The Coaching Tree that wasn’t
By: Stuart Grant
Tags: Coaching, NFL, Winning, Bill Belichick, Organizational Culture

SPORTS

Matt Patricia’s firing accentuates the rarity of Bill Belichick’s genius

Detroit Lions logo courtesy of Wallpaperaccess.com

With the firing of Detroit Lions Head Coach Matt Patricia, it’s time to revisit the coaching tree that wasn’t — that of New England Patriots Head Coach Bill Belichick. As of his hiring in 2000, we have seen twenty years of his former coordinators getting hired and fired as head coaches. As the list grows longer, a deeper dive leaves clues as to why these assignments ended in failure.

Coaching is a uniquely human endeavour with highly variable results. Two plus two rarely equals four in sports. Few NFL head coaches leave a job on their own terms. Superbowl winners like Mike McCarthy can be made to walk the plank.

The NFL is a copycat league in all things. The conventional thinking is that an assistant coach or coordinator from a winning program must have the recipe for the secret winning sauce. The complete dearth of original thought evidenced by this approach to hiring first time head coaches is on public display.

While the tenure of Miami Dolphins Head Coach Brian Flores looks promising, NFL teams should understand by now that hiring Belichick acolytes does not get you a shake and bake version of the Patriot Way. Instead, teams are getting a replaceable part of a system, not one of its founding architects.

If anything, the repeated firing of ex-Patriot coordinators is confirmation of Bill Belichick’s exceptionality and non-conformity. So how contrarian is he?

In twenty years as a head coach he has never joined the NFL Coaches Association. After all, what if he slipped up and shared something that could hurt the team? Making pals around the coaching fraternity might make him soft on game day. Your enemies have done you the favour of telegraphing their hatred. It’s your friends that make you vulnerable. Why would we think his coordinators of today and potential adversaries of tomorrow are not being kept at a similar distance?

Why haven’t other NFL teams factored in that the Patriots account for losing assistants to better jobs? Do they think a genius of Belichick’s magnitude will let his intellectual capital walk out the door? If there’s one thing we have learned, it is that the Patriots are built for continuity and contingencies like staff and player turnover. When Patriot veterans leave for higher salaries, the team is rewarded through compensatory draft picks. This dovetails elegantly with their team first approach.

Bill Belichick and Matt Patricia — photo by author

There are no superstars on the Patriots. Even Tom Brady did not differentiate in status from his team mates. Free agents are known to take a “Patriot discount” to be able to play for a champion. Players who are seeking their maximum paydays end up signing elsewhere. This leaves no doubt as to who is essential or dispensable. The interests of the team are superior to those of the individual. A star creates divisions of status within a team and gives the opponent something to focus on. A team of egoless utility men devoted to a singular leader leaves the adversary wondering where to attack.

The team’s deft handling of veteran acquisitions is another signature making opponents look stilted by compare. When the Patriots bring in free agents, they are coached into meaningful team play immediately. We have seen this with Randy Moss, Mohamed Sanu, Junior Seau and Stephen Jackson to name a few. It appears that, as a teacher and coach, Belichick has a system in place to quickly integrate new talent. This may mean an abbreviated playbook and having to make fewer situational decisions in live play. Whatever the method, it means being an engaged contributor from day one.

How does that compare with other teams? My back of the napkin fan experience tells me that a new player usually needs 6 to 8 games to contribute meaningfully on other teams — even after attending training camp. Somewhere in Foxboro is a fast tracked, abbreviated and digestible learning curve that other teams haven’t reverse engineered yet, much to their detriment.

Remember the 2008 offseason when the Patriots came off their Superbowl loss to the New York Giants? They lost Richard Seymour and Mike Vrabel to trades and Teddy Bruschi and Rodney Harrison to retirement. I thought Belichick had finally outsmarted himself and allowed too much talent to exit in one go. Not so. The Patriots went 10–6 in 2009, losing in the playoffs to the Ravens. Not a title but certainly a maintenance of competitiveness.

I have been to two Patriot games where I got a good view of their sideline. One lasting impression was that every player and staffer was involved in doing something to help the team. The backup quarterback was sending in fake signals to throw off the opponent. There were no sideline spectators, everyone was a participant.