Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time by Ian O'Connor

Author:Ian O'Connor
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction, Sports, Biography
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2018-09-30T14:00:00+00:00

Out of Andover, Ernie Adams wrote a letter to the football coach at Northwestern, Alex Agase, an All-American college and pro player who had seen action as a Marine on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and had earned a Purple Heart. Adams asked if there might be an opening on the Wildcats’ staff, and Agase did what most major-college coaches never would: He answered the letter.

Agase told Adams he could serve as team manager, with a shot at more prominent assignments if he proved worthy of the challenge. And once he was on campus, in the fall of 1971, the curly-haired kid with thick glasses and a thicker New England accent proved more than worthy. Adams had spent most of his practice time with the team chasing footballs and setting up tackling dummies and cones. A Northwestern assistant, Jay Robertson, who had served as an infantry officer in Vietnam and as Wildcats captain under Ara Parseghian, often noticed Adams moving unusually close to the live drills to carefully observe the coaching that was being done.

One day, Agase summoned Robertson to his office and handed him a thesis in a cardboard binder that was titled “Treatise on the Dropback Pass.” Robertson read it without knowing the identity of the author and decided, “Goddammit, this is deep stuff.” Big Ten schools weren’t proficient in the dropback pass at the time, and Agase had little interest in turning his program into an aerial show. Yet he wanted Robertson to know that the new team manager was responsible for the advanced breakdown on the passing game he’d just absorbed.

“I was amazed,” Robertson said.

Agase asked Robertson to evaluate Adams over the winter and find out if he could help the Northwestern staff. Robertson took the kid into the downstairs meeting room known as “the Dungeon,” a onetime ticket office in the old stadium that had tables, chairs, film projectors, a fridge, a toilet, and not much else. Coaches went down there to study their team and the opposition in peace. “I gave Ernie the keys to the Dungeon,” Robertson said, “which was probably the happiest day of his life at Northwestern.”

Adams showed up at the football offices carrying a black briefcase nearly every day after classes and lunch, and then he’d disappear into the Dungeon. He immediately learned the coaches’ terminology and broke down films of Big Ten opponents. Robertson and a Northwestern colleague, Bill Dudley, took Adams to the Notre Dame spring game to see if he could scout Parseghian’s Fighting Irish live. They sat in two dusty photographers’ boxes above the press box, Ernie in one booth and the coaches in the other. When they compared notes at halftime, Robertson and Dudley had added to their diagrams a phantom play—one the Irish hadn’t run in their intrasquad spring game—just to see if Adams was paying attention. The coaches showed Ernie the bogus card and pressed him on why his diagram of that sequence didn’t match up with theirs.

“And he said, ‘No, I remember this play.

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