by John Powers
“Because somewhere between those 1,000 things there’s one and then there’s 1,000. There’s got to be some kind of priority. So every time you come to the end of the week you want to bring it back to what are the most important things to do as a team and at each position: Here are the three most important things for you to do this week. So that you don’t lose sight of the big picture and so you don’t take a chance on players not knowing what the most important things are and making those decisions themselves. 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.”
CHANGING GAME PLANS
“That happens pretty much every week. Sometimes it’s on Thursday, sometimes it’s on Friday, sometimes it could even be on Saturday. We could say, ‘Look, cross this play off. Cross that play off. Cross this adjustment off. We’re not going to do that.’ Either we ran it a couple times and for whatever reason—either it didn’t look good or we didn’t get a run right or we just don’t have enough time to practice it against what we really think we’re going to see. We just say, ‘That’s it.’ And we talk to the players about that, too. Particularly the quarterback, but not just the quarterback. If we had a secondary or the linebackers and we talked to them at the end of the week and they’re like, ‘I still don’t feel really good about this,’ well all right. You know what? We don’t need it. We’ve got other stuff we can call, hopefully. The whole game isn’t just hinged on this one thing. If Tom [Brady] says, ‘You know what? I don’t really feel good about this play down here, they do this, they do that.’ Okay, well, maybe if you ran it three or four more times—but we don’t have time to run it three or four more times.
“So you just say, ‘Okay, let’s pull the plug on it. We have other plays. We have other stuff we feel good about, so let’s forget about that one.’ We do a walkthrough on Saturday, but Friday is the last day where you really run everything. If something comes up today that’s still a little bit dirty then that’s probably not a good sign. But sometimes you have to do it and you say, ‘Okay, look, we’ll take a little more time on Saturday and set it up in the walkthrough. We’ve got to get this. When this happens, this is the only way we can handle it, so let’s go through it one more time and make sure everybody’s on the same page.’
“You get later in the week and you deal with some one-time situations—two-minute, backed-up, four-minute, two-point plays—that may or may not happen. Kickoff return after a safety—you know, all that stuff. You do it and if you make a mistake on it you’ve just to correct it and move on. You throw that out and then you’ve got to put something else in. The big thing is you want everybody to feel confident and feel good going into the game that what we’re going to call we know what to do and we can be aggressive doing it. If you have that, then you’ve got a chance. If you don’t and you can’t play aggressively, then that’s not what you want to do.”
DAY BEFORE A GAME
“It’s a review of everything that we’re going to do. There are some situations the day before the game that we go over in the meetings or go over on the field in a walkthrough that we haven’t covered prior to that week. You can’t cover every situation in every game that could possibly come up. That would be impossible. But usually over the course of three to four weeks you can pretty much get them all. Maybe you kick off after a safety, kickoff return after a safety, the squib kick situations, the take-a-safety-on-a-punt, all those kinds of things.
“Just as an example, in the kicking game you maybe wouldn’t cover every one of those every week but you cover two or three of them this week and then two or three of them the next week and then two or three of them, so then after a cycle of four to five weeks you would have hit it. Those things don’t come up every single game. You’re lucky if it’s once a season. But any really critical plays, like a must onside kick or having to block a punt rush at the end of the game when you’ve got to punt the ball and you know they’re coming—things like that are covered on a more weekly basis.
The coach with owner Bob Kraft, who hired him in 2000 after dismissing Pete Carroll. (photo by Jim Davis)
“And then we try to pull it all together so over the course of the week the players get told about 5,000 different things. ‘On this play do this, if they do this we do that. If they do this, we do something else. If this happens, this happens. If that happens, something else happens.’ Okay, but now we come to the game. All right, forget about all that. What do we need to do here to win? What are the most important things that we have to do here to win? We know there are 1,000 things we’ve talked about and everything is important but in the end let’s get back to what we need to do here tomorrow.”
FINAL PREPARATIONS
“Friday is certainly a coming together time and Saturday a lot of times is just a further coming together or further solidifying. Maybe we put some things on the back burner: ‘We’ve got this if we need it. We’ve got that if we need it. If this situation comes up this is how we’re going to handle it, but this is what we’re going to go with. Here’s how we’re going to play the game.’ Now if we have to adjust it, we adjust it. Because when you go through all of that in the beginning of the week the players really don’t know—and sometimes the coaches don’t know for sure, either—exactly how it’s going to unfold.
“To just identify and get everybody on the same page—‘Okay, here’s how we’re going to start so let’s don’t get confused with this other stuff. If we need it we’ll come to it, but that’s not what we’re going to lead with.’ So then the players can really zero in on, ‘Okay, those calls, those adjustments… if this is called and that happens here’s what we’re going to do. There’s another play where that might happen, but that play is 40 plays down the road. That’s not what we’re thinking about right now.”
SATURDAY PREPARATION
“The game plan is pretty much done by Friday. Friday afternoon we’re on the plane. We have a walkthrough practice on Saturday. There’s not a whole lot of game planning going on. Maybe you prioritize some of the calls you want to make. ‘Do we want to make this first? Do we want to call this first and then come with that? Do we want to call that first and then come back?’ That type of thing. But I would say more so it’s just getting caught up on a lot of little loose-end things that come up, getting ahead on the next team. Watching film, breaking down the next team you’re going to play, or some of the coaches that are involved in the pre-scouting preparation. And for the play callers, more of prioritizing calls and making sure, thinking about the Saturday morning and night meetings. How you want to present the thing to the team, what reminders and what priorities, what film you want to show, and so forth.
“It’s pretty standard. Whether we play home or away, the Saturday routine is the Saturday routine and that follows up off what happened Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. What’s the best way to bring everything together on Saturday prior to the game so you put your team in the best possible mindset and state of preparation for Sunday? ‘Here’s what we’re going to call. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to save this. This is our adjustment if they do that. Here’s how we’re going to start the game. When they give us this look, here’s what we’ll do and that type of thing.’ Make sure everybody’s on the same page.”
OUTDOORS ONLY
“When I first started coaching, there were no indoor options. At the Colts we were [usually] in Memorial Stadium, which wasn’t a great practice facility because they sodded the infield after the baseball season and that area was all roped off. So you couldn’t practice at that end of the field. You had to practice at the other end. Or the other option was you could push the WALK button and walk the team across the street to Eastern High School. On the field there—I would say it was two percent grass and 90 percent dirt and glass and rocks—and practice over there. So that’s what it was. There was no indoor facility at Denver. There was no indoor facility at the Giant
s. We practiced every day, obviously, outside, like in training camp. So the world of the NFL now is a lot different than what it was.”
WEATHER FORECASTS
“When you play in New England, you have to be ready for everything. I’d say based on the forecasts we’ve gotten so far this year [2014] none of them have been even close to what the game conditions were. There was 100 percent chance of rain last week and the only water I saw was on the Gatorade table. You know, it is what it is… I’m not saying I could do better than them [meteorologists]. It’s just that they’re wrong a lot. That’s a fact. They’re wrong a lot.”
WEATHER PREDICTIONS
“I’m no better weatherman than you are or anybody else. As you get closer to the time you play then you usually have a more accurate assessment of it. I’ve made the mistake of telling a team too far in advance, ‘Well, it looks like it’s going to snow or rain or be hot or be cold’ and then you come around to game time and it’s the exact opposite. It’s just a waste of time and the players look at you like, ‘You’re really on top of it this week, Coach.’ I’ve kind of gotten out of that business. We’ve been out here at practice. We’ve practiced in rain. We’ve practiced in wind. We’ve practiced on hot days and we’ll practice on cold days before the season is over.”
WEATHER FACTOR
“In the end, whatever the conditions are out there, the team you’re playing is the team on the other side of the line of scrimmage. That’s who you have to beat. It’s not like golf where you’re hitting the ball into the elements. There’s somebody on the other side of the line of scrimmage. You have to block and tackle, cover and defend and all that. [Weather] is certainly a part of the game… it’s a factor, but I don’t think it’s as much of a factor as the execution of your team against your opponent. That’s who the real opponent is.”
ADJUSTING TO WEATHER CHANGES
“It certainly affects the kicking game first and then the deep passing game second and then everything else third…. I’m always hesitant to talk to the team about that too far in advance because then when you are wrong you’ve just wasted a lot of time talking about a situation that—guess what?—is not the way it is.”
WEST COAST TEAMS PLAYING IN THE EAST
“These guys have all played in cold weather. They’ve all played on the East Coast. They’ve all played in those kinds of situations. It’s not like it’s high school and this is the first time we’ve gotten on a plane or something. This is the National Football League.”
10-GAME ASSESSMENT
“There are a number of things that fundamentally change going into the second half of the season. The opponents, there’s some different matchups. The weather could be a little bit more of a factor than it was earlier in the year. Situationally, we’ve all put our cards on the table. There’s been enough situations in the first 10 games where you know everybody has had to show what they want to do in certain situations. Now all of that is out there and you’re at another stage where, do you want to do the same thing in those situations or do you want to have a little bit of a change? Do you want to give them something else to think about or do you want to go back and rely on what you’ve practiced the most?
“You’re in a different phase there on some things like that. Your fundamental offensive, defensive, and special teams core systems we’ve been practicing a long time and played a lot of games. I don’t think you want to make too many changes to those but there’s some subtle modifications that you make along the way, that the opponents make along the way based on what they’re seeing from you, that you’re into a little bit of that type game that I don’t think you were into in the first few weeks of the season. You work on those situational things and they come up and you go with what you practiced. Now, for the most part everybody’s seen that. We’ve seen what theirs are, they’ve seen what ours are. Now, where do you go from there?”
DECEMBER RECORD
Since Tom Brady became starting quarterback in 2001, the Patriots are 58–11 in games played in December, the final month before the postseason. The club has missed the playoffs only twice, in 2002 and in 2008, when Brady was out for the rest of the season after injuring his knee in the opener.
“I’d like to think there’s a lot of pride taken around here in every game, including December…. We try to take pride in our performance every week, from Game 1 to Game whatever. That’s the way we do it. Come in, prepare for the team, get ready to go, try to play our best on Sunday, and try to win. That’s what we do every week. I don’t have any real formula for why, but the most important thing is that we maintain consistency there and we try to get to the highest level of consistency that we can. I’m not saying we always do it. We’re far from perfect. We make a lot of mistakes but that’s what we try to do. We try to do it on a regular week. It’s not like we go along in October and November and say, ‘Okay, we’re going to really change things here in December and try to start playing good football.’ We try to play good football all year long. We try to coach well. We don’t always do it, but we’re trying.”
Belichick and Tom Brady embrace after the most unlikely Super Bowl triumph over Atlanta in 2017. (photo by Stan Grossfeld)
6. Opponents
As the son of an assistant coach who literally wrote the book on football scouting, Bill Belichick is renowned for his meticulous preparation for the Patriots’ opponents. “We don’t have a 162-game schedule,” he said. “We play 16 games. Every one of them is a big game. They’re all urgent. They’re all important. You don’t get any of them back.”
Belichick and his assistants make a point of knowing every starter, every backup, and every special teams player on the rival roster. “We have an individual scouting report on each player that plays on every one of those teams,” the coach said. “What their tendencies are, what their strengths are, what we think their weaknesses are, and how to play them.”
Belichick and his staff catalogue several thousand plays that opponents have used in recent seasons even though they know that they probably won’t see more than 70. “We don’t just want to say, ‘Well, that’s not going to come up,’” he said. “I think that would be irresponsible.”
In a league that, from drafting to scheduling, has been designed to produce parity, preparation is paramount. “Every week you’re up against a team that has the same opportunity as you do, the same salary cap, same draft choices,” said Belichick. “Every week it’s a huge challenge to be able to compete against that team. That’s what it’s about for me.”
IDENTIFYING WELL-COACHED TEAMS
“The adjustments that they make. How well their players, as a group, play fundamentally. How well they handle situations—down and distance, time, things like that. It’s not so much about the play. A lot of that is just having the right distribution, doing the right thing, and doing the right thing in a situation when the quarterback scrambles, when stuff happens—screen passes, misdirection, deceptive plays, things like that. How the defense plays them. How well the offense executes them. How often they have obvious miscommunications where something is wrong. You don’t know exactly what it is, but you know something is fouled up, versus the defense gives the offense a bunch of different looks, different situations, and they can handle it. Obviously they’re doing a lot of things right.”
DIVISIONAL INTENSITY
“We don’t have a 162-game schedule. We play 16 games. Every one of them is a big game. They’re all urgent. They’re all important. You don’t get any of them back. You only get 16 chances in the regular season. For us, every game is a big game. Obviously, division games are a little bit bigger because of the importance of the standings and what they mean to the division, but every game is a big game. Last week was a big game. Next week will be a big game. They’re all huge. Division rivals, those games are intense. Both teams know each other well. They know their schemes. They know the players. They’ve really played against eac
h other so there is a high level of competitiveness there. That high level of competitiveness is there in the other games as well. This one you just know each other a little better, that’s all. You’re more familiar with them.
“The Jets are tough. I’m sure they think we’re tough. That’s the way it is in this division. You play tough games in the division. It’s highly competitive and the week leading up to it is an intense week. You want to try to get everything right. You know they’ve got all the tips on you. You think you’ve got all the tips on them. You want to try to balance those out and attack their weaknesses and exploit your strengths. That’s the matchup every week there.”
DIVISIONAL OPPONENTS
The Patriots have been playing their three AFC East opponents—the Bills, Dolphins, and Jets—home and away since the AFL and NFL merged in 1970, and have met Buffalo and New York ever since the inaugural AFL season in 1960. During Belichick’s tenure (through 2017), New England has an aggregate regular season record of 80–28 against those rivals and has won 15 divisional titles, the last nine of them in a row.
“We have all of this year’s information. Then we have our two games against them last year. Then we have all the games that we had from last year going into our games…. It’s a couple thousand plays on offense, a couple thousand plays on defense. It’s probably 700–800 plays in the kicking game. It’s a lot of plays. They can’t do everything that they have shown, but you have to be ready for it because they have it and they’ve done it and we know they have it.
“I think it’s trying to whittle down the volume of information, which is excessive. It’s way more than you need, but you can’t ignore it. If they did something in the past, we can’t ignore it. Or if they’ve had a strong tendency of doing something in the past but they haven’t done as much of it recently, but they’ve shown it, we know they still have it. We don’t just want to say, ‘Well, that’s not going to come up.’ I think that would be irresponsible. But at the same time, you can’t get ready for everything. There’s just too much history.
