I can't believe the amount of hate that has been thrown at Bill Belichick all week. Yes the New England Patriots were outcoached by the New York Giants but give the guy a break for leaving the field one second early. Is this really even news? Everyone knows that the field at a Super Bowl quickly becomes a circus after the game is over (well maybe New York Jets fans don't but I think even they can probably imagine it). He just wanted to get out of there. I'm amazed that people are really concerned about this and it's really just a shame that it's stuff like this that gets counted as controversy against the Hoodied one.
Belichick is concerned with one thing: winning football games. He makes no apologies about that. The media wants every NFL coach to be Dick Vermeil. Emotional, verbose, a father to his players, not afraid to tear up when the moment strikes him. Sorry folks, this isn't Bill Belichick. He knows that the media can be a disease to putting together a winning football team. They take rumours and speculation and use them to divide professional sports teams. They take quotes out of context ("I play when I want to play") to serve the stories they want to write. So Belichick cuts them off at the knees by limiting any information that is disseminated to them. In David Halberstam's Education of a Coach he describes how much time and thought Belichick puts into his press conferences. He anticipates what he will be asked and knows exactly how to put a stop to any attempt to create controversy. He makes the media's job extremely difficult and thus they take any opportunity possible to return the favor.
I'm not going to get into Spygate here. I'm just so sick of reading about it. Spygate I is dead and buried to me. As for Spygate II, if Matt Walsh has tapes of the St. Louis Rams Super Bowl walkthrough the Patriots should be punished. It's my personal opinion that he does not have any kind of proof and is just looking for his 15 minutes. Roger Goodell seemed to support this with his comments to Adam Schefter of NFL Network on Wednesday saying they found "evidence to the contrary" of the walkthrough being taped. You can believe that the Patriots cheated their way to five conference championships and four Super Bowl games this decade (including winning streaks of 18 and 21 games) but you're just kidding yourself. The fact that this whole Spygate thing has gotten a second life is, to me, just another sign of how those who don't like Belichick want to see him gone. He's too good, too competitive, and not cheery enough.
Belichick is a football genius. How many geniuses do you know in other professions that aren't somewhat eccentric? Albert Einstein used to smoke cigarette butts he found on the street. If he was doing that today, how much flack would he take? Would people discredit the Theory of Relativity because of it? Bobby Fischer is another example - sure he might've been a little crazy but he's most remembered for playing chess. The list could go on and on. Bill Belichick's genius just happens to be with the organized chaose that is professional football. Motivating and teaching 52 men to execute specific physical and mental tasks under the highest of pressure. It's just a shame that people cannot apreciate it and are more concerned with things like why he walked off the field one second before the clock expired.
