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When you were growing up, you always heard people talk about football. They would talk about, like, the way it was when I was younger, or a coach, the way it was when I was coming up. You're not coming up. I mean, you're established now, but let's say 15 years down the road. Some of your players are trying to tell the story of what it was like when they played. You're trying to tell the story of what it was like. How do you even tell the story? Because you've been a head coach a few years here. None of those two years have been the same. I don't mean your record. I mean the rules, the structure of the sport, the calendar. 20 years from now, someone asks, hey, coach, Lashley, what was it like when you were a young coach and you just got to ask which month of which year, I guess?

At the radar sports evolving, I don't know what it would look like in 20 years.

To your point, I've been coaching three years. All three years have been completely different rules of engagement to the game.

How the portal works, how NIL works, how the rules of the game work. The day I got hired,

basically, of December 1 of 22 was the first December we had, you know, true NIL and an unlimited

transfer. That was my first month on the job, and so welcome to it. And so it's changed a lot. I was talking with Mack Brown just last year and he said, man, the game has changed more in the last two to three years than it did my first 40. And he's right. Some of those changes are great, but you know, change can be good if there's some planning behind it and it's a structure behind it. Right now we're struggling to have structure behind it. Don't you have to be a little compartmentalized in a sense that there's part of you who loves the game and you're just a fan of the game, that part of you probably wants to scream about some stuff. But then you're also the head coach of a major program. And it's not your job

to be negative. It's your job to be positive. It's your job to take the situation at hand and guide your program the best you can. You don't have time to complain. I mean, people like me can afford to just do one of those things. You kind of got to put away that human side, more the natural side, and you just got to steer the ship.

And even if it's foggy all around and you can't really tell where you're going, you got to just steer the best you can. Yeah. Well, I have a saying you can't complain because nobody'd listen. Right. Nobody care. It is, you know, as a coach, your job is to solve problems. That's all you do. I mean, whether it's problems in game, nonstop, you're just figuring out how to fix things, how to solve things.

So that's what we do. I mean, whether it's problems in game, nonstop, you're just figuring out how to fix things, how to solve things. So that's what we do as coaches. And in a lot of ways in our sport right now, the coaches, we're just catching all the challenges and just figuring out the way to handle them the best we can. Because we don't have a big voice, we don't have a lot of say in what happens, But we're the boots on the ground. We're the ones coaching. We're the ones living it day and day out with our players. So it is a challenge. You know, on one hand, yes, the person who loves the game, just the peer, I love college football. I love the game. It's the best game in the world. It's the best team sport there is. It's a great teacher of life.

So many of us coached because of what it did for us. So yeah, the I love the game person in me.

Definitely would want to scream. I care about the players that I coach. I care about, I still call

them kids, but the young men that we get to recruit and

coach, we desperately care about them and what's best for them both now and in the long term,

regardless of what people think. At the same time, those two things can be true and the number

one thing is I'm hired to win. I'm hired to win now with the rules that have been given to me. And a lot of times

those three things don't line up right now. And so that's the challenge as a coach is how do you

lead your program? How do you lead a winning program? That's what you're hired to do. That's your

job. And that's what we do as coaches is solve problems and figure out different ways to do things.

At the same time, care about your kids, care about the love of the game, and want to help

sustain or maintain the things that make this game great.

You know, because I do have concerns about the well-being of our young men that we're coaching

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