FanNation - The Republic of Sport

People don't like Belichick and the New England Patriots because they stand out like nerds in a league of sports franchises. Belichick is not known as an ex-jock who was handed the reins of a team. When people think of Bill Belichick, they think of that precocious 12-year-old boy who dissected film for his father when his father coached. And his father didn't coach the Trojans of USC or the Spartans of Michigan State, but the Naval Academy Midshipmen (of all schools). (Midshipmen being "subordinate officers" or alternatively "commissioned officers of the lowest rank"). The signature book written about Bill Belichick is titled The Education of a Coach, which sounds like a college textbook.

It doesn't help that Bill Belichick's one witty, casual reference in his CBS interview contained the words "book club." Face it. The guy's a brain. He is what we call a "cerebral" coach. It's the same stigma that got Bill Walsh and the San Francisco 49ers the reputation of a "hoity toity" finesse team in the 80s.  Everytime the 49ers faced their antithesis, the Chicago Bears, the John Madden Playbill was "Force Versus Finesse." Yes, they were champions, but they weren't a REAL NFL team, were they???  This isn't REAL football, is it?

Belichick is a, if not THE, pivotal figure in the evolution of this league. He gave the league a central nervous system. He showed us how to win consistently under a rule structure designed to prevent teams from dominant runs (i.e. "parity"; "cap"). The intelligence he brought to situational defenses, positional groupings, cap management, personnel selection, player and team development is legendary. And he won with teams that were considered to have less individual talent than most (i.e., the "waiver wire team"). Is it any surprise that fans of other teams which get by mainly by brute force, sideline talk of "farts" and "turds" (see Brett Favre), and large contracts to Terrell Owens, despise the man? They always did. Belichick was never really part of their game. Even before Spygate broke, he was viewed contemptuously by fans of other teams for winning in ways that we could not see ON THE FIELD. He won with Xs and Os, with the whole-is-greater-than-the-sum-of-its-parts team play, and with behind-the-curtain organizational excellence.  You almost need alchemy or the physics of field forces to understand how this team performs, because it's not always available to the naked eye and to the 10% of our brain that only sees billiard-ball style cause-and-effect relationships.

Decades from now we should be studying him like Shakespeare, that is, if we weren't fans of a sport. Unfortunately, there will always be a "misplaced" quality to the man, as if he should be finding the cure for cancer, running the United States Department of Commerce, or ghost-writing for Tom Clancy.  

Life is a double-edged sword. You know what they say: "Great men have great flaws." At least this was said of JFK in reference to all his womanizing. And sometimes geniuses can't see the hand in front of their face, which is what I think happened with this particular rule. I have known unique intelligences in my life who didn't always read all the department memos or read them the same way, and I remember how their colleagues would marvel at their stupidity, unconventional thinking, and penchant for self-sabotage. Some of these individuals lose their careers and some move on despite their individual psychology to become the greatest minds of their field.

Belichick A Product of the NFL

Coaches are generally insecure when it comes to their jobs and uncertain about all the intelligence gathering performed by opposing coaches. Who is doing what? What is the measurable effect?  No coach wants to be caught at a disadvantage, least of all a coach educated in the military tradition. The NFL could have done much to alleviate coach anxieties, but instead paid lip service to its own rules. Actually, to say it pays lip service to its own rules is an understatement; more accurately, the league once behaved as if it were an official policy to pay lip service to its rules. Some rules, like tampering and deadlines on coach-to-QB headset communications, are just not enforced. Other practices which cry out for regulation and are clearly invasive, are simply not prohibited at all (e.g. the parade of players cut by the Pats in the final roster reduction through the offices of one Eric Mangini prior to the Jets opening day game against the Patriots).  If you want to cherry-pick one rule (videotaping) and one team (Patriots), then you are neglecting a wider problem with NFL culture. Columnists like Peter King and Greggg Easterbrook (the extra "g"s are for "gratuitous") derive enjoyment out of pointing out the obviousness of the rule to make Belichick's claim of "misinterpretation" appear all the more untenable and disingenuous. But this is short-sighted. As clearly as this rule is written, the overall NFL rule structure itself, and its enforcement, lacks cohesion and clarity.  Intelligence gathering, a practice consistent with Belichick's military connections (Naval Academy) and proclivities as a reader (Art of War), is embedded in the culture of the NFL, and the NFL appears to take great pleasure in its roots in technological 20th century warfare ... in which covert actions play a role. The NFL treats its rules much like world war combatants treat the Geneva Convention.

Our country owes its war victories to minds like Belichick's. Fans of other teams who enjoy the rough and tumble of the gridiron revel in the sports war metaphors, but conveniently forget the role of covert actions. The real source of obfuscation here, paradoxically, comes from pundits like Peter King and Gregggg "Extra-gs-are-for-'gratuitous'" Easterbrook, who suggest the decision not to break a rule should have been a clear and easy decision to make.

I'm sure this is what Belichick and many other coaches would want to tell you. The league's coaches have no reason to be reluctant to condemn Belichick. It would be easy to do just that. But they understand how this happened and they see in Belichick, and in Belichick's current plight, a product of the NFL. Roger Goodell represents a changing of the guard in NFL leadership. He will bring clarity and impact to the league's rule structure, but it's too big of a leap to go from a league which condoned and implicitly encouraged a Wild West attitude to intelligence gathering, resulting in Belichick and his plight, to league which punishes its first known offender with a year's suspension. And make no mistake, the NFL is aware of other offenses by other coaches, but is keeping this information close to its vest to protect the integrity of the league, which is all well and good to fans that begrudge the Patriots their run of success.

So when a columnist throws in my face a rule which appears to be written with great clarity, as if to suggest coaches would be stupid or calculating to violate it, I cannot help but view that columnist as naive. A substantive piece on the subject resembles something closer to what you are reading now. Now I am no professional journalist by any stretch of the imagination, but I also don't take the easy way out, nor do I put to paper so to speak only those words I know my readers will understand with ease or agreement.

I see those who want to stick a dagger in Belichick as shameless opportunists and exploiters of unremarkable character. There will never be anything special about them or about the way they understand our world. They are all just errand boys sent by grocery clerks to collect a Bill.