Testing For Football Smarts
Everyone knows about Bill Belichick’s FBI. He has one of the NFLs best football minds and has been one of the game’s great innovators. But he know as well as anyone that ideas alone don’t equal victories. It’s not what Bill or any other coach knows-it’s what the players know. That is why Belichick places such a high priority on finding players who are smart enough to execute the scheme he’s running.
When Belichick is evaluating college players, he likes to give them a quiz. He’ll meet a prospect in a classroom on campus or in a hotel room at an all-star game, put the player in a chair just like a student, and talk through five or six or 10 things that the Patriots do. He’ll tell a defensive lineman, for example, that he’ll be down in a three-point stance on first and second down, and in a two-point stance on third down. He’ll diagram it all for them on a white board. Then they’ll take a break. When the reconvene, Bill will sit down, send the kid to the board and say, “Now tell me everything I just told you.”
From there he can make a judgement call on whether the player has shown the requisite FBI to succeed in his system.
