The Brilliance of Bill Belichick
The New York Giants recently announced they will be honoring the 30th anniversary of the Super Bowl XXV championship team.
In honor of that upcoming celebration, here is a chapter from The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the New York Giants by yours truly which offers a behind-the-scenes look at the brilliance of then defensive coordinator Bill Belichick, later the Patriots head coach and the one-time boss of current Giants head coach Joe Judge.
As we count down to the September 8 release date of The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the New York Giants, please enjoy this excerpt which explores Belichick's brilliance as a defensive coordinator and how master game plan in defeating the Buffalo Bills in Super Bowl XXV.
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Long before Bill Belichick became known as the master of the Patriots way, he was the Giants’ “other” Bill—the ambitious, football-obsessed young assistant who rose through the team’s rank to become their defensive coordinator after the Giants promoted Bill Parcells to head coach.
Belichick was part of Ray Perkins’ inaugural coaching staff in 1979, appointed as a special teams coach and defensive assistant. Yet despite having lettered in football as a center and tight end during his college career at Wesleyan University, he gravitated to the defensive side of the ball.
When Belichick had to work with the Giants linebackers, linebacker Harry Carson admitted there was some initial uncertainty among the players about Belichick’s qualifications.
“Generally, when you’re a coach, you probably have played the position and can, from your personal experiences, understand what a player might be thinking or how he’s going to react in certain situations,” Carson said.
“Because Bill had never played linebacker, I think there were times in your head where you thought, ‘Well, what does he know about playing linebacker? He never played the game.’”
Carson remembered those early days going into the meeting room with Belichick and how the coach would draw up plays for the defense to practice. “We’d look at what he put up on the board, and we’d go, ‘Nah, Bill, I don’t think that’s gonna work.’
“But then we’d go out on the field, and we’d start to run the defense as he drew it up and it would work. We also started to realize that he thought differently than a traditional linebacker. I mean, he was much more into putting players in certain positions. So he won us over because the things he did helped us to become a much better defense.”
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While both Belichick and Parcells were regarded as football geniuses and sticklers for detail, they could not have been more different personality-wise.
“Well, for one, Bill Parcells has a personality,” defensive end George Martin said with a chuckle when asked what the biggest difference was between the two men. “Belichick has no personality. He really doesn’t. He’s an Xs and Os man, period. I think he wrote a book one year, and he talked about how he had to put his personal life on hold during the season.
“According to him, during the season, there is no daddy, there are no birthdays or funerals. There are no disruptions; it’s all about football, and he was consumed by football, whereas Parcells, I think, understood that people are human and that there are going to be things that, believe it or not, are more important than football.”
But it was that dedication and passion to football that Martin said made Belichick into the football savant he’s known as today.
“That man knows football as intimately as anyone. He is just a remarkable individual when it comes down to Xs and Os,” Martin said.
“We would go out with a very great game plan against an opponent, and if for some reason, that game plan or the execution wasn’t working, at halftime, he would always come in with the perfect adjustment every single time. And if it was executed the way he explained it, it was sheer genius.
“I’ll give you another example. When he was the special teams coach, he always had what they call ‘trick plays,’ but it’d be unfair to characterize those plays that way. What he had were plays that would always capitalize on the opponent’s mistake. And I can tell you that 99 percent of the time, if executed the way he explained it, it was flawless.”
Linebacker Carl Banks said Belichick took pride in teaching and providing the method behind his madness on his drills and strategy.
“He didn’t waste a lot of time with things that didn’t make sense. So if we had to hit a blocking sled, we had to do it a certain way, and that reason was explained to us,” Banks said. “He often gave real-life analogies as to why we had to do things a certain way to prepare for a particular blocking scheme.
“The game plans he put together were for the 90 percentile of players. And if that one player found himself in an unfortunate situation, he’d say, ‘Look, we can protect everything but this play, if this happens, then they caught us off guard. But this is as much [yardage] as they should make on a play like this.’
“And he also said if the other guys do their part, no one would have to worry about being exposed.”
Belichick’s ability to anticipate and adjust with such precision to this day still amazes his former players.
“His brilliance is in his simplicity,” Banks said. “That’s what people marvel at, but the one thing that you’ll notice about every team he has coached is that they’re fundamentally sound.
“It’s very hard to find their players out of position. And if you go on to beat him on some things, so be it. But his teams don’t make a lot of mistakes. And when you have everybody on the same page, it’s pretty easy to game-plan.”
And what about Belichick’s meshing with the personalities in the Giants locker room?
“That’s easy,” Martin said. “It worked well because it yielded results. You know that old saying, ‘Damn the torpedoes if it results in a victory’? We had experienced the misery of losing for so many years, and there was nothing worse than that. So if you’re going to have this guy with no personality come in and tell you that he has a philosophy for winning and you find out it works, well hey, we might not like the smell or the color, but we’ll take that any day of the week.”
Belichick delivered, all right. Still, he might very well have saved his most creative and downright genius game plan of his Giants coaching career for Super Bowl XXV to stop one of the most prolific offenses in the league at the time.
In 1990, the Buffalo Bills offense, led by quarterback Jim Kelly, finished with the league’s best scoring offense, averaging 26.8 points per game.
The Bills had also scored on 66 out of 72 red-zone trips, with 48 of those scores being touchdowns.
That season, the Bills debuted their K-gun offense, which featured three receivers (including Hall of Famers Andre Reed and James Lofton) and a single running back (Hall of Famer Thurman Thomas), with Kelly having the autonomy to call his own plays out of the shotgun formation.
The K-gun also often operated sans the traditional huddle. Kelly would get his guys to the line of scrimmage and call the plays, audibling as necessary. That approach created a fast-paced tempo designed to wear out opposing defenses and limit substitution of personnel in between plays.
The Bills offense, which had scored 95 points in two playoff games, presented a “pick your poison” dilemma for Belichick and the Giants defense.
Do they try to stop Thomas, who finished that year third in rushing yardage with 1,297? Do they go after the receivers? Or do they go after Kelly, tied for fourth that year with Boomer Esiason of the Bengals with 24 touchdowns and whose offensive line had only allowed 20 sacks all season?
In the game of football, conventional wisdom dictates that if a team is successful stopping the opponent’s running game, they’ll give themselves a fighting chance at winning.
But if you’re Bill Belichick, you don’t accept conventional wisdom until you’ve looked at the full picture.
In studying the K-gun, Belichick realized that limiting the Bills’ time of possession wasn’t going to be enough. So Belichick and his staff came up with a multi-step plan designed to disarm the Bills’ K-gun.
The multi-step plan was simple. The Giants would scheme to take away the Bills’ crossing patterns that Kelly relied on hitting so that his receivers could run for large chunks of yardage.
The Giants also planned to flood the Bills receivers with as many defenders as possible before, during, and after the catch, with a focus on trying to knock the ball out and limiting the yards after the catch.
Belichick also wanted the defensive backs covering the receivers to be physical, which meant hitting Reed and Lofton as they came off the line of scrimmage. The defense was to also rush at Kelly on virtually every play.
As for Thomas, well, let him have his day in the sun.
Belichick’s thinking was if the defense could disrupt the timing of the K-gun and the Giants offense could exercise ball control via its running game to keep the Bills offense on the sidelines, the Giants would have a good chance at a victory.
At first, Belichick’s defensive game plan was met by skepticism by some of his players who were part of a strong run defense that allowed 91.2 rushing yards per game, the fourth-best mark in the league that year.
But as Carson previously said, Belichick had a way of thinking differently and coming up with ways to put the defense in the best position to make plays. And with Belichick more concerned about Kelly lighting up the scoreboard than Thomas imposing his will via the ground game, the players soon bought in.
It worked to near perfection. On their opening drive, the Bills went three-and-out, something they hadn’t done since a 29–14 loss to Washington on December 30, 1990.
It was a sign of things to come. The Bills ended up converting only one of their eight third-down attempts.
While Thomas did indeed run wild—he finished with 135 yards on 15 carries and a rushing touchdown—none of Kelly’s 212 passing yards resulted in a touchdown pass. The Giants ended up holding Reed and Lofton to a combined nine receptions for 123 yards, with Lofton’s lone catch, which went for 61 yards, being the longest by a Bills receiver that day.
While all the buzz after that game was about Scott Norwood’s missed field goal that would have won the game for the Bills, were it not for Belichick taking away the nucleus of the Bills offense and keeping their scoring to a minimum, Norwood’s missed field goal might not have even mattered.
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This excerpt from The Big 50: The Men and Moments That Made the New York Giants by Patricia Traina is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information or to order a copy, please visit Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Bookshop.org, or Triumph Books.
Save 20% off the (printed copy only) now through September 30, 2020 when you order direct from Triumph Books. Use promo code NYGIANTS20 for 20% off your purchase, print edition only. Visit Triumph Books or call 1-800-888-4741 to order.
