Bill Belichick vs. the NFL: The Case for the NFL's Greatest Coach
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Bill Belichick vs. the NFL: The Case for the NFL's Greatest Coach
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781633196179 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Triumph Books |
| Publication date: | 10/15/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bill Belichick vs. The NFL
The Case for The NFL's Greatest Coach
By Erik Frenz
Triumph Books LLC
Copyright © 2016 Erik FrenzAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-63319-617-9
CHAPTER 1
The Making of a Legendary Coach
One does not simply walk into the NFL and become a legendary head coach. Bill Belichick built his legacy brick by brick and he didn't start when he showed up in Foxborough, Massachusetts, to become the Patriots head coach. In fact, Bill was born into football as the son of Steve Belichick, who coached in various roles across college football for more than 40 years from 1946–89. Steve spent most of his days as a scout and coach for the United States Naval Academy. Bill immediately took an interest and became something of a child prodigy as a coach.
His attention to detail was evident right from the get-go. "I never pushed Bill," Steve said, according to ESPN. "He was just always so interested ... and so attentive to detail. He went to prep school at the Phillips Academy, where the Bushes went, because he once heard me advising recruits that they needed an extra year at prep school. Then Bill told me he wanted to go to college in New England, and I said, 'You've never even been to New England.' Bill said, 'Yeah, but I've done some studying and found there are more good schools in New England than anywhere else and I want to see them.' So we spent two weeks seeing them."
Bill ended up at Wesleyan, in Middletown, Connecticut, where he played tight end and center in football and where he also took interest in lacrosse and squash. In 1975 — the same year Belichick finished his economics degree — he began his NFL career as an assistant to Baltimore Colts head coach Ted Marchibroda. He was making $25 a week to study the opponent's offensive tendencies by drawing play diagrams on note cards, punching holes in the cards to denote categories such as first and 10, gains of more than four yards, screen passes, defensive blitzes, etc., and then sliding an ice pick through the holes to sort through the cards. "I learned probably more football in that room — it was a cinderblock closet, really — but I probably learned more football in that room than anyplace else I've ever been," Bill said. "It was like a graduate course in football."
Belichick's next resume builders followed. He was an assistant special teams coach with the Detroit Lions in 1976 and he added tight ends and wide receivers to his list of hats in '77. From there, he took another job as an assistant special teams coach and a defensive assistant with the Denver Broncos in '78. The next stop was with the New York Giants, but Belichick didn't start off with the defensive coordinator job that eventually put him on the map. Initially, his move to the Giants was lateral. He took a small promotion to become a special teams coach, shedding the "assistant" label from his title while maintaining his role as a defensive assistant.
In his third year with the Giants, Belichick added linebacker coach to his resume. He maintained his role as special teams coach and linebackers coach from 1980–84, during which time the Giants linebackers were feared, earning the nickname "The Crunch Bunch" for a group that featured Lawrence Taylor, Harry Carson, Brian Kelley, and Brad Van Pelt. Taylor and Carson would eventually be named to the Hall of Fame, Van Pelt was named to five Pro Bowls, and from the year of 1980–84, the four linebackers were named to a combined nine Pro Bowls (four for Taylor, four for Carson, one for Van Pelt). The Crunch Bunch last played together in 1983, but the Giants' defensive reign of dominance was not over. The Crunch Bunch gave way to the Big Blue Wrecking Crew, right around the time Belichick was named defensive coordinator in 1985 — just a couple years after Bill Parcells took over as head coach from Ray Perkins.
It wasn't long before Belichick's 3–4 defense was wrecking everything in sight. They were the No. 5 scoring defense in the NFL in Belichick's first year as coordinator and No. 2 in his second year. They held Joe Montana's San Francisco 49ers to three points in a 49–3 rout in the first round of the playoffs, followed by a 17–0 shutout of the dominant Washington Redskins, and then a 39–20 bucking of the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XXI. Belichick's first taste of Super Bowl glory was quickly followed by his first taste of a Super Bowl hangover, but the Giants rebounded in the following years and ranked in the top 10 in scoring from 1988–90.
And that's when Belichick had the finest single-game performance of his young coaching career. The year was 1990, the game was Super Bowl XXV, the opponent was the Buffalo Bills. Led by quarterback Jim Kelly, running back Thurman Thomas, wide receiver Andre Reed, and others, the Bills offense was a scoring juggernaut with 95 points in their previous two playoff games.
That was before they ran into Belichick and the Wrecking Crew. The Giants held the Bills to 19 points — just the fifth time all season the Bills had been held below 24 points on offense — and they did it with the first example of Belichick's signature pick-your-poison approach.
Over the years, Belichick has developed a reputation for eliminating an opponent's greatest strength and forcing the opponent to win through unconventional means. The Giants sought to disrupt the Bills passing attack with aggressive coverage against the wide receivers, knocking them off the line and off their routes. This aggressive plan focused on the passing game but opened up opportunities for the running game. As a result the Bills ran the ball 25 times for 166 yards and two touchdowns, but Kelly was just 18-of-30 for 212 yards on the day.
The Giants began the game with just two defensive linemen on the field, but despite a defensive scheme that was designed to slow down the passing game, the Bills kept trying to pass the ball, as that had been their bread and butter all season. By the time they adjusted, it was too late. Belichick's Super Bowl XXV defensive gameplan landed in the Hall of Fame. And in a league that has trended toward the passing game in recent years, there are elements of his gameplan that have become commonplace in defensive strategies across the NFL.
* * *
It should come as no surprise that Belichick earned his first head coaching job hot off the heels of his now legendary defensive gameplan. While the Giants were running roughshod over the NFL in 1990, the Cleveland Browns were in the midst of a lost season in which they fired their head coach, Bud Carson, just nine games into the season and just a year and a half after he took over for former Browns head coach Marty Schottenheimer.
In 1991 Belichick took over a team that had won just three games the year prior to his arrival, and success didn't follow him from New York to Cleveland. The Browns won six games his first year and seven games each of his next two years.
One thing he did take with him, however, was his grisly demeanor. He didn't exactly endear himself to the local media with his tendency to avoid revealing anything resembling information, which made it all the easier for the media to rail against his decision to jettison popular quarterback Bernie Kosar in the middle of the 1993 season in favor of Vinny Testaverde.
The media began singing a different tune in 1994, when Belichick coached the Browns to an 11–5 record and their first playoff appearance since 1989. Belichick's defensive genius began to show through, as the Browns were the league's No. 1 scoring defense. He earned his first career playoff victory against his mentor, Bill Parcells, and the New England Patriots. That was the high point of Belichick's Browns career. It was all downhill from there.
"Bill Belichick will be my head coach in 1996." The Browns were 4–5 when Browns owner Art Modell gave Belichick that endorsement. The Browns went on to lose six of their next seven games from that point. How quickly things change. Modell had made the declaration after announcing he had made deals to move the team to Baltimore, but things went downhill well before that point.
Belichick wanted to add a new dimension to the offense to tilt matchups in his favor and so he implored Browns owner Art Modell to sign talented-but-divisive wide receiver Andre Rison to a $17 million contract, which forced Modell to borrow money from five banks. The move didn't pan out like Belichick hoped, thanks to a combination of underperformance, barbs thrown back and forth between Rison and Modell in the media, and Rison's self-vilification. (He infamously said, "Baltimore, here we come," in an expletive-laden tirade following the Browns' Week 12 loss to the Green Bay Packers.)
Belichick had also made another controversial decision at quarterback, when he benched veteran Testaverde for rookie Eric Zeier, who finished the season with 50.9 percent completions, four touchdowns, nine interceptions, and a 51.9 passer rating. Belichick was fired after that season, but even in a "five-year reign of error," as dubbed by Browns media, the surly head coach had laid the foundation for his next coaching gig through his mistakes.
Of course, after his failure with the Browns, other teams were hesitant to pick up what Belichick was putting down. So, Belichick linked up with his old friend, Bill Parcells, for another run at a championship with the New England Patriots. Belichick joined the Patriots as an assistant head coach and as defensive backs coach, helping the team get to Super Bowl XXXI in the 1996–97 season. The Patriots' pass defense gave up yards in bunches that year with the third highest total against them, but they allowed just 17 passing touchdowns (sixth fewest) and intercepted 23 passes (fourth most).
Belichick then took over as New York Jets head coach for the first time, while the Patriots and Jets worked out compensation for Parcells' services. Those were some successful Jets teams, and they never posted a losing record under Parcells. They even went 12–4 in 1998 and made a trip to the AFC Championship Game.
But following the 1999 season, when Belichick was named Parcells' successor, the Jets and their head coach were about to make headlines for a bizarre press conference and a now-famous note scrawled on a napkin.
CHAPTER 22000: Breaking Ground
"I resign as HC of the NYJ."
You won't find a more famous combination of seven words/abbreviations to ever be scrawled on a napkin in NFL history. That short phrase spelled the end of Belichick's time in New York, but it did not yet denote the beginning of Belichick's empire in New England. Only after several lawsuits and a trade of a first-round pick did Belichick officially complete his journey up I–95 from New York to Foxborough.
Coming to New England was not the end goal of Belichick's resignation press conference with the Jets. "I didn't resign to get to this spot," he said on a conference call shortly after his arrival in New England. "I resigned because I wasn't comfortable with the situation with the Jets." Belichick was looking at two situations: one under a familiar owner in Robert Kraft where he would be given dual duties as head coach and general manager, another under a changing ownership group with the Jets, where he would have his mentor Parcells looming over him in an ominous position of authority.
The Patriots were a good team when Bill Belichick arrived. They were just waiting for the right coach. In 2000 Belichick inherited a team that was already stocked with eight first-round picks and seven second-round picks. They were a young team. Of the 65 players that suited up for New England in 2000, 39 were age 26 years or younger, 19 were above that age, and only seven were 30 or older.
The nucleus was in place with Kevin Faulk, Troy Brown, Damien Woody, Willie McGinest, Tedy Bruschi, Ty Law, Lawyer Milloy, and Ted Johnson. Each of these players would go on to contribute to one, two, or all three of the Patriots' championships from 2001–04. Those pieces were all acquired in the space of seven years from the beginning of Bill Parcells' tenure as Patriots head coach in '93 to the end of Pete Carroll's tenure in '99. But most of them were dug up during the Parcells era with only a few good picks scattered in between the egregious draft flops of the Carroll-Bobby Grier regime.
That nucleus would remain the nucleus for a long time to come, but why — with so many talented players — were the Patriots falling further and further away from their goals with each passing year?
To understand the Patriots' rise to prominence after Belichick's arrival, it helps to first have an understanding of what they were before they became the model organization for the NFL. In the space of four years from Parcells' departure in 1996 to Carroll's ouster in 1999, the Patriots went from a Super Bowl contender to a playoff pretender. The Patriots started 6–2 in Carroll's final year leading the organization but finished with a 2–6 slide that left the team out of the postseason for the first time in four years. After finishing 11–5 in '96, the Patriots finished with one fewer win and one extra loss each season for the next three years to go 10–6 in '97, 9–7 in '98, and finally 8–8 in '99. "In that third year, I know we only went 8–8," former Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi said in a conference call prior to Super Bowl XLIX. "But I thought I saw coach Pete Carroll, saw him harden a little bit. It's a different deal out here in New England. And his mentality in the way he handles things was so different than Coach Parcells. And I thought we had some players that were much older and a lot of players that were very young that only knew one way, and that was the Parcells way, old-school Jersey, if you will. And then coming in, new-school California. But I think that just that team was in a place where they weren't ready to accept what Pete was trying to give. And whether that's them being in the wrong place in their career, not at the right time ... or maybe just being stubborn and too set in their ways, but those combination of things could be a factor in terms of it not working out."
But this was a sudden symptom of a long-term diagnosis, a gradual slide from the verge of championships to the brink of irrelevance.
The 2001 season is the official dawn of the Patriots dynasty; the 2000 season, though, was where it all began. Any Patriots fans who are old enough to remember can tell you exactly where they were when Jets linebacker Mo Lewis delivered the hit heard 'round the world that sent Drew Bledsoe to the bench. What they might not be able to tell you, though, is why Tom Brady was the one who took over at quarterback in the moment that changed the course of NFL history forever.
The Patriots didn't necessarily need a quarterback of any variety, even a backup, headed into the 2000 NFL Draft. They carried four quarterbacks into the 2000 season: Brady, Bledsoe, John Friesz, and Michael Bishop. Was Brady dead weight? Yes. Would it stay that way? Obviously not.
The 2000 roster needed an extra running back, defensive lineman, or linebacker more than it needed a fourth quarterback. To Belichick, those were all worthy sacrifices to make to keep Brady on the roster. And if they'd gone about it any other way, Brady might have been scooped up by some other team off waivers and never played a down for the Patriots. "It really doesn't matter whether the guy is on the practice squad or on the 53-man roster. If he's inactive, he's not going to play in the game," Belichick said during training camp in 2012. "Then the question is as an organization: which players do you want to protect? You can protect the ones on the 53. To some degree, you can't protect the ones on the practice squad. So in that particular case, that's why we didn't put Brady on the practice squad — because we wanted to make sure that we had him, not so much for that year, but for the following year."
A fourth quarterback wasn't the reason the Patriots lost their first four games, including two against division rivals. A fourth quarterback wasn't the reason the Patriots lost 11 games that year, but that fourth quarterback was arguably the biggest reason the Patriots won 10 or more games in 14 of the next 15 seasons and counting.
Brady wouldn't stay fourth on the depth chart for long, but his opportunity only came because Belichick saw in 2000 what he hoped could pay off in 2001 and beyond. But Brady's addition to the roster was just one of many factors that made the 2000 season so important in building for the future of the franchise. To borrow from his old mentor, Bill Parcells, Belichick was just starting to cook the dinner and still needed to shop for the groceries. In order to do so, however, he first had to find out exactly what he had in the cupboard.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bill Belichick vs. The NFL by Erik Frenz. Copyright © 2016 Erik Frenz. Excerpted by permission of Triumph Books LLC.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword by Mike Mayock,Introduction,
1. The Making of a Legendary Coach,
2. 2000: Breaking Ground,
3. 2001: The Dawn of a Dynasty,
4. Bill Belichick vs. Bill Parcells,
5. 2002: Hung Over,
6. Bill Belichick vs. Tony Dungy,
7. 2003: They Hate Their Coach,
8. Bill Belichick vs. Vince Lombardi,
9. Bill Belichick vs. John Madden,
10. 2004: Three Out of Four Ain't Bad,
11. Bill Belichick vs. Jimmy Johnson,
12. Bill Belichick vs. Chuck Noll,
13. 2005: Apples Falling from the Tree,
14. Bill Belichick vs. Bill Walsh,
15. Bill Belichick vs. Tom Landry,
16. 2006: A Missed Opportunity,
17. 2007: Chasing Perfection,
18. Bill Belichick vs. Don Shula,
19. 2008: A Season Without Brady,
20. 2009: Defensive Overhaul,
21. Bill Belichick vs. Joe Gibbs,
22. 2010: Moss Moves On, Gronk Moves In,
23. 2011: Hello, Old Friend,
24. Bill Belichick vs. Tom Coughlin,
25. 2012: Hurry Up,
26. 2013: The Fall of Gronk,
27. 2014: Super Again,
28. Bill Belichick vs. Pete Carroll,
29. Bill Belichick vs. George Halas,
30. 2015: Short-Handed,
31. Bill Belichick vs. Paul Brown,
32. Spygate and Deflategate,
33. Bill Belichick and Tom Brady: The Definition of Synergy,
Appendix. Bill Belichick by the Numbers,
Acknowledgments,
Sources,