Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  “That wasn’t fair to Belichick,” Accorsi said. “I just got my first head coaching job, I’m really into this, and the GM’s looking to leave. So he couldn’t possibly trust me after that. I wasn’t all in . . . This guy’s thinking, My GM’s leaving, and then he really wanted complete control. Totally justified.”

  Accorsi would be remembered in Cleveland mostly for the deal with Buffalo that landed the first pick in the 1985 supplemental draft used to take the University of Miami’s Kosar, who wanted to play for the Browns, the team stationed 80 miles from his Boardman home. The GM left Cleveland impressed with Belichick’s skill as a talent evaluator, with his ability to relay his personnel preferences to the scouts, and with his philosophy on offense.

  “He knew how he wanted to play,” Accorsi said. “He said, ‘We’ve got to play the game in the middle of the field. People always try to take away the edges . . . You’ve got to have the courage to throw the ball in the middle of the field.’ I’d never heard that before. He was a creative thinker.”

  Belichick had already formed a partnership with Mike Lombardi, a scout for Bill Walsh in San Francisco before Accorsi hired him in 1987, and he would lean more on Lombardi with Accorsi out; the personnel man was a significant voice in developing the Browns’ grading system. Belichick would expand the role of Ozzie Newsome, the former tight end who had moved into the front office, and, as always, he’d seek the counsel of his friend from Andover, Ernie Adams, the offensive assistant who was working with running backs and tight ends. Adams, among other duties, had been heavily involved in the 1991 draft.

  Belichick had also brought in a young coach from Murray State, in Kentucky, named Scott Pioli, whom he’d befriended during his Giants days, to work as an assistant in pro personnel. Out of Washingtonville, New York, a college player at Central Connecticut, Pioli made the 90-minute daily drive to the Giants’ camp at Fairleigh Dickinson–Madison, where his best friend’s girlfriend was working security. She introduced him to Belichick, who was impressed with the kid’s hustle and his stated desire to learn everything he could about the profession. The coach offered him a home on the sofa in the suite he shared with his colleague Al Groh. Five years later, Pioli was making $16,000 to scout talent, drive Belichick to the airport, and do whatever the Browns’ head coach asked of him. Belichick would sometimes stuff hundred-dollar bills in Pioli’s ashtray and tell him to fill up his gas tank and buy himself a good meal.

  But Belichick was leaning mostly on Belichick. He was putting this overwhelming challenge on his own shoulders. He’d replaced a brand-new indoor field with another indoor field he preferred, costing Modell a pretty penny, so his players would have better footing in practice. He’d interviewed more than 100 potential assistants for his staff and worked out hundreds of college prospects and available NFL players known as Plan B free agents—those players not among the 37 protected by each team.

  Belichick pulled the Browns out of National Football Scouting, which pooled general draft information for different teams, to take sole ownership of his personnel evaluations. He was reportedly granted the resources to hire as many as ten scouts after Accorsi’s resignation, and he put in his own numerical and letter grading system to measure prospects, with an assist from Dallas Cowboys chief scout Gil Brandt, who visited with him a few times to discuss the Cowboys’ system. Dallas was the first NFL franchise to use computer analytics in grading talent, emphasizing data loaded into an IBM machine over some grizzled scout’s gut instinct, and Brandt was willing to meet with Belichick, Saban, and Lombardi in Berea to share some of the Cowboys’ secrets.

  “We went through what we did and how we did it,” Brandt said, “and I think they pretty much adopted the system we used, because it was a pretty good system. It was a way to evaluate players by having something tangible so that there were characteristics we used, position specifics we used, a numbering system we used, and a grading system we used to help you identify players. When you saw the numbers for the successful ones and the non-successful ones, it jumped out at you.”

  Though one Browns official downplayed how much the Dallas system influenced Belichick and his method of evaluating prospects, Brandt was kind enough to open a window on his franchise that his host in Berea never would’ve opened for an NFL competitor. He explained how the Cowboys identified and then developed young talent in their system. Years later, Belichick would thank him by saying that Brandt belonged in the Hall of Fame. “He’d probably be the first guy I would put in there,” Bill said.

  When it came to information, Belichick was always a taker, never a giver.

  The Browns ended up using a grading scale on which 8.0 represented the projection for an immediate day-one starter and potential Hall of Famer. A 5.5 would be an undrafted free agent from a smaller school, a 5.6 an undrafted free agent from a bigger school, and a 5.7 a “make it” player, or someone who could make a roster. A 6.0 would be a potential starter who needed development, and a player between 6.6 and 6.9 would be a first-year starter with elite physical skill. Any prospect graded at 7.0 or higher would be a Pro Bowl–level talent.

  The system was designed to highlight the players who had the necessary physical tools to play professional football, and to put numerical limits on those who were deficient in any of those areas. “Bill likes cornerbacks that are big,” said scout Chris Landry. “If you’re under 5´11˝, that guy can’t get over a 5.5 grade, even if he has great production and all the other areas match up.”

  The letter grades were equally important, as they identified perceived flaws. In a scout’s report, the letters printed before the numerical value signified a physical deficiency. The letter B told the reader that the player didn’t have bulk. An S announced a lack of speed, and a T branded the player as tight, or not fluid. The letters printed after the number signified a nonphysical deficiency, such as c, which represented a character issue. “Or an m was a mental guy,” Landry said, “not mentally strong . . . Bill would want further definition on that.”

  Bill would want his scouts to tell him what a player was likely to do for Cleveland, not what round he should be drafted in. Height, weight, and speed were always the most critical measurables, but a prospect with no letters after his number grades earned a more serious look. Belichick’s goal was to build a roster around Pro Bowl players in their mid- to late twenties, and to build a new version of the Giants—a big, physical team that welcomed the opportunity to play in the wind and the cold. In pursuit of this goal, he was amazing colleagues with his professional stamina and single-minded approach to the craft. He would often be seen in a dark meeting room watching film while on one exercise machine, or highlighting notes—with the cap of the highlighter wedged in a corner of his mouth—while on another.

  “People who showed up at nine or ten o’clock in the morning in suits and ties might complain about Bill,” Tony Dick said. “But when we were there at two or three in the morning shoveling snow to get coaches into the parking lot, we’d see him show up at three in the morning after leaving at midnight. He knew when everyone was arriving at, and leaving, that building. Nobody knew more about that than Bill Belichick.”

  Early on, Belichick was winning over people in the building and around town. Kosar praised him in the newspapers. The fans loved it when he punctuated his very first home victory, over the Bengals, by making his way to the Dawg Pound—the end zone bleachers that housed the most rambunctious fans—and rotating his fist before mocking Bengals coach Sam Wyche for calling the AFC Central a three-team race between Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Houston. “Maybe he’s right,” Belichick said in a rare public jab at another coach. “Maybe it will still be a three-team race.”

  As much as he was working Saban and his fellow assistants to the bone, Belichick also earned their undying appreciation for giving them all, or much, of the money he was making from his TV and radio shows above his reported $400,000 wage. The head coach also was known for his hundred-dollar handshakes—where he’d slip a staffer or a sec
retary a Benjamin as if he or she were the maître d’. Chris Landry said it wasn’t uncommon to find an envelope in the top drawer of his desk filled with more cash than he’d earned in his paycheck. One of Cleveland’s later scouting assistants, John Lombardi, grandson of Green Bay Packers legend Vince Lombardi, said Belichick would pull him out of a hallway and into an office and hand him money or a steakhouse certificate. Belichick even brought into the office a hairstylist and paid for all staffer haircuts. His generosity was widely considered his best character trait, especially among the youngest members of the organization.

  But his first two years were marked by conflict, too, and not just with the media. Reggie Langhorne, wide receiver, was the first significant player to test Belichick’s authority. Langhorne was a camp holdout who had been demoted on the depth chart, and when he refused to run routes for the scout team, Belichick fined him and made him inactive for the road game against the Giants. Belichick had also fined the receiver for being one or two pounds overweight. “I think he was smacking me around,” Langhorne said, “and I’d been in this city seven years and I felt there was no way he was going to bully me.”

  The receiver spoke of the tug-of-war between a rookie coach trying to establish his system and entrenched veterans who’d had success under Schottenheimer doing it a different way. Langhorne conceded that Schottenheimer could also act like a dictator at times. “But I could talk to Marty,” he said. “Most guys on the team could talk to Marty. This guy, no.”

  Langhorne didn’t play a second season for Belichick, and neither did fellow receivers Brian Brennan and Webster Slaughter, who also complained about their roles in the offense. For the most part, Belichick had semifunctional relationships with Slaughter and Brennan. In fact, he rewarded Slaughter’s efforts in camp one day by sending him into the locker room to put on flip-flops, return to the field, and sit back and watch practice. On another camp day, Belichick broke up a fight between Slaughter and cornerback Raymond Clayborn. “And then we’re standing there, still angry and saying things,” Slaughter would recall, “and Bill broke the ice by saying, ‘OK, which one of you guys hit me?’ Everyone bust up laughing. He had a dry sense of humor. I really got him. I really understood him . . . He’s probably my favorite head coach to play under.”

  Yet Slaughter signed as a free agent in Houston. In the seven seasons after Kosar was drafted, in 1985, Slaughter, Brennan, and Langhorne combined for 918 catches and 73 touchdowns for Cleveland in the regular season and postseason. Belichick’s quarterback would have to get by without a lot of familiar firepower.

  On defense, Belichick was having serious trouble reaching the kind of understanding with his best player, Michael Dean Perry, that he’d reached with Lawrence Taylor. Perry wanted to play the attacking, shoot-the-gap style Carson had him play, and Belichick wanted him to adhere to more restrictive two-gap principles. Perry and Belichick had also quarreled over his weight and the origin of the tackle’s knee injury. “When Belichick first came in,” Perry said, “we didn’t see eye to eye. We don’t see eye to eye right now, and we probably won’t in the future.” By late in the 1992 season, the Pro Bowler was asking for a trade.

  One day, Belichick called the training room and Perry answered. As he handed the phone to the team trainer, Bill Tessendorf, Perry held the receiver away from his mouth and said, “It’s Hitler. Little Hitler.” Belichick heard it and laughed. “The reason he called him Little Hitler,” recalled Perry’s fellow defensive lineman Anthony Pleasant, “was because Bill was trying to kill us in Cleveland all the time in practices.”

  Perry was riding the stationary bike during practice once when a teammate asked him if he was injured. The tackle answered that he was feeling just fine. When the teammate naturally followed up by asking why he wasn’t on the field, Perry responded, “I’m not playing for that fucking guy.”

  It was never easy suiting up for Bill Belichick. Tommy Vardell, the first-round pick in 1992, ended a brief training-camp holdout and walked straight into a buzz saw. He called his first couple of days in camp “insanity” and recalled full-contact practices as long as three hours in the heat that were followed by conditioning runs up the hill. Vardell was a California kid out of Stanford who was used to the dry heat and cool breezes off the Pacific, not the humidity off Lake Erie. It wouldn’t be until later in Vardell’s career, when he played for other teams, that he realized the Belichick pace in camp was, in his words, “pretty crazy.”

  Fullback Ron Wolfley, a four-time Pro Bowler as a Cardinals special teamer, arrived in 1992 to some startling sounds. Belichick demanded that the Browns run sprints or gassers, and some players responded by disguising their voices and shouting, “Fuck you,” or “This is fucking bullshit”—figuring Belichick wouldn’t be able to identify the culprits amid the noise of the stampede.

  Wolfley thought this open disdain for the primary authority figure was poison for the football team. The fullback adored Belichick’s style. “And I say this as affectionately as I possibly can: He was a bit of a sociopath, and I loved it,” Wolfley said. “He didn’t care about your family. He didn’t pretend to care about your family. He didn’t ask about your family . . . He’d leave you alone. You go out there and do your job and, I kid you not, he wouldn’t talk to you. I loved that about him.”

  Wolfley said Belichick ordered the players to run five gassers in a certain time, with a one-minute rest between each gasser. The fullback trained and trained for this test, and still got sick on his fifth and final turn. “When I crossed the finish line, I barfed,” Wolfley said. “And as I went down and was holding my knee, I see these lizard-skin boots backing away from me. The guy in the lizard-skin boots was Bon Jovi. I almost barfed on his boots, and I’m thinking, How in the world does Bon Jovi hang out with a guy like Bill?”

  Perry and other disgruntled Browns would say that Belichick was trying too hard to be Parcells, and that he lacked the people skills to pull it off. But one of the old Giants who ended up in Cleveland, Everson Walls, maintained that Little Bill had little choice but to take on some Browns. “I’ve never been around players who griped so much,” Walls said. “In New York, the climate there was all about toughness. Michael Dean Perry was a great player, but he was always bumping heads with Bill about practice, running, injuries. He was a problem.”

  He wasn’t the only one on the defensive line. Belichick asked Burnett and Pleasant to put on weight and become more user-friendly in a two-gap scheme, and Burnett thought that directive was a mistake. He thought Accorsi had drafted the defensive ends to use their athleticism to contain John Elway on the edges and finally reach a Super Bowl. Though Belichick had a history of switching up his schemes on nearly a weekly basis, as he had in the Giants’ most recent postseason drive to a title, Burnett also thought his coach was too careful and predictable in using his Cover 2 scheme, a zone defense developed by Steelers coach Chuck Noll that requires two deep safeties to split the field.

  Burnett maintained that Saban agreed with him, too. “Nick was so pissed with Bill,” he said. “He wanted to do so many things and he was hamstrung by Bill. I used to meet with Nick all the time, and Bill would not bend as far as changing defenses. He stayed as vanilla as ice cream . . . I said, ‘Nick, why don’t we run this? Why don’t we run that?’ Because we had all this stuff. I was in love with the game. To Nick I was like ‘Oh, man, remember in training camp when they couldn’t block us on this blitz?’ He goes, ‘I know, I know. But sometimes I put it in the game plan and Bill won’t run it on Sundays’ . . . We maybe used a tenth of Nick’s playbook.”

  Burnett was more frustrated than Saban with the head coach. “Bill would condition us during the season; it was high schoolish,” Burnett said. “Come on, man, we’re pros. You’re going to make us run six gassers because you didn’t like the last team session for today? Bill, that’s how he was. A micromanager. My biggest learning experience during that time came through Nick Saban. I owe a lot of my knowledge defensively to Nick . . . We would do th
ings in practice. We’d do a lot of Nick’s stuff in practice, and they couldn’t touch us. But game time came, we’d only play a certain number of defenses and we’d blitz once. We’d play not to lose, Cover 2, and never put the other offense on their heels.”

  Another old Giant whom Belichick brought to Cleveland, Mark Bavaro, surveyed the widening circle of complainers and decided his coach was “outnumbered.” That became more apparent when Scott Galbraith, a tight end who played his college ball at USC, weighed in with his assessment of the coaching staff.

  “Bill Belichick was a certifiable crazy freakin’ madman,” Galbraith said. “We hit every day, all day. Marathon practices . . . In the locker room, we thought Belichick was short-lived, another Modell cheap quick fix. We were convinced that he was going to be a flash in the pan. Belichick could not relate. We knew this son of a gun would not last long. I mean, who would play for this asinine jackass? Who would do that? In the locker room, we had no respect for Bill Belichick at all.”

  Galbraith called the Browns’ offense “prehistoric, elementary, almost impossible for Bernie to succeed in.” Years after he retired and became a pastor and team chaplain for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, Galbraith said he probably needed to seek forgiveness for the hatred he felt for Belichick over his two seasons in Cleveland.

  He was clear on the original source of that hatred—Belichick putting an assistant Galbraith found unqualified in charge of his career. The tight end called his position coach, Ernie Adams, “a joke” who offered no clear roadmap to improvement. “He’d say, ‘Hey, Scottie, you gotta catch that ball,’” Galbraith said. “Or ‘Hey, Scottie, you gotta get that block.’ I’d say, ‘OK, Captain Obvious, I was trying. But do you have the principle on how to complete that block next time, or are you just saying I have to get that block?’ But after a while it was hopeless.”