Socci’s View: Before looking ahead, a personal look back at the past 11 seasons
So where was I?
On Friday morning I started filling this space with thoughts about the past 11 seasons of Patriots game days and the times between them listening to Bill Belichick over conference calls, on WebEx streams and from seats in various press rooms. Several sentences in, news flashed by way of a phone notification, and I backspaced away from Bill for a forward-thinking rewrite about his successor Jerod Mayo.
Three playoff doubleheaders later, Belichick has interviewed in Atlanta and embarrassments of Dallas and Philadelphia have flooded every platform from X to ‘MyFace’ with memes of him under references to Jerry Jones and Jeffrey Lurie. By the way, which do you find the more tantalizing prospect: Bill responding to Jones’ weekly public critiques of his – always Jerry’s – Cowboys or Lane Johnson reacting to the Patriot Way becoming the Eagles way?
Anyway, Bill’s on to the next team. Before he gets there, allow me to pick up where I left off, which was actually a good seven years before calling Belichick’s 206th win in my first regular season broadcast from Buffalo, where Mayo captained the defense and Tom Brady captained a comeback.
It was a Sunday morning, on a rare day off for the Patriots, in October of 2006. Belichick was back home in Annapolis on the U.S. Naval Academy yard, where his father Steve coached and taught for 33 years and was laid to rest 11 months earlier. Dressed in suit and tie, his oldest son, also named Steve, at his side, Bill stood in the lobby of Navy’s football offices, on the second floor of Ricketts Hall.
This was the building where Belichick’s dad remained a fixture well into his retirement. He’d swing by the football suite, grab a styrofoam cup of coffee and walk down the hallway to read the local newspapers delivered daily to the sports information office. Every so often, as the voice of the Midshipmen since 1997, I happened to be there at the same time. If I was lucky, I got to hear Coach Belichick, as everyone knew him around the Academy, spin an anecdote, offer an opinion or teach me a lesson or two.
More than once, the topic was broadcasting. I learned, for example, that he watched games with the TV sound muted, unless Jerry Glanville was commenting (“he’s the only one who knows defense”). In another instance, I had my own work critiqued, after he heard me refer on-air to Bill Walsh as the father of the West Coast offense (“let me tell you about Paul Brown!”).
Our longest conversation was our last, largely centering around the recently-published “The Education of a Coach.” Its author David Halberstam had described the book, written about New England’s Coach Belichick, as an homage to Navy’s Coach Belichick. What most impressed the latter, unsurprisingly, given his keen scouting eyes for the most granular details of an opponent’s formations, motions and play calls, was Halberstam’s meticulous reporting technique. No tape recorder. Full quotes, hand written, with context into his reporter’s notebook. I can still picture Coach Belichick in the back of Navy’s press box, a half hour to kickoff with Temple, demonstrating how Halberstam scribbled and highlighted, while pretending to flip the pages of an imaginary notebook.
About then, our radio producer interrupted. Air time intervened. I could have listened all day. It was the last time I spoke to Coach Belichick. It was his last Navy game.
Bill Belichick’s aforementioned homecoming in 2006 was on a bye weekend for the Patriots that began with a Saturday matchup of Navy and Rutgers – the Scarlet Knights, featuring twin cornerbacks named McCourty, shut out the Midshipmen – and concluded with Sunday’s campus visit. Bill and young Steve were there to formally donate more than 400 titles in the family’s football library to the Naval Academy.
There, in the soon-to-be (and still) home of the “Belichick Collection,” a nostalgic Bill reminisced to a few reporters about game-days of his youth, when he hawked programs outside Navy-Marine Corps Memorial Stadium on Rowe Boulevard. He wistfully answered questions, including mine, which related to my last conversation with the original Coach Belichick, and Halberstam’s homage.
Holding a microphone off his left shoulder, I saw his softer side. The next time in his company, seven years later, I caught a different side of him.
Belichick had just wrapped up a spring press conference on Gillette Stadium’s press box level and, flanked by right-hand assistant Berj Najarian, marched toward the elevator. Patriots veep of media relations Stacey James and I trailed, more than a few steps behind. Hired weeks earlier to be the Pats new broadcaster by CBS Radio Boston, few people in the organization knew who I was; the head coach wasn’t one of them. The doors opened, they stepped in and so did we. Instantly, the doors shut on any foolish notion I might have had that my Navy football cred would afford me an ‘in’ with the favorite son of Annapolis.
James introduced me, I smiled and started blathering. I failed to utter as much as the first few syllables of a mutual friend’s name: Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo. Maybe I made it past the initial “a” before trailing off into silence, frozen by the look. No, not the death stare gone viral from podiums around the NFL; the slightly less intense one that conveys annoyance and the question: ‘W(ho)TF are you? The ride down felt like the longest descent of my career. Before hitting field level, Najarian smiled, piercing the silence. “Get ready to call a lot of wins,” he said.
Najarian was right about that. My first six years on the call featured an average of 12.3 wins a season. Plus 2.2 wins a postseason. The Pats let me tag along to six straight AFC Championship games and four Super Bowls, and in three championship parades.
While I still drew that look occasionally over the years, sometimes forgetting the question I intended to ask in the midst of a long-winded preamble to the point I never got to, and sometimes realizing before the words escaped my mouth that mentioning Vic Fangio’s reported blitz rate was a foolish idea Bill wasn’t about to suffer, I’d like to think I ended up earning credibility in the coach’s eyes.
At least, that’s how I was treated, even after the great times gave way to not-so-good days since the final weeks of 2019. Of course, I unashamedly admit, being the play-by-play guy, my questions were likely to elicit Belichick’s softer side. Doing my job week-to-week required gleaning insight about opponents, general strategy, football history. Not that I didn’t sit uncomfortably or even cringe at times when others asked what they had to ask when controversies arose or the team felt the depths of a 30-point playoff loss or, most recently, a 13-loss campaign.
For me, on the whole, the seasons – 11 of Belichick’s 24 as Patriots head coach – and weekday sessions, particularly on Fridays, were a mostly joyful ride. And educational.
Any opportunity to listen to Bill wax poetic about Paul Brown or Gil Brandt, break down the art and science of long snapping or left-footed-punt returning, drill down on the differences between one team’s 3-4 defense and another’s was like listening to a dissertation for a football doctorate. All his Friday lessons combined have taught me enough to realize how little I know.
What I marveled at most in my early summers around the Patriots is how fluid Belichick was on the practice fields, roaming between position groups to offer coaching points to all 90 players. One period he’s here, tightening up punt protection. The next period he’s there, pulling an undrafted rookie aside to correct his hand placement when jamming a receiver at the line. He always seemed to be paying attention to everyone, and everything. Frequently referring to himself as a teacher, it’s how I saw him at his essence; in a visor, twirling his whistle around a finger, gesturing with his hands to drive home his points to the last man on the roster.
Of course, it wasn’t always easy to tell who he was talking to out there. There were OTAs when the Patriots practiced without numbers. And weeks in July and early August when rookies wore jerseys in the 50s and 60s. Inconvenient as they were for those of us in the media tent, such were Bill’s ways of doing things; they were among the many quirks of covering the Pats.
Most of my 11 seasons, his teams played well into winter, creating a history of celebrated schemes and heralded in-game adjustments and leaving a trail of confused quarterbacks and broken opponents. Yet, in looking back on the best of my 11 seasons, I think not of the ‘mad genius’ or ‘diabolical schemer’ often portrayed by national media (“Genius!” Steve Belichick used to say, according to Halberstam. “He walks up and down football fields, for goodness sake!”). Bill is a student of history, and practitioner of its lessons (see his choice of the wind over the football to start an overtime vs. Denver in 2013; born from a Bill Parcells decision vs. Washington a quarter century before). He, like his father, developed not only eyes for an opponent’s most minuscule tells; he had the will to turn over every rock, frame by frame of game film, to search for them. At their best, Patriots players were consistently put in a position to succeed; and they were generally kept out of positions to fail. And, frankly, the man who coined ‘Johnny Foxboro’ wasn’t above running practices like ‘High School Harry’; Patriots players ran laps after penalties or turnovers.
My second season, I vividly recall joint practices with Washington in hot-and-humid Richmond, Va. As the last one concluded, most Washington players casually returned inside, while some mingled with fans and media. Patriots players stayed out to run gassers. Amid them all, Bill, twirling that whistle, bellowed: “This is when championships are won!” Or words to that effect. Five months later, they captured the franchise’s fourth title.
In the middle of their second dynastic decade, none other than nemesis Bill Polian, then doing radio color for ESPN, told me that week-to-week, the Patriots were the best-coached team he saw. Yes, save for four games in 2016 during my tenure, they always had the best quarterback on the field, week-to-week. But yes, I still believe, year-to-year, a lot of that quarterback’s growth into the best ever had to do with learning under the best-ever head coach.
Unfortunately, since that quarterback left, the team that had seldomly lost began losing more than it won. The reasons are many, as I’ve discussed during Monday-morning chats with Fred and, when appropriate, in-game exchanges with Zo. There’s no need to include them in this space, for today’s purposes.
A few hours from typing these final words, Mayo will be introduced as the 15th head coach in Patriots history. I’m excited for him and the future, just as I’m grateful for my past 11 seasons watching and listening to the franchise’s 14th head coach. The sentiments aren’t incongruous, as numerous players have shown since last week’s news – about both Bill and Jerod – broke.
There’s a chance the third generation of coaching Belichicks will remain. Reportedly, both Steve and Brian have been offered roles on Mayo’s staff. It’s not surprising, and it goes beyond their relationships with Jerod. Much maligned, they’re proven themselves to be good coaches. Steve and Mayo have run one of the league’s best defenses over the past several seasons, including the last two, when Bill’s time was diverted more to offense and the offensive line than in the past. Within that period, there hasn’t been a better, more consistent position group than the safeties Brian oversees. Several started their careers here as cornerbacks, before cross-training in the secondary.
Whether they stay or go, wherever their father winds up, I wish them, like him, well. After all, weighing my experiences over the last 11 years, I had a hell of a ride.
Bob Socci has been the play-by-play broadcaster for the Patriots Radio Network on 98.5 The Sports Hub since 2013.
