Bill Belichick’s Big Secret: Football Can Be Very Dull
One late July training camp afternoon so long ago I was there, Bill Belichick made a shocking confession.
“This is the time when camp gets old,’’ Belichick said. (I am quoting from memory, not notes, so this is a paraphrase). “Players feel that way, coaches feel that way, everybody. All you can do is work through it.’’
Bill Belichick directs his team in late July of 2014.
My first reaction to this admission was a jubilant sense of vindication. Training camp is about as boring as sports gets. It’s not just me, Belichick thinks so, too! My next was startled admiration for the coach’s intellectual honesty. Coaching NFL football has been the only job he’s ever known. Football is infinitely fascinating to Belichick, so much so that trying to instruct the media in pigskin theory is the one exception to his tight-lipped public persona. For him to say part of the game was tedious was big time candor.
As time has passed, I now realize that Belichick’s admission was another effort at football instruction, one that failed in my case because it was too subtle for me. For Belichick, the issue was, this part of football is boring. What do I or any other coach do to make it less so?
That in turn should have led to another revelation. Training camp wasn’t the only part of football that looked dull. What if Belichick agreed with me on those, too? What if the coach felt that ennui was as big a threat to his team as knee injuries? What would he do about THAT?
Plenty as it turns out. Some of Belichick’s most notable coaching methods may be interpreted as means of keeping his players engaged though the necessary but not necessarily absorbing parts of their craft, which are, in fact, most of the parts.
Games are three hours of exhilarating, depressing, frightening chaos for players and coaches alike. Calling that experience “fun’’ doesn’t do it justice. But even the team that wins the Super Bowl gets no more than 60 hours of that high-octane life experience a season. Live action practice is occasionally violent choreography, based on constant repetition like all choreography. I think most fans would be surprised by how humdrum a pro football practice can be. Yet practice is the second most interesting and second rarest time segment of a player’s working year.
What takes up the rest of it? There’s the weight room, where he lifts heavy objects, the most onerous form of blue collar labor. There’s the meeting room, site of the most onerous activity in white collar jobs. And there’s film study — a.k.a. homework — the most objectionable part of school.
Assume a player started football’s routines as a child in Pop Warner. Fifteen to 20 years later, he’s in the National Football League and knows no other way of life. Would it be surprising if said player, especially a veteran on a winning team, began to tune out a bit, going through the motions on some of football’s innumerable repetitive motions?
The player-coach relationship is transactional. Players respond to coaches whose instructions help them win games. To tell players things, coaches must make sure they’re listening and believe them. Doing so with the same franchise for 15 years as Belichick has is a monumental accomplishment. Bill Parcells was a great coach, but one of the main elements of his greatness was to know just when his sarcastic ruthlessness was losing its effectiveness, making it time to bail out for a new set of players/pupils/galley slaves.
Belichick’s first and most important weapon in his battle with boredom is game planning. As is legendary, the Patriots’ game plans vary wildly from game to game, based on the coaching staff’s evaluation of a specific opponent. Logical as this seems to the layperson, such variety means the Pats must practice more different plays in the same time allotted to rivals who have one-size fits all “schemes’’ giving opponents a head start in getting their choreography right.
As seasons 2001-2014 prove, that head start doesn’t mean much. My guess is it’s more than counterbalanced by how much less dull it must be for the Patriots to come to work each week knowing they will be confronted with a different set of challenges and responsibilities. It is always easier to pay attention to new material.
Take the four-blocker eligible-ineligible receiver formation Belichick and the Pats used last week to send John Harbaugh into baffled rage. Walk a practice in the Pats’ cleats. Wouldn’t it be much more fun to practice something so outside the norm than to spend the same time buffing up the seam routes to Gronk? Wouldn’t that formation convince you your coaches were more than a step ahead of the coaches for what you knew was a dangerous opponent?
That conviction can’t be quantified for outsiders. But I’ve been close enough to football to know it’s real, and in times of duress, like being down 14 points in the third quarter, it’s of considerable value.
The Wall Street Journal had a recent story on a less publicized part of the Belichick method. He gives players frequent oral pop quizzes, hard ones, too, on the team’s own game plan and on that week’s opponent. Pop quizzes are never popular. They can improve study habits, though.
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Testimony from former (current? be serious) Patriots on the nature of those quizzes was illuminating. Some questions cited seemed pertinent. Others, like “where did the guy you’re gonna block go to college,’’ did not. The only common thread of the questions was the idea that there’s never too much to learn about football.
That’s a nice summary of Belichick’s whole life right there.
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