Belichick's ability to strategize is core of his genius

11:02 AM EST on Tuesday, January 25, 2005

So what makes Bill Belichick such a great coach?

What's his secret?

Journal photo / Bob Breidenbach

Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, raising his hands to signify a fourth-quarter touchdown by Deion Branch against the Steelers in the AFC title game Sunday, has a philosophical premise that it's better to be smart than tough.

Is it his ability to keep his team focused and committed, no easy thing in this day and age? Is it his ability to transform his will to his players, no easy thing to do in any age? Is it both? Or is it something esoteric, some formula that he keeps hidden deep in the catacombs of Gillete Stadium, a football version of the Da Vinci Code.

What's his secret?

That's what everyone wants to know, as this guy who spent much of his professional life in the large and formidable shadow of Bill Parcells, had emerged as the coach of his generation, the one everyone now wants to emulate. This man without any discernible charisma, without any of the obvious personality traits we tend to associate with coaching giants, who now is being mentioned in the same sentence with Vince Lombardi.

So what's his secret?

I suspect it's based on the philosophical premise that it's better to be smart than tough, something that flies in the face of what we often think football

is about. Especially now, in this macho age where the common coaching mantra is play hard, and when things don't go well, play harder.

Belichick is the antithesis of this, someone who first made his coaching bones as a defensive strategist, now is universally recognized as the creator of the best schemes. From the beginning, he was different, not so much an ex-player as someone who had learned to game plan as a young kid whose father was an assistant coach at the Naval Academy. Not someone who gets his players to play the hardest. Someone who gets his team to play the smartest.

It's this ability to strategize, one based on the premise that no two game plans are ever alike, that's at the core of Belichick's coaching genius. Peyton Manning likes to get into a comfort zone? Get physical with his receivers, get him out of that comfort zone. Ben Roethlisberger is a rookie quarterback who has some mobility but whose passing touch had deserted him the last few weeks? Sit back and make him throw pinpoint passes through narrow lanes.

Two weeks. Two different game plans.

Belichick often makes references to this, if we listen hard enough. How each week presents different challenges. How any team can beat you. How the only game that matters is the next one. These are Belichick's weekly mantras. Clichés? No doubt. But read between the lines, and what comes through is that since no game is ever alike, then no game plan is alike, either.

In a sense, this is old school. It's the way coaches used to prepare, back before the prevailing wisdom became this is what we do and you have to stop us. That's the way many coaches do things nowadays, concerned with what their teams do, based on the macho belief that if we can impose our will on you we will beat you.

You hear it all the time from coaches in a variety of sports: This is our system. . . . This is what we do. . . . No one works any harder than we do. . . . We just have to do what we do better.

Belichick is the opposite of that.

He is concerned with taking things away from teams, making them do what they don't want to do, aren't particulary comfortable doing. The football equivalent of throwing curveballs to a fastball hitter. A game plan focused on making other teams adapt to what he's doing, football field as chessboard. A game plan focused more on being smart than on being tough, as though toughness in the NFL is a given and it's where we go from here that's important.

Or how do you prepare for the Pats' defense when it changes every week? How do you prepare for them when they always are reacting to what you do?

People talk all the time about the Patriots' system, the implication being that there's this all-powerful system out there, one that other teams all but surrender to. A secret formula that only Belichick and his staff are privy to.

But what is it?

Sometimes they throw a lot. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they blitz a lot. Sometimes they don't. As if every game is a brand-new canvas.

So what's the system, other than the perception that Belichick somehow gets into other quarterbacks' heads?

I suspect there is no one system. That it's constantly in flux, varies from game to game. For Belichick's teams always are flexible. Not just season to season, but game to game. It's the reason the Pats have been so successful putting players in unlikely spots, like Troy Brown playing defense and Richard Seymour being an occasional blocking back. To Belichick, they are football players, and good football players are interchangeable, multi-dimensional.

Which is not to demean the Pats' toughness. They proved that long ago. And no game plan is worth anything if players can't implement it. And any coach must get his team to play with great effort or the best game plan in the world is ultimately as worthless as chicken tracks in the snow.

To Belichick, though, that's merely the starting point, the broad brush strokes before the color is applied.

So what's the secret?

His ability to make teams do what they don't want to do.

His ability to make his team smart, as well as tough.