Lou Holtz Quotes

The Sisters of Notre Dame at St. Aloysius Grade School influenced my life tremendously. This was due to the fact that they encouraged you always to make sure that God is the focus of your life, and they didn’t allow you to do anything except to the very best of your ability.

An agent won’t help you get drafted higher, won’t make you win more games, and won’t make you faster or stronger.

My wife doesn’t even want to spend 2 hours with me.

All an agent is going to do is buy things for a player, damage his eligibility, and make the player dependent on them.

We have an obligation to help people that cannot help themselves. The mentally retarded, the physically retarded, et cetera.

For victory in life, we’ve got to keep focused on the goal, and the goal is Heaven.

When the bank asks me about my assets, I include my friendship with Regis Philbin.

I think everyone should experience defeat at least once during their career. You learn a lot from it.

I used to pray that God would make me a great athlete, and He never did.

I believe in the crucifixion of Jesus Christ.

Football coaches don’t have real problems.

I have to admit, I sometimes wonder how much more successful I would have been as a coach had it not been for my spending summers on the golf course. I could have watched more film, that’s for sure. One advantage Joe Paterno had over me was that he didn’t play golf.

If you try to fight the course, it will beat you.

I’m an old man, and all my life I’ve said that Notre Dame should remain independent because it’s a national school.

I give opinions, not advice.

I was born January 6, 1937, eight years after Wall Street crashed and two years before John Steinbeck published The Grapes of Wrath, his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the plight of a family during the Great Depression.

My wife told me if there is any rumors about me, it better be about politics and not about my social life.

The key to winning is choosing to do God’s will and loving others with all you’ve got.

If you made me the national commissioner of football, I’d tell you one thing that I would mandate. The second Saturday in September, we’re going to have conference day. Everybody from the SEC plays a Big 12 team. Everybody from the Big Ten is going to play the ACC. Everybody from the Big East is going to play the Pac-10.

I feel that God wants me to coach; otherwise, he wouldn’t have put the desire in me.

At home I have a copy of the April 21, 1986, issue of ‚Sports Illustrated.‘ I’m on the cover with the blurb, ‚Can Lou Do It?‘ I’d just arrived at Notre Dame, and with spring football underway, I was the focal point of that week’s coverage.

I look like I have beriberi and scurvy.

All my life, I’ve been trying to make a hole-in-one. The closest I’ve come is a bogey.

When I work a game as an analyst, all I do is look at the game like a coach.

ESPN is a great organization to work for.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961. The pay wasn’t much, so to get $300 more per year, I agreed to coach the golf team. I didn’t even know how to keep score, and really, my main job was not to wreck the van on the way to tournaments.

I was raised a Catholic on both sides of the family. I went to a Catholic grade school and thought everybody in the country was Catholic, because that’s all I ever was associated with.

I think that we have opportunities all around us – sometimes we just don’t recognize them.

Had I been a great athlete, I’m not sure I would have even gone into coaching. I may have turned out feeling that my life ended when my athletic career ended, as happens so many times with various athletes.

As a coach, one thing that used to frustrate me was one player would make a bad decision, and that’s all you would read about in the papers all over the country. We have so many athletes do so many wonderful things for other people, and you never read about it.

At age nine, I got a paper route. Sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. I also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. I owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. When I didn’t collect, the balance came out of my profit. My average income was six dollars a week.

My philosophy in life is, Decide what you want to do. You have to have something to hope for.

In golf, the player, coach and official are rolled into one, and they overlap completely. Golf really is the best microcosm of life – or at least the way life should be.

When I die, and people realize that I will not be resurrected in three days, they will forget me. That is the way it should be.

I have no desire at all to become the winningest coach at Notre Dame. The record belongs to Knute Rockne or some other coach in the future.

I believe that having a spiritual life is so important in everybody’s life.

I don’t exercise.

I do think coaches need to get away from the game more, though. It’s good for them.

A lifetime contract for a coach means if you’re ahead in the third quarter and moving the ball, they can’t fire you.

I’ll assure you this: I will have nothing to do with politics.

I’ve followed Notre Dame football since 1946, when I listened on the radio and Johnny Lujack tackled Doc Blanchard in the open field to preserve a 0-0 tie.

If you look at the history of Notre Dame, if you hire a coach who’s been successful at another college program, they’re going to be ultra successful at Notre Dame because the talent will always be there.

My first assistant-coaching job in football was at William & Mary in 1961.

I’m no genius.

I don’t think there’s been anything in the game of football in my lifetime that has changed college football more than redshirting.

When I left the University of Notre Dame, I honestly felt I would never coach again.

I was raised in a religious environment, and my wife is one of the more religious people that I have ever known.

Don’t tell your problems to people: eighty percent don’t care; and the other twenty percent are glad you have them.

I think that everybody needs four things in life. Everybody needs something to do regardless of age. Everybody needs someone to love. Everybody needs something to hope for, and, of course, everybody needs someone to believe in.

Don’t run if you can walk. Don’t walk if you can stand. Don’t stand if you can sit. Don’t sit if you can lie down.

If what you did yesterday seems big, you haven’t done anything today.

Do right. Do your best. Treat others as you want to be treated.

I follow three rules: Do the right thing, do the best you can, and always show people you care.

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

I just have an enthusiasm for life.

I truly believe the things Notre Dame stands for.

Winners embrace hard work. They love the discipline of it, the trade-off they’re making to win. Losers, on the other hand, see it as punishment. And that’s the difference.

Ability is what you’re capable of doing. Motivation determines what you do. Attitude determines how well you do it.

The University of Notre Dame does not redshirt, and I endorse that policy completely. I am very much in favor of redshirting, but not at Notre Dame. But there’s no doubt about it. It puts us at a huge disadvantage.

Notre Dame is the one school that has a national recruiting base, from Florida to Texas to California.