The Art of Winning – Bill Belichick – Episode 126
The Buddies tackled Bill Belichick’s “The Art of Winning” with the religious devotion only Patriots fans can muster. The Buddies got to chatting about why selfish players are actually fine, the tragic lack of insider Patriots secrets, and whether comparing NFL salary caps to office vlookups should be a crime. They also debated who should play Belichick in a biopic (Dennis Quaid vs. Randy Quaid, depending on how crazy things get). So grab your tattered hoodie, your “I f*cked that up” attitude, and join us as we read through the Greatest Coach of All-Time’s new book.
Intro/Book Report (0:00-3:58)
Stock Up/Down (3:59-27:21)
Praise/Lack of acknowledgements (27:22-33:47)
Love/Hate (33:48-40:37)
Casting the Movie/Biopic (40:38-42:35)
Conclusion (42:36-45:00)
NEXT BOOK: Iron Gold by Pierce Brown
Transcript for SEO purposes 🙂
Welcome to our book club. I’m Dylan here with my teammate in the trenches. Keith, what’s up, buddy? Hey. My coach, d man.
My coach, my muse, my flame. Here at the Buddy Book Club, we’re breaking down some bestsellers, and this week, we’ll be discussing The Art of Lessons from a Life in Football by Bill Belichick. Hot off the presses. I think this was released, like, May 6, and it is now the twenty ninth, the day of recording. So we decided to do this because we are New England Patriots fans, born and raised.
We’re in our thirties so I feel like we had like two prime sets of Patriots domination. We always look back and say things that happened during your formative years just stick with you. Like I could watch a terrible TV show from when I was a kid, but if it had that memory along with it, I would still love it. When the Patriots went on their first run, we were probably like thirteen, fourteen. When you’re going and hanging out with your buddies, it’s not like, let’s get drunk and do crazy stuff.
It’s let’s just do crazy stuff, which is really the best time of life when you’re just drinking grape soda, having a good time. And then we had a second run when we were getting drunk and doing crazy things. Yeah. So that’s why we decided to do it. I’m sorry if this book isn’t for you necessarily.
We’ll we might get into how it’s not for us. But anyways, if you’d like to recommend a book for us to read or reach out to us in past episodes, you can visit our website, buy@bookclub.com, sign into our DMs on, x or Instagram, buy a book on podcast, let’s do us acting on Spotify, wherever you podcast. Five star reviews would be great. Download, subscribe, all that stuff, Keith. Three eight five on Goodreads.
I didn’t know how, and I really don’t know how I wouldn’t even say, like, biographies because that’s not what this is, but, like, self help books because that is what this is. I don’t know how they tend to relate on on Goodreads, but I assume if you looked up some of the better ones they would probably have pretty good ratings. Either way, three eight five, that means it’s not up to the snuff, but we’ll decide that here. Do you have anything to say say before we get into stock up, stock down? I have a book report.
Oh, sneaky. Yeah. I had to get I had to make up for it. Was this part of motivation, or was this change, or is this adversity or perseverance? Which chapter did you decide to base your book report on?
He didn’t really cover it. It’s more religious. So I will Oh. Dive into it now. Oh, so it’s more Psalms or maybe Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.
Yeah. Corinthians. Got it. Okay. Well, without further ado, go for it.
I grew up in New England. And like any good Irish Catholic boy, I went to church every Sunday and counted down the minutes until it was over so I could grab a couple of donuts and then head home and watch the Patriots. The whole religious thing didn’t really stick for me. That is until I found the Holy Trinity or duinity or or by God in Bill Belichick and Tom Brady. Belichick represented everything I believed in.
Love for the game of football, history, teamwork, winning. When he traded away Drew Bledsoe or Cutler Malore or traded away Jimmy Collins, I questioned him. But he proved me wrong every time. He divinely zigged while everyone zagged. He did things his own way, all while being crucified by the media at every turn and having Satan AKA Roger Goodell and the owners try to tear him down.
Bill Belichick is my guiding light, the man I pray to. This book, however, is in the Bible. I got a few nice tidbits of it, some interesting stories, but ultimately the problem is it’s not for die hard football fans or Patriots fans, but it’s also not really a self help book for the average person. You kinda need to know football. So it’s somewhere in between.
But the man brought us six championships, d man. Six championships, so he can do wrong no wrong in my eyes. You know what? That’s a good Goodreads review. Like, if I read that on Goodreads, I would be like, this guy gets it.
Because there’s I did go through a few of them, and I was like, these p people take this either too seriously or don’t have any love for Bill Belichick in general. I will give that a a minus. Let’s get into some stock up, stock down. Keith, what do you have for stock up? Stock up, the media is like mushrooms feed them shit and keep them in the dock.
Stock up. Belichick of the media interactions are obviously stuff of legends. He shows up to the the press conference wearing a tattered sweatshirt, could not give one fuck. He was given one word answer saying we’re on to Cincinnati. Mhmm.
After a tough loss, like, a really bad loss, I would tune in and watch the press conferences because no one hated losing more than Bill Belichick. Like, no one cared more. Like, so it made me feel so much better. Like, the worst thing that can happen is you have a crushing defeat, and then the player is like, yeah. I didn’t really care.
It’s like, whatever. We’ll get them next time. What the hell? Like, I care more than you do? That’s not how it’s supposed to work.
Anyway, I found it interesting that he admitted that he played little games, when he went to the media and and talked to them. Like, a lot of times the media would ask him, like, leading questions that would have him answering a certain way, and he said that he would he would just go out and be like, no. I’m not answering that way. So I’d I’d fuck with him, which I never heard him admit. I thought he was always, like, being coy of, like, oh, they have a job to do.
I have a job to do, and, like, I’ll do the best I can. But he admitted admitted here that he’s like, nah. Fuck the media, pretty much. He was doing the Super Troopers gags. Like, he was basically he said, go and be like, oh, what are we gonna do this time?
The repeater, or do you wanna do the meow? Like, you have five meows. Yeah. Yeah. He He was just trying to, like, I’m not gonna say this word in this press conference.
So it was a game within a game for sure. There were few tidbits in the book, and I also enjoyed that one for sure. My first stock up is audiobook talent, stock up. So How dare you, sir. We we here at the buddy book club, we listen to a lot of audiobooks.
We love to read, but later in life, we found that audiobooks are really our calling. I probably read I don’t know. How many episodes do you think we do a year? Like, around 30, usually? Yeah.
And then I read a a few books outside of that. I read maybe five of them. The vast majority, I’m listening to audiobooks. And as you listen to these audiobooks, you start to see talent prop up in different books. And I’m thinking about the guy who did Wool that also did a different book that we did or, you know, obviously, Jim Dale only did Harry Potter, but as far as I know, because he’s the goat.
Bill Belichick shouldn’t do audiobooks. I’m not even sure that Bill Belichick can read. He was having some trouble, and I know that you’re going to take this personally because you also have your own issues reading, granted that book report was wonderful. It seemed like he had issues actually reading his own words, and when he’s trying to do his jokes, like, his dry humor jokes, he’s reading them. He’s not doing them as if he was saying them.
So it was it was very interesting because usually, if someone writes a book about themself, I love hearing it in their voice. You know, Malcolm Gladwell does it. It’s it’s really good. David Sedaris is maybe the best. Bill Belichick.
I’m sorry. Not it wasn’t the best hearing it from him, although it’s a weird mindset because I’m also glad that I heard it from him because I felt like maybe I got to know him a little better or got to spend time with him. And because he gives those one word answers in press conferences and whatnot, it was nice to hear him in a longer format. But at the same time, I don’t share the points got across as well the way he was reading it. I had someone ask me, was this a ghost written book?
And I said, absolutely no. I I know a % this was written by Bubblegag because it it wasn’t written like your typical storytelling where, alright, here’s a theme, and now let me kind of create, you know, narratives around that theme or or anything like that or a typical help self help book. It was kind of a lot of non sequiturs and just random stories, and then he’d go on another point. And I was like, wait. What?
Mhmm. And I don’t know if there was, like, pictures or something in the audio book or the actual book that were, like, separating these things to make it more make more sense. But there are some instances where I was just like, wait. It’s like he pulled a it’s like he pulled a Larry David and just told the publisher no notes. I’m accepting no notes.
And they’d the editor would come in, and they’d say, hey. This doesn’t really make a ton of sense. Or the way that it’s set up, it just doesn’t really pay off. I think the way you’re looking at it, he said, no notes. I am doing no notes.
This is my book. So Yeah. Yeah. I I appreciate the the hubris. That’s for sure.
What about any other stock ups you got? Being selfish stock up, I was a bit surprised to hear Belichick talk about having selfish people on your team is okay. Like, that’s something that you would think kinda really goes against the whole Patriot Way mentality, but that is a culture that it was built and that’s just a label that that’s been applied to it. But there is a culture that is the Belcher culture that he’s established, which was the last chapter, which was by far my favorite chapter. Yeah.
Team teammate self. Right? That’s the whole point. Team teammate self. Which he defined as more as, like, it was very, very military structure wise.
Yeah. And I like how he said that he pretty much, you know, directly stole it from the navy, which is ship shipmate self or whatever the case is. And it makes a ton of sense in a football setting. And I think him drawing parallels to other successful players or coaches who have grown up in military families, that’s an interesting side of things. I feel like there should be, like, an economist study that or something along those lines.
Yeah. That seems like a Malcolm Malcolm Gladwell thing. For sure. With that whole concept being uniformity, teamwork, all that stuff, the whole idea of having someone that’s selfish and being able to still want those people on your team is an interesting ideal that I didn’t think he would ever bring up and say, oh, yeah. It’s fine to have selfish people in here.
So a lot of the way he drafts people and the players he brings in are very football team oriented and not like for the personal gain is what I would assume. But he did make a good point, which I think in the real world brings up a good topic of the idea that you can have selfish people as long as you just align their goals with the team. Mhmm. So like, if you have a receiver and he’s super selfish, wants the ball all the time, great. If we’re you know, get him the ball more and he’s if he’s gonna produce, awesome.
If he doesn’t produce, then he doesn’t make as much money. That’s basically how the team’s gonna operate anyways. It’s, you know, if he’s not doing well, then we’re the team’s not gonna do well, Which seems like every job I don’t understand why every single job doesn’t have this where it’s like the waiter mentality. If the waiter provides a good service and good time for the people he or she is serving food for, they’re gonna get a tip more. They’re the establishment’s gonna make more money.
People are gonna come back more regularly because they like the service they got. Like, why doesn’t every company have some sort of payout where especially if you’re for profit obviously, that the better you service you provide and the more profit the company makes that you get bought into that. It seems like that’s should just be every company. I don’t know why that’s such a, you know, very small sect of, like, only sales really gets it or waiters or, like, service people. It doesn’t seem it seems like everyone should be bought into the company.
Yeah. And there’s a big push now for the service industry to go no tip, and it’s just built in to their salary. Which Which will make their service terrible. Well, I’m I’m sure there’s a big debate around there, and neither of us really are in the know about that. But as a consumer of those things, like the service industry, like going to a restaurant, if I get really good service, I will tip more.
Granted, the range is, like, 15 to 25. Right? Like, at least not me. Friggin’ the wife will tip them 50% and will be living in a cardboard box on the street if she had it her way. But, you know, if if I get bad service, you’re getting the standard 15%.
I’m not gonna go less than that. Like, I’m not a crazy person. But if it’s, for some reason, really good, like, I went to a place and they were just, like, giving us free stuff. And they just made it seem, like, with the whole point of going out to a restaurant, which is this is an event It’s special. But it also feels like home.
Like, it’s special, but it feels like home. So I agree with I agree with you there. Yeah. And I also liked his idea of with these selfish players, the idea of, Hey, you don’t want to block. You just want to catch balls.
But how about we have these plays where if you block, you block the first time and then the second time it looks like you’re going to block, but then you’ll catch a touchdown. So you kind of it sets up. It’s a setup. So that’s how to, like, deal with selfish players. And then in general, just the NFL is something that I took from the book and it’s so obvious, but of course, is it’s a huge pool of players.
So you’re going to have the whole gamut of personalities, the whole gamut of the whole gamut of people who have different motivations for why they’re there. So getting them on the same page is extremely difficult, and I think that’s really what he did best, and I think that’s what he why he wrote this book was to show how he was able to manage and motivate these people and their expectations and also keep them in line. Did we get that? I think so. Did he equate it a lot to us peons?
Yes. That wasn’t Yeah. Did not need that. I just could have taken it from the football side and drawn some of those conclusions myself, but I did like that idea in general. So I will agree with your with your stock up on that one.
My next stock up is the old adage, never meet your heroes. So after reading this book, I feel like like I have met Bill Belichick, and, unfortunately, for me, it didn’t live up to it. We as Patriots fans, and maybe this is just the Boston media or whatever the case is, we’ve always heard that he may be gruff and unfriendly in front of the cameras, but in person, he’s a jovial guy with a dry wit. And if you wanna talk about the intricacies of football or World War II, he’ll talk your ear off. He’ll pull you, you know, for hours, you can just sit there and talk about those things.
In this book, and with him narrating it, he seemed more like one of those random people that the HR department at your company hires to come in and give this boring ass talk about, like, being a team player and how to keep your head down and bust your ass for a little pay because that is the rat race, and we’re doing it for the greater good. You just seem like one of those people who started their own business, and they just go around to all these other businesses talking corporate bullshit. Or someone that was in the Olympics thirty years ago and got a bronze medal, and now they’re just a public speaker at offices because the, you know, the HR department can get them for, like, a thousand bucks, and they just do that every day. So I wish it was a little more from him, and I don’t know. I just it didn’t live up to it for me.
So that’s why I’m a little upset because he is he is definitely one of my heroes from afar. Definitely one of one. Stock up, hand up, which is something we say a lot here. It’s something that you, at least in my mind, you coined. I think I stole that from Barstool, so I can’t really, Oh, did you?
Yeah. I think so. Oh, okay. Either way. Hand up is just when you make a mistake.
You know, you say hand up. It could be when we’re doing something on the pod, like, I forgot to press record. Oh, hand up. That’s on me. It could That’s a dumb one.
It could be in in life. We’re playing, we’re playing kan jam. I miss an easy one. You know? Hand up.
It’s on me. Taking ownership from your for your mistakes. It it’s really important and just saying either saying hand up or putting your hand up, it’s good. Belichick, though, he takes it a little deeper. He says in his mistakes chapter, his favorite four words are, I fucked that up.
And it’s pretty much it’s exactly hand up except instead, he encourages people to say, I fucked that up and own up to their mistakes. And, I just appreciated his take on hand up because he pretty much has a whole chapter for it. Yeah. That was one of the only thing I was things I would say that kinda did relate really well to the real world where there’s all these parallels trying to be made where that one is, like, okay. That’s a good one.
That’s actually, like, one that makes sense that you wish more people took accountability and just said, oh, my bad. You know, like, especially at work where you’ve definitely seen the the people that not they’ve never done anything wrong in their entire life. Yeah. It it’s it’s funny because we were as I finished this book, we had some new hires on our team, and we do kind of one on ones with them, you know, meet and greets or whatever the case is and just extol our advice to them. And I just finished the book, and I this was the only thing out of this whole book that’s about self help and management.
This was the only thing I said to those people. I pretty much said, You’re new. You’re going to make mistakes. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s not a problem, but admit them.
Put your hand up. Say, I fucked up, whatever the case is. Learn from it and move on. That’s it. So Yeah.
Took that for Belichick. Great. Then I probably would have said that anyways. It’s not like, you know, hand ups are a thing. You can get into stock down.
Insider info stock down. For for a dude that’s coached for forty years, I kinda thought we’d be getting a little bit more interesting stories of, like, stuff you’ve never heard. But, like, a lot of this stuff that was told was frankly stuff that just a media person’s already Yeah. Mentioned. You know, for an organization and a person that are super secretive and not letting anything out and you don’t really know what’s going on inside the building, this wasn’t like a, here’s the the secret recipe.
This was like a, work hard. Then here’s an insider story of how the two thousand one Patriots came out as a team. It’s like, I’ve heard that story a hundred times. I love it, but there’s no other, like, insider info on that. Or Yeah.
Just give a little bit of something that we haven’t heard before. Even if it’s related to that exact story. I’m fine with that. There there were some of that. I will I’m not gonna say I didn’t like, I knew knew everything.
But at the same time, this is a guide to your point that someone asked him about the long snapper and the the evolution of the long snapper, which is maybe the most forgotten person on any football team. Like, nobody cares about that. And he went on for eight minutes just off the cuff talking about it. Mhmm. He has the knowledge.
So what I wish really would happen is and Michael Holly did this. He wrote a book following around the Patriots, and it was an awesome book. I really, really liked it. And I thought we’re gonna get more of that where he basically just followed Bill Belichick and the Patriots around and wrote all these stories of, like, insider info of, like, what it’s like to be in the building and, like, how Beltran approaches things. And it was, like, incredible because it was a inside the hall.
I think I have that book, and I never read it. Yeah. I read I like I mean, it was also a lot about draft the NFL draft, which I like. So he was, like, talking about how he loved Sean Taylor and all the like, he was trying to trade out for him and all these offers he gave out to get get him. And I was like, oh, that’s really cool.
Like, it’s stuff you’d never heard before. But, like, if he even, like, he’s talked about how he tried to trade Gronk and Gronk and said, would retire. Like, tell me what the trade was. You know? Like, that would be interesting.
Like, oh, we were Yeah. Gonna move him here. Or and there’s the reason we moved him. And it was a big mistake by me because, obviously, Gronk was vital to our team and, like, as such an unselfish player, but I was thinking this when I did it, which was stoop you know, that would’ve been good. Like, that’s to be a great hand up right there, you know, to to get that and instead of info.
But we don’t get any of that. What really needed to happen was someone sit in a room with him for or call him around for a year and just pepper him with questions and have him answer those and then create a narrative around that rather than him just being like, I’m gonna sit down and write something. Yeah. Or if he says, hey, I wanna do a book that is like, the chapters are gonna be things about dedication, roster construction, star players, preparation, improvement, moving on, mistakes, communication, adversity. I wanna do a book that has those things and tell them that’s your plan.
And then they can ask you questions book like this. Sprinkle in a few stores you may not have heard before and I’m sold. The best one that we get is maybe the AB 3 thousand dollar raw milk story about how he’s trying to figure out how to pay him back because of the stupid raw milk thing that AB’s all upset about. Oh, really? I thought that was such a zero story to me.
I was like, it’s $3,000. You guys are a multibillion dollar corporation. Who gives a shit? It is a zero story, but I get how it fits into that narrative. Like, random stuff can come up and you have to deal with it.
And I’m sure he made it seem like it was something when, granted, he just told someone, Hey, give this guy his $3,500 Let’s move on. But mostly, we get the adaptability one, which is, oh, we went to a game in Buffalo on Christmas day, and we got snowed in, and there wasn’t any hotels. So we found a hotel in Rochester, and there happened to be a barbecue joint down the street, and we all had a great time. And Tom Brady chunked a beer. Cool.
Yeah. That was cool. I’m cool to have more. It’s either no. If they gave us a bigger like, a back story of that night, exactly, honestly.
Like, get get some hot takes because, like, we’ve heard some from, like, Edelman and other players about Brady doing this chugging contest or whatever the case is, But give us a little thing more. Like, that also doesn’t show you’re adaptable. That just is like luck. You found a hotel in Rochester that had a great barbecue place down the street. So Not a good example.
I agree. Cool. What it should happen when we become famous from the Buddy Book Club and this becomes a massive podcast, is you should if you’re famous like this, you should journal every single day. I come home and I do the exact same thing every single day. I have nothing to write about.
If you are going and traveling to Buffalo and then doing this and then there’s a store there’s a million stories that we had every single day for that famous, journal. So you have stories so you can come back on and write this book. You know what I mean? Yeah. That’s interesting.
I don’t know if he really has time to journal. He seemed like a pretty busy guy. Write down, like, oh, those are the five things that happened today. Like, oh, there’s a funny story. And you can then remember when you go back and read it.
The book just needed better anecdotes. It’s it’s as simple as that. We just don’t get anything. If he then ties anecdotes that we haven’t heard before to his point, I’m more likely to, one, remember the point and, two, enjoy reading it. What What else do you have for Stockdown?
Plus one, being reminded the real world whilst reading a book, Stockdown. Probably my biggest we’ve said it once. We’ve said it a thousand times. I’m trying to escape the real world when I read a book. I you wanna talk about football?
I’ll listen all day. I’ll fucking listen to the cows come home. Tell me everything about football. Tell me eight minutes on on long zapper. I’m in.
You know, I’m I’m happy about that. You wanna talk about dragons? I’ll get my second grade imagination out. I’m ready to go. I’ll have that thing firing.
Last thing I wanna do is hear about, you talk about the NFL cap structure and how it, or, like, how to defend Terrell Owens and how that, is similar to doing v lookups on my computer all day, you know, and how that compares my work. I don’t wanna hear that shit. I don’t hear it at all. I didn’t I didn’t sign up for this. If you wanna talk about leadership, fine.
If you wanna talk about motivation or dedication or perseverance, all those things, fine. Just don’t fucking tie my work into it. Alright? Sorry. Yeah.
Stop talking about that. A %. It’s it’s like having Ted Williams, one of the best hitters of all time, famous Red Sox, you know, World War two fighter pilot or whatever the case is. Having him say, oh, I’m gonna write a book. This is gonna be amazing.
And then it’s him equating all those things to being a cubicle monkey. I I I know how boring my life is. I don’t need to be better. Like, I do manage people. So, yeah, sure.
I could probably get better at that. But if I wanted to get better at that, I wouldn’t be reading this book. I’d be reading a different book about managing people, not a book that is about football that is also about managing people. It’s very odd. It’s very odd structurally, which brings me my stock down, which is self help books in general.
This this book takes self help if this was the only self help book you read, which I’m gonna to guarantee that there’s a lot of Patriots fans out there who saw this book come out. It’s by Bill Belichick. He wrote it. He reads it. Yeah, I’m going to read this.
And they see that it’s a self help book and they’re like, Oh, all self help books must be like this, so I’m not gonna read any more of those. This book just ruined the whole self book self help book industry because I got nothing out of it besides that one mistake thing. It wasn’t relatable. Even his comments about what we’re doing as cubicle monkey managers in the business world, they weren’t accurate. I think you had said that his girlfriend helped him do some relating to the real world, and she’s a pageant model, so I have no idea what she knows about.
Like twenty three or twenty four years old. Yeah. She’s not she’s not been in the Yeah. She’s not been in the real world at all. So I have no idea.
But The real world is an accounting job that you that you would come in and work on Saturdays. I haven’t done that, but that’s what real world is. That’s that’s the terribleness of the of the real world. And and I’ve read some good self help books, Atomic Habits, Outlive. You’ll like this one, Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence.
You could read that one and and buck up on it. But in in this book, Belichick says in in chapter 14, Unchanged, he says, you aren’t listening to this book to learn about clock management best practices or the finer points of how to keep a team out of field goal range. Wrong, Bill. That’s exactly why I’m reading this book. I want to know the finer points of how to keep a team out of field goal range and then an anecdote of how you did that either during a season or a big game that mattered.
That’s what I want to know because I don’t know that stuff. That is totally out of my wheelhouse. That’s out of the world I live in. I want to be part of that and know what was happening behind the curtains. There’s so much in Have you ever seen those I mean, the football life that he mentions in here was really good.
There’s also obviously, every time the patriots come out win a Super Bowl, they had this, like, video that would come out afterwards. And Like behind the scenes stuff. Yeah. Like behind the scenes stuff. Yeah.
And Ernie, who he talks about in this book, who is, like, his best hire or whatever, like, his buddy from Andover Academy or whatever the case is, there’s Ernie has such good takes in these Super Bowl celebratory books, and he’s also been on Julian Edelman’s podcast and done a couple of stories about these big games and they’re exactly what you think, the behind the scenes stuff. He briefly talks about it in the Seahawks game, this and that Super Bowl when, Hey, normally, you would take the time out there, but I looked over at the sideline. I saw that they didn’t look prepared. There was a lot of frazzle going on on that side, so I said, hey. Let’s not take the time out, and we’ll do what we gotta do.
That’s kinda something I wanna hear, but I want more. Give me more. Yeah. What led you to that? You know, how is it to make that decision in such a quick moment?
Like, do you feel the weight of that decision? He also mentions just, like, working hard. He’s like, yeah. I’m working, like, sixteen hour days. I’m like, what does that entail?
I don’t like, I would love to have, like, a day in the life of Bill Belichick. Like, what’s he doing for sixteen hours? You know? And, like, what’s he looking for in film? What are the things that he’s you know?
That’s what just, like that’s what’s interesting. When I was watching you know, when you used to watch hard knocks and when it was still good, and they would show the coaches taking a walk with their wife in the morning. He’s like, oh, I’d like to start the day, you know, with a walk with my wife and the dogs. And they show the outside. It’s 03:30 in the morning, and they’re taking a walk.
It’s like, oh my god. You’re gonna have a 03:30. Watch those, I’d always be like, Belichick would do this way better than whatever he’s doing. You know what I mean? Like, every single thing, I’m like, he’d be doing so much better than this.
But he I I guess because he’s trying to still coach, he probably just is like, I’m not telling the secret sauce, which then, like, don’t release this book. Yeah. Wait wait for it. We don’t really there’s not, like, characters in this book. As a change here, I’m gonna say, who were you happy to hear his take on or that he spent pages writing about this person?
And who do you feel didn’t get enough love or you wanted to know more about? Let me start with the second one first because I think this book came out and there’s a big controversy on I forgot it was, like, sixty minutes or one of those where they asked him why Kraft wasn’t thanked Mhmm. Which who who cares? It’s not a book about Kraft. It’s about book about football, but that is until I read it and we get to the acknowledgment section.
I don’t know if you listened to that whole thing. I did not. It’s about a thousand people long. I’m not even exaggerating. I think it’s it’s nine minutes long.
Oh. Him just reading names. And on that list is, like, every single player, every single coach. He lists Roger Goodell as a thank you Mhmm. To him.
When you put that in context, you you gotta say something about crap. Even if you hate Kraft, you you hate Goodell, obviously. You gotta say Kraft in there. Right? So it’s not a it was a fair question now that I had that context because it it is ridiculous.
Yeah. It’s a fair question anyways because Kraft let you be the coach and GM. You know? That that doesn’t happen. That’s true.
But if he, like, mentioned, I wanna thank Bill Parcells and my dad and these other three people that helped me and that was it, he’d be like, alright. Well, it’s not a book about craft. It’s a book about football teachers and coaches. You know? But he didn’t he put everyone in there.
I think the only thing he said about craft was that there was, like, issues with ownership when you’re doing something. That was it. Yeah. I responded this a couple times because he’s because I wanted to figure out what he meant by it. He said, the biggest mistake I made was putting the priorities of the football team ahead of the ownership goals.
Yeah. That was the mistake Yeah. Which trying to read between the lines of what that meant. What I think it meant is because he also left some breadcrumbs earlier in the book. He mentions that there’s a lot of people he wanted to resign who didn’t have enough money.
Mhmm. So, like, Vince Wilfork and Probably, like, Richard Seymour. Richard Seymour. He’s so he mentions all these people that he couldn’t sign. Then he also says Tom Brady.
So what what I think that means is essentially ownership was, like, we’re gonna give out whatever amount of money we want to Tom Brady. And he’s, like, I think we should give this amount of money. That’s it. And then that got back to Brady. And, essentially, ownership goals was to keep Brady at all costs, and his goals was to do whatever is best for the team.
Mhmm. And he didn’t wanna do that. And, ownership basically got mad. And then, the other thing too, I think, is that someone else pointed this out to me, but Patriots in the time of his, like, last twenty years have spent the least amount of cash. Even those are accelerated, they’ve spent the least amount of cash in those twenty years or second at least amount of all the NFL.
Mhmm. So on average, they’ve spent 30,000,000 less than their top team. So his goal is probably to spend more money in the last season. He did obviously spent a ton and then they didn’t win. And so the ownership’s like, get the fuck out of here.
Like, we don’t wanna spend that much money and have you lose still. So I think that was the I read between the lines. So Yeah. That was something that’s a good take. Patriots stuff, I think.
Yeah. That’s a good take. What about you? Well, what about, like, was there anyone that you were happy to hear his take on? The February people?
I really think he he gave the flowers to all them. Bruske, Laurie Malloy, especially because Laurie Malloy, like, people like Laurie Malloy, Ty Law, a few of those guys, Will McGinnis that, like, end up on other teams or he cut. I do like that he he was giving his flowers to those people where you didn’t know if and even Mike Vrabel, he would give a tons of flowers too even though they have had a rocky relationship too. So I like that. What about you?
I liked I liked James White. I thought he was a good one. Oh, yeah. Because, you know, he just shows that this is that’s exactly the kind of person he’s looking for in a player. Just super tenacious and, you know, does their job, but then also can can do anything.
So that was a really good one. I I I like some of the Vrabel stuff, especially now that Vrabel’s the head coach, and I know him and Vrabel have have had their issues, but saying he’s gonna run with the DBs for for sprints and stuff like that. He tried to stuff in a couple of jokes there too about how Vrabel would say, oh, why aren’t the coaches weighing in? And he’s like, now that Mike’s a head coach, I’m sure he wouldn’t want one of his players asking the written jokes aren’t that bad. I think the delivery is Yeah.
Well, that’s what I’m saying. I think he, in person, could have said them fine, but for some reason, he can’t read. So when he’s reading his own joke Let’s let’s say let’s let’s not, Bismarche people who can’t read? What’s the, yeah, what’s the phrase there? That’s like calling the cop the pot, pluddle black, whatever.
It’s like calling the pot kettle black. It’s exactly what it is. Yes. I think Brady didn’t get enough love. I mean, he’s mentioned a Are you serious?
He gets I thought he got his I thought he got way too much. Or not way too much, but just a ton. He’s mentioned a lot, but in, like, single sentences. You know? There’s no deep dive.
He talks about that Tuesday morning meeting or whatever the case is when Brady would come in and the competitive nature between the two of them and how they would look at game film or Brady would see something. And Belichick with that relationship almost was like, oh, you think you’re better than me, kid? And so because of that, it forced Belichick to work harder. So I liked that take of it, but I’ve seen videos of that. I think it might have been in A Football Life.
I’ve seen videos of him and Brady doing that meeting. It was awesome. It was so good to see. So we can get more like, let’s get more in-depth about this. How did you approach an actual game?
Like, here’s an example of how Brady and I would would take a game. I mean, also, you know, this book for me took a turn for the worst right at the beginning when he said something along the lines of, like, this book is about consistent winning. So obviously, I have to talk about Brady. And then he immediately talks about Patrick Mahomes and showers praise on him for, like, three pages. It’s like, wait, what?
You just said you were gonna talk about how awesome and consistent Brady is at winning and his competitive nature, and then you just switched to Patrick Mahomes? So I think Brady gets mentioned a lot for sure. But for the amount Well, he has a whole page that I know. It’s a whole one ninety nine. So here’s a page to Brady.
But I need Well, he only does it for his dad. Otherwise, he’s got Well, no. He does it for Bill Parcells too, I think. His dad, Bill Parcells, and Brady. But I just needed anecdotes.
Once again, I just needed more Yeah. Brady anecdotes besides a quick sentence about how he can chug beer and then how he’s smarter than everyone else and works harder. Okay. Cool. I know these things.
These are things I know. Tell me things I don’t know. What about love hate? What’d you love about, the art of winning? I’ll rattle some off.
I think these are just stuff that I didn’t know. So that’s most of it’s gonna be. I didn’t know that Terrell Owens no one thought Terrell Owens can play and, like, even his medical staff are, like, there’s no way he’s playing and they didn’t have a game plan for him for the Super Bowl. That was interesting. Yeah.
That was cool. I love the Julian Edelman. This is, this is, like, what how the chapters, I think, should have started for all of them. It should have been, like, perseverance chapter and it should have been Julian Edelman wakes up at 6AM. It’s the Super Bowl morning.
Like, you write it almost from his perspective, and he’s doing hand drills. I love that tidbit of, like, yeah. He wakes up 6AM on Super Bowl morning and because he does it every single morning. Make up, like, how it happened, but, you know, kind of, like, blur the truth with it. Like, Bill says, like, I woke up at 5AM or 6AM to go to get a coffee, and I walk outside, and Julian’s with our strength training guy doing this on a you know what I mean?
Something along those, like, open it with that. Pad the pad the stats a little bit if you need to there. You had to make the story better. I I agreed. It just made me also wanna do that drill.
I’d be like, oh, I could do that. I’m sure. Yeah. I did, like, the Cleveland and the Giants stories just because I’d never heard those really just because I was there before our time. There were some some behind the scenes.
Then I sent this player home during the Super Bowl, and I was like, I wonder who that was. Yeah. Or, like, came in and cut someone and was like, oh, who did you who did you cut? Because they were five minutes late to a meeting on your first day. I thought in general, it was nice to hear direct from the man himself.
I know I’m, like, shitting on this a lot, but at the same time, it’s it’s good to hear Bill Belichick in a long format about what’s going on in his mind even if it relates to self help type stuff with tidbits of football. I’m gonna soak it up. He’s notoriously short and not to the point. So I appreciate him here and actually, like, hearing him talk for more than we’re on to Cincinnati. And even in interviews, you know, he’s quick.
So and he that’s the only time we see him. It’s so I felt like he was on his own turf with this one, and we were able to just kinda listen in. And, unfortunately, it didn’t live up to what my expectations were, but that’s on me. I can’t blame him for that. He wrote what he wanted to write, and, good for him.
I’m just glad I was able to kinda watch peeping Tom on it. What about hates? Biggest issue where you talk about is the real world examples. I also read Michael and Barty’s book about and it was very similar themes. It was like what makes a winning coach essentially and that was really great around the different cultures each of the coaches he’s worked with have built and, like, what they’re trying to do and then, like, the playbook they’ve installed in order to craft a culture around certain things.
It was, like, really, really, like, more football focused. I wish this book was similar to that. Mhmm. But the one example that really really bugged me was he was talking about how to deal with the media. And he said, so a lot of times the media would bring up negative stuff that’s happened in the past and I would just self I just correct them and say, right now what I’m doing is x y and z, which I was like, oh, that’s an interesting way to approach it of like, reset the stage and you can reframe any question even if it’s negatively asked.
But then he goes on to give an example of how you can do that with clients when you’re when a deadline has passed. He’s like, right right now we’re just focusing on the best product out there and producing the best results. I’m like, that’s the worst analogy I’ve ever heard about your life. First off, the media is not a client. The media is is is not something anyone has to deal with outside of politics and entertainment.
It’s not a thing. It has no consequences on your job. It may hurt your your image to other people, but it has nothing to do with your job. So it it doesn’t make any sense to compare it to any than what you said to them during the gonna lose well, you might lose your job if you mess up with the media, like, bad. But if you fuck up with a client situation, you know, you you might lose your job or What would be more analogous is, like, a player comes in and players have contracts that say they have to be at a certain weight by a certain date for training camp or whatever the case is.
Right? They have they have they’ve signed contracts that say they need to be stipulations where they need to be. If a player came in and said they said you’re fifteen pounds overweight or underweight or whatever you need to be. Right? They they said that to Bill Belichick and then and then Bill and the player just said, well, right now, I’m working on getting better at each day and they’re like, you just cut them.
Like, that like, so the analogy makes no sense. Or a client would just fire you. They’re like, well, I needed it today because I need a a project done today. You didn’t deliver it. So see you later.
Yeah. You had a deadline. You missed it. Sorry. Exactly.
That’s it’s how the real work. So I’m like, I’m so annoyed that not only are you using real work analogies, which is annoying, but also using them poorly. It just annoyed the shit out of me. But, anyways, that was the biggest thing. Yeah.
I I had that, so I’m not gonna rehash it. My other one was, you know, this wasn’t a blueprint of how he participated in eight Super Bowl winning teams, which is what I wanted. And we’ve talked about this, but, you know, it’s how to become an effective manager. You know, I just where are the first person insights? Where are the hot takes or jabs at rivals?
You know, they’re anecdotes, but they’re they’re hastily told, and they lack any depth. I need juicy insights. I don’t I don’t wanna tell all. Like, this doesn’t have to be a tell all memoir. I I don’t want 20 pages of a smear campaign of what happened between him and craft, but I could use five.
I could use five. In in chapter two, motivation, he says, there’s a thing in scouting that is known, but I’m not sure the league would be happy with me discussing it. I’m gonna say it anyways. And I was like, nice. This is awesome.
What are you gonna tell us? And he says, does the player in question love football? What? This is something that everybody knows, but the league wouldn’t be happy with? Yeah.
Duh. I’m sure you wanna know if the player loves football. That’s important. It’s not he’s acting like that was a big deal. So I don’t know.
It was it bothered me, obviously. So that’s where I’m at. For For that same example, it’d been great to be like, here’s a player this guy is a fourth round grade that we gave. He here’s all the players that were drafted before him. And here’s why he’s better.
We determined that he liked football more because of x, y, and z. He did these things. Well, none of these players didn’t do it. He’s, like, what he did, you know, in the community, all these things like that where he he can, like, give examples of why a certain person is more successful because they love football and here’s the DNA that shows that he did that. Like, that’s Yeah.
Or go into the Edelman stuff and talk about how somebody that didn’t have all the measurables necessarily and and I know he talks about it with a couple of players, like Edelman and, James White. But more specifically, during the draft, how you decide that their love for football is more important than all the other things that other teams are holding dear. We obviously can’t cast the movie, but I do wanna know who you think would play Belichick in the biopic if there ever was a biopic of Bill Belichick. Did you ever watch the FX show? No.
Hernandez one? No. There’s some clips out there. I’ve never seen the show. I heard it’s awful.
But there’s some clips of someone playing Belichick, and it’s the most absurd thing you’ve ever seen. So it was like a Bon Jovi clip of him, like, rocking out to Bon Jovi. I’m like, there’s no chance this ever happens. What? It’s pretty funny.
You gotta watch it. It’s kinda crazy. Okay. Who would play him? I have to think.
Do you have someone off the phone? I had Dennis Quaid. I think looks wise, pretty good. Dennis Quaid, obviously, a very good actor. I think he could do the Belichick pretty well because he also has that little gruffness to him where he can play that way.
And if things go really off the rails for Belichick with this, UNC situation because there’s, like, you know, scuttlebutt, he might not even be the head coach, and now he’s potentially getting married to this 20 year old whatever. And this biopic isn’t gonna sell to a studio and it goes direct to TV, we could just do Randy Quaid and it would just be Krazy Belicheck. So those things are are both possible. So you could have Dennis but also have Randy there as a backup. I’m gonna go enemy of the the gates.
Gene Hackman? He’s dead. Ed Harris. Oh, okay. Oh, enemy of the gates.
Enemy of the state. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Ed Harris.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Great movie. Wow.
Great movie. Yeah. The silly side stuff. He can be super, super intimidating, but they also be quiet while he’s doing that. Yeah.
Or I should have mentioned The Rock. I was gonna say, I’m I actually was really surprised you I and don’t get me wrong. I love both movies, but I was kinda surprised you went ahead and had Harris, the enemy at the gates as opposed to you were thinking about the scene when he’s giving that little boy chocolate to tell him where the sniper is, and Belichick, that’s, like, dollars when they’re negotiating a new contract or something like that. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Alright. Keith, who is this book for? What do you rate it? Off the top, I had mentioned that I’m not really sure who it’s for.
It’s probably for like a general, sports fan, I would say. Not necessarily a Dire Pages fan, not necessarily a person that doesn’t like sports. In between that and then someone that maybe or maybe someone that’s younger that hasn’t heard a lot of these older stories about the Patriots and things like that. And that and they’re like starting a job or starting a managerial position and haven’t hasn’t read any sort of self help or anything like that. So I think it I think it’s for that person.
It’s not necessarily for someone that’s, like, a super diehard Patriots fan or football fan or someone that’s mature in their career that doesn’t really really need this. Yeah. This person really would have to take their job very seriously to be like, oh, I’m gonna glean these insights from Bill and then I’m gonna Outside of the typical work hard and do your job and all that stuff, like, managing the salary cap isn’t something that’s really applicable. Even as much as he tries to relate it to that. Alright.
Well, hey. I’m you suggested I’m glad we read it because it would be sitting there in the back of my mind as, hey. I wonder how that book is. So I I am glad we read it. I’m gonna give it a a six out of 10.
Three six out of six Super Bowl rings out of 10. Yeah. That’s right. I was gonna say three out of five. Yeah.
So Okay. There we go. Yeah. That’s I was just maybe being funny with that. Yeah.
Our next book is we are back to Red Rising, Iron Gold. Iron Gold book four of Red Rising. Hard reset, which I really appreciate. That’s hard to do. I respect him a lot.
You know, a lot of new characters, and it’s all broken up into, like, kind of, like, different stories, and I’m sure they’re all gonna collide at some point. But it’s definitely different than other stuff, which we’ll see. Cool. Well, hopefully, we’ll be able to, scurry our way through that. It should I think we’re gonna try to do the series.
Or is that the plan? I I want I heard a lot of people say that, like, the book six is incredible. So Okay. So, yeah. So we’ll probably go one, two, three there.
I’m not gonna make any promises, but we’re definitely gonna do the series. So if you’re interested and you’re reading it, we still have a lot of time left. So feel free to jump in. Maybe throw, like, a movie or something in between. Yeah.
Because they’re long. They’re long. Yep. So jump in there with us, and, we’ll get back into, you know, some Pierce Brown Red Rising type vibes, which which we love. And it’s great for the summer while you’re driving around.
Listen to it. Alright. Cool. Well, Keith, thanks for chatting again. That was Bill Belichick, The Art of Winning, and we’ll catch you for Iron Gold.
Alright. Alright. Bye now. Bye now.
