Seven Nation Army
Practice Squad Player
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- May 9, 2007
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An excerpt from the Breaking Down Belichick article. The reference to the Dawg Pound and the tearful Packer fans are hilarious. Also illustrates the sense of frustration and powerlessness that opposing fans have when facing Belichick and the Patriots.
The Smartest Guy in the Room. (But About That Room…)
By Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone political writer and author of Smells Like Dead Elephants: Dispatches from a Rotting Empire
Anyone looking for insight into the behavior of Bill Belichick need only look at a few sample questions from the Wonderlic, the SAT-style test administered to college players before the NFL draft. Graded on a scale of 1 to 50, players are asked questions like "When rope is selling for 10 cents a foot, how many feet can you buy for 60 cents?" Players get 12 minutes to answer 50 questions, and it's a Herculean struggle. Scores of 10 and 12 out of 50 are common. Isotoner spokesman Dan Marino is said to have scored a 16. Steve McNair reportedly managed a 15.
This is the intellectual environment in which Bill Belichick works. Remember that a great many coaches are ex-players. Whiz-kid coach Jon Gruden was a third-string quarterback at Dayton who spent his high school years filling notebooks with X's and O's—not actual plays, mind you, but just the letters. Mike Ditka, you wouldn't bet even money that he could write his name in the ground with a stick. And he nearly ran for the Senate! That tells you something about the sea of mental mediocrity that is the United States in general, let alone the NFL. It also explains why Belichick didn't seem particularly intimidated by the sight of Senator Arlen Specter doing his apocalyptic-bloviation act on ESPN.
Bill Belichick's problem isn't that he's "too smart," as some have contended. His problem, actually, is that he's just smarter than everyone else he sees on a daily basis. He gets up every morning to work alongside people who need to be reminded that it's easier to run behind a tight end than a wide receiver.
Someday in the near future, he will be asked for the nine-thousandth time to "talk about the value of team chemistry" by yet another balding sportswriter with a huge spare tire who's slogging through the sad terminal adolescence that is his professional existence. On the road, Belichick looks into the stands and sees grown men wearing dog masks and hats fashioned to look like big pieces of cheese staring tearfully at the field alongside their plump sons, idiots-in-training with mustard-stained faces, both generations mystified and devastated by whatever B or B-minus plan he cooked up to beat their team that day.
An able man working in this environment long enough will naturally develop some problems in the area of taking other people seriously. And not just other people's opinions about his job performance, but their rules, their expectations of conduct, their moral outrage. In the Spygate scandal, it didn't help that the so-called infraction was a thing patently absurd on its face—filming signals made out in the open for the whole world to see, the equivalent of filming a third-base coach. Belichick is not wrong to be frustrated by what a big deal everyone is making over this. Where he is wrong is in not seeing that only a madman films a third-base coach. A real genius would never lose sight of the fact that football is just a game, and there are certain lines he would never cross to win one. That is the difference between being really smart, and just smarter than most—and we can all hope that Bill Belichick is smart enough to figure even that out, someday.
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