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Bill Belichick Explains How Watching College Football Helped Patriots Players Peak in the NFL: “Talk About Strategy and Playcalling…”

Suresh Menon
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North Carolina Tar Heels new head coach Bill Belichick speaks to those attending his hiring announcement at Loudermilk Center for Excellence.

When Bill Belichick confirmed his appointment as UNC’s head coach, many wondered what the Croatian could gain from this shift. After all, it does seem like a step down for someone with half a century of NFL coaching experience and a gazillion Super Bowls.

However, for the legendary Patriots coach, that’s not the case at all. It turns out that Belichick has learned a lot from college football, which even built the Patriots foundation we know and love today.

In his latest appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, Belichick revealed that one of his favorite memories as a Patriots head coach was discussing and dissecting college football games with his players at dinner time. His players apparently had a jolly time making cases for their alma maters while engaging in banter. Strategic discussions also took place.

Many times, Bill found his players discussing among themselves how they would have made a particular play while analyzing recent games, blunders, losses, and missed opportunities through a tactical lens.

“Everybody would be watching college football and they would be talking about ‘Hey watch out for the Bingo situation’, ‘they’re going to hard count here’, ‘be ready for this’… they were talking situational football or giving each other a hard time about what their alma mater had done right… inevitably there would be a situation […] where they would be like ‘hey what would we do in that situation’…”

Players would also seek Bill’s advice on broader plays they couldn’t understand. And according to the Croatian, deliberating on them helped him learn a lot about the game of football and develop new strategies.

“You’re sitting there as a coach saying you know we don’t quite have that, like what we would do if it was this, but this is a little bit different. We need to talk about that… I learned so much as a coach because those guys would bring up stuff.”

Now that the cat was out of the bag, Bill urged NFL teams to adopt this practice of watching CFB games as a regular habit, emphasizing that it would only expand the learning curve. Traditionally, coaches dedicate themselves to studying their upcoming opposition and watching films of previous matches, but clearly, more can be done.

In Bill’s eyes, every matchup presents a new situation that forces coaches—and players—to consider what they would do in that scenario.

“You know the Cincinnati-Denver game is another one that I think I (would make my players watch) if I was a head coach in the NFL. I don’t care what team I was on, I would watch that with my staff and then go over it with the team and say, ‘Okay, you know here’s what we do, here’s what we would do, here’s the type of play we would run, here’s when we would do and play both sides of it because you could be on offense or you could be on defense…’”

It’s heartening to see Bill share some secrets that made him the coach we know today. It’s also hilarious that he spills the beans now, after his exit from the NFL. The fact that he waited until signing with UNC to reveal them adds to the humor.

Post Edited By:Samnur Reza

About the author

Suresh Menon

Suresh Menon

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Suresh Menon is an NFL writer at The SportsRush with over 700 articles to his name. Early in his childhood, Suresh grew up admiring the famed BBC of Juventus making the Italian club his favorite. His love for soccer however soon translated to American football when he came across a Super Bowl performance from his Favourite Bruno Mars. Tom Brady’s performance in the finals left an imprint on him and since then, he has been a die hard Brady fan. Thus his love for the sport combined with his flair for communication is the reason why he decided to pursue sports journalism at The SportsRush. Beyond football, in his free time, he is a podcast host and likes spending time solving the Rubik’s cube.

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