Fridays with Bill

by John Powers

  “You can’t wait. Now while all that’s going on we would have somebody else who would be seeing if there is a replay and then they would tell me or I would say, ‘Okay, Josh [McDaniel], we’re going to challenge the play.’ That type of thing. We’re a little bit independent on that. As the play caller you have to see the situation, see what the down-and-distance is or what the field position is. Is it inside the 20? Is it inside the 10? Because maybe you have a breaking point on your calls there, possibly. Then you want to know what their personnel is. So if you’re changing personnel you want to know what’s in the game. Is nickel in or did they stay regular? Or did they come in with dime or whatever it is?

  “As soon as you get that information, then you make your call. You can’t have five people talking at once. You get the information from the press box as quickly as we can see it. The ball is on the two, it’s second down, here comes nickel. Then, all right, you make your call. Or sometimes they hold their subs until you make your subs. Here comes goal-line, whatever it is. As soon as you make your call you say, ‘Okay, give me whatever it is—give me three receivers. Three receivers start on there and then as the call is being made the person in the press box says, ‘Here comes nickel. Or here comes dime. Or they’re staying regular.’ Then he’ll finish making his call because that might affect what he’s calling. It might not, but it might. Meanwhile, the whole replay thing is separate from that.”

  KEEPING OPPONENTS GUESSING

  “When somebody does that [an unusual formation] to you, you’ve got two reactions to it. One is, if it was successful, ‘Until we stop it they might do it again,’ or ‘They did that this time, they’ll probably do something else the next time.’ And you could be right or wrong. So that’s part of the challenge of game planning. It’s no different with anything else, either. It’s not just a player in a different position. It could be a formation or a play. So you run a play that works or a formation that you can see gives them trouble with an adjustment and then you’re at the next game and what do you do?

  “Do you go back and do the same thing and say, ‘Well, they couldn’t handle it, let’s do it again?’ Or do you say, ‘Well, they’re going to be working on that. Let’s go to something else.’ And sometimes you can out-dumb yourself by going to something that hasn’t worked and giving up on something that has. And sometimes you can out-dumb yourself by doing the same thing every time, knowing they’re spending the whole week on it and not moving on to something else…. Every team does things differently from another team. We do things differently than Buffalo did them. New Orleans does things differently than Miami did them.

  “Everybody is different and you’ve got different players, so the game-planning decision ultimately comes down to how much do you want to do what you do and how much of what somebody else does can you apply? Or, how much of what somebody else does do you want to try to shift and do what they do? And then, what kind of problems does that bring for you? Yeah, you can do what somebody else did, but if they were very familiar with it and they knew how to adjust it and they know how to handle different problems that come up within it better than you do, then it’s a good idea but you can’t go out there and execute it, which in the end is really what it comes back to: What can you execute? We can draw up anything we want on the board: ‘You guys go here, you guys go there.’ But then when the play starts, can you actually get done what you need to get done?

  “That’s where it comes down to execution. In the end that’s more important than the Xs and Os. You can put the Xs and Os wherever you want them but if you can’t do it, then what good is it? So you’ve got to be able to execute where you put them and depending what your system is and where you place them and what changes you make, sometimes you can, sometimes you can’t. But you’ve got to decide how much you want to commit to that. If you want to change from what you do to what somebody else did in another game, you’ve got to decide how big of a change that is and then how well you can actually do it.”

  DIRECTIONAL KICKING

  “Directional kicking is like anything else. It’s a strategy. There are some advantages to it and there are some drawbacks to it. One of the advantages is you can shrink the field and put the ball in a certain location and that can be good. The drawbacks to it are [that] it creates a lot of field somewhere else so if they bring it all the way across the field you are defending a lot more space. So if you kick it long enough or low enough or they can hold you up long enough to get back there sometimes you don’t solve a problem, sometimes you create one.

  “It is hard to tell your coverage players to all go to one spot because you can’t always get the ball kicked to where you want it. It is hard enough to kick the ball high, long and straight. Now you are talking about hitting the corner of the green, carry the bunker and all of that. Well, if the ball is not over there and you send everyone over there and the ball ends up down the middle or, God forbid, out of bounds on a kickoff…. It is hard to place the ball perfectly right where you want it in the punting game and even on kickoffs. You can sometimes favor a side, but it is not 100 percent that the ball is going to be over there.

  Belichick does have more than one expression. But this banner, visible behind the End Zone Militia’s celebratory musket fire at Gillette Stadium, displays his default version. (photo by Barry Chin)

  “How much do you commit your coverage when you kick it that way? And then if it is not kicked that way you are outnumbered or you are outflanked. Any time you try to directionally kick—let’s say to the short side of the field—sooner or later those teams are going to try to test you out and come back to the big side, the long field, and if the ball is not all the way over there and you happened to have that on, you could really be giving up a big one. There are some good things to it. It has a place both on kickoffs and punts but it has some downsides, too. You have to either do it very well or pick your spots. Sometimes when we play here or in Buffalo, because of the wind, whether you want to directional kick or not, you are directionally kicking. You don’t have any control over it. It is just too much. That changes the game a little bit there and it probably shortens the field, too, because the ball just doesn’t travel as far.”

  IDENTIFYING YOUR OWN TELLS

  “One of the best places to start is with your teammates. So we work against each other each day and what a good teammate will do, a defensive player will tell an offensive player, ‘Hey, I can tell when you’re pulling. I can see your depth.’ An offensive player would tell a defensive player, ‘I can tell when you’re blitzing,’ or ‘We see a man-coverage stance or a zone-coverage stance. In zone, your feet are here. When you’re in man, it’s a little bit different.’ A lot of it starts on the practice field…. If one of our players can pick it up, you’ve got to assume that one of their players watching film can pick it up, if it’s a stance or a mannerism or whatever it is.

  “I know that the quarterbacks do that with the secondary and the defensive coaches will do that with the offensive coaches, especially in training camp, but sometimes even in the scout team stuff. We talk about what the quarterback saw. How did he know this was going to happen? Or somebody tipped it off. Or, how did the defense know that this was going to happen? Well, because they’re not threatened by something else. We haven’t run this kind of complementary play to it and that’s why it’s being overplayed by a guy in practice. So we definitely try to watch ourselves, but I think on the practice field or on practice film there’s a good give-and-take there between the staff and the players to try to help each other.”

  Belichick consults with offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels during the 2017 training camp. (photo by Jonathan Wiggs)

  PLAYING AGGRESSIVELY WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK

  “You want to be aggressive. You want to be able to take advantage of those opportunities that you can get a little jump on the play without giving them up, without exposing yourself, without putting yourself in a vulnerable positio
n either as a team or as an individual player. We do the same thing; that’s what coaches do. You try to make calls that give you an opportunity to be aggressive and take advantage of something without having too much exposure. Just in case they don’t do that, then what’s the downside? What’s going to happen if they do something else? Are you going to get strip-sacked? Are you going to get hit for a 10-yard loss? How aggressive do you want to be? How much do you want to try to push the envelope on that?

  “It’s a coaching-scheme thing. It’s also individual player decision-making on each play. It’s complicated. It gets into matchups. If a guy is covering one guy you play it one way. You’re covering somebody else, you might play it a little bit differently. You’re blocking one guy, you’re thinking a little bit more of this. You’re blocking another guy, you might not think quite as much of that. That changes within the game, where people move and so forth. Part of being a football player is making those kinds of decisions. That’s what instinctive, good players do. They make the right one.”

  PREPARING FOR UNPREDICTABLE PLAYS

  “If you have a team that has a history or some type of trend of doing a certain thing then you hit it that week for sure because it’s on your checklist. But procedurally there are a thousand plays that can happen at the end of the game. We can’t practice every one of those plays every week. Same thing in the kicking game. There are a hundred situations that if the play comes up once a season it would be a lot. But they come up so you hit those on an infrequent basis but try to make sure that you cover them so if it does come up you know how to handle it.”

  NO-HUDDLE ADJUSTMENTS

  “Sometimes after you’ve been through a no-huddle situation or even a two-minute drive, the players and the coaches, we’re standing on the sideline and have had eight or nine plays and, in all honesty, some of them are running together. Whereas at the normal pace, most of the time if you say, ‘Hey, what happened on that play?’ the player will say, ‘Well, here’s what happened,’ and they know the play and they know the situation you’re talking about and all of that. In a no-huddle they’re saying, ‘On that play, what happened? Did that? Did he? Did he pass protect or did he fake and then check out?’ ‘What play are you talking about now?’ They just run eight or nine plays together. So defensively and offensively it does put a little bit more stress on your sideline. Just the pace of the game.

  “It’s third down and your punt return team has got to be ready, your field goal block team has got to be ready, depending on where it is. Then all of a sudden you’re back out there playing on a first-down call. So it can happen pretty quickly. It just means that everybody’s got to be alert and they’re a lot more used to it than we are because they’ve been doing it on a weekly basis.”

  BALL SECURITY

  Leaving a ball on the ground is a certain way for a Patriot back or receiver to find himself back on the bench. In three of the last four seasons, the club has ranked second in least fumbles made and consistently recovers more than it loses.

  “In the end it’s the players’ ability to secure the ball and their dedication to protecting it. There’s some turnovers that when you watch the play you say, ‘Well, there wasn’t much we could do to prevent that.’ There are other ones that you could do more to prevent and so you just hope that every player will do everything he can when he has the ball to secure it and take care of it. There’s going to be some plays where a defender comes in and has a perfect hit with his helmet right on the ball, and there’s enough pressure on the ball that will jar it loose from just about anybody. And then there’s other plays where there’s almost no pressure on the ball and it comes out. The same thing with interceptions. Sometimes the defenders make great plays and you look at it and say, ‘Boy, that was a tremendous play!’ And then there’s other times you look at it and say, ‘Boy, that could have been prevented with a better route, a better throw, better protection, whatever happened on that play.’ You try to avoid the ones that are just careless.”

  TWO-MINUTE OFFENSE

  Under Belichick, the Patriots have been masterful at scoring in the final two minutes of the first half. Last season they managed it 14 times, including in both AFC playoff games, and also did it six times in the second half, including game-winning scores against the Texans and Steelers. The Eagles turned the tables on them in the Super Bowl, though, tallying scores late in each half.

  “The two-minute at the end of the half is a lot different than the two-minute at the end of the game. They’re two completely different situations. I know everybody talks about them like they’re the same but to me they’re not anything the same. You don’t have to score at the end of the half. If you have to score at the end of the game to win the game then that’s a totally different situation. If you have to score, to get in position to kick a field goal or score a touchdown to win or tie the game, then that’s a totally different situation than at the half, when if you don’t score at the end of the half you haven’t lost the game.

  “Do you want to score? Sure. You want to score every time you have the ball. That’s why you put the offense out there. If you don’t want to score you just send the punt team out there. We’re always trying to score but it’s different at the end of the half. You try to take what you can get and not put yourself at more risk than you have to. At the end of the game you have to do whatever you have to do to move the ball and get it in position to win the game. So you have to take chances.

  “You have to do things you may not want to do in order to have an opportunity to make plays you need to make. That’s dictated by the situation. Field position is part of it but so is everything else—time, timeouts, how you match up in that situation. I think it’s all part of it. There are a lot of factors in that, in what you call and what happens in the sequence of plays that you call. Each one is different. Obviously there are some common threads but I think each situation each week is different based on the matchups and based on whatever the specific situation is—time, timeouts, field position, playing conditions, et cetera.”

  HAIL MARY PASSES

  “I think it’s not an overly strategic play. You want to get the ball in the end zone and get people around it, however you orchestrate that. I mean, you don’t want to throw it short and you don’t want to throw it out…. Trying to get the ball to somebody that has a chance to go up and fight for it and then having other people there to rebound the ball if it comes up. Defensively, it’s sort of the reverse of that. You’ve got to have somebody go up and you don’t want to get out-jumped for the ball. Then you never really get a shot at it. But at the same time you want to be able to box out and keep the other players who don’t go up and jump for it from coming down with the rebound.”

  10. Art & Science

  Bill Belichick began coaching in an era of blackboards, erasers, and 60-millimeter film. The modern day of digital technology and iPads baffles him. “If the TV’s busted some people can walk in there and fix it. I look at it, all I see is wires,” he said. “TV, VCR, Sirius radio, whatever it is. It all looks the same to me.”

  But since the Patriots players are comfortable with 21st century methods of learning, Belichick and his assistants have changed how they impart information. “We’ve converted as a coaching staff and as an organization to what’s better for the students,” he said, “than what’s better for the teachers.”

  But while Belichick acknowledges the value of high-tech modes of instruction, he stresses that the fundamental things still apply. “In the end,” he said, “you have to go out there and play football.”

  OLD-SCHOOL TECHNOLOGY

  “You think about people like Paul Brown and Vince Lombardi and Sid Gillman and every picture I think of them as next to a projector with the film running. I still have a lot of films in my personal possession. I have nothing to watch them on. There’s been obviously a huge change. Film technology and the whole teaching and being able to do cut-ups, and I do
something and I can share it with somebody else. If somebody else does the work they can share it with me. The communication and the flow of information is incredible, nothing that I would have ever envisioned in 1975 when I was working with the Colts.”

  HOLE-PUNCH TECHNOLOGY

  “I’m totally overwhelmed by [modern technology]. Without somebody holding my hand and helping me through it there’s no way I could get a fraction of what I get. When we were with the Colts, I wrote every play on a card. I drew the card, I drew the play, and then every category that the play fit into I checked off alongside the outside edge of the card. If it was first-and-10, plus-territory, gain of over four yards, screen pass, halfback was the receiver, the defense ran a blitz—whatever categories it fell into, then I would check those off. I would take the hole punchers, so there were like 200 holes around the edge of the card, and I would punch out the holes that I had checked off. Then you have a whole stack of cards here, slide the ice pick back in there, and all the screens fall out, or whatever you’re looking at.

  The 60-millimeter man puzzling over modern technology. “I look at it, all I see is wires.” (photo by Jim Davis)

  “So, okay, 15 screens and you look at them. How many were strong? How many were weak? How many to the halfback? How many were play-action? How many were on third down? How many were on second down? Figure that out and stack them back in there again. I would do like 200 of those—screens and third down and red area and goal line and short yardage and what they ran against blitzes and what they ran from slot and what they ran from motion and all that. That’s about as archaic as you can get, the ice-pick method. But it worked.”

  TECHNOLOGY EVOLUTION