About 15 years ago, the Pro Football Writers of America had a major problem to discuss at their annual meeting during Super Bowl week.
The problem was related to the PFWA’s Media Access Policy, a long, detailed agreement, negotiated with the NFL, that spells out the rights and responsibilities of NFL beat writers.
The policy is extensive. The current version is 4,516 words and has 24 separate sections, covering everything from how often teams have to make players available for interviews to game-day media parking.
Occasionally, a coach or team will violate the policy, and the PFWA brings the violation to the league’s attention, for disciplinary action to be taken to allow the beat writers to do their job.
The problem under discussion at the 2010 Super Bowl meeting? Bill Belichick had hacked the policy.
According to legend, Belichick took a highlighter to the document and found everything that he was required to do for the media. He then changed colors and highlighted any vague or imprecise language in the policy.
The policy requires a coach to make his offensive and defensive coordinators available on a weekly basis. A quick check of the 2010 New England roster shows that no coaches on the staff had those titles. So, Belichick and the Patriots were exempt from that requirement.
Teams must make position coaches available to the media on a regular basis. Once a year is “a regular basis”. And heaven forbid that any policy use the word “should” instead of “must” or refer to “reasonable access.”
Belichick took the time to break down the media policy, the same as the Jets or Bills offensive schemes, scouting it thoroughly and methodically, looking for weaknesses. And he took the time to do it while in the dead center of an 18-year stretch of dominance that saw the team win six Super Bowls (they had already won three, with three still to come) and reach the big game nine times (they’d gone four times, with five to follow).
Why did he do it? Because, quite simply, that’s what Bill Belichick does. He’s the Jurassic Park velociraptor, systematically probing the electric fence for weaknesses, then exploiting them.
One Patriots outlet counting nine separate NFL rules changes between 2004 and 2018 that resulted from Belichick taking advantage of loopholes in the current rulebook. The language leaves grey area around the weekly injury report? Or which five players on offense are ineligible to catch a pass? Or how substitutions between plays are handled? Belichick and his highlighter pens found a way to take advantage and get an edge.
NFL coaches pride themselves on attention to detail and tireless devotion to their job, sleeping in their office in an effort to find the one clue on game film that will give them an edge over this week’s opponent.
And year after year, week after week, late night after late night, Bill Belichick found that key to victory more often than the other 31 coaches in the league.
The Patriots were often called the Evil Empire by the rest of the league, but Bill Belichick wasn’t Darth Vader or the Emperor. He was Dolores Umbridge, or Dwight Schrute, putting on reading glasses and poring over paperwork to do his evil bidding.
Yes, Bill Belichick is coaching a college team for the first time in his career. Yes, his Patriots teams struggled in the couple seasons after their Hall of Fame quarterback left. Some observers are taking that as a sign that Belichick’s UNC experiment is a disaster in the making.
College is completely different from the NFL, they say. He’ll have to deal with recruiting, boosters, classes schedules for players, all these things he never dealt with before.
In other words, someone threw Br’er Belichick into the brier patch. An NCAA manual just begging to be picked apart is what gets him up in the morning. Belichick will carve it, and everything else that’s unfamiliar to him about college football, the same way he’s done with everything else.
In fact, he already has.
When he interviewed for the UNC job, rumors leaked out that he’d presented the school with a 400-page organizational bible, spelling out, in detail, his vision of how a college program should be organized. He also had a separate bible of equal length for potential suitors in the NFL, according to reports.
Belichick denied that at his introductory press conference with very specific phrasing.
“I don’t have a 400-page document,” he said, leaving the door wide open for documents of any other length. And is there anyone that doesn’t think a copy of the NCAA rules and regulations, highlighted in a rainbow of colors, has already been moved into an office at Kenan Stadium?
Bill Belichick will outwork, out-scheme and out-specify everyone in the ACC. He will drive everyone nuts, from opposing coaches to the media to the commissioner. Rules will likely change. Loopholes will close. And out will come the highlighters once again.
College football is about to get hacked.
