“You are what your record says you are.” The line is credited to the football coach Bill Parcells. In January 1994 a newspaper column credited it to “a wise man with a bad football team and a Super Bowl ring.” That man was Parcells, then in his first year as coach of the New England Patriots.
The column’s point was that nobody wants to hear excuses about injuries, bad luck or a hard schedule. The line is older than Parcells’s use of it. The San Diego Union printed it in October 1978, under the headline “Chargers Get Foes’ Praise, Not Victories”: “You are what your record says you are, and never mind how you got that way.”