“My guess is that my uncle and dad were behind the trees just laughing,” Mendenhall said. “But they taught us that we could do really hard things, and man, did it feel good when we were done. We literally felt like we could do anything after that.”

That story leads us back to that somber meeting room back in December. Mendenhall knew he had to create a culture where his players, the ones who didn’t make eye contact, looked defeated, heads down, had to accomplish the football equivalent of 40 acres of hay so they could believe they could do anything.

From that first meeting to the first practice in the spring, the new coach and his staff had to continue to pound that message.

“They didn’t understand the urgency in which they were going to have to snap out of where they were to where they had to be to make it through a day,” Mendenhall said. “The message shifted to ‘You can do this, you will do this. Wait and see how you feel because you’ve done something hard.’

“Going from losing games by three, four, five, six, or seven points to winning those, that isn’t a slight gap. That’s a huge misnomer. That’s a giant gap,” Mendenhall continued. “There’s a reason those games aren’t being won. Going from losing to winning close games is a ton of work, not a little work.”