The Work Was Already Waiting for Me
When I returned to Washington State as athletic director, I had plenty to think about.
I also had spring work waiting for me on the ranch.
That combination probably wouldn’t make much sense to someone who had never spent time on a farm. To me, it was ordinary. The fields still needed attention, and I had a new job that needed my full attention too.
So I worked.
And while I worked, I thought.
I spent hours in a John Deere tractor, going about the business I had known since childhood while sorting through what I wanted to do at Washington State. I didn’t set out to create some special thinking routine. I was simply doing two things that had been part of my life for a long time.
Eventually, my staff gave those hours a name.
“Tractor time.”
The name stuck.
A Ranch Never Really Leaves You
There are parts of childhood you assume you’ll leave behind.
A school eventually ends. You move away from home. Your work changes. The places you spend your time become different.
But the way you were raised tends to follow you.
For me, farming was never just something my family did for a living. It was the setting of my childhood. I knew what it meant to work long days, to pay attention to weather, equipment and timing, and to understand that some things simply couldn’t be rushed.
Those habits didn’t disappear when I moved into college athletics.
They just showed up in different places.
Sitting behind a desk in an athletic department was obviously different from sitting behind the wheel of a tractor. The decisions were different. The consequences were different. But I still liked having time to look at a problem from several directions before deciding what to do.
Maybe that is why the tractor became such a natural place for me to think.
The Washington State Job Needed a Plan
I knew the territory when I returned to Washington State.
I had spent 13 years there earlier in my career, then another 12 years observing the university from the perspective of a conference peer and opponent. I wasn’t walking into an unfamiliar place and trying to figure out where everything was.
I already knew many of the people.
I knew the history.
I knew where some of the problems were.
What I needed was a plan for what came next.
So while I was working on the ranch, I started putting that plan together in my head.
The interesting thing is that I didn’t spend weeks sitting in an office writing a strategic document. I worked through it while doing something familiar. Within a few hours, I had a fairly clear idea of where I wanted to begin.
That plan came down to four things: analyze, prioritize, compartmentalize and utilize.
The wording may sound like something that belongs in an office presentation.
The thinking behind it came from somewhere much less formal.
A tractor.
The Problem Was Bigger Than One Department
One of the first things I decided was that Washington State football had to get healthy.
I knew what that could mean for the rest of the athletic department. Football wasn’t an isolated piece of the university. A successful program could affect other sports, admissions, fundraising, media attention and alumni involvement.
That was part of what made the job interesting.
You could never look at one piece without considering what surrounded it.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized that my job wasn’t simply to fix individual problems as they appeared. I needed to understand which problems were connected and decide where attention would have the greatest effect.
That is what I was working through while driving the tractor.
I wasn’t trying to make the story sound better than it was. I was farming and thinking about my new job at the same time.
The Same Habit Followed Me to Nebraska
Years later, that phrase came back to me in a completely different setting.
While I was at Nebraska, I found myself facing another difficult coaching decision. Matt Davison and I were discussing Scott Frost and the possibility of bringing him back to Nebraska.
I didn’t have the answer immediately.
So I told Matt I needed some “tractor time” to figure out a plan.
He understood exactly what I meant.
The next morning, I came into the office with an idea. That idea eventually led to a private meeting with Scott in Philadelphia.
I find that part of the story interesting now because the tractor itself wasn’t important anymore.
The phrase was.
It had become shorthand for the way I liked to work through something complicated.
Give me some time.
Let me think.
Then let’s decide what we’re going to do.
Maybe That’s What We Carry From Home
When I look back at my career, I can see plenty of things I learned in college athletics.
I learned from coaches.
I learned from colleagues.
I learned from difficult decisions and from the people affected by them.
But some of the habits I relied on most came from much earlier.
They came from the ranch.
There was something familiar about working a field while thinking through a problem. The work gave me enough structure to keep moving, while the long stretches of quiet gave me room to sort things out.
I didn’t call it a leadership technique.
I wasn’t trying to create one.
It was simply how I had learned to work.
That’s one of the reasons I included stories like this in Crab Creek Chronicles. When I look back over my life, the distance between the ranch and college athletics seems much smaller than it once did.
The tractor and the athletic department belonged to very different worlds.
But the person sitting in both places was the same.
Looking Back From Here
I have spent a lot of time in offices, stadiums, boardrooms and athletic facilities.
I’ve also spent a lot of time on tractors.
If someone had told the young boy growing up near Edwall that one day his farm work would become part of how he approached major college athletic decisions, I doubt he would have understood what they meant.
At the time, I was just doing the work in front of me.
Maybe that’s the funny thing about a life.
You don’t always recognize the significance of a habit while you’re living it.
Sometimes it takes years before you see how one part of your life quietly prepared you for another.
For me, a little of that preparation happened in a John Deere.
And even now, I can’t think of “tractor time” without thinking about home.
FAQs
What is “tractor time” in Bill Moos’ memoir?
“Tractor time” was the name Bill’s staff gave to the hours he spent working on the ranch while thinking through important decisions.
How does ranch life connect to Bill Moos’ career?
Bill’s years growing up and working on a ranch remained an important influence on how he approached work, decisions and challenges throughout his career in college athletics.
Is the tractor story included in Crab Creek Chronicles?
Yes. Bill describes developing his initial plan for Washington State athletics while working in a John Deere tractor during spring work on the ranch.
Did Bill continue using the idea of “tractor time”?
Yes. The phrase followed him into his later career. While working at Nebraska, he used “tractor time” again when he needed time to develop a plan concerning the hiring of Scott Frost.