Bill Belichick

Coaching any sport is much harder than it seems. There are some jobs that almost anyone with the right education can do. Coaching is definitely not one of those jobs. One can get educated on drawing X’s and O’s on a paper for decades and still might be far from being a successful coach. Of course knowledge of the sport is very important too but to be successful in a job like coaching, one has to dedicate himself to his job; his job has to be his life. This is the major reason even those who hate Patriots still respect Bill Belichick and agree that he had unique abilities that make him so successful. His exceptional intelligence, his ability to break down and exploit game film, his singular discipline and his almost unmatched work ethic makes him probably the best coach in the NFL today and even one of the best in the history of the NFL.

Bill Belichick got most of his education on football coaching from his father Steve Belichick. Compared to Bill, his dad was not a famous football coach although he was known for his incredible ability to break down and exploit game film. Bill as a football player himself learned a lot from his coach and father, Steve Belichick. With this knowledge and his genius, he made a lot of his dreams and the dreams of the fans’ come true.

One example of this was that Super Bowl game against the Rams. It is hard to forget a game in which everyone was expecting an easy win for the Rams just like the game they won against the Patriots during the regular season. St Louis’ team was a very good team. Their offence looked like it was flawless and unstoppable. However “Every offense has weaknesses” says Bill Belichick and for that Super Bowl game he definitely studied his lesson well. He made his defense concentrate on one player, Michael Faulk. On practice he chose someone from the scout team to be Faulk and made them run Ram’s plays over and over again. In every play he kept yelling at his defense “Where is he? Where is he?” to encourage them to follow Faulk at all times. After a week of hearing the same yell before every play: “Where is he?” finally one of the defensive players turned around and yelled “Shut the fuck up” which even Belichick appreciated, because it meant they had it down. He was very patient when he was explaining his plays and he was very explicit about what exactly he wanted his players to do on the field. There were other things that they had worked on too, and Belichick knew it all worked very well when his players poured ice cold water on him after the Super Bowl victory that day.

One of the important characteristics of Belichick that made him a unique coach was that he knew every team had a weakness, and he never stopped working or watching those tapes over and over again until he found those weaknesses. His confidence always had a positive impact on his players and made them believe they can succeed.

“Bill Belichick was a star who did not want to be a star, a celebrity in search of privacy and the right to do his job without any public interference”. According to Belichick modern media especially television detracted coaching. This was not because he could have developed new plays with his assistant coaches or go over some old tapes instead of watching TV but because TV was singularly dangerous. “It fed egos, and swollen egos detracted from the essence of football, which is the idea of team”