Chasing history, while shunning it
JACKSONVILLE, Fla. -- The championship flag may be flying at Gillette Stadium, but what does it mean a year later?
''Whether we win all our games or lose them all, it doesn't make any difference," Bill Belichick says. ''It's not about last year. This is about what we do this year."
The way Belichick sees it, the 2003 football season belongs somewhere back in the Mesozoic Era. For him and his star-spangled laborers, there is no time and no world outside of this evening's Super Bowl XXXIX date with the Philadelphia Eagles at
The flag may be still fluttering in Foxborough, but the Patriots are defending nothing. ''This season we started with the same record as everybody else," Belichick says. ''We were trying to get to the same point that everybody else was, and that's it."
It is Belichick's magnificent myopia that has kept the once-ragged Patriots restless and hungry, even after two championships in three years and a record 21-game winning streak that Belichick would not publicly acknowledge. Those achievements are in the past and Belichick has limited use for history, however glorious. Tell him that New England has become a "model franchise" and he shrugs.
"Things are positively said, things are negatively said," Belichick mused before the Patriots' playoff run began with impressive victories over the Indianapolis Colts and Pittsburgh Steelers. "Criticisms are made, accolades are given. It's generally [about] what has been done in the past . . . Whatever has been done, has been done."
What interests him is the simple challenge of winning the next game. "Every Sunday, you've got to expect a dogfight in this league," says the 52-year-old Belichick, who has been coaching in the NFL for 30 seasons and in New England for the past five. "I enjoy that part of it, and it's something that stimulates me."
What separates Belichick from his peers -- and has him being mentioned among the game's great coaches, the Lombardis and the Landrys, the Walshes and the Nolls, the Gibbses and the Shulas -- is his exceptional focus, his obsession with detail, his knack for simplifying and clarifying, his uncanny ability to shape his team into whatever it needs to be from week to week and his gift for getting his players to buy into his vision.
"In my opinion, he's a Hall of Fame coach," says safety Rodney Harrison, who calls Belichick `something of a mad scientist'. "Look what he's done with a bunch of so-called no-superstars, a bunch of average Joes."
What Belichick has done is to convince a team that has won 33 of its last 37 games that even a handful of championship rings guarantees nothing.
"When we walked in for the first day of training camp, he had posters up on the wall saying `Don't believe the hype,' " says quarterback Tom Brady. "He showed the teams for the last three seasons and their records the year after they won the Super Bowl. It's not about him trying to trick us. He's letting us know what's real."
One of the teams on the wall was the Patriots, who missed the playoffs (albeit on a tiebreaker) the year after they upset St. Louis to win Super Bowl XXXVI. There was no handwringing from Belichick about the mathematical whimsies of postseason qualification. His team, he said flatly, simply didn't play well enough.
After New England defeated the Carolina Panthers last season for its second crown, Belichick immediately set about making improvements. "He hasn't stood around and admired his work," says ABC football analyst John Madden, who coached the Oakland Raiders to their first championship in 1977. "After I congratulated him on winning the Super Bowl again, the first thing he said to me was, `Have you ever seen worse defense than we played in the fourth quarter?' Instead of letting them throw confetti on him and giving him a parade, he was already getting fired up."
All-business sense
Belichick's players, who stepped off the plane here a week ago wearing jackets and ties and carrying briefcases and laptops (the Eagles, who haven't been to the Super Bowl in 24 years, carried video cameras), are a reflection of their coach -- hard-working, well-prepared, no-nonsense.
"The coach does a great job of preaching it and the players accept it," says Texans general manager Charley Casserly. "He doesn't want to be a star. Ask him if he ever washes that sweatshirt."
Belichick took the same straightforward approach when he was head coach in Cleveland, even though the Browns endured four losing seasons in five years. "At the core, he is the same guy now that he was in Cleveland," says Scott Pioli, New England's vice president of player personnel. "All of the things that were important to him then are important to him now."
Belichick was the same guy three decades ago when he was an unpaid volunteer with the Baltimore Colts, sleeping on a cot in coach Ted Marchibroda's room at the Howard Johnson motel. "When you gave Billy a job, you didn't see him until it was completed," Marchibroda remembers. "He locked himself in that room and he didn't come out until it was over."
That was Belichick's modus operandi all the way up the professional coaching ladder, as special teams assistant for the Detroit Lions and Denver Broncos, and linebackers coach and defensive coordinator with the New York Giants, where he earned his first two Super Bowl rings. From the age of 10, when he broke down game films with his father, Steve, a longtime assistant at the Naval Academy, there was no doubt about what Belichick wanted to be.
"When Marty Schottenheimer left Cleveland and we were about to hire Bud Carson, I interviewed Bill," recalls Ernie Accorsi, now the Giants general manager. "I walked out of there thinking, this guy decided around about the age of reason that he wanted to be a football coach."
When Belichick landed the Browns job two years later, Accorsi got a close-up glimpse of Belichick's singlemindedness. "We took a private plane to scout players down South, three schools one day, three more the next," Accorsi recalls. "When we got to Memphis about 9 p.m., I'm exhausted. All I wanted was a drink and dinner, but I hear Bill talking to the desk clerk about getting a VCR to look at more tape. He was tireless."
Though Belichick took Cleveland from a 3-13 season to the playoffs, his tenure ended badly. The Browns were skipping town for Baltimore, the team was losing again, and Belichick, who released beloved quarterback Bernie Kosar, heard angry "Bill Must Go" serenades from embittered fans.
What did he learn from the experience? "If you're the head coach, you don't want to see the team move in the middle year, would be one thing," Belichick observed, wryly.
Belichick, who may be the league's most unsparing self-evaluator, learned more than that. He learned to delegate more to his assistants. "Sometimes, it's better to let somebody else worry about the things they can do and let me worry about the things that only a head coach can do," he says. And he learned to have a more collegial relationship with the media, with whom he frequently crossed swords in Cleveland.
But when Belichick got a second chance at a head job in New England, the essentials didn't change. He knew the kinds of players he wanted (smart, tough, adaptable, committed, versatile) and he knew how he wanted them to play. Most important, he got them to sign on to his vision.
"He speaks in real specifics and they trust him," says Bill Walsh, who coached the San Francisco 49ers to three championships. "The players have bought into everything he does. They play right up to their full potential for him."
No coach in the league is better at crafting and communicating a game plan. "He'll tell us what the keys to the game are," says center Dan Koppen, "and if we do those things, most of the time, we'll win."
Even when the Patriots weren't winning -- they went 5-11 in 2000 and lost three of their first four in 2001 -- Belichick stuck to his vision even as fans and the media began wondering.
"He's taken some hits," says Madden. "Playing Brady over [Drew] Bledsoe. Releasing Lawyer Milloy. All the talk about a player mutiny, losing the locker room. Everyone jumped on the pile, but Bill just rode right through that crap. There are not a lot of coaches who can do that."
Don't look back
Even now, with another two rings on his fingers, with one victory following another, Belichick refuses to believe the hype. It is flattering, he concedes, to be compared with Packers legend Vince Lombardi, to have the Patriots described as the league's gold standard.
"I am sure that in a short amount of time, if things didn't go well, there would be some other things said," he says. "Hopefully, I wouldn't go jump off the bridge when that happens. You take it in stride."
If the Patriots prevail again tonight and Belichick joins Walsh, Pittsburgh's Chuck Noll, and Washington's Joe Gibbs as the only coaches to win three Super Bowls, he will go back to Foxborough and do the same thing he'll do if the team loses. Evaluate and move on.
"He's not going to be satisfied, and if you're not going to be satisfied by winning the Super Bowl . . ." muses Madden. "It's an admirable trait and it works for him, but I also think, jeez, when do you enjoy it? I don't think he ever does that and he doesn't let his players get caught up in it, either. He just keeps plodding."
The enjoyable part, Belichick says, is the weekly chess game (New York Jets running back Curtis Martin calls him "the Bobby Fischer of football"), the drawing up of the battle plan, the movement of queens and rooks and bishops and pawns around the gridiron. "There's that uncertainty," he says. "Here's the way we planned it. Will it turn out that way?"
Each week, Belichick and his staff unveil a different scheme. What works against the Colts will not work against the Steelers. What worked against the Steelers will not work against the Eagles.
"His magic, the thing that Bill and his staff and his players do, is to be able to morph themselves from season to season, from week to week, even from half to half," says Tennessee Titans defensive coordinator Jim Schwartz, who was a scout with Belichick in Cleveland. "They're incredibly adaptable."
You cannot win this year's championship with last year's plan or last year's players. The way the coach of the undefending champions sees it, the Lombardi Trophy, the silver football that goes to the victors, is an annual, not a perennial.
"That trophy represents the team -- T-E-A-M -- that is able to play the best season for the year that it's engraved," Bill Belichick says. "The next year, we start all over again."
