"Failures are expected by losers, ignored by winners"
About this Quote
"Ignored by winners" is the sharper half, and it's deliberately provocative. Winners, in Gibbs's worldview, don't romanticize failure as character-building or dwell on it as tragedy. They compartmentalize. Ignore doesn't mean deny; it means refuse to give failure narrative control. In competitive sports, attention is a finite resource. If you spend it relitigating the last drive, you miss the next snap. Gibbs compresses that pragmatism into a binary that coaches love because it turns a complex psychology into a usable rule.
The subtext is culture-shaping. He's not merely describing winners and losers; he's manufacturing them through language. Call your team "winners" and you authorize a posture: mistakes get corrected, not confessed. The quote also reflects an era of football ethos where toughness is as much cognitive as physical: emotion is information, not a destination. Of course it's an oversimplification - some failure demands deep review - but that's the point. A slogan isn't built to be fair; it's built to be portable, repeatable, and just insulting enough to change behavior.
Quote Details
| Topic | Motivational |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Gibbs, Joe. (2026, January 17). Failures are expected by losers, ignored by winners. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/failures-are-expected-by-losers-ignored-by-winners-80747/
Chicago Style
Gibbs, Joe. "Failures are expected by losers, ignored by winners." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/failures-are-expected-by-losers-ignored-by-winners-80747/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Failures are expected by losers, ignored by winners." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/failures-are-expected-by-losers-ignored-by-winners-80747/. Accessed 11 Feb. 2026.









