by Ian O'Connor
Bill Belichick interviewed with Marchibroda and told him he wanted to work 14, 16 hours a day, and that he’d do anything his boss asked of him. “Obviously,” Belichick told him, “I have a long way to go, so put me to work.” Marchibroda thought the kid sounded sincere enough and took him up on it.
“I got three meals, a bed, and a lot of football,” Belichick said, “and that was all I really wanted at that time.”
And just like that, Bill Belichick had landed his first coaching job. He didn’t have to start his career in high school or college—the Division III backup was heading right for the pros.
What kind of coach would he be once he got there? An exchange Belichick had with John McVicar offered a hint. McVicar had never even seen a lacrosse game while growing up in Colorado, and when he brought his stick home during vacation breaks, his friends thought it was some kind of newfangled fishing pole.
Belichick knew McVicar’s size and speed could help Wesleyan, so he schooled him in the finer points of the game. One day, Belichick asked McVicar to let him take his stick home for the night.
“And he restrung my stick so the ball would stay in there better,” McVicar recalled. “He taught me how to make my lacrosse stick illegal and then fix it before the ref could catch you. He strung it loose, the depth of the pocket. In those days, the depth could be no deeper than the ball. He made it extra deep. If someone on the other team said I had an illegal stick, Bill showed me how to pull a string to tighten it up and then hand it to the ref.”
Speaking many years later, McVicar, a liver transplant surgeon, laughed at the memory. “He told me how to use an illegal lacrosse stick,” Bill Belichick’s old teammate said. “If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.
“It doesn’t surprise me, or wouldn’t at all,” McVicar continued, “if he tried to use every advantage he could to win an athletic contest.”
5
Billy Ball
At 23, Billy Belichick thought he had the best unpaid job in the world. The Baltimore Colts were his childhood team, and he could still name their starting lineups on both sides of the ball. He had met the likes of Johnny Unitas and Alex Sandusky while working at his father’s football camp, and that famous horseshoe logo on his shirt meant everything to him.
They all called him Billy then, and that was the only downside to the gig. Belichick told the players that he didn’t like to be called Billy, that he’d appreciate it if they called him Bill. “Worst mistake he made,” said Bruce Laird, the strong safety. “Billy” it was going to be.
Belichick was getting to work for a rookie head coach named Ted Marchibroda, an overwhelmingly decent human being in an often indecent profession, and he was not being asked to collect dirty jocks and towels from the locker room floor. Marchibroda had worked as offensive coordinator under Washington’s George Allen, who enjoyed the luxury of having more assistant coaches than he could count. The Baltimore general manager, Joe Thomas, was known for his frugality and his insistence on employing a smaller staff, which created an opening for Billy to expand his role.
“When [Marchibroda] had his seven assistants,” Belichick said, “he could have used another ten guys . . . But I think we scrimmaged the Redskins four times, and there were guys on that staff that I really had more responsibility than . . . the ninth, tenth guys on the staff and all that. Not that I knew anything, but we just didn’t have that many people. So I was doing the stuff that they were doing.”
Billy lived for free at the Howard Johnson’s near the airport, with Marchibroda and assistants George Boutselis and Whitey Dovell. “I had a fella I knew was running the HoJo,” Marchibroda said, “and he said he could get some rooms for the coaches if I could get him a couple of passes for his boss. And I did.”
They met for breakfast around seven every morning, and Marchibroda always picked up Billy’s tab. The Colts’ coach covered enough of Billy’s meals and expenses, Steve Belichick would say, that he should’ve been able to write off Billy as a dependent on his taxes.
The younger Belichick drove the older coaches from the hotel to the office in the morning and back again around midnight, and he saw this task as a blessing instead of a burden. Billy did a lot more listening than talking on those drives, and he realized just how little he knew about what it takes to coach in the pros.
“So not only did I, in my first year, get the whole experience of, from the minute you walk in the office, the coaching, the players, and the meetings and all that,” Belichick would say. “There was also the being involved with the head coach and the offensive line coaches, special teams coach, on an off-the-field basis of 45 minutes each way in the car.”
Marchibroda immediately realized that as soon as he put Billy in a room to do a job, he wouldn’t see him again until that job was done. He had Billy doing film breakdowns for Maxie Baughan, the defensive coordinator, helping out with special teams, running the scout team, working the Xerox machine like mad, and sending films to opponents. Sometimes Billy’s girlfriend, Debby, made the drive up from Annapolis in her mother’s Dodge Swinger, but his leisure time was measured in minutes, not hours. Belichick would write up and draw every play on a card and then, on the outside edge of the card, check off every category that play fell under. Then he’d apply what he called the ice-pick method.
“If it was first-and-10, plus territory, gain of over four yards, screen pass, halfback was the receiver, the defense ran a blitz, whatever categories it fell into,” Belichick said, “then I would check those off. I would take the hole punchers, so there were like 200 holes around the edge of the card and I would punch out the holes that I had checked off. Then you have a whole stack of cards here, slide the ice pick in there for third down, and boom, all the third-down cards drop out. Then you take all those cards and look at them and put them all back together, put the whole deck of cards back together, stick the ice pick back in there, and all the screens fall out . . . I would do like 200 of those. Screens and third down and red area and goal line and short yardage, and what they ran against blitzes and what they ran from slot, and what they ran from motion. All of that.”
The work wasn’t always so monotonous and free of emotion. Sometimes Belichick was asked to inform players that they’d been cut from the team, an assignment that inspired some to call him “Bad News Bill.” This couldn’t be comfortable work for a college boy who had grown up idolizing the very men he was charged with firing.
But Joe Ehrmann, third-year defensive tackle, was among the Colts who were struck by the way Billy handled that job and carried himself around the facilities. He wasn’t only mono-focused and committed to everything Marchibroda wanted him to do; he was unafraid of the dark side of coaching. If an established player had to be sacrificed for the betterment of the team, Billy was willing to honor the process.
“I had a great deal of respect for the young guy,” Ehrmann said. “He wasn’t intimidated . . . His goal wasn’t to be the most popular guy in that camp, and he wasn’t. There was a job to do and he did it, whether it was driving coaches around or cutting players . . . I don’t remember him spending a lot of time or energy going out of his way to attach himself with the players. He didn’t feel any pressure to be liked.”
Marchibroda was likable enough for the entire staff anyway. Only 44, he came across as a mentor, as someone older than his years. Players didn’t fear being disciplined by him as much as they feared disappointing him.
Marchibroda thought it was critical to empower everyone in the building. During his first day on the job, he introduced himself to a secretary in the coaches’ office, Maureen Kilcullen, and asked her, “What have you done today to help the Colts win?” She thought he was crazy. Over time, Kilcullen realized that Marchibroda wanted her to believe she was just as important to the cause as his star quarterback, Bert Jones, and his star running back, Lydell Mitchell.
This collaborative culture emboldened Billy Belichick, too. He was allowed to make his share of mistakes, including the one he made aft
er Marchibroda handed him his old Redskins playbook.
“One of my jobs was to white-out ‘Washington Redskins’ and type in ‘Baltimore Colts’ on it and then Xerox it off,” Belichick said. “It was literally the same: the same offense, and Maxie Baughan was the same defensive coordinator, and it was the same defense. I remember there were a couple pages somehow that snuck into the playbook that ‘Redskins’ didn’t get whited out, and I heard about it on that.”
Marchibroda’s staff had a hell of a task in front of it, as the Colts were no longer what they had been in Unitas’s prime. Baltimore was coming off three consecutive losing years, including a 2-12 season in 1974 that started with Howard Schnellenberger as head coach and ended with the GM, Thomas, replacing Schnellenberger for the final 11 games. The Colts didn’t win even once in their home ballpark, Memorial Stadium.
They opened training camp at Goucher College after practicing the year before at a high school, McDonogh, where Ehrmann said players showered and dressed in a makeshift locker room under metal bleachers while trying to survive the fumes from a propane heater. It didn’t take long for Billy to make his mark at Goucher. Three or four weeks into camp, Thomas approached him and said, “You are doing a pretty good job. We’re going to start paying you.”
Thomas told Billy he’d start making 25 bucks a week. After taxes, he’d be bringing home a whopping $21.22. “Don’t spend it all in one place,” Thomas told him.
The Colts had to wait for the Orioles to end their season in the American League East to take up full-time residence in Memorial Stadium in late September (Earl Weaver’s team missed the playoffs in 1975), leaving them to conduct some of their business at McDonogh. When the Colts were housed at Memorial, sometimes the grounds crew needed to prepare the field for the Orioles or cover it because of wet weather, forcing the football team to be shifted to an alternate site. Belichick recalled the Colts, in uniform, hitting the walk button and crossing 33rd Street like a junior varsity team to practice at the Eastern High School field, which, he later said, “had two blades of grass, dirt, glass, rocks.”
Of course, Memorial was no picnic even on the sunniest of days. On warmer days early in the season, the bowels of Memorial could feel about as comfortable as the boiler room of a submarine. Belichick worked right outside Weaver’s office, in what he described as a cinder-block closet. Jones, the quarterback, thought the locker room was nothing more than concrete walls and cold, dreary, wet concrete floors.
“We all had pets,” Jones said. “Whatever critter came by that day.”
Bruce Laird’s favorite locker room pet was a cockroach the size of a small rodent. Players would come off the field, shower, and then shake their clothes to get the roaches out before getting dressed. Staffers would unlock a door to a storage room, turn on the light, and then wait a minute before entering so whatever was inside had time to scatter.
Belichick couldn’t believe that the stadium didn’t even have a suitable weight room, or that the team didn’t have a strength coach. “There was a little universal gym that had four or five stations,” he said, “and that was it.”
As the season wore on, the field was so worn down that the grounds crew painted the dirt green to project the illusion of grass. But to the Colts, if Memorial Stadium was a dump, it was their dump. The team had moved there in 1953 and had played in Memorial through Brown v. Board of Education, the Cold War, the assassinations of Jack and Bobby Kennedy and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the riots in Baltimore, and the civil rights movement.
“Back then at Memorial, everyone would come together,” Ehrmann said. “The CEO would sit next to the cabbie . . . That was the beauty of that 1975 team that galvanized the community. We learned how to meld those two cultures, black and white. One day the music in the locker room is country and western with Bert, the next day it’s soul music with Lydell and the other black players. It was a magical time in terms of relationships.”
The ’75 Colts had to repair the broken trust between the franchise and a fan base that was already sick and tired of losing. Baltimore opened the season by routing the Chicago Bears, 35–7, holding a rookie named Walter Payton to no yards on eight carries. But the Colts returned to form by losing their next four games, leaving Marchibroda to publicly complain that his team had played without passion in extending its losing streak. In the locker room, the head coach embraced a more hopeful tone when he told the Colts they would advance to the playoffs if they ran the table over their final nine games.
Ken Mendenhall, center, emerged to tell Marchibroda’s secretary, Kilcullen, what the head coach had said. She laughed. Everyone in and around the building figured the Colts were staring down the barrel of another painfully long season. Marchibroda and his staff didn’t surrender to any such inevitability.
They worked absurdly long hours in their effort to save the season. The team didn’t provide catered meals to the staff, so the coaches would work until dinnertime, leave the building and walk to a restaurant, and then return to work some more. Baughan said that he sometimes slept overnight on his office floor, and that he taught Belichick “how to sleep on his desk when he got tired.” Jones, the quarterback, recalled seeing Billy asleep on the training room table. This was the George Allen way, passed down to Marchibroda and Baughan: Allen defined leisure time as five or six hours of sleep.
The time invested didn’t go to waste. The Colts blew out Joe Namath and the Jets at Shea Stadium, beat the Cleveland Browns by two touchdowns, and then signaled for the first time that they might be capable of something special. They were playing the 5-2 Bills in Buffalo, and O. J. Simpson scored the game’s first three touchdowns.
Buffalo was up 28–7 in the second quarter when Jones caught fire, hitting Roger Carr for 89 yards and leading the Colts on a staggering run of 35 consecutive points to ultimately prevail 42–35. For the first time that season, Marchibroda had ripped into his team at halftime. He had good reason to be pissed off. “There was a point in that game,” Belichick would say years later, “where I honestly think the only person on the field that thought we could win was Bert Jones, and he kind of played and willed the team to win, and it kind of caught fire after that.”
Jones was the Louisiana-born, rifle-armed son of Dub Jones, the former Cleveland Browns star. He could do things with a football that stunned Belichick, who was taken with the quarterback’s athleticism, shoulder flexibility, and arm strength. “As a pure passer,” Belichick would say, “I don’t think I could put anybody ahead of Bert Jones.”
Jones thought highly of Billy, whose $25-a-week wage had been raised to an obscene $50 a pop. The quarterback and the young assistant were what Jones called “tendency people,” or football guys who wanted every bit of information they could get before every snap to improve their odds of success on that play. Though Jones saw Billy as the equivalent of a graduate assistant in college, he knew him to be an integral part of the team.
“He was like a walking computer,” Jones said, “before there were computers.”
Belichick was as detail-oriented as any of the veteran coaches on staff. He would break down the 16-millimeter films and feed data to Laird, the signal caller at strong safety. Billy passed on information about the splits of opposing tight ends, or certain movements, or “tells,” in a player’s positioning or body language that could tip a play. Belichick’s information on what the opponent would or wouldn’t do was, in Laird’s words, “incredibly accurate.”
In one game, Billy told Laird that when a certain team lined up in slot formation, and when a certain receiver lined up inside the numbers on the slot side, that receiver would run an out route almost every time. “That’s pretty powerful information to have,” Laird said. “And sure enough, it was true.
“He was such an introverted guy and so quiet,” Laird continued, “I rarely had a lot of conversations with him, other than to look at his information and tell him after the game when we came in, ‘Hey, man, that was great. That was unbelievable’ . . . I think he wo
uld’ve made me a much better player if he stayed. I know he made me better in 1975. Billy realized the game is a game of chess, not just brute strength.”
The Colts blew out the Jets at home, beat the Dolphins, Chiefs, and Giants by a combined 51 points, and then outlasted Miami in overtime and New England in regulation to claim the AFC East with a nine-game winning streak. “It was the greatest turnaround in NFL history,” Belichick said, “from 2-12 to 10-4.” It was a victory of cohesion and competitiveness over sheer talent, and it would come to be known as the Miracle on 33rd Street.
The romance between this great football town and its fabled football franchise had been rekindled. The Colts were back, and everyone was deliriously happy. Everyone but the GM who had pieced the team together. Joe Thomas was upset that Marchibroda was getting most of the credit for the renaissance, and his PR man, Ernie Accorsi, had to remind him that former New York Yankees executive George Weiss got elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame despite the fact that his manager, Casey Stengel, got most of the public credit for the Yanks of the fifties.
“You’re going to have to live with it,” Accorsi told him. The PR man would also tell Thomas, “You have Harry Truman’s balls and Lyndon Johnson’s thin skin, and that’s a bad combination.”
The rest of Baltimore wasn’t too worried about the GM’s hurt feelings. Early in the season, Belichick estimated that there “weren’t 17,000 people in the stands.” The winning changed everything. Three-quarters of the way through the year, Belichick said, the Memorial ticket lobby was so packed that the team couldn’t move through that area. “So we had to go out through the [Orioles’] dugout,” Belichick said, “out onto the field, and come back in that way or it would take us a half hour to get through the lobby, with everybody asking for autographs. I mean, it was a madhouse.”