Red Sox
Patriots
Celtics
Bruins
The insight of Belichick
My pal Jason Cole, over at Yahoo! Sports, scored a lengthy one-on-one with Bill Belichick, and it didn't disappoint.
Go here and check it out. Belichick goes in-depth on several things, both past and present (and even future) with Cole. Some highlights ...
Cole: So if I gave you six first-round NFL draft picks, Brady might be available?Belichick: Each guy’s price is different. If a team asks, you see what the price is. Now, is Jerod Mayo available? No, not really. But there are certain players who are young that have a certain number of years left on their contract that you want on your team, so you’re really not going to trade them. Those guys are realistically not available, no. But is everybody else available for a certain price on every team? I would say, for the most part, they probably are. Who’s willing to give that? What you want and what someone else is willing to give, that’s usually very different. In this case (the Seymour trade – in return, the Patriots get Oakland’s first-round pick in the 2011 draft), it worked.
Cole: Why are there so many bad teams around the league this year?
Belichick: Here’s the only thing I’ll say: I think to have a really good team in this league, you have to make a lot, a lot of good decisions. You have to have a lot of good people, players, coaches, whatever. You need a lot of those. Conversely, to not be competitive, you would have to have a lot of bad decisions. One bad decision is not going to do it, one bad player is not going to do it, one bad coach is not going to do it. You’re going to have to collectively, over a cumulative period of time, make a long series of bad decisions and accumulate a lot of players who are substandard for their position. There have to be a multitude of things that go wrong.
Cole: Jimmy Johnson once said, if you don’t take too many risks, you can win nine or 10 games a year.
Belichick: Jimmy probably said the same thing to you that he once said to me: “You’re really only competing with about 10 teams a year. If you just say out of the way, the other 20 teams will screw it up themselves. Whether it’s ownership or personnel or coaching or some combination of factors.” Ego, internal struggle, something will happen to two-thirds of the teams, that was Jimmy’s theory. That leaves you with about 10 teams that you’re going to have to really battle with. Those teams have it together. They’re going to make good decisions and if you play bad football, they’re going to take advantage of it. They’re going to find some undrafted guy or some middle-round pick or some veteran free agent who is going to spark their team. Pittsburgh is always going to be there. Indianapolis is always going to be there. They may not win it, but they’ll be there. You’re going to have to beat them. Philadelphia is going to be there. Yeah, [quarterback Donovan] McNabb might get hurt one year and they might go 7-9, but they’re going to be there. You’re still battling them on every front.
Comment
Permalink
E-mail
