Bill Belichick doesn’t give us much to work with. You get the sense that, if he had it his way, we would know even less about him than we do. He’d show up on the sidelines on Sunday, stare grimly out onto the field, maybe pump his fist once or twice, pat a few guys on the helmet, and that would be it. He would address his team in the locker room — with no cameras around, natch — and head straight home to enjoy a nice [redacted] and get some sleep. We wouldn’t see him again until next Sunday.
In lieu of that, we get monosyllabic pressers and the odd Mic’d Up segment. All these serve to illuminate is that Belichick considers the media a distraction and is sometimes just a dope ineffectually yelling “Go! Go! Go!” at the field like the rest of us.
Because of Belichick’s unwillingness to be a personality, all we have to draw upon, when we’re discussing him, are decisions, outcomes and his overall opaqueness. He is, to people not on his football team, a funeral-faced decision machine that is often right, which is part of why his teams have been so successful over the past decade-plus. What happens, though, because we’re always reaching for something when we talk about Bill Belichick, is that he’s often characterized as a consciously unorthodox genius.
But outside of a couple audacious calls he makes each season, Belichick isn’t an especially strange coach. It’s not like the Patriots’ defense is Finnegans Wake, scheme-wise. They do what works and remain flexible. The only reason Troy Brown ever played nickel corner for the Pats is because the team didn’t have a halfway-decent nickel corner, not because his coach was trying to show the rest of the league he could use a slot receiver in his secondary and still win games. Belichick isn’t inscrutable. The refrain of his most famous speech is “Do your job.” He decided, before a Super Bowl, to remind his team that football is about execution. That’s about as orthodox as it gets.
Belichick took the wind instead of the ball in overtime on Sunday night. He did so because he felt like the Broncos couldn’t score a touchdown on their opening drive and knew the gusts would significantly reduce Matt Prater’s field goal range. There wasn’t a huge payoff in that we didn’t see Prater miss an otherwise-makeable, windblown 48-yarder. Both teams struggled to move the ball in the final period. The Pats won because of a flukey special teams mistake by the Broncos.
What’s ultimately significant about Belichick’s decision is that he made it. He did what he thought — oh man, brace yourself — gave his team the best chance to win. His ostensible flouting of conventional wisdom was a happy accident, an excuse for us to delight in what seemed like eccentricity.
I’m hesitant to ascribe qualities to Belichick. I always feel like I’m creating a character based on him, one that I can familiarize myself with and analyze. But what’s clear from what we can see is that he doesn’t concern himself with what anyone is going to say about what he does. There is no conventional wisdom, only what he thinks based upon experience and understanding. He’s so secure ‚ both in himself and in terms of his standing in the Patriots’ organization — that it allows him to make whatever decision he feels he needs to make. In this way, Belichick is the ideal head coach, but also like any other I’ve ever watched.
