Patriots coach has well-earned reputation for stopping whatever's thrown his way

By Gordon Edes, Globe Staff, 2/2/2002

EW ORLEANS You put his name in a computer search engine, type in the word ''genius,'' and, Mr. Einstein, you suddenly are presented not once, but more than 200 times with a football coach.

Even if the genius's 83-year-old father wonders aloud who has taken leave of his senses, when they're asking him whether ''Bill Belichick'' and ''genius'' belong in the same sentence.

''I mean,'' Steve Belichick noted here the other day, ''you're talking about somebody who walks up and down a football field.''

Maybe if the old man had done something else for a living, Belichick would have wound up the hotshot on somebody's hook 'n' ladder company.

''I'm sure if he had been a fireman,'' Bill Belichick said at his press conference here yesterday, ''I'd have been pulling the hoses behind him.''

But Steve Belichick coached football, 33 years as an assistant at Navy, and the same kid who could spot the difference between a Buick and a Ford when he was 5 years old was breaking down football game film before he learned to conjugate a verb. And now he is here, toting around a label that tends to show up at Super Bowls with the same frequency as guys in sharkskin suits.

Don Coryell and Bill Walsh on the offensive side of the ball, Buddy Ryan and Chuck Noll when the other guys have it. Shoot, some people would probably put Bill Parcells on that list. (Isn't it funny that Marv Levy, who actually is a really smart guy, typically doesn't make the genius cut? You don't suppose it has anything to do with Buffalo's history of failure in the Big Game, do you?)

''Genius? I don't know, I'll have to check his IQ,'' cracks Charlie Weis, the Patriots' offensive coordinator, when asked whether Belichick deserves such billing for what he has done with defenses.

''I've been with Belichick 12 years now,'' Weis said. ''My first year, 1990, that's way back. All I did was break down film for him. I was his form of a graduate assistant, like they have in college. I know this, that things stay true to form, and I know every year, no matter who he's playing, the players seem to know what the other team is doing before they do it.

''Now that's not by accident, OK? They have a plan. They know what to do. He listens to the advice of his assistants, and he's not one of those guys who will take ill heed of anyone's advice. If he thinks it gives him a better chance to win, he'll do it.

''He obviously has a clue. He's been doing it as long as I've known him, and he's been doing it at the highest level. If that qualifies as genius, that definition, then it fits.''

You talk to the guys who were there back at the beginning, like Rick Forzano, who was the head coach at Navy and hired Belichick in 1976 as an assistant special teams coach, and Belichick was always a good listener.

''Sometimes, he might not look like he was listening,'' said Forzano, reached this week in his Detroit-area office, ''but he was always observing, and he'd go back to his room and make a list of ideas to bring to the staff. He knew his place because he was so young, but he was so observant of everybody.''

Forzano laughed. ''I'm sure he saw the things I did wrong,'' he said, ''and made sure that someday he wouldn't do the same things.''

Input is welcomed

Talk to the guys who occupy Belichick's locker room, and his honing devices may be better than ever. Defensive back Terrell Buckley, for one, is almost shocked at how willing Belichick is to hear out a player.

''What I really appreciate,'' Buckley said, ''is what I call a common-sense defense. If I'm covering a guy man to man and he's Z-ing across the field and they're picking me with their front side tight end, some coaches will keep telling you to run with the receiver, even though you know the tight end is going to pick you and the receiver's going to be running free.

''We don't do that here. If the tight end is going to pick me, somebody's going to be waiting on that receiver on the other side, and I'm going to pick the tight end up. Common-sense defense.''

Simple? ''It's that simple,'' Buckley says, but it comes from two-way communication between coaches and players.

''I've been around coordinators where even if the other team's offense is giving you opportunities to make plays, they won't change it for nothing,'' Buckley said. ''I'm like, `Coach, we see it, can I switch? They don't throw outside routes. Let me get inside.' They say, `No, this is my system. This is how it's going to run. If everybody does their job, it's going to be successful.'

''Well, I haven't ever seen one play where everybody does their job.''

Belichick and his staff aren't like that, according to Buckley.

''It's not a dictatorship where the coach is, `This is how we're going to run it,''' Buckley said. ''Last week in Pittsburgh, something wasn't working, so we're talking about it on the sideline. They're asking us what we think - `Yeah, no, maybe,' but because we discussed it, everybody was of one accord when we went back on the field. That's much better than, `We're going to run this regardless.'''

Belichick's credentials as an X's-and-0's, how-many-schemes-can-I-invent-this-time guy have always put him at the valedictorian level wherever he coached. Other coaches aren't ashamed to admit they've copied Belichick's defense when it's time to play an opponent that Belichick already has solved.

Dad deserves to take a bow for some of that, too, Belichick said yesterday.

''One of the great learning experiences for me was when I would go on the road with my dad,'' he said. ''My dad was a scout. The only game he really ever saw Navy play was the last one against Army; the rest of the games, he was out on the road scouting the team Navy was going to play the following week.

''And back in those days, with the film exchange being a lot slower than it is now, films coming in by train and air freight, and boy, sometimes those teams would just put them on the wrong flight or send them to the wrong airport. By the time the films got in, a lot of times, the week was half over. What was important was seeing the game live, in person, and being able to understand what was going on; and bring it back to the coaches so they knew what the latest information was.

''Just watching him work during the game and understanding how he could see what all 11 players were doing on both offense, defense, and special teams, because again back in those days, the coaches coached everything.''

Belichick, Forzano said, saw the game better than most.

''Some people just have a feel for it,'' he said. ''Billy had that feel for the game, he had his hand on the pulse.''

Adjustment specialist

Roman Phifer, the Patriots' linebacker who also played for Belichick when he was with the Jets, has called Belichick a football ''whiz kid'' - a guy whose idea of a night at the movies is a half-dozen videotapes of Peyton Manning, Kordell Stewart, and, this week, Kurt Warner. But what may surprise people, according to Patriots linebacker Bryan Cox, is that after all those nights of mind-numbing preparation (this week's like cramming for final exams), Belichick isn't afraid to improvise in the moment.

''Bill is one of those guys who is not afraid to scrap a whole defense for a game in the first quarter,'' Cox said this week. ''All the stuff we practiced all week? Throw it out, we're not running any of it anymore.'

''He did that in New York a couple of times. He was drawing stuff up in the dirt - `OK, we're going to do this, this is what we're going to call it, and let's go, OK?' Did it work? Yeah, yeah. Genius? I'm not sure genius, but he's damn good.

''The biggest thing about his defense that sets him apart is it's a week-to-week deal. What you get this week, you may not get next week. What you get next week or two weeks from now, you might not have seen this season. He's going to do what he feels he needs to do to win a game.''

Have the Patriots junked a game plan this season?

''He hasn't thrown out a whole game plan, but he's certainly put in some stuff that we haven't practiced for weeks,'' Cox said.

Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi rolled his eyes when he heard about the stick-in-the-dirt routine in New York. ''If they did that there, maybe that's why they never got here,'' he said.

''That never happened with us. But what we have here is a real group effort. It's not just Bill, it's Romeo Crennel and Eric Mangini and Rob Ryan. Bill has done a good job putting quality minds around him.''

The genius, Bruschi suggests, is the ability to surround yourself with enough other smart guys. Crennel is the defensive coordinator, Mangini has the DBs, Ryan the outside linebackers. Crennel has been with Belichick for close to 20 years, but in terms of reputations, he's clearly stuck in the shadows of the head man's balcony.

''It doesn't make any difference who gets the credit,'' Crennel said, ''as long as we win. We've worked on this system before, the parts have come along, and we've grown together, both of us.

''I've been in this business for 20 years, and that's what the deal is about, winning ballgames. Maybe my being here gives him more confidence to do the head coaching job. Trying to do both jobs can spread you thin.''

Unpopular opinion

In Cleveland, they had another name for Belichick, one that also took the measure of the man's intelligence, but from the other end of the spectrum. No one is called a genius when your team goes 5-11.

But the stuff slung his way when he bottomed out with the Browns was as excessive as the praise lavished on him now, according to his father.

''That year was the year [Art] Modell left town,'' Steve Belichick said, ''and that team had about 16 pregnant wives. Do you think their minds were on football?''

No time for Belichick's blitzes, apparently, when you're wondering what time your wife's next Lamaze class is.

But now, with the Patriots, especially with Crennel back on board this year, Belichick seems to have time - and an answer - for anything that comes his way. Lousy starts, quarterback controversies, wayward wide receivers - not to mention the Oakland Raiders and Pittsburgh Steelers.

''When he first came here, I ran the offense, he ran the defense, and the one thing he wasn't allowed to do was really manage the team,'' said Weis. ''Then, when he brought in Romeo this year and turned over the defense to Romeo and other guys, that allowed him to become a head coach, and I think he's really flourished. His personality has come out as he's gotten more familiar with guys on both sides of the ball.

''When you're a coordinator, you're not supposed to have a personality, you're only supposed to teach them what to do.''

Leave it to a guy with a reputation for being something of an offensive genius, former Chargers coach Kevin Gilbride, to try and define what makes Belichick a defensive genius.

''He's a guy who uses his personnel effectively, whatever he has - based on what they have, they're doing the best they can - and secondly a guy that has the ability to disrupt your flow on offense.

''In other words, he anticipates what you do, he knows what your strengths are, he's not going to let you do that, he's going to force you to play to your weaknesses, to the areas you're least efficient at, and he does it in a way that keeps you off-balance. He bets that if he keeps you off-balance enough and doesn't give you the easy one and makes you drive 60, 70 yards every time, he's going to force you to guess wrong one or two times, so even though you move it a little bit, you're not moving it all the way in.''

Some people have looked at all the offensive weapons the Rams have and decided that to beat them it will take more than a genius, it will take a miracle worker.

Not Forzano. He's betting on Steve Belichick's boy. ''I'm not a betting man,'' he said, ''but I told a good friend of mine, I'd take the Patriots and wouldn't even take the points. I'll put Billy's defensive ability against Mike Martz's offensive ability.

''I think it's going to be a great football game.''