Belichick-George Allen connection

I skimmed/read a breezy little book about Belichick:

The Education of a Coach – David Halberstam, 2005

Basically what I got out of it was, that Belichick learned the game from his dad, Steve Belichick who was a great film-studier and fine and well-known coach in his own right.
Bill Belichick would watch tons of film with his dad from the time he was nine years old or so. His dad had a gift for film study, and it turned out Bill did too. Everywhere Bill Belichick worked, prettymuch every player and coach noticed he just had a special knack for seeing things on the film that others missed. A gift.

He also had all the usual workaholic tendencies that a lot of coaches have.

The most interesting part of the book for me, was the way Halberstam linked
Belichick to a man he never coached with – George Allen.

w
v
Some excerpts below:

…so it was that Bill Belichick…in June 1975, landed on the door-step of the brand-new coach (Ted Marchibroda) of the Baltimore Colts….

…Marchibroda was a George Allen protégé’ who had been hired to bring the very successful George Allen system to Baltimore. He had spent nine years under Allen, five years in Los Angeles and then four years with Allen as he rebuilt Washington…

…that season they badly needed someone to break down film on opponents which was critical to the Allen system…

….there were only three coaches on defense: Maxie Baughan as well as a defensive line coach and a defensive safety coach. Baughan, the old Los Angeles Ram linebacker, a coach on the field as a player, was a man whose sense of George Allen’s complicated defenses, was so advanced that he had called signals for Allen and then coached under him in Washington…

…”I think he (Belichick) was the forerunner of something new, that professional football was not just a game, but was a profession, like the title said, or was going to be a profession,” Baughan said years later….systems are always changing but Billy knew that already, and that you had to adapt game by game; he knew that everything was always changing. That was one of the things that set him apart. And another thing was work ethic….

What Belichick also had, Baughan believed, in addition to work ethic and skill with film, was what Baughan called ‘a great cognitive instinct.’ He could watch all the film and not only get down what each play was but perhaps more importantly, he understood what it all meant, what the thinking on the other side of the ball was. That is, he could think like the opposing coach…

…He was at the right place at the right time, because given their system, there was an unusual dependence on someone who could break down film and chart what the other team was doing, especially the other team’s offense. They were running, as best they could, the George Allen defense, and Allen was the leader in that era of figuring out the tendencies of the opposition. In those days they were called breakdowns, and Allen himself had apprenticed in Chicago under George Halas, one of the leagues original owners and coaches. Halas had been a pioneer in doing breakdowns and keeping them year by year…Halas began in a fairly elementary way charting other teams tendencies over the years and keeping the records. Then Allen, branching out on his own in Los Angeles took the breakdowns much further, focusing on tendencies in situations, play by play, based as well on different field positions and different amounts of time left on the clock. “In a way”, Marchibroda said, “Halas began it, and George Allen took what he did even further and then Billy, when he became a head coach, took what Allen did even further. But there is a major connection, from Allen to him; he is George Allen –connected even if he never worked for Allen. So back in Baltimore, we had the perfect system to employ his special talents.”

The key to the George Allen defense was not to be reactive, nor to wait for the offense to make its moves and then react, but to be proactive, for the defense to seize the initiative.
That demanded an exceptional knowledge of what the other team was planning to do, it formations, tendencies…”If you use the George Allen defense you cannot be reacting to the other team—you had to be a split second ahead, to know what was coming…and Bill was very good at it, the best we had ever seen,” said Bruce Laird, on of the Colts defensive backs. “Bill would bring the film to Maxie Baughan, and it would all be there, a reel on what they did…and it was funneled into us very quickly, and gradually we mastered it then the more it all became instinct. That meant we were not back on our heels…but we were attacking and we felt we knew what they were going to do.”

…Maxie Baughan had understood quickly that the Allen defense was too complicated for the players they had, most of whom were young. It had been designed for experienced players, who had been together a long time. So he simplified it, and Bill Belichick felt very much a part of that success…

…watching Bill Belichick was like watching a young George Allen, because Allen always had so much information; he always wanted to know more than anyone else about what the other team would do. Allen more than any other coach Laird knew believed in knowledge as a key to football. He wanted his players to know as much as they could and he was always talking to them. He always wanted to know, not just if you knew what he was talking about but also if you understood — and Bill, though he was just starting out, was much the same way.”

(Belichick, btw, also worked on a staff in the 70’s in Detroit with Fritz Shurmer)

• This topic was modified 9 years, 9 months ago by wv.