I’ll start with one of my favorites: Randy Moss.
I traded for Moss when I was with the Raiders. No one disagreed about Moss the player. He was a consensus once-in-a-generation talent. But when it came to his character, there were many different takes. Some scouts around the league didn’t think he could get along with his teammates; others thought he was a great clubhouse guy. Some thought him selfish; others thought he was team first all the way. Some didn’t even think he was coachable.
In the end, Davis cared about one thing: talent. He believed, in that old-school way of his, that he could handle any player who got out of line. Whether he was right about that or delusional didn’t matter; it allowed us to take chances. During Moss’s first year with us he was one of our hardest and smartest workers and a great teammate. Unfortunately, he got injured before the season was half over. The next season under new head coach and former Raider great Art Shell, a different Moss showed up, one who wasn’t buying what the inexperienced Shell was selling. If Moss respected you, he was all yours. If you lied to him, or tried to con him, or didn’t respect his intelligence, well, you had a problem.
Thinking that Moss had lost a step, Davis was willing to trade him, and when Belichick called from New England in 2007, I told him that Moss was his kind of player and that all the other crap that was being spread about him was just that. Moss may not have been afraid to speak his mind, but I knew that he and Belichick would get along, in part because each would respect the other. In fact, Belichick later called Moss one of the smartest players he has ever coached.
Moss, of course, delivered big-time. In his first year in New England he had 98 catches and 23 touchdowns, averaging more than 15 yards per completion for one of the most prolific offenses in history. His physical gifts were off the charts, but even more remarkable was the way Moss and Belichick became kindred spirits, two football nerds underneath all those rough and torn edges. Anyone who bothers to see past the off-the-field issues knows that despite his rare physical gifts, Moss approached the mental part of the game like an underdog always looking for an edge. He often would come off the field yapping about how an opponent was trying to leverage him one way or another. He noted for quarterbacks and offensive coordinators in real time how defenses were reacting to his moves and dealing with his speed. It was Moss who helped teach Belichick how to see the downfield passing game from a player’s standpoint, how the routes looked on the field in three dimensions, not just as a circle and lines on the blackboard. Moss loved to practice, he loved to engage his teammates, and he loved the game—and that love was infectious. He was quick to help younger players. He quickly won over Belichick and the entire Patriots franchise. Even when his life was a mess, Moss was never sloppy as a player, a pro’s pro.
Most of all, Moss displayed another Belichick staple: mental toughness, which the Patriots define as “doing what is best for the team when it might not be best for you.” To the outside world Moss might have seemed like a basket case, but in Belichick’s universe he had earned the highest compliment possible. In New England, Moss was a “program guy”: someone who works hard, is a supportive teammate, and cares deeply about winning. In other words, someone with football character.
Moss is proof that character is such a key factor in the NFL that scouting now needs to be as much about a prospect’s personality assessment as about his talent on the field. Maybe that means spending more time in the campus police office than the football office or more time at the local pub quizzing the bartenders who serve the players. Finding the real truth about a player’s character can be done only with feet on the ground.
When cornerback Tyrann Mathieu tested positive for synthetic marijuana at LSU, he was removed from the Tigers’ team and many NFL scouts moved him to the do-not-draft board. He went on to become a star for the Arizona Cardinals, a consummate pro who has never missed a game because of off-the-field issues. Many teams decided that his recreational drug use—in college!—defined his character. The Cardinals thought not, and they were proved right.
Another example: LSU’s La’el Collins was a high-round offensive lineman on everybody’s board in 2014. In the week before the draft, his romantic partner, Brittany Mills, was shot and killed in her apartment. When word leaked that Collins might be a suspect, teams were thrown into a panic. I had a great campus source, an auxiliary member of the program—a woman—who called right back to assure me the news was wrong. There was no way Collins could be involved, she said. She was around the players all the time, and she swore that Mills and Collins were no longer an item. This could not be the matter of jealous rage that it was being portrayed as.
With the draft just days away, every team had its security officers trying to learn more. Collins passed a lie detector test, but that wasn’t likely to be enough to keep him in most teams’ plans. On the day of the draft, Collins wasn’t selected. No team decided the reward was worth the risk. A few days later, the Baton Rouge police quietly moved past Collins as a person of interest in the case. In New England we still didn’t feel like we could sign him, but the Cowboys gave him a contract. Smart move. On the field, he’s been nothing but stalwart.
With Mathieu and Collins the system to determine true character worked. With Aaron Hernandez it failed, miserably. When Hernandez was coming out of the University of Florida, there were rumors of some marijuana use and bar fights and documentation of a troubled childhood. But his head coach in Gainesville, Urban Meyer, and the members of Meyer’s staff were staunchly supportive. Turned out Hernandez was good at keeping his secrets. No one on the Patriots staff had any idea how dark his past was before we drafted him or even when we rewarded him with a big contract. Sure, he was a loner who didn’t hang out much with his teammates, but he was smart, knew his assignments, and loved to play. Hernandez was a great tight end, but he was also a murderer and a sociopath who somehow was able to sublimate his violent habits when he was at our football facility. In the Patriots’ offense the tight end is such a key factor that it may have skewed our risk/reward scale, but I’m not looking for any kind of absolution here. (I also don’t know to what extent brain injury contributed to Hernandez’s undoing.) I’m just trying to show how easy it is even for teams that care about character to make big mistakes.
It’s such a complicated task, in fact, that even an expert like Belichick relies on professional outside help. Bob Troutwine is a Ph.D. based in Kansas City, Missouri, and a cofounder of The Right Profile, creators and administrators of unique physiological profiles that “tap” the heart and mind of prospective players. We liked the TAP—Troutwine Athletic Profile—so much that we made everyone applying for a job in the organization take it.
Don’t confuse the TAP with the Wonderlic, the better-known intelligence test that the NFL administers to potential draftees. The TAP offers more insight into personality, asking questions such as: If you could be an animal, which would you be: A. Cat; B. Dog; C. Lion. The questions are random and maybe a bit off the wall, but they lead to important conclusions about the prospect. And only Troutwine can decode the responses. In fact, one of his favorite tricks is being able to tell if a girlfriend, rather than the player himself, has filled out the test.
In Cleveland, Belichick gave the test to a young man who wanted a job in our personnel department. Troutwine called 10 minutes after we submitted the results for his review. In an excited voice, the normally calm doctor declared in no uncertain terms, “Don’t let that kid out of the building; he will be the best employee you have.” We didn’t even give him a chance to get specific; we just dropped the phone and hired Jim Schwartz, who at the time was a former linebacker and economics major at Georgetown who finished third in his class. Despite a fistful of Wall Street job offers, Schwartz took a job as my college scouting assistant. Today he is one of the top defensive minds in the game.
Whether it’s a coaching prodigy or a Pro Bowl player who ends up in prison, it all comes back
to character. And because character issues can resonate so powerfully beyond the locker room, they often involve the entire team, from the public-relations department to the owner, and that complicates matters further. In Cincinnati, for example, owner Mike Brown believes in giving players second (and sometimes third and fourth) chances. As one of the league’s more frugal owners he also likes the idea of getting highly talented players at reduced cost because of character issues. That’s why Marvin Lewis is free to take risks on troubled players such as Oklahoma running back Joe Mixon, who received a one-year suspension in college for punching a woman in the face.
It works both ways with owners, however. When Belichick was in Cleveland, he desperately wanted to draft Warren Sapp with the tenth pick overall in the 1995 draft. I can still hear Belichick raving about Sapp, a dominant college player at Miami. Before the draft, though, NFL assistant director of security Charlie Jackson whispered to Browns owner Art Modell that Sapp had off-the-field issues. Still hoping to secure public financing for a new stadium, the Browns couldn’t afford the public-relations risk. Modell overruled a furious Belichick, who traded Cleveland’s pick for a no-name linebacker. Sapp went on to become a locker room leader in Tampa and one of the greatest defensive players of all time. Eventually, he ended up in northeast Ohio, after all—at the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton.
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While the rest of the sports world was still catching its breath the day after the Patriots’ dramatic 28–24 win over the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX, Bill Belichick already had the next year on his mind. Knowing that special teams coach Scott O’Brien was planning to retire, he asked O’Brien on the plane ride home if he was okay with making the announcement the next day so that the team could begin to move forward. In Belichick’s mind he wasn’t being callous or unsympathetic; 2014 was ancient history, and he was already in planning mode for 2015. Like a Stoic, when Belichick proclaims, “We are on to Cincinnati” or “We are on to next year” or “Scott O’Brien has retired,” he means it.
Whether the Patriots season ends with a Super Bowl parade or a first-round loss, Belichick’s off-season approach to building his next team is always the same and always masterful. Every tactical assumption and roster decision made during the previous season is fair game. No one is grandfathered onto the next year’s team—not for draft status, not for financial commitment. Year after year, roster spots are earned.
When the season ends, the Patriots coaching staff immediately holes up in the offensive team meeting room at Gillette Stadium to begin preparing for the next season. With Belichick and his trusty Mac laptop at the ready, the autopsy begins. Every facet of the organization is probed, examined, and challenged as he looks for ways to improve the team.
Belichick’s off-season team-building meetings are probably better run than most Fortune 500 board meetings. They start with each positional assistant assessing each player in his unit: strong and weak points, relevant medical history, projected role for the upcoming season and beyond. The conversation eventually comes around to developing a plan specifically tailored to help each player get better. Off-season roster planning in New England always includes figuring out how to tweak the ways we teach our lessons. Like his mom and dad before him, at his core Belichick is a teacher and believes strongly in the idea of “taking the lessons from the meeting room to the classroom to the field.”
Hulking defensive tackle Vince Wilfork, for example, never needed to get stronger but did need to lower his body fat, whereas linebacker Rob Ninkovich needed to be stronger and more flexible. When free agent corner Malcolm Butler arrived in New England, he learned the playbook better through one-on-one walk-throughs and independent study time. He needed one-on-one tutoring and special attention, so a plan was created for Butler to spend extra time with the assistant coaches. After two weeks we revisited the situation and realized that Butler learned best from seeing and doing rather than talking, so more time was devoted to on-field practice and less to classroom study. Each player retains information differently, and it’s the coach’s job to determine the best way to instruct him.
Belichick knows coaches tend to define their current problems as having binary solutions: A or B. It’s the simplest way to break down the issues at hand. But though that might work at their level, general managers like Belichick can’t fall into this “false duality” trap. They know there are often more than two solutions to any problem. At the GM’s level the best way to solve a problem is often alternatives C, D, E, and F. Belichick’s staff meetings allow him to push beyond the false duality to those more enlightening alternatives.
Belichick lets the coaches talk first, but invariably he has questions. He’s in search of the right answers, not just any answers, and so he takes the time to listen to many different thoughts and ideas before coming to a conclusion. It’s listening that leads to a clear choice when he is faced with a tough decision. In the end, Belichick is brutal in the decision making regarding his roster: When he knows a player’s financial demands put him out of reach, for example, he instructs the coaches to move on. That player might be the most talented guy on our roster, one who played hurt and is beloved in the locker room, but by the time that meeting’s done he might as well be dead to us. That’s another one of Belichick’s secrets: He can connect emotionally with players as a coach in a way that extracts their very best on the field, but then he can go upstairs, put his GM hat on, and make cold-blooded financial decisions regarding that same player without so much as a second thought. It’s breathtakingly calculating and ruthless.
But it is also based on a wide range of intel. Belichick is not above asking a defensive coach, for instance, about an offensive player. He encourages everyone to have an opinion as long as there is data, insight, or experience to support it. No one dares to operate by the seat of his pants for fear of being called out by the boss. In essence, Belichick’s open and transparent process at the beginning of each off-season helps remove personal biases so that the room can reach clean conclusions on how to spend the rest of the off-season.
The autopsy also covers the more ephemeral aspects of team building, such as attitude, relationships, and chemistry. Today we operate in a world in which millennials dominate the NFL workforce. Brady, in contrast, is old enough to be the dad of some of the young guys in the locker room. He’s a Hall of Famer to you and me but a geezer to some of his teammates. To get his job done, though, he must relate to these kids just as any boss does. Therefore, after 2015, our off-season review included detailed discussions about how to work with millennials: how to reach them and motivate them. I promise you, no other NFL team thinks this way.
Skill without the proper mental state gets you nowhere, and Belichick knows it. Although his wardrobe never changes, Belichick often talks about how each year means a different team makeup. For example, the 2016 team that defeated Atlanta in the Super Bowl was in his words “tough and hardworking.” He had little doubt that they would fight through bad performances, including the first three quarters of that Super Bowl. But his 2009 team, the one that lost to the Ravens in the wild card game? That roster was not nearly as tough. “I just can’t seem to get them to focus,” Belichick confessed to Brady in a walk-through before a game with the Saints. When faced with the same problems in 2014, Belichick solved his toughness problem the same way your high school coach did: by making the team practice in inclement weather. He would yell at his millionaire players, “Forget the elements; get your shit on and get outside,” and if it didn’t necessarily produce the crispest workouts, it did seem to hone their determination. There were so many bad-weather practices with that team that by the end of the season, as soon as it started raining or snowing, players beat him to the punch, yelling to one another: “Get your shit on and get out there.”
Belichick takes all the information from the initial off-season meetings and synthesizes it into three lists—for offense, defense, and s
pecial teams—prioritizing the most deficient positions in each unit. Then we spend the rest of the spring and summer fixing those problem spots. When I joined New England in 2014, at the top of the need chart was a single word: cornerback. We had to re-sign Aqib Talib or find his replacement. When we couldn’t make a deal with Talib, Belichick simply moved on to former Jet Darrelle Revis—one more example of how Belichick the emotional coach never sways Belichick the pragmatic GM. All of my conversations with Belichick about Talib centered on the swagger he added to the locker room and how he brought out the best in the other defensive players. Those qualities were essential to our team makeup, and Belichick loved that Talib provided all of them. But love is never blind in the New England front office.
Belichick the general manager knew that the reason he was able to trade for Talib during the season was that the guy had a somewhat checkered past off the field. The risk/reward had been worth it. But not anymore. Not with the concern over his durability. (Talib had missed two of the most important games in his tenure, the 2012 and 2013 AFC championship games, suffering first-quarter injuries in both.) We pivoted to Revis. And that was that. Our contract offer to Talib reflected the new reality of the 2015 season. He signed with Denver, where he won another Super Bowl ring. Did we make the wrong decision? Belichick doesn’t care. That’s ancient history. He coaches with his heart, but he makes personnel decisions with his head and never looks back.
Granted, it wasn’t yet a big-time need, because Brady was still playing at a peerless level, but Belichick believes that the best time to develop a young quarterback is when you already have one. So we were looking for more than talent. We needed someone who would not be intimidated by Brady. We needed mental toughness as well as physical skills. And we found it in a not-obvious person: Jimmy Garoppolo from Eastern Illinois.
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