25 First Downs (2 Min Read) | Vol. 222

PSA: If you missed my announcement about changes to The ONE Thing, click here.

September 25, 2026

“The score takes care of itself.” – Bill Walsh

25 First Downs

Q4 starts next week. And, huzzah, it’s also football season. Which means I get to tell you about February 5, 2017.

Last week I had Coach Jordan Freed on the podcast, and he hit me with a pop quiz.

It’s the third quarter of the Super Bowl. The Falcons are up 28-3 on the Patriots. Atlanta fans are already celebrating. Twenty-five points. No team has ever come back from more than ten points down in a Super Bowl. Ever.

Jordan: “What’s the maximum amount of points you can score on one drive in a football game?”

Me: “Eight.”

Jordan: “That’s a touchdown and the two-point conversion, right? So how many possessions is he down?”

Me: “Three. No — four.” I did the math out loud and still got it wrong on the first try.

Four possessions. Not 25 points. Four possessions. Here’s the point Jordan was making. Twenty-five points is a feeling. Four possessions is a plan. One of them you marinate in. The other one you can actually run.

Brady took it one possession at a time. He drove the ball down the field and scored. Then he got the ball back and did it again.

Coach Jordan picked this up from Joe Montana. Montana played for Bill Walsh, and Walsh had a formula that had nothing to do with the scoreboard. Get to 25 first downs, and you’ll win the game. Walsh won 102 games and three Super Bowls coaching the 49ers. 25 first downs at a time. 

That’s a strange way to coach a team. It’s a great way to run a business. In The ONE Thing, we call this thinking “Goal Setting to the Now.” To take effective action, we have to break down the big goals into manageable milestones. 

A possession is too big to manage on a Tuesday morning. A first down isn’t. A first down is the small, repeatable thing you can actually count this week. In real estate, it’s listings. Jordan has never coached an agent who hit their listing number every single month and missed the rest of their goals.

You have a version of that. Demos booked. Proposals sent. Chapters drafted. Conversations had. It’s the one number that makes everything downstream predictable.

So the work isn’t figuring out how to score 25 points before December 31st. The work is naming your first down. Then getting one. Then getting another. Thirteen weeks left. That’s your quarter.

One question to ponder in your thinking time: If I’m behind, how many possessions is it really?

Make an Impact!
Jay Papasan
Author | CEO | Coach