How does Bill Belichick sustain a winning culture? Three ex-Patriots dish on their ‘gold standard’
NY DAILY NEWS
FOXBOROUGH — Bill Belichick won’t give away his secret recipe.
He won’t reveal his ingredients to creating and sustaining the winning Patriots culture that has become the envy of the entire NFL.
“That’s a tough question, probably a long answer, might need a book on that one,” Belichick said Monday, too deep in preparation for Thursday night’s game against the Giants to dish on the Daily News’ inquiry. “The question you asked is a little more than I can handle right now.”
There is no reason for Belichick to spill his secrets, though, is there? The NFL has a parity problem, and Belichick’s Patriots are the reason why.
New England is the reigning Super Bowl champion and 5-0 to start this season. It has won six of the last 18 Super Bowls beginning with Belichick and Tom Brady’s first win together in 2001.
It has represented the AFC in half of those 18 Super Bowls, including each of the last three and four of the last five. And it has won 16 of the last 18 AFC East titles, including the last 10.
Bill Belichick and the Patriots have been perennial Super Bowl contenders since winning their first championship in 2001. (Tom Pennington/Getty Images)
Sure, there have been 10 other Super Bowl champions in that 18-year span, including the Giants and Steelers, who have won two each. And there have been 18 different NFL teams represented in the Super Bowl from 2001.
But that means there are 14 NFL franchises that haven’t reached the Super Bowl this century. Essentially, AFC wild-card qualifiers and other division winners might alternate, but almost no one dethrones the Pats.
The Giants, who have missed the playoffs in six of the last seven years, are one of many NFL franchises looking to order what the Patriots are having.
They have pursued Belichick assistants Josh McDaniels and Matt Patricia (now the Lions’ head coach), and GM Dave Gettleman constantly talks about building a new culture as a foundation for success with head coach Pat Shurmur at the helm.
Sources have told the Daily News that Belichick’s self-sustained winning culture is one of the most distinguishing characteristics to his success. Generally, this refers to high expectations that Belichick has created, maintained and reinforced with Super Bowl rings to cement in stone.
To get a grasp on the details of how Belichick has done this, though, I spoke to some of those who know him well. This isn’t the book Belichick referred to, but it is a window into how he operates and achieves consistent success.
NATE SOLDER, GIANTS LEFT TACKLE, TWO-TIME PATRIOTS SUPER BOWL CHAMPION (2014, 2016): “I think they put a lot of thought into creating that (culture), and I think it all starts with Belichick honestly. He does a great job getting them to buy into the process, what he calls eliminating bad football, making dumb mistakes, believing the team mentality that what’s best for the team is not always best for you — getting guys to buy into that.
Nate Solder, seen here on the Patriots in 2016, won two Super Bowls with Bill Belichick. (Al Bello/Getty Images)
“I don’t think it’s self-sustaining. I believe the guys that are there are doing a tremendous amount of work to maintain that standard. I think there’s a misperception that once you win a championship the next one kind of flows, and that’s not the case. As you see, most teams don’t do that. So it’s about the next season being able to turn the page and still have that same sort of drive and mentality that you did to win the first championship for the second one.
“And that gets more difficult. I think you have incredible leaders, guys that are so driven to be successful at what they do, starting with Belichick and the coaches and a lot of the players.”
MICHAEL LOMBARDI, FORMER GM, BROWNS/PATRIOTS EXECUTIVE, AUTHOR OF ‘GRIDIRON GENIUS’ ON BELICHICK: “It all comes down to the owner (Robert Kraft). The owner has got to be willing to buy in to the program the coach is selling. And the reason Bill sustains it is that he doesn’t view being a head coach as designing new plays, he views it as being the guy who maintains culture. So everything about his behavior is doing what’s right for the culture and making sure culture is adhered to.”
(Editor’s note: Lombardi’s 2018 book, ‘Gridiron Genius: A Master Class in Building Teams and Winning at the Highest Level,’ chronicles a lot of what makes Belichick unique. Belichick even wrote the foreword for the book).
“He comes in, educates the team on how to handle winning and losing, what’s expected each week, how each week’s a new week. They don’t celebrate after a win. They’re on to the next team. There’s no contentment. There’s no ‘I want this.’”
CARL BANKS, TWO-TIME GIANTS SUPER BOWL CHAMPION LB WITH BELICHICK AS DEFENSIVE COORDINATOR (1986, 1990): “The roots go back to the Giants. He was part of setting a gold standard with the Giants, and I’ve known him since he was a position coach (linebackers/special teams). I think part of sustaining a successful and winning culture is No. 1 it starts with teaching, No. 2 it starts with accountability at both ends, with staff and with players. And they set expectations for each other and hold each other accountable.”
Giants LB Carl Banks, seen here in 1991, won two Super Bowls with Big Blue when Belichick was defensive coordinator. (Stephen Dunn/Getty Images)
SOLDER ON B.B.’s EXPECTATIONS: “So we’d go over goal line, as most teams do, towards the end of the week, either Thursday or Friday. And at 7:30 a.m. Wednesday morning, he asked Sebastian Vollmer what is their goal line front personnel? And Sebastian’s like we get to that on Friday, I have no idea (laughs). So he just started making stuff up. But those were the expectations: This is not what you’ve been coached, but you’ve already done so much research, you know going in what you should know on Friday on Wednesday morning. That was the expectation.”
LOMBARDI ON B.B.’S TENETS: “Their four things when you walk in are do your job, be attentive, put the team first, and speak for yourself. Speak for yourself means you don’t speak about other guys’ business, and no one answers for you. You answer for yourself (to media).”
SOLDER ON B.B’S THREE RULES FOR REPRESENTING NEW ENGLAND: “Be prepared. Speak for yourself. And don’t fuel the noise.”
BANKS ON WHAT B.B. LEARNED WITH THE GIANTS: “I think the lesson for him was to have great players to coach. I say this with humility, but he learned how important it was to have great players who could take coaching that he could make better. So if you know you can challenge Lawrence Taylor to be better on a block, and that player will learn and work on it — and he knows he’d better know the answer in film study the same as the expectations are for a guy on special teams — that message goes all the way down the food chain.”
LOMBARDI: “He’s not afraid of confrontation with a player.”
Hall of Fame receiver Randy Moss recently told a story on ESPN about how he could not believe when he arrived in New England that Belichick would point out Tom Brady’s mistakes in team meetings the same as he would any other players’ gaffes. Solder nods his head.
SOLDER: “I think the way (Belichick) sees the game is very objective, so he wouldn’t just call you out, he’d show you on film where you screwed up and how you screwed it up as a teaching point. It’s one thing to say you need to play better, it’s another thing to say well you did this wrong and you need to fix it by doing this. And you’d be like, OK, you’re right, that was embarrassing, but you’re right. I need to work on that!”
BANKS: “He’s an extremely consistent person. He drills the hell out of you. There’s a purpose to every movement you make in practice, and you actually look forward to doing it in a game because you know it works. It has a purpose as to how you fit in the scheme.”
SOLDER: “Say they’re putting in a play in practice. They won’t put in a play for the Giants. They’ll be putting in a play for an opponent five weeks away. So they’d put in a play for a team coming up in five weeks, we’d start working on it, and we’d have five weeks to perfect that play before we actually used it in a game. (If they did that this week) they’ll have no intention of using it against us. They’ll just have it in the playbook and they’ll be able to practice it that much more by the time it’s actually ready for the game.”
(Solder, who still has plenty of Patriot in him, admits the Giants “do some of that, too, but I don’t talk about what we do.”)
BANKS: “Ask any person who played for him if he ever heard Bill say I didn’t make the right call or I gotta do a better job of getting you guys all on the same page. You hear that all the time with him. He is the most collaborative coach you could ever imagine when it comes to things that will make his team successful. There’s not a single bad play or good play that happens that he doesn’t ask a player what went on during the course of that play. And he’s taking notes on it. You always see him he’s constantly in the moment, coaching the moment.”
LOMBARDI, EXCERPT FROM ‘GRIDIRON GENIUS:’ “Whether the Patriots have just won the Super Bowl or not, the first thing Belichick does is wipe the slate clean. One of his favorite sayings is ‘To live in the past is to die in the present.’ It’s why you see no Super Bowl trophies as you walk through the players’ entrance and why all the photos from the previous season are removed as soon as the season is over. That clean slate demands a trip back to basic principles and fundamentals after a detailed examination of the current process.”
SOLDER ON ONE BYPRODUCT OF A WINNING CULTURE: “I think they’ve afforded themselves — if there is such a thing — they take some risks, I think, that maybe a new head coach might not be able to take, personnel-wise or strategy-wise.”
BANKS: “It’s called the gold standard. You win because of that. He’s uncompromising when it comes to fundamentals, with the way his coaches teach football, and he’s uncompromising when it comes to the accountability of both coaches and players.”
SOLDER: “They’re not perfect. Every time they’ve won a championship they’ve had very close circumstances. There’s something that’s just out of their control in the whole deal. Because say if they always did this then they would always win, but they don’t always win. And there’s certain cases where it’s really close and they barely win and it could have gone one way or the other based on the way the ball rolls. But they’ve done a really good job of putting themselves in those situations where it’s competitive and it’s close and they give themselves a chance to be successful, I think.”
No kidding.