Politics & Power Quote by Tony Dungy

Dungy’s sentence is built like a play call: the obvious objective up front, then the real message tucked inside the cadence. “Our goal was to win” is the price of entry in the NFL, but he immediately widens the lane. The repetition of “to win” isn’t accidental; it sets up a contrast between winning as a result and winning as a method. That second clause - “in the right way” - is where Dungy’s cultural project lives. It’s a quiet rebuke to the league’s long romance with “whatever it takes,” the wink-wink tolerance of bad behavior so long as it produces Sundays.

Context matters: Dungy’s Colts were a small-market team with a squeaky-clean quarterback, operating in an era when the NFL’s image was being tugged between corporate respectability and tabloid mess. The “role models” line is both sincere and strategic. Coaches are judged on rings, but franchises survive on civic trust: ticket sales, stadium deals, local pride. By naming “Indianapolis,” “Indiana,” and “the National Football League,” he’s mapping concentric circles of accountability, turning a football team into an ambassadorial unit.

The subtext is also personal. Dungy’s public identity - calm, faith-forward, disciplined - made him a counter-narrative to the caricature of the volatile, win-at-all-costs football boss. He’s asserting that character is not a side quest; it’s part of the system. The brilliance is how he frames it as competitive, not moralizing: doing it “the right way” becomes another kind of victory, one that lasts after the parade confetti is swept up.