BB Interview w/ Coach K

[mooseontheloose]

Belichick was on with Coach K and had a few interesting things to say, mostly about his perspective as a coach.

Krzyzewski asked Belichick the following questions: How do you maintain your hunger? How do you get rejuvenated? How do you get focused for the next journey that you're going to take with your team?

Belichick, who turns 65 on April 16, answered in multiple layers.

"I just try to maintain a balance with it. Football is very important to me, and I put a lot into it, but there are times during our year when you can step back and refresh a little bit," he began. "Going out to Pebble Beach for a couple days was good for me, not that I played great golf or anything, but being in that environment. In the summer, before we go to training camp, I spend some time just relaxing with the family and kind of getting refreshed and taking the pressure off for a little while. That definitely helps.

"I really enjoy the different phases of the season," Belichick continued. "Right now we're in a team-building phase with free agency and then next month the draft and then all the players will be in and we'll start. As you know, you can't pick up where you left off last year, you've got to start all over again, so the kind of starting all over again process has really already begun for us.

"But I enjoy that, because it's a different type of coaching than it is coaching in playoff games, where you have an experienced team and players that have been doing things for six months and your execution level is much higher than what it is when you start all over again in spring practices or the beginning of training camp. I enjoy all the different aspects of it. They're all challenging."

It's also where Belichick is doing that work, and with whom, that helps rejuvenate him.

"I really enjoy coming to work every day. Mr. Kraft and the Patriots organization has given us a great support system and a great opportunity to be successful, so we all just try to do our jobs," he told Krzyzewski.

"I enjoy working with young people. That certainly keeps me young, even though the gap's widening. And I do my best to absolutely take on the whole social-media thing, you know, head on, on a collision course. But other than that, being with young people certainly keeps you young, and that's been important for me. I'm sure you feel the same way."

On Super Bowl 51: "Our guys played like champions in the last 20 minutes, and we really were able to have a lot of things go right, which they needed to pretty much just had to fall the way they did, or we would have been in trouble. So it was a great year and a great victory for our team."

How he viewed Patriots' early performance: "The Super Bowl, for me, and I know you've been in these games before and you can relate to this: There are some games you feel like you're in control of the game, but you're not in control of the score. That's kind of the way I felt in the Super Bowl. We moved the ball. We were able to stop them on third down. I didn't feel like we were being dominated on the field. But we were being dominated on the scoreboard. Vice versa, I've coached other games where we might be ahead by 14 points, but I felt like it was because they turned the ball over a couple times, or maybe we couldn't really stop them, or we couldn't really run the ball or control the line of scrimmage, so I didn't feel like we had control of the game, even though the scoreboard might indicate that. I'm sure you've had that feeling too, where you look up at the scoreboard, and it is what it is. But if that's the same score in a different game, you might have a different feeling. ... That didn't really happen for me in the Super Bowl. We tried to stay with what we were doing, except for defensively, once we got into the fourth quarter, we just became a little more aggressive with our calls, took a free safety out of the middle of the field and put him into coverage and just tried to press things a little tighter to create a negative play. Fortunately, we were able to get a couple of negative plays, which helped us in a couple of those series in the fourth quarter."

On Tom Brady: "The biggest thing Tom does for us is to try to keep us out of those bad plays where we have [a] 5-10 percent chance of really being successful, whether it’s a coverage or a blitz or an alignment that they give us, and he sees that what we’ve got called just isn’t what we want to be in. That wasn’t why we called the play, was to run it against that particular look. Then sometimes he’ll be able to get out of those and get us something that, like I said, gives us more of a fair fight."

 

[Undertaker #59*]

Great stuff, thanks.