Good Article By Curran This Morning, comparing BB to Steve Jobs

[ctpatsfan77]

I can't speak for Steve Jobs, but I'm guessing that BB is a man who prefers not to have his good deeds broadcast to the world.

Remember what Jim Brown said about Bill Belichick:

Brown: I don't compare myself with anyone. Let me tell you about someone I do admire. Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots has contributed more to the work I surround myself with than any black athlete in modern times – financially, intellectually, every way. He's been in the prisons with me. He's met gang members in my home; he's met gang members in Cleveland [where Belichick coached the Browns form 1991 to '95]. He's put up money. He's opened up areas of education for us very quietly and very strongly. Imagine what would happen if Michael Jordan did the same thing.

And one more story, from ESPN of all places:

THE GOOD SAMARITAN IN A SUPER BOWL VISOR

David Salisbury is interested in talking only if I promise to play nice. There is no hiding where his loyalties lie. At the start of training camp each summer, Salisbury hangs a Patriots flag outside his house in Cranston, R.I. When New England loses, the flag flies at half-staff. When the Patriots win, his neighbors tend to avoid him.

"I only met him for those couple of minutes," Salisbury says on the phone as he waits for a Patriots game to start on TV. "You know what? I just wish I had met him under different circumstances."

His brush with Belichick came on a late Saturday afternoon in July 2006. Five-hundred drivers must have blown by the twisted, upside-down BMW on a patch of Route 95 just south of the Rhode Island border, Salisbury says. Not Belichick.

Salisbury and the coach, wearing a Super Bowl XXXVI visor and apparently on his way back from watching his son play lacrosse, were good samaritans.; Together, they helped an injured driver whose car shot across the highway, hit a drainage ditch and flipped on its roof.

[. . .]

Belichick almost escaped without being recognized, but the whole thing became too much for Salisbury, who let out a cry of "Hey! You're Bill Belichick!"

Sssshhhhhh, said the stare Salisbury got back. So he refrained from asking for an autograph. Didn't seem like the right time, or place.

Instead, he wished Belichick luck on the season. "Thank you very much," Belichick said. And then he was gone, off in his sensible SUV, just a few days before training camp.

"He just pulled over like anybody else," Salisbury says, still amazed at the wonder of it all.

 

[Patspsycho]

No, he's not the world's greatest communicator and motivator, but that doesn't matter so much.

I don't quite agree with this- perhaps he comes across like this to the media, but to his own team, I believe he communicates pretty well and knows how to motivate them. One proof for this is how well his teams have bounced back from losses- rarely have we seen back to back losses in the BB era.

 

[PatsWickedPissah]

This is way off topic, but Gates' "Project Tuva" website, featuring annotated videos of Feynman's "Messenger" lectures, is pretty righteous.

Project Tuva

Thank you. I'm a science geek and I love Feynman. Great autobiographical books.

 

[Water Boy]

Awesome article by Curran. I have immense respect for BB and wouldn't want any other coach in the league. That being said his press conferences and many of his weekly radio interviews are brutal. Yes every once and a while you get a nice nugget of information like he admits he's a tough guy to play for, but only after endless predictable non-insightful answers to even the most innocuous question. I wish they'd just bag the mandatory post game press conferences and his weekly radio interview and let BB address the media on a voluntary basis.

 

[RobertWeathers]

Awesome article by Curran. I have immense respect for BB and wouldn't want any other coach in the league. That being said his press conferences and many of his weekly radio interviews are brutal.

It's funny. When he does decide to leave the game I will miss the pressers but my god, they are tough to take. 11 years of those things...man.

 

[MoLewisrocks]

as always breer says

Someone who follows him need to tweet Breer that Tomase got off easy, just like Borges did... Guys with little or no redeeming value who screw up on that level shouldn't be punished by getting promoted to the beat they always wanted to begin with or get hired by another rag and allowed to retain their HOF voting credentials like some friggin' birthright...

Breer is symptomatic of what is wrong with the sports media in the internet age. Kids who haven't begun to pay their dues get to critique guys who have and are so accomplished they had gameplans already enshrined in the HOF while this generation of fanboy mediots were still in grammar school...

 

[patfanken]

I know..I know...

I acknowledge the fact that he slashed Apple's philanthropic-related programs which were spun up again by Ross after Sorkin called him out and chose not to join Bill& Warren's foundation but I won't judge him or call him a miser because of it. I'm aware of the criticism hes received.

I do believe that he and his wife gave a ton to schools, hospitals and cancer research facilities under anonymous donations. Large sums ($100-$200m) showed up in the coffers of these institutions without a word or any wanted recognition. Checks would arrive by courier. Thats it.

As you know, Jobs was just a different guy. He absolutely felt that his companies, jobs and technologies that were created WERE his charity and whatever HE BELIEVED Apple, Pixar, etc. couldn't fix, he took care of privately.

Not trying to be a Steve Jobs apologist (hes made his mistakes like alienating his 1st child) but some people operate on a different plane. He was one of them.

The thing that struck me most about Jobs, besides the earth shattering impact he had on the world, was that he lived on a regular street, in a nice, but not exclusive neighborhood, in a nice house suburban house that none of us would notice. I liked that it was in a place where you could walk down his street, walk up to his door., ring the doorbell, and he'd come and answer the door.

Now compare that with a DB like Donald Trump.

 

[patfanken]

Awesome article by Curran. I have immense respect for BB and wouldn't want any other coach in the league. That being said his press conferences and many of his weekly radio interviews are brutal. Yes every once and a while you get a nice nugget of information like he admits he's a tough guy to play for, but only after endless predictable non-insightful answers to even the most innocuous question. I wish they'd just bag the mandatory post game press conferences and his weekly radio interview and let BB address the media on a voluntary basis.

s
You know part of the problem with the pressers are that he's never asked the right questions. Anyone who has seen him talk about any kind of "general" football topic would find him both entertaining and informative. We just get a glimpse of it when he does his Bellistrator bit on Patriots All Access.

I don't understand why they don't ask him something other than the questions they already know the answers to. A good example was the guy who asked him about the evolution of the 2 TE offense. Who else but BB could, in a nano second, go back into the 70's and come up with Hill and Sanders and talk about them. How good was that, but those questions are rare.

I have a season of questions I could ask him, that I know I would get a response that would teach me something. This guy is one of the great "teachers" of our time, not just a coach. He has over 35 years of football knowledge and NFL History just there for the asking. All you have to do is ask the right questions

 

[AzPatsFan]

Awesome article by Curran. I have immense respect for BB and wouldn't want any other coach in the league. That being said his press conferences and many of his weekly radio interviews are brutal. Yes every once and a while you get a nice nugget of information like he admits he's a tough guy to play for, but only after endless predictable non-insightful answers to even the most innocuous question. I wish they'd just bag the mandatory post game press conferences and his weekly radio interview and let BB address the media on a voluntary basis.

No. It is absolute fun watching him dodge and weave and spend minutes purposely not saying anything that can be used against him or his team. He is like the great Matador fooling the Press Bull with his deft cape work!

He provides absolutely no information about injuries to his players or when they will return, if ever, despite rules that he more than complies with, and even goes overboard to include every hangnail, and splinter. He uses the technique of superfluous information to actually confuse rather than inform as he wanted to do.

It takes a a real "artiste" to speak voluminously for any indeterminate amount of time and say nothing at all, after you bleed out out all the goo and non information.

Only when asked about some historical trend in football does he open up and provide original and in depth thoughts that are usually very insightful. So he could if he wanted to do so, but he thinks he cannot profit from doing so, so he purposely and effectively does not provide any information. And he succeeds!

He freely speaks about how great both his upcoming foe will be, or his just vanquished foe is, who was just crushed.

 

[Deus Irae]

s
You know part of the problem with the pressers are that he's never asked the right questions. Anyone who has seen him talk about any kind of "general" football topic would find him both entertaining and informative. We just get a glimpse of it when he does his Bellistrator bit on Patriots All Access.

I don't understand why they don't ask him something other than the questions they already know the answers to. A good example was the guy who asked him about the evolution of the 2 TE offense. Who else but BB could, in a nano second, go back into the 70's and come up with Hill and Sanders and talk about them. How good was that, but those questions are rare.

I have a season of questions I could ask him, that I know I would get a response that would teach me something. This guy is one of the great "teachers" of our time, not just a coach. He has over 35 years of football knowledge and NFL History just there for the asking. All you have to do is ask the right questions

He gets asked a lot of great questions. He just doesn't answer them. When a game's over, he'll get asked about a play, and he'll say "I'll need to look at the tape". Then, later on, when he's obviously had a chance to look at the tape, he'll say "We're moving on to the next game...".

It was somewhat funny the first 1000000000 times. Now it's just a pain in the ass.

 

[MoLewisrocks]

That's our footbal antichrist/anarchist...Just a pain in the ass with a .724 regular season and .750 post season winning percentage. Damn him.

 

[Mike the Brit]

I don't quite agree with this- perhaps he comes across like this to the media, but to his own team, I believe he communicates pretty well and knows how to motivate them. One proof for this is how well his teams have bounced back from losses- rarely have we seen back to back losses in the BB era.

I'm going to stick with what I said. I mean it though, if you look at my original post, from a position of admiration.

You don't need to have rah-rah cheerleading speeches to motivate people if -- one -- they want to win, and -- two -- you're in a position to help them do it. And it's like a family member. What wouldn't impress an outsider will impress those who know someone well. Both of those things work for BB. He just needs to say: "We're not doing x, y and z -- if we do that we can win this game" and it gets home in a way that another coach who doesn't have that authority wouldn't. What's more -- another positive thing about his communication -- is that, when things are going badly, he doesn't rant against people demeaning them.

But still, BB is not someone who always gets things across. And you can see that from the number of people who have been pretty hurt by the way that he has dealt with them. It's not just that he has done things that go against their wishes -- NFL coaches have to do that all the time, and I truly believe that BB is not by any means heartless in doing what he thinks is best for the team. But we've had enough cases where he's done what he thought was best but the people who have been on the receiving end haven't understood what was going on -- it's hit them at the time totally unexpectedly.

Obviously, Bledsoe was the prime example, but there have been a lot of others. I remember when the media were talking about Meriweather in pre-season and they asked him if the reduced playing time he'd received was a sign that his place was in jeopardy. "No," he said, "if that was the problem, I'd have heard from Bill Belichick. He's good like that." A few days later he was cut and I have to say I felt sorry for Meriweather -- not because I think that BB didn't have good reasons to make the decision he did, but because he didn't communicate it to the player in the way that the player could grasp.

Well,that's a limitation. We all have limits. As I said in my last post, what's astonishing about BB is the way that he's worked to maximise his strengths and work around his limitations. May we all be as good at that in our careers.

 

[Koma]

I still struggle to understand how some people thought that BB, Kraft and the org got off easy.

The "they got easy" stance would be easier to understand from NFL people and media members like Breer if they had showed any type of reaction to the events of the past 2 years.

Last year, there was an incident where one team actually taped another's practice and, this year, the league put in the lime green vest policy, which opens the door for videotaping anything from the sideline.

If people thought what the Patriots did was so terrible and were so worked up about it, they wouldn't let those 2 events pass without a murmur. Since they did, it's more likely that their outrage is manufactured than genuine.

 

[FredFromDartmouth]

When asked about Parcells....BB said "We are both *******s" and this could equally apply to him and Jobs but I think BB was blowing smoke and he is not really an *******---he just has to be because of the cap and other factors.

 

[MoLewisrocks]

I'm going to stick with what I said. I mean it though, if you look at my original post, from a position of admiration.

You don't need to have rah-rah cheerleading speeches to motivate people if -- one -- they want to win, and -- two -- you're in a position to help them do it. And it's like a family member. What wouldn't impress an outsider will impress those who know someone well. Both of those things work for BB. He just needs to say: "We're not doing x, y and z -- if we do that we can win this game" and it gets home in a way that another coach who doesn't have that authority wouldn't. What's more -- another positive thing about his communication -- is that, when things are going badly, he doesn't rant against people demeaning them.

But still, BB is not someone who always gets things across. And you can see that from the number of people who have been pretty hurt by the way that he has dealt with them. It's not just that he has done things that go against their wishes -- NFL coaches have to do that all the time, and I truly believe that BB is not by any means heartless in doing what he thinks is best for the team. But we've had enough cases where he's done what he thought was best but the people who have been on the receiving end haven't understood what was going on -- it's hit them at the time totally unexpectedly.

Obviously, Bledsoe was the prime example, but there have been a lot of others. I remember when the media were talking about Meriweather in pre-season and they asked him if the reduced playing time he'd received was a sign that his place was in jeopardy. "No," he said, "if that was the problem, I'd have heard from Bill Belichick. He's good like that." A few days later he was cut and I have to say I felt sorry for Meriweather -- not because I think that BB didn't have good reasons to make the decision he did, but because he didn't communicate it to the player in the way that the player could grasp.

Well,that's a limitation. We all have limits. As I said in my last post, what's astonishing about BB is the way that he's worked to maximise his strengths and work around his limitations. May we all be as good at that in our careers.

I disagree. I have heard too many players present and past state that you always know where you stand with Bill. I think those who don't simply failed to acknowledge the message. That's often ego. Bill won't blow smoke up your ass, nor will he toss you under the nearest bus. If he sits you, you got a problem. And if you don't understand that you're either delusional or stupid. I used to think he could make it easier to hang on to guys by talking them up or talking nice to them or making sure they knew the team appreciated or needed them. But I eventually realized he doesn't do that because he wants self motivated players - like the QB - who want to be here because they want to win more than they want the last buck or that smoke blowing up their ass. He hasn't got time to coddle egos. He's got more important **** to do.

 

[Fencer]

Lots of differences between the two, obvious. Steve Jobs was one of the great consumer marketers ever; indeed, that was the core of his skillset. That's not BB.

Jobs worked in an industry where people expect to be treated well. BB works in a field that's kind of modeled on the military.

BB thinks carefully about how to lead people. I doubt Jobs did.

Still, it's not a crazy analogy.

 

[supafly]

Many great comments in this thread.

If the 2011 Pats make it back to the SB this yr, I will personally feel as though it would be right up there with one of his best coaching performances ever.

Then again, I keep saying that again and again, every few yrs...

 

[Fencer]

Steve Jobs has done a lot of great things for people. You just don't know about them and he didn't want you to in the first place.

Not on the Bill Gates level.

Bill got it from his mother. You know all we've heard about Myra Kraft this year? Mrs. Gates was a WASPish version of the same thing.

Personally, I know Bill was a jerk, although I bet his apparent mellowing in middle age is real. I only met Steve once for a minute or two, so I couldn't say in his case, except to say that yeah, he wasn't exactly dripping in charismatic warmth.

 

[RobertWeathers]

Not on the Bill Gates level.

Of course not. Considering hes given away tens of billions and Jobs net worth was ONLY $8.3b

Bill got it from his mother. You know all we've heard about Myra Kraft this year? Mrs. Gates was a WASPish version of the same thing.

Personally, I know Bill was a jerk, although I bet his apparent mellowing in middle age is real. I only met Steve once for a minute or two, so I couldn't say in his case, except to say that yeah, he wasn't exactly dripping in charismatic warmth.

Yep. Folks won't say that Melinda changed him but she brought out qualities in him that were his mom's.

Jobs was very charismatic - on stage. Like I said earlier. He was just a different dude.

 

[Water Boy]

s
You know part of the problem with the pressers are that he's never asked the right questions.

Here's a few questions that should never be asked again at a BB presser. Please feel free to add to the list.

1. Why did player X play or not play at a certain position
2. Why was player X acquired or waived
3. What's the status of player X's injury
4. What schemes (in general terms) will be utilized against against a opponent X.