Yeah, that was never his philosophy. Phil Savage: "He proceeds to go through all these little intricacies on the game film Twenty minutes! In my immature mind I'm sitting there in the dark doing the math: Three games to break down on each side of the ball, 60 plays in each game, 20 minutes a play means I can get through three plays in an hour.
My god, I'll never sleep again. And I didn't. The Browns were nearing bankruptcy when, on Nov. Rick Venturi: "After three years of losing football, they were nearing the end of their rope in Cleveland.
We turned it around in We won 11 games and won the wild-card playoffs. We were really on the cusp of something great there in Cleveland.
Nobody in the world could have survived that. It was an absolute dumpster fire, what ownership did to him in Cleveland. If you look at the Bill we know now, the same thing he did in New England was going to happen in Cleveland. I have no doubt that in Cleveland would have been like the Super Bowl season in New England if Bill had been allowed to continue to grow and groom his staff and his team.
Rick Venturi: "Once they announced the move, became as bad as anything I've ever been through from a football standpoint -- a total, miserable death slide. It went from the greatest sports city in the world to an 80,person wake on Sundays. Bill would never show it, but it took a toll on him. After the Browns' final home game, Belichick's postgame interview under the stadium was drowned out for several minutes by fans chanting "Bill must go! As he waited at the lectern for the noise to abate, his firing imminent, his face was a contorted mix of defiance and disappointment.
In a way, this was his dad's Vanderbilt moment. If ever he was granted another chance, he'd do everything differently. But first, penance awaited: Four more years as a Parcells underling, first with the Patriots and then three seasons in New York with the Jets, where Parcells is said to have mocked Belichick as a so-called genius and failed head coach on an open headset during a game.
In , when Parcells retired temporarily from coaching, he named Belichick his successor in New York. Concerned about instability with ownership and wanting to step out of Parcells' considerable shadow, Belichick scribbled out a resignation letter on a napkin -- he was quitting as "HC of the NYJ," it stated -- and bolted to New England.
The Jets got three draft picks as compensation. Parcells says the two former colleagues have never discussed the defection, which gave Belichick the total control he needed: as head coach and GM. Phil Savage: "That's the big separator for Bill from everyone else: Usually, the GM handles the business and the coach handles the team.
Bill's one of the few out there, if not the only one, who can do both. Bob Quinn: "The rest of us can't be both the head coach and the GM. There's only one person who walks on this earth that does it at this level. Phil Savage: "To be great on the field, you have to be emotional. To be great upstairs in the front office, you have to be robotic.
The way he can separate in his mind the deep, personal relationships he has to have with his players downstairs in the locker room, on the field and in games, versus the business reality of looking at the same exact players from a strictly financial standpoint, as commodities, when he switches hats upstairs in the front office -- that's not just incredibly hard, that's almost impossible.
Al decided to go with Jon Gruden, an offensive-minded coach, which surprised no one in the league. But Al liked Bill very much. Bill made it clear he would always tailor his schemes to maximize his players' talents. That's what the best coaches do, the best business people do and the best leaders do: They put their people in the best possible position to succeed. And that's what Bill does. I was always tickled pink years later when Al would say to me, 'Well, you sure can pick a coach, kid.
Dick Miller: "Occasionally, I get letters from former students that are very nice and make me feel wonderful. This is one of them. It reads: 'I honestly never thought that my economics background would be of much help as a football coach, but with the new salary cap, I need a calculator to break down game films. The creativity of contracts and 'beating the cap' will have a lot to do with each team's success in the NFL in the next few years and I'm sure you'd be very good at it.
I always carry many fond thoughts of Wesleyan and your guidance with me and I look forward to the gulp 20th it can't be reunion this summer. Best wishes for the New Year, Bill Belichick. Bob Quinn: "I'd get to the office somewhere between 6 and every morning and he was always there. In 15 years I could probably count on both hands the number of times I pulled into the parking lot and he wasn't there. When the leader of the organization does that, it's really easy for everyone else to kind of take that mentality too and say, 'If he's doing it, we all should do it.
He gets maybe two hours of sleep, and the rest of his life is football. He's paid the ultimate sacrifice for this game. Rich Ohrnberger Patriots Lineman, : "That's not the easiest environment to be in. It was stressful. It separated you sometimes from your immediate family, but you felt an obligation to this organization to really give your all. At any other place there was a focus on football and winning but never quite to the level of New England.
And it really was attributed to how Bill ran the show over there. Since a season in his first year in Boston, Belichick has never finished a year under. Matthew J. After the team meeting I said, 'Coach, I apologize, the power in Cumberland, Rhode Island, was blacked out because of the storm. Then he just walked out. I got a letter from the team a few days later saying I had been fined for being late.
I bought that alarm watch and have worn it ever since. Curtis Martin: "My rookie year in New England, we'd scrimmage goal-line full go at the end of the practice. Seven or eight times in a row he told the defense I was running and jumping over the top and to keep me from getting in. He would literally tell them what side I was going to run on.
They were just teeing off on me. But out of eight times, I got the ball in the end zone like five times. He wanted to see what type of fight I had in me, if I would break. Kevin Faulk Patriots Running Back, : "When he first got to New England, for almost three years I'd see Bill in the hallway going to breakfast at the facility. Now, I'm from Louisiana. I don't care who you are, I'm going to say 'Good morning, how you doing?
How's everything today? I said good morning to him for years. Then, one day I said it and he finally looked up and said, 'Good morning, Kevin,' and so I reached out and I stopped him, and he was like, 'Whoa, whoa, Kevin, what are you doing? What's wrong?
Do you know how long I've been saying good morning to you and you haven't said a word? Rick Venturi: "He has a very dry, cynical sense of humor. A couple of times we'd hit the parking lot at the same time in the morning, and on the way into the facility he'd comment on The Howard Stern Show.
He's a real closet rock 'n' roll nut. He traveled with the Rolling Stones for a few weeks through Europe one summer. Bon Jovi used to come to Cleveland and catch passes in practice. He had a suite in Cleveland and we all went to Pink Floyd together as a group. I didn't see him with his lighter out, but it wouldn't surprise me if I did.
Rosevelt Colvin: "Bill knew what was going on with everything at every moment. Unless Bon Jovi was there. Then he couldn't care less what was going on. Phil Savage: "He really doesn't care what he looks like. The cutoff sweatshirts? The hoodies? Some of our older veteran coaches and scouts would make comments like, 'What's the deal with our head coach, the guy looks like hell?
Bob Quinn: "There's not a lot of small talk with Bill. Not a lot of, 'Hey, what did you do this weekend? There's no mincing words. Aqib Talib Patriots Cornerback, : "That's how he is with everybody, no games -- OK, a few games, but he's not going to beat around the bush. He's going to tell you if you're playing terrible, if you're playing like s, if you're playing great.
He's not scared to tell you any of that. Clear-cut, direct, straightforward. Phil Savage: "He's not going to fly off the handle and yell and scream at people. That's just not his personality. Rick Venturi: "He has the most unique way of just getting under everyone's skin.
In Cleveland, we ran a cover 2 technique -- where the defensive backs had to jam and run -- that was not easy to teach, and my guys were really struggling with it. Bill just turns to me in front of everyone and says, 'This s is getting really hard to watch. And you're just going, 'Aw, goddamn it,' and your whole body is tense -- I don't know how to put it in words, but you went home and just said to yourself, 'I will never let this s happen again.
And I got back to the sidelines, and he just chewed me out. He said a bunch of expletives to me. It's ingrained in my mind. Bill doesn't mind if it's a passionate thing you do, you make a big play and get up and be excited, but there's a range where, anything after three seconds, you cut that off. Believe me, after that one I didn't step on any other lines. Phil Savage: "He will say something to you in a sarcastic tone that, wow, is just so right to the core. It hits home twice as hard and makes you feel about an inch tall.
Even for a coaching prodigy with a withering sense of humor, Belichick's ultimate success as a head coach is due, in a significant way, to an enormous stroke of luck. During the sixth round of the draft, instead of taking quarterback Tim Rattay with the th pick, the Patriots selected Michigan's Tom Brady.
Rick Venturi: " When you get a guy like Brady that late in the draft, that's just lucky. But the Patriots kept four quarterbacks in , which is pretty rare. So maybe the brilliance wasn't in drafting Brady but in Bill's recognition right away that he had something special when no one else knew it.
Adam Vinatieri Patriots kicker, : "I think the first Super Bowl season was probably the year that it really switched for Bill. The first couple of years, we were a little shaky while he was getting his personnel lined up. Bledsoe gets banged up, Brady comes in, and we start winning games. When Brady first came in, his first start, the rest of the team was like, "This is a young kid, we have to step up and help each other. He told us not to try to do too much by thinking we had to cover up for others.
We followed his lead and it worked. That's when they started drinking the Kool-Aid of believing that Bill knew what he was doing and that Bill had a vision. Thirty-some years after he aced the Lions' coaching quiz to land a job in Detroit, Belichick's own weekly player exams, meticulous game prep and increasingly relentless pursuit of every possible advantage become part of Patriots dynasty lore.
They don't like business getting outside. They like to keep everything inside, even scouting reports. If a piece of paper is on the floor, it gets crumpled up and thrown away. They make sure you turn everything back in and shred all that stuff. Adam Vinatieri : He knew what was going on in the building at all times. He controlled which doors we went out of. David Samson recently took to his podcast to make the bold declaration that Belichick had unequivocally become the greatest coach the NFL had ever seen.
It all came down to a routine win over a disappointing Cleveland Browns, the team he cut his teeth within the nineties. The win over the Browns was victory No. Samson compared that feat to baseball. The win club for NFL coaches, however, is far more exclusive, and the year-old Belichick will need to stick around to climb the ladder more. He trails only George Halas and Don Shula in the coach win rankings, and unsurprisingly, those two are often listed among the greatest NFL head coaches ever.
He barely edges out both in terms of winning percentage, although the slightest losing streak at any point by the Patriots could put them ahead of him. But when his coordinators get offered head coaching gigs elsewhere, that maniacal adherence to control, and his inability to let his coordinators fail, thereby teaching them how to lead, will ultimately be his downfall in the court of public opinion. You must be logged in to post a comment. There, we said it. The rest have a combined record of Ah, that feels better.
They are: Sean Payton Saints. Yeah, we were just as surprised to see his name here The thing that makes Bill Belichick a phenomenal, strategically successful head coach is his control freakish nature. Share this:. Share on Tumblr.
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