"If you whoop and holler all the time, the players just get used to it"
About this Quote
Bryant is puncturing a fantasy that passion is automatically productive. The line is coaching minimalism with teeth: noise, deployed constantly, becomes wallpaper. In an era when college football was tilting toward spectacle and booster-driven intensity, he’s reminding everyone that attention is a finite currency. Spend it on every play and you devalue it; reserve it and it lands like a gavel.
The specific intent is behavioral economics in a houndstooth hat. Bryant isn’t telling fans or assistants to be quiet because he dislikes enthusiasm. He’s protecting the signal-to-noise ratio inside a program that runs on routine, fear, and focus. Players adapt to stimuli. If the sideline is always at a ten, a ten stops meaning anything. Urgency has to be legible. So does disappointment. His best weapon is calibration: praise that arrives rarely enough to feel earned, correction that hits clearly enough to sting, and silence that makes the next word matter.
Subtext: Bryant is also asserting authority over the emotional climate. The coach isn’t just calling plays; he’s managing the room. Constant whooping is a kind of needy performance, a bid to be part of the action. Bryant rejects that. He’s drawing a line between doing and reacting, between leadership and theater. The quote works because it’s blunt and slightly parental, smuggling a broader lesson about modern life: when everything is hype, nothing is.
The specific intent is behavioral economics in a houndstooth hat. Bryant isn’t telling fans or assistants to be quiet because he dislikes enthusiasm. He’s protecting the signal-to-noise ratio inside a program that runs on routine, fear, and focus. Players adapt to stimuli. If the sideline is always at a ten, a ten stops meaning anything. Urgency has to be legible. So does disappointment. His best weapon is calibration: praise that arrives rarely enough to feel earned, correction that hits clearly enough to sting, and silence that makes the next word matter.
Subtext: Bryant is also asserting authority over the emotional climate. The coach isn’t just calling plays; he’s managing the room. Constant whooping is a kind of needy performance, a bid to be part of the action. Bryant rejects that. He’s drawing a line between doing and reacting, between leadership and theater. The quote works because it’s blunt and slightly parental, smuggling a broader lesson about modern life: when everything is hype, nothing is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Coaching |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Bryant, Paul. (2026, January 16). If you whoop and holler all the time, the players just get used to it. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-whoop-and-holler-all-the-time-the-players-82477/
Chicago Style
Bryant, Paul. "If you whoop and holler all the time, the players just get used to it." FixQuotes. January 16, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-whoop-and-holler-all-the-time-the-players-82477/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"If you whoop and holler all the time, the players just get used to it." FixQuotes, 16 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/if-you-whoop-and-holler-all-the-time-the-players-82477/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.
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