ATLANTA — 11Alive Sports offers four insightful nuggets or anecdotes about Bill Belichick (No. 3 in all-time wins), who will enter Sunday as the oldest Super Bowl head coach in history.
As luck would have it, the 66-year-old Belichick (most playoff victories and Super Bowl rings of any head coach) will merely break his own age-old record from last year, since the New England Patriots prefer to make a standing appointment for the Super Bowl every February.
1. Belichick's Boy Wonder legacy for the 1980s was built on the defensive side of the ball. However in 1977, Belichick directed the Detroit Lions' wide receivers.
How did the receivers fare that season?
Officially, not a single Lions wideout cleared 45 catches, 500 yards or three receiving touchdowns; but that was the final season of the NFL's so-called Dead Ball era (too much physical contact downfield).
To wit, for the 1977 season, only eight NFL receivers notched 50 or more catches ... and zero players flirted with 1,000 yards – let alone 900.
2. According to Sports Illustrated, Belichick and Nick Saban first met at Ohio State around 1980, when the latter was a defensive assistant for head coach Earle Bruce (Belichick was on a scouting visit).
Also, their first dinner occurred at the home of Belichick's parents in 1982, when Saban was coaching alongside Steve Belichick at Navy.
Six years later, according to SI, Belichick and Saban would arrange a clandestine meeting somewhere in New Jersey, as a means of exchanging detailed philosophies about the Cover-2 defense. This encounter would unwittingly change the worlds of college and pro football for the next 30 years.
(In the late 1980s, Saban was a defensive backs coach under Jerry Glanville, as crazy as that sounds.)
The '2' calls for the back-end safeties being responsible for the two deep zones, or halves, with a general starting range of 13-15 yards from the line of scrimmage.
3. Belichick had a front-row seat for Tom Brady's 'crazy' pursuit of an errant golf ball, a search that could have led to the G.O.A.T. quarterback getting injured ... or even falling off a cliff.
Here's the story:
"We were on the sixth hole [at Pebble Beach], which is a long par 5 and it goes up a big hill and the ocean is on the right, and the fairway kind of falls off to the right. Most of us golfers are little slicers anyways, so lot of balls end up over there – in or by the ocean," Belichick said.
"So there we are, playing in a pro-am tournament, where, as an amateur if you hit a bad shot you don’t really worry about it, you play the pro’s ball anyways, that’s what you have him for. There’s not a ton of pressure on the amateurs because you have a good player with you who probably is going to make a par on almost every hole and birdie a few.
"So Tom hit one, his second shot, over [to the right], and I see a starting quarterback, a Super Bowl MVP, a league MVP literally hanging over the side of the cliff probably 200-300 feet above the ocean trying to hit a golf ball that’s a pretty meaningless shot because the pro already is going to do better than he would on the hole.
"But that’s Tom, he’s very, very competitive, very focused. Plays kind of fearlessly, whether it’s on – in this case on the golf course – or on the football field. But I was just thinking to myself, ‘This is a crazy sight that I’m looking at here.'
"So (Brady) hit the ball and then his caddie kind of walked over there and gave him a hand and helped him back up this cliff that he was a few feet down on, or below. So I certainly breathed a little bit easier when he came up for air on that one.
"But yeah, when I think of Tom, I think of situations like that. It doesn’t really matter, but to him, it matters and he only knows one way to do it and that’s the way he’s going to do it."
4. Incredibly, Belichick has twice served as head coach of the Jets ... without competing in a single game under that title.
How is this possible?
a) Early in 1997, after the Patriots' Super Bowl loss to the Packers, New England head coach Bill Parcells had designs on breaking his contract and taking over the Jets franchise.
But the two AFC East rivals needed to negotiate compensation before Parcells could officially make the jump.
In the interim, the Jets named Belichick (Parcells' trusted lieutenant the previous year) as head coach ... a title that would last for six days, before Parcells officially assumed the No. 1 spot.
b) Fast forward just a few years down the road.
Parcells had secretly arranged with Jets management that Belichick would become head coach whenever the former opted for retirement; and when Parcells abruptly resigned after three seasons, he thought the decks had been cleared for the Belichick succession plan.
But alas, Belichick's introductory news conference with New York also became a resignation announcement, since he had already accepted the head-coaching gig with the Patriots – a job he has maintained, to some acclaim, for 19 seasons (five championships and counting).
Can you imagine if Twitter had been around for Belichick's surprise resignation?
Whoa.
