What Are You Really Playing For? David Pollack on Making Every Day Count
Editor's Note: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Regent University, its faculty, administration, or affiliates.
College Football Hall of Famer David Pollack visited Regent University to speak with student-athletes about identity, priorities, and what it means to compete for something that lasts.
David Pollack has accomplished more on a football field than most players ever dream of. A three-time All-American at the University of Georgia, a first-round NFL Draft pick, and an inductee into the College Football Hall of Fame, Pollack’s resume is the kind that defines careers. But when he stands in front of a room full of student-athletes today, that is not the story he leads with.
Pollack spoke recently to Regent University student-athletes as part of the Center for Christian Thought and Action’s ongoing speaker series, delivering a candid and convicting message about faith, identity, and what it truly means to set your priorities in the right order.
The Foundation That Won’t Hold
Pollack’s path to faith was not a dramatic conversion moment in a stadium or a church. It began quietly, with a friend’s invitation to a church lock-in during his junior year of high school, and with a physics teacher named Mark Watson who had a Bible sticker on his computer and the patience to walk a restless, energetic young man through the Gospels.
From there, Pollack’s faith grew alongside his football career, shaped profoundly by his time at Georgia under head coach Mark Richt, a man Pollack credits as one of the most significant mentors in his life. “He taught me how to speak and how to walk it out,” Pollack has said of Richt.
But it was not until September 2006, when Pollack fractured vertebrae in his neck on the second play of his second NFL season, that his faith moved from the margins of his life to the center of it. Lying in an ambulance, the career he had built his identity around suddenly gone, Pollack encountered something he had been too busy and too driven to find before: stillness.
Are You Getting Still Enough to Listen?
One of the most pointed moments of Pollack’s talk came when he addressed a complaint he hears regularly from students and young athletes: “I don’t hear from God.”
His response was direct. Are you getting still enough to listen?
“When everything stopped, and I got still enough, it’s amazing what I hear from God,” Pollack has shared publicly. “God wants to be invited into your day, God wants to be invited into your circumstances.”
In a culture that rewards constant motion and relentless performance, stillness is countercultural. For athletes especially, the pressure to prove yourself can crowd out the very quiet that God uses to speak. Pollack knows this not as a theological abstraction, but as a man who had to lose everything he performed for before he finally slowed down enough to listen.
His challenge to Regent athletes was not soft. If you are not spending time in the Word, how do you expect to obey it? Society will tell you to believe your own truth. But there is only one truth, and it requires showing up for it daily, in the quiet, before the noise of competition drowns everything else out.
Every Day Counts
Pollack’s message was not one of defeat. It was one of hard-won perspective. He told the athletes plainly: he refuses to let what he used to do define who he is.
The NFL career, the ESPN analyst chair he held for over a decade, the accolades and the platform, none of those things are his identity. His identity is in Christ. And that identity does not depend on a stat line, a contract, or someone else’s evaluation of his performance.
Out of that conviction came the framework that now drives his speaking and his newly released book: Every Day Counts: Start Where You Are. Use What You Have. Do What You Can. (B&H Publishing, April 2026).
“Finding motivation, joy, and passion in life doesn’t come by accident — it takes intention,” Pollack writes. “Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow is irrelevant. Today is the only day you get. So let’s make every day count.”
The book is more than a football memoir. It is a practical guide to resilience and personal growth rooted in the conviction that adversity is not the end of your story; it is where your best story often begins. Pollack offers readers concrete frameworks for winning the day, including his 50-40-10 principle: a rhythm built around focus, effort, and faith designed to help people perform at a high level without losing what matters most.
“You have to know that adversity is coming,” Pollack says. “You have to stop worrying about the adversity and focus on what your response to it will be. Will you use it for God’s purposes, or will you waste an opportunity to change your life for good?”
For Regent’s student-athletes, navigating the pressure of competition alongside academic and spiritual formation, this framework is more than motivation. It is a map for integrating faith into the daily grind of life as a Christian competitor.
A Challenge Worth Carrying
David Pollack is not the kind of speaker who leaves you feeling comfortable. He is the kind who leaves you asking harder questions about what you are actually building your life on and who you are building it for.
For Regent athletes, that challenge fits squarely within the university’s mission: to produce Christian leaders who change the world. Before you can change the world, Pollack would argue, you have to get still enough to let God change you. And then you have to get up the next morning and do it again.
Every. Single. Day.
Interested in going deeper? Pick up David Pollack’s new book, Every Day Counts: Start Where You Are. Use What You Have. Do What You Can., available now from B&H Publishing.
