the board. We try to put our players in situations that game days are not unlike what they've been through in practice."

A college football player's life has changed much over the past couple of years, just as has all of ours with the pandemic and the economy and politics. There are all kinds of distractions.

Mountaineer coach Neal Brown believes that one of his players' biggest challenges is keeping their eye on what's important.

"A lot of our preparation for our players is about time management because we feel like the thing that everybody has the same is the same amount of time, and how you manage that is a real differential in the success of each individual," he said.

One question lingers over all you do, in life or in sports.

How do you evaluate success? It has to be different for Brent Venable, at perennial champion Oklahoma, and Lance Leipold, at perennial last place finisher Kansas.

"It's an excellent question," Leipold said. "You know, I think what we're really saying is sometimes how are you going to measure progress when it's not showing up in the win and loss column all the time.

"We understand and we emphasize, as well, we're not in the moral victory business, and we understand that completely. But we're always looking at, whether it be individual improvement in certain things, how we've gone about our daily business and really how we've connected dots with our players about becoming better holistically, whether it be weight room or academically and better leadership, better teammates, that these things are going to stack upon themselves and help us on game day."