by Ian O'Connor
Baltimore’s spirited charge into the postseason would run smack into a brick wall, or, rather, a Steel Curtain. Pittsburgh was the defending Super Bowl champ, and in the middle of a run that would leave the Steelers with four championships in six seasons. The Colts’ chances of pulling off an upset were severely compromised when Jones suffered an arm injury early in the game. His backup, Marty Domres, completed only 2 of 11 passes and was intercepted twice. Somehow the visitors were up 10–7 in the third quarter before Terry Bradshaw overcame a first-half knee injury and two interceptions of his own to run for the touchdown in the fourth quarter that gave Pittsburgh a two-score lead in what would be a 28–10 victory.
Marchibroda assured his Colts afterward that they’d lost to a better team. The Steelers had a dominating defense and Hall of Famers on both sides of the ball, and a coach in Chuck Noll who would become the first to win four Super Bowls. Belichick had great appreciation for Noll’s intelligence, his diverse interests away from the game, and his talent for consistently fielding physical and fundamentally sound teams. By watching the 1975 Steelers at work, even at Baltimore’s expense, Belichick finished a one-year educational experience that was worth far more than 50 bucks a week.
Billy said he learned more football in the dungeons of Memorial Stadium that year “than any place I’ve ever been. It was like a graduate course in football.” Belichick so impressed Marchibroda and his assistants that the Colts hired one of his old teammates from Wesleyan, Tom Tokarz, to take up his apprenticeship the following season.
Not that the Colts ever wanted to lose Billy. Marchibroda saw how often players such as Jones, Laird, and linebacker Stan White used the young aide as a resource. “Nobody complained about Billy,” Marchibroda said. “Nobody had anything negative to say. I saw the players wanted information as soon as they saw Billy. I knew he was doing the job, and the players were glad to have him there. Before practice, they were going up to talk to him. They wanted to get his firsthand knowledge.”
According to Marchibroda, Belichick wanted a $4,000 salary and a car to return to the Colts for a second year, and Thomas wouldn’t give it to him. Detroit Lions coach Rick Forzano, a Paul Brown disciple and former staffmate of Steve Belichick’s who once stayed at the family’s Annapolis home, stole him away with an offer of $10,000 and a new Thunderbird.
Billy left for Detroit, and the relationship between Marchibroda and Thomas turned sour, in part because the head coach fought for Billy and the general manager let him walk. Thomas would be out after the 1976 season and off to run the San Francisco 49ers, who went 7-23 in his two seasons as GM.
If Billy made an exceedingly positive impression on Marchibroda and most of Baltimore’s coaches and players, he did little to impress one highly regarded figure in the organization: Maureen Kilcullen. On Wednesday mornings, she recalled, Billy started his advance work on the opponent to be played a week after that upcoming Sunday’s game.
“I thought he was kind of surly,” Kilcullen said. “My encounters with him were mostly him coming into the office to give me some kind of scouting report or game plan. He just wasn’t very talkative. I was the only woman there, so that could’ve been a different dynamic . . . If Billy was going to piss anyone off, it would be a peon, me, someone who wasn’t going to hire him. Maybe that’s the way he was. I didn’t particularly care for it.”
Billy had the responsibility of sending game film to that week’s opposing team. And if the films were supposed to be delivered by Tuesday, sometimes they didn’t arrive until Wednesday.
Kilcullen was the one fielding phone calls from angry, shouting coaches who demanded to know where their films were. “It drove me freakin’ nuts,” she said. Kilcullen would try to get Billy on the phone, but he dodged her calls. Kilcullen thought the young assistant was merely being a pain in the ass.
But with the passage of time, Kilcullen came to wonder if Billy’s unwillingness to perform a simple task in a timely fashion had been something else. She couldn’t speak to his true motivation then, but maybe there was a reason the opposing coaches waited an extra day before they got their hands and eyes on those films.
“Maybe,” Kilcullen said, “it was inches with Bill . . . Then he’d push the envelope somewhere else another inch, and then another.”
Maybe in his rookie year in the NFL, Billy Belichick was reaching for a competitive advantage for the very first time.
Rick Forzano had a 10-year-old Billy breaking down film for him at the Naval Academy. Forzano specifically remembered a young Belichick looking at tight ends and receivers when he turned on the projector in Annapolis, so he decided that in addition to assigning him some special teams work, he would put him in charge of tight ends.
Billy’s arrival in Detroit had a bit of a full-circle feel to it, as his father had played for the Lions. Steve Belichick had put in 20 years at the Naval Academy, and he no longer harbored the dream of becoming a head coach, or of working anywhere but Annapolis. Steve had passed on a couple of offers to be an NFL assistant, and he’d fully embraced the tenured academy life of a teacher and coach who helped make men out of the young Midshipmen and did everything in his power to make Army the second-best team on the field once every fall.
Steve was happy scouting opponents, working with the punters and the younger players, running the field-house steps to stay in shape, and watching his only child do what Steve never did: coach in the NFL. “Billy had a lot of his dad’s traits,” Forzano said. “Detail, discipline, a very dry humor. He can cut your legs out from underneath you and you don’t know it. Steve was good at that. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”
Forzano thought Billy could see things most assistants and scouts couldn’t see. He had Billy doing extensive work on the kicking game, on ways to attack the opposing kickers and to protect Detroit’s. “I think he was always finding that little edge,” Forzano said. “He was in the film room more than a Hollywood producer.”
Forzano had become the Detroit head coach after his predecessor and boss, Don McCafferty, died of a heart attack in July 1974. The Lions’ owner, William Clay Ford, hired Forzano over two assistants with NFL head coaching experience in Bob Hollway and Eddie Khayat, who had coached the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Eagles, respectively, and over future NFL head coaches Raymond Berry (a Hall of Fame end with the Colts) and Jerry Glanville.
The players saw Forzano as tough, energetic, and hardworking. “But a lot of us thought Hollway or Khayat would or should get the job,” said linebacker Jim Laslavic. “We were all surprised when Rick took over. So he was up against it a bit.”
Another Detroit assistant, Wally English, said Ford’s hiring of Forzano, who had a 17-43-1 overall record at the college level, created a fracture on the staff. Khayat and Hollway lasted only one season with Forzano, and English recalled that Khayat, a former ten-year NFL player and amateur boxing champ in Mississippi, had backed his former boss into a corner at the Senior Bowl and engaged him in a heated discussion.
Forzano went 7-7 in 1974 and ’75, then added to his staff the likes of Ken Shipp—who had worked as offensive coordinator with Joe Namath and Archie Manning—and Fritz Shurmur (defensive line) and Joe Bugel (offensive line), who later stood among the league’s finest assistants. And Billy Belichick.
“His father said, ‘Don’t call him Billy; call him Bill,’” English said. “I guess [Billy] indicated he was a younger guy . . . Everyone respected Bill, even though he was a Forzano guy. Forzano gave him a lot of leeway when he got to that kicking game stuff. He would let Bill talk to the whole team. Even though Bill didn’t have the title, he was like the special teams coach.”
Much as he had in Baltimore, Belichick quickly earned the respect of players with his knowledge of X’s and O’s. He was 24 years old, younger than most of the Lions, and it didn’t matter. “Billy was a whiz kid,” Laslavic said. “I don’t remember anyone ever messing with Billy, even though the players were older than him. He was too serious about his work.�
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Shipp, a respected offensive coordinator and passing game innovator, had given his phone-book-thick playbook to Belichick to study and told him there would be a quiz on its contents in a couple of weeks. Shipp was skeptical of Billy’s chances of passing the test; the kid had devoted most of his time and energy to defense in Baltimore, after all. But when Belichick ultimately took the five-hour test, Shipp was stunned by the results. “He damn answered everything,” the offensive coordinator recalled.
In his two years in Detroit, Belichick was educated by veteran coaches who handed down lessons learned while working with great players in great programs. Shipp taught him how pass patterns needed to be adjusted based on particular coverages. Shipp’s replacement the following season, Ed Hughes, showed him the Dallas Cowboys system he’d helped run while working with Tom Landry and Roger Staubach—the protections, the passing and running game, the shifts and motions the Cowboys liked to run.
Glanville had worked with Steelers defensive coordinator Bud Carson at Georgia Tech, and he gave Billy a glimpse of the defensive philosophy and Cover 2 scheme that shaped Pittsburgh’s dynasty. Jimmy Carr had been a cornerback on the only team (the 1960 Philadelphia Eagles) ever to defeat Vince Lombardi’s Green Bay Packers in the postseason and had served as a defensive coach with Minnesota, Chicago, and Philadelphia. He was among the first to utilize nickel packages, zone blitzes, and other newfangled schemes. Shurmur and Bugel would later win a combined three Super Bowl rings.
Belichick took from all these men. “And that sucker would work 24 hours a day,” Bugel said. “It was unbelievable to watch. I told him when I left Detroit, ‘Billy, you’re going to be a great, great coach.’”
Belichick was not afraid to challenge his older colleagues. Once a backup to Johnny Unitas at the University of Louisville, English was coaching Detroit’s running backs when Billy attempted to correct him on a run play to the weak side, with the fullback lined up behind the quarterback and the halfback lined up behind the left tackle. English wanted the fleet fullback, Horace King, to carry the ball, and he wanted the halfback to either block outside or inside depending on what the tackle did with his man. But Billy didn’t think the halfback should play off the tackle’s block; he wanted the halfback to go inside each and every time.
He explained that if the linemen took big splits, his way was all but guaranteed to work. “Bill was coaching me, 12 years his elder,” English said, “on how I should coach running backs . . . I respected that he had the balls to bring me in the office to draw that up.”
English didn’t take his advice, and kept the play as he designed it. Belichick did get his revenge in another forum, though: He regularly beat English in racquetball games by hitting the ball low, off the sidewall, in places his opponent couldn’t reach.
If Belichick had a best friend on the staff, it was Floyd Reese, the 28-year-old strength-and-conditioning coach and a former UCLA star, who presided over the kind of weight room and weight program that didn’t exist in Baltimore. They were ambitious grinders who hung out together, who traded ideas on how to finally improve the Lions’ fortunes on Sundays. (Detroit had appeared in one playoff game since last winning the NFL championship, in 1957.) Reese would find himself asking a question in a staff meeting that made the older coaches stop and think, only to hear Belichick follow up a few minutes later with a question that was three levels more advanced than Reese’s.
“I was always trying to catch up to Bill,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Lions were always trying (and failing) to catch up to the Minnesota Vikings in the NFC Central. Detroit lost three of its first four games in ’76, all to divisional opponents, and Forzano handed in his resignation three weeks after his owner, Ford, blitzed him and GM Russ Thomas with a win-or-else ultimatum. The Lions introduced as Forzano’s successor their own personnel guy, Tommy Hudspeth, whom the Detroit Free Press described as a “45-year-old non-drinking, non-smoking Mormon (one wife, three children).” Hudspeth had been the head coach at Brigham Young and the University of Texas–El Paso, and he promised that the Lions would throw the football.
New England was the next opponent on the schedule. The 3-1 Patriots had just completed a 48–17 blowout of an Oakland Raiders team that would go 13-1 and win the Super Bowl. The week before that victory, the Patriots defeated the two-time defending champion Steelers in Pittsburgh. Detroit–New England appeared to be a mismatch, and the worst possible opening-act scenario for Hudspeth.
But Billy Belichick was always thinking up different schemes at his home in nearby Birmingham, and he had an idea for Shipp and his new boss. While working for the Colts, Belichick had watched film of the Los Angeles Rams’ 1974 playoff victory over the Washington Redskins. Rams coach Chuck Knox used what he called an “ace” formation, which included two tight ends, two wide receivers, and one running back. Rams receiver Lance Rentzel said that the Redskins were confused by an alignment that was directly responsible for his team’s first touchdown—a ten-yard pass to tight end Bob Klein that punctuated an eight-play, 72-yard drive.
Belichick approached Shipp. “Look,” he said, “I know we haven’t ever used this formation, but, you know, I studied this formation when I was at Baltimore last year. I think this is really going to give the Patriots a problem. Can we take a look at this?”
This is why Belichick thought two tight ends would dramatically improve Detroit’s odds of winning a game it had no business winning: “New England,” he would later recall, “had just beaten the Raiders by 31 points playing a lot of Cover 3 in their 3-4 defense . . . Back then in the conventional pro set, it was very hard to get three receivers out to the weak side, because to do that, you’d have to release both backs. Against a 3-4, you just couldn’t get them out quick enough. But if you switched to a balanced two-tight-end, two-receiver set, then you already have a guy at the line of scrimmage that can get to the weak side of coverage very quickly.”
The Lions looked at it, debated it, then used it. Detroit had two talented tight ends in Charlie Sanders and rookie David Hill, and they were versatile enough to be split or used off the line as wingbacks. As it turned out, the Patriots had little idea what to do with the two of them. Greg Landry, Detroit’s veteran quarterback, completed 15 of 18 passes and threw for three touchdowns in this 30–10 rout, all three to Hill and Sanders. Landry also found Horace King underneath for six completions and 45 yards. Hudspeth credited his assistants for discovering on film that New England’s linebackers liked to drop deep in pass coverage.
Belichick noticed that the Lions were loose, confident, and energetic against the Patriots. “You could have probably gotten the Lions and 40 points if you wanted to put money on that game,” he would say. “But that day was different. There was a boost of energy. There was a power surge. There was a confidence that just wasn’t there even a few days before. You never know how change is going to affect a team.”
Belichick was referring to the change of leadership. And even though Hudspeth didn’t call the plays, didn’t wear a headset, and didn’t do much beyond staying out of the way—UPI described him as “seemingly little more than an interested spectator as he wandered along the sidelines”—his presence in Forzano’s place clearly had a positive emotional impact on the team.
Chuck Fairbanks, New England’s coach, would forever refer to the double-tight-end formation as “Detroit” after this loss, changing the Patriots’ in-house language for many coaching staffs to come. Hudspeth? He went 5-5 that season and then got fired after going 6-8 in 1977.
Belichick was back in search of a job. He took two truths from that upset victory over the Patriots that would stay with him for the rest of his career. The first was his belief that nobody should be afraid to deploy a tactic simply because it cuts against the grain of conventional thought.
The second was about self-confidence, and Belichick’s sudden awareness that he was on to something big. He looked at how his formation, his idea, had destroyed the 3-1 Patriots, and he came to a reaso
nable conclusion.
“OK,” the young Detroit assistant said. “I can coach in this league.”
Bill Belichick arrived in Denver in 1978 a married man. He’d exchanged vows at the Naval Academy the year before with Debby Clarke, and they found a place in the Denver suburb of Morrison.
Professionally, everything felt different, too. Unlike the Colts and Lions, the Broncos had just made a trip to the Super Bowl, albeit a losing one, on the strength of their vaunted Orange Crush defense. They represented Belichick’s first legitimate chance to win a ring.
Bill ended up working with two defensive coaches, in Richie McCabe and Joe Collier, who would make a lasting impression on him. McCabe was a former NFL defensive back and a secondary coach who took to Bill and almost immediately starting telling people he was going to be a head coach someday. Collier introduced Belichick to the 3-4 defense, and had his 26-year-old aide breaking down film, though his forecast for Bill’s career was a little cloudier than McCabe’s.
“You wouldn’t visualize him [being a head coach] because his personality wasn’t outgoing,” Collier would say decades later. “You didn’t look at him as a potential head coach. I looked at him as a potential coordinator, which I thought he’d be great at.”
In fact, Denver’s rookie head coach, Red Miller, recalled that Belichick was “the most dour young man I’ve ever been around” and that he “wasn’t the best-dressed kid.”
Bill didn’t have much interaction with Miller, who worked primarily with the offense and the offensive line, yet he did log enough hours to spend some nights sleeping at the office. He helped out Marv Braden, the special teams coach, and filmed Denver’s workouts. Sometimes he caught Bucky Dilts’s punts in practice, and talked to Jim Turner, the kicker, about his methods of warming up. He spent as much time as he could in Collier’s room, soaking up every last detail about the 3-4. Babe Parilli, quarterbacks coach, said Belichick visited him to go over pass-play reads and progressions. Parilli enjoyed the give-and-take, but, like Collier, he thought Bill’s personality (or lack thereof) didn’t match up with the profile of a future head coach.