by John Powers
AFTER THE FIRST YEAR
Belichick was head coach in Cleveland from 1991 through 1995, and was dismissed after four losing seasons. Though he wasn’t hired as Patriots head coach until after Pete Carroll was fired in 1999, he did spend a year in Foxborough as Bill Parcells’ assistant in 1996.
“In some respects it’s easier to coach the team after the first year. The first year, a lot of times there’s an adjustment or a transition depending on what happened previously. In succeeding years at least you have the ability to build off of some kind of base. Each year brings its own challenges. I think that’s the way it will always be. There are always new things. Every team changes somewhere along the line—players, coaches, situations, schedule, opponents, conditions.
“There is always change and, to a certain degree, you have to go back and rebuild that every single year. That is what training camp is for, that’s what preseason games are for, that’s what practice is for, is to just continue to build that up brick by brick and get your team prepared for it, to deal with it this year, not just because it happened in the past. That ensures that you’ll handle it correctly or well this time or the next time it comes up.”
LOYALTY
“I feel a loyalty to all the people that are in the organization. And I’m not saying I’m great or anything, that’s not the point. The point is, when you’re the head coach, there are a lot of people that are dependent on you. Having been an assistant coach for a long time and been the son of an assistant coach for a long time, you know that your future is, to a certain degree, tied to the head coach. It’s important to me to be able to hopefully provide some stability to the other members of the coaching staff, the members of the organization that relate to the football department, the players. We all know that the first thing that changes is the coach; the next thing is most of the roster.
“I certainly like the fact that we have players that have been brought up in this system, that have tried to develop in this system and hopefully they have the confidence to know that they can come back and play in this system again with the skills and the training and the knowledge that they’ve learned to do it. I feel a loyalty to them and I think that they also feel a loyalty to me along those same lines. It’s a two-way street. I know everybody has got to take care of themselves and their own needs and all that.
“I do have a lot of loyalty and respect for the people who work for me and I want to try to continue to provide a good working environment for them to be successful, for us to be successful, so that we can all benefit from that. So, yeah, I would say that’s definitely important to me. That’s the way I was brought up. I mean, when you’re an assistant coach and the head coach isn’t there, you’re probably not going to be there, either. That’s just the way it is. I learned that a long time ago.”
STAFF CONTINUITY
“We’re very blessed here to have the group of guys that we have on our staff. They have their position groups and their players ready to go each and every week. On a short week it’s even more critical for that communication to be exactly the way that we need it to be so they can learn the game plan and adjust to the things we’re asking them to do in a short period of time. They each have a lot of different responsibilities relative to presenting the scouting report, the game-plan information, the installation, the tips and pointers for each player and each position group. I’ve got a tremendous amount of trust and faith in those guys. They do a tremendous job with their group of guys and I think it shows on the field.”
SMALLER STAFFS
“I’ve always thought that the smaller staff is a little bit easier for me to handle and the coaches that I’ve worked with, particularly Bill Parcells, certainly lived with a small staff. I know my first year with the Baltimore Colts we had only seven assistant coaches and a lot of teams in the league had double digits, 12 or 13. When you have 20-something coaches, it’s hard to get all of those people on the same page, let alone to get all the players to have that kind of consistency. When you have one coach responsible for a group instead of two or three it’s easier to get the kind of consistency and communication that you need within that group. So that’s why I do it that way. That’s how I was brought up and that’s what I know, and I guess I’m comfortable with it. I’m sure other coaches have other ways of doing it and have good reasons and they’re very good and they do a great job, too. I’m not saying it’s the right way. It’s just our way.”
CHALLENGES AND REWARDS OF COORDINATORS
“It’s the performance of your unit. Certainly the performance of the team is important, but if you’re an offensive coordinator you really don’t have much input in the kicking game or defense…. I’d say the most rewarding thing is to see your unit improve and develop and play competitively and successfully out on the field. The most challenging aspect of it is getting them to do that.”
For some die-hard fans, the devotion to the head coach literally is skin-deep. (photo by Pat Greenhouse)
ASSISTANT COACHES’ DUTIES
Belichick had a lengthy and varied apprenticeship before he became a head coach, spending 16 years as an assistant with the Colts, Lions, Broncos, and Giants. While he spent almost all of that time working on defense and special teams, he was employed by Detroit for a season as receivers coach. After Belichick was cut loose by the Browns, he spent another four years as Bill Parcells’ assistant head coach with the Patriots and Jets.
“It’s something that definitely goes under the radar for the most part, but when you’re an assistant coach you have the players that you’re coaching and you have X number of plays and it’s an important decision how you distribute those plays—which players get which plays, how many they get, the exact ones they do get in terms of their preparation. You can’t run everything and everybody can’t take all the plays.
“The [plays] that you give to the various players, there should be a reason for them and some type of rotation that gives everybody work and everybody improves. But you’ve got to be selective as to who does what, who’s in with who and who takes which plays. And, again, that can have a lot to do with the preparation of the players and the team. When you get to the end of the week and you get into a game and you call a play and the guy hasn’t run that play in practice because another guy ran it—whatever the reasons were—that can affect your timing and so forth.
“So those are really little decisions, but they’re big decisions and they’re critical decisions, and those are the ones that the assistant coaches [make]. You have to get everybody ready but you also have to get the guys that you think are going to be doing it sure that they can do it. And that’s what a good assistant does at any position.”
SHARED CHARACTERISTICS BETWEEN COACHES AND SCOUTS
“I do think that a person that is good at scouting and is good at coaching is a better coach or a better scout than somebody who is just one or the other, because it gives you better understanding. If you scout players and you understand the scheme that they’re playing in it’s a little bit easier to understand what the player’s doing rather than just watching his physical skills.
“You can watch him play the game and say, ‘Okay, you know in this situation this is really what he should be doing.’ You’re sure that’s what he’s being coached to do. Maybe you can figure out which guy is making a mistake when there is a mistake made. If you have a good understanding of schemes and football—a coaching Xs-and-Os kind of background—and at the same time when you’re coaching and you’re making out game plans and you’re trying to evaluate the other team, if you’re really good at evaluating players and picking out their strengths and weaknesses, then that can help you attack or defend what your opponents are doing there.
The coach signing a variety of football keepsakes during last year’s training camp. (photo by John Tlumacki)
“I think that’s a good combination. Sometimes coaches get into a comfort zone with players wh
o just know what to do, who know their assignments, and there’s a comfort level there because you know the guy is not going to go out there and [mess] it up…. Sometimes scouts see it the other way around. They see a guy with more talent but don’t take in to account the experience or the overall instinctiveness, that a player with a little less talent could be a better football player because of his instincts and his intangibles and things like that, than a guy who can run a little faster and jump a little higher. Again, there’s a balance there because both things are important.”
APPROACHING A NEW SEASON
Belichick has worked as an NFL coach for 43 seasons. Not only has he never held a job outside of the league, he also never has been unemployed.
“We’ve always taken the approach that every year is a new season and last year is last year. The slate is wiped clean for all of us—rookies, veterans, coaches, experienced or inexperienced. We’re all starting all over again and we all need to build a good base, build a good foundation, reestablish our level of performance in the next season. It’s been six months since any of us have played or coached competitively and we all need to go through the same process of fine-tuning our skills and bringing the team together as one collective unit. That includes all those people—players, coaches, play callers, coordinators, trainers, all the people involved in the game-day operations.
“This year is its own entity and you start all over again from scratch. That’s the way we’ve always approached it. We’ve had successful seasons and we’ve had other seasons that didn’t end the way we wanted them to, but the following year we’ve tried to take that approach. Certainly you come into the season with a good level of confidence after having a successful season the year before, but I think we’re all mature enough to realize that it’s a new year. You can look at the standings from last year and the year before and year before that and you see teams go from the bottom to the top and you see them go from the top down the line…. One year the Dolphins were, whatever it was, 1–15, and the next year they won the division. We see that pretty regularly in the NFL now, those types of examples.”
Wherever he is on the practice field, Belichick is the central figure. (photo by Jonathan Wiggs)
MARCHING ORDERS
“Let’s say we start the season in April. We sit down with that player and say, ‘Okay, here’s what we want you to do in the off-season program—weight, conditioning, technique, position, whatever it is. Here’s what we want you to concentrate on.’ We get to the end of that we say, ‘Okay, here was your off-season. You did this well, you need to do a better job of this.’ Okay, now we’re heading into training camp, ‘Here’s what we want you to do—this, this, this, and that.’ We get to the end of training camp, ‘Okay, you did a good job on this, you still need to work on that. This is better, or this still needs to be improved.’ We get to somewhere in the midpoint of the season and we sit down and have the same conversation. ‘Look, this is what we told you at the beginning of the year. You’ve done a great job with this, you still need to do better at this, this, and that—here’s what you need to do.’
“Injuries may play a part in some of those discussions. We get somewhere close to the end of the year, all right, we have X number of weeks to go. ‘Here’s what we need from you the last three weeks, four weeks, whatever it is. Here’s what you need to concentrate on. You did a great job on this, that, and the other thing. Here’s what you need to do.’
“So we do it on a regular basis. We’re not going to sit around here and waste a whole year and then say, ‘Okay, let’s have a meeting.’ We’re not going to have a meeting every day, but there are certainly different parts of the year where you can. We do it for the entire team. It’s each individual player, it’s each coach, each position, each unit. Offense, defense, special teams, running game, passing game, kickoff return, punt coverage, whatever it is. We evaluate those at various points and say, ‘Okay, how are we doing? We’re all right on this, we’re not so good on this, we need to make this change, whatever.’ We’re our own R&D team. We can’t hire some consultant to come in here like a company can do and, ‘All right, let’s take a look at this and you guys do a study on that and tell us this, tell us that.’ Who’s going to do that?”
PLANNING PRACTICES
“We talk each day about what the team needs. We have a basic structure of, this is what we do, but we change that depending on what we feel our needs are. Definitely a big part of it is health and the overall readiness of the team. That’s very subjective, obviously, but we do the best we can in consultation with the training staff, the strength and conditioning staff, position coaches. A lot of times they have a good tempo of where their individual group or particular players are and sometimes that affects the rest of the preparation.”
EVALUATING INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE
“In the end the bottom line is, how do you feel the player’s production on any given play is rated towards the potential? Or what he could have done or he should have been able to do in that particular situation? That doesn’t mean every play has to be an 80-yard touchdown. It just means, given what happened on the play, what is the most you could have expected from him and did you get that? Did you get less or was there a critical mistake that really put the team in a tough situation or put another player in a tough situation?… Sometimes [you have to say about] certain players in certain games, ‘Well, they didn’t really have many chances in that game,’ or ‘It’s really hard to evaluate them in that particular game because there just weren’t a lot of opportunities.’”
EVALUATING LINEMEN
“You can evaluate what you’re teaching them to do. Do they understand the plays? Do they understand their assignments? Are they using the proper technique in their assignment? Can you evaluate whether a guy can power rush or whether you can stop a power rush or whether you can stop the physical play or block physical players in there? No, and we don’t want to evaluate that. That’s not what this is for. In terms of evaluation, it’s definitely limited. What we do want is that players understand their assignments, their techniques, adjustments that they’re going to have to make so that when we can evaluate it they already know what to do and there’s not a lot of ‘Do I do this? Do I do that?’ hesitation, which nobody looks good doing.
“It’s hard to evaluate a player when he’s not confident or sure of what he’s doing. If he knows what to do and he’s sure how to do it and he goes out there and does it the best that he can and the guy on the other side of the ball does the same thing, then you can see what you have.”
PRIORITIZING INSTRUCTIONS
“You always want to prioritize what’s important because by the end of the week we’re sitting here on Friday or Saturday and every player has been told 1,000 times: ‘Do this, do that.’ ‘When this happens, do this, when that happens, do that.’ ‘If they do this, you’re going to check to that.’ ‘Read this guy, read that guy.’
“There’s got to be some kind of priority…. You want to bring it back to what are the most important things to do as a team and at each position…. You remind them that this is how the game is played. This is what your role is. This is what your job is. First things first.”
MISTAKES
“We’re all going to make mistakes and nobody makes more of them than I do. I understand that mistakes are part of the game. I’ve been in it long enough to know there’s no perfect player, no perfect game or practice. If you go out there and compete against high-level competition they’re going to make some plays, too. But there’s below the line and we just can’t live with that and expect to win. That’s the bottom line… if you’re playing defensive back you can’t have a ball thrown over your head for an 80-yard touchdown. It’s not acceptable.
“I don’t care if the guy is a Hall of Fame player or if he’s a rookie free agent in his first practice. We can’t play like that. We can’t throw a pass into a team meeting where there’s four defend
ers there and try to jam the ball in there and get it picked off when they have four guys standing there. It’s unacceptable. We can’t win doing that. I don’t care who the quarterback is, it doesn’t make any difference. We can’t jump offside and false start and be in first-and-15 and first-and-5 and let them convert third downs and third-and-4 because we jump offside. You can’t play like that. It doesn’t matter who the player is, it’s still below the line. We just can’t play like that and expect to win with those kinds of mistakes.
“Now, is that going to happen? Yeah, it’s going to happen, sure. I understand that. But if it happens too often, we can’t play like that. And there’s a new coach up here, too, if it happens too often. I know that, too. The things that cause you to lose, you have to eliminate. Before you can win, you can’t lose. When you do things as a coach or as a player that cause you to lose then you won’t be in this job long.”
IDENTIFYING BREAKDOWNS
“My advice to you and to the fans and to everybody else would be: [don’t] be too quick to decide who’s right and who’s wrong when you don’t really know what’s going on. And that’s hard for me, too. If I watch something on another team, I can see there’s a mistake. I’m not necessarily sure who made it. Obviously, something wasn’t done properly; that’s evident. But what went wrong and why it went wrong, what’s the background of what happened, if you’re not part of the team, that’s a very hard thing to evaluate. I know it’s very hard for me when I see a mistake on film that another team makes to identify exactly what the problem was because it could probably be one of two or three things. Unless you actually know what the call was, what they were taught to do, I don’t know if you really know who actually made the mistake.”
