Count former Vikings coach Les Steckel among the many people who saw something special in Belichick years ago.
“I coached one year at the Naval Academy with Steve Belichick, Bill’s dad,” Steckel recalled Sunday. “Bill was a quality-control guy within the Baltimore Colts and later the Washington Redskins, and he would come over and walk in every time with a piece of chalk and go over to the blackboard — and yes, there were blackboards in 1977 — and he’d say, ‘Coach Steckel, let’s go over here and X and O it, let’s have at it.’
“I could tell right then he had no interest in playing politics to be a football coach. He wanted to be an X and O ‘strat-atician,’ and that was my concept as well. We really hit it off. When Bud [Grant] asked me to be the head coach when he stepped down that year [1984], I thought of Bill. I knew he was bright and I knew one thing for sure, he was going to be a great football coach. It just didn’t work out, but I knew he had a future.”
He nearly had Belichick hired as an assistant coach in 1984, with Belichick interviewing for defensive coordinator, but he ended up staying with the New York Giants and was named their coordinator in ’85 before getting his first head coaching job with the Cleveland Browns in 1991.
Steckel said that one of the great things for the NFL was that Belichick, who was fired from Cleveland in 1995, got his second chance to be a head coach in New England in 2000.
Count former Vikings coach Les Steckel among the many people who saw something special in Belichick years ago.
Yes, the Vikings and Steckel nearly had Belichick hired as an assistant coach in 1984, with Belichick interviewing for defensive coordinator, but he ended up staying with the New York Giants and was named their coordinator in ’85 before getting his first head coaching job with the Cleveland Browns in 1991.
