I’m Bill Belichick. I’ve been coaching in the NFL in some capacity for 31 years. As a head coach, I’ve led the New England Patriots to the Super Bowl four times, winning three. Two years ago I captained the most prolific scoring offense in the history of the NFL. Many revere me as the greatest strategist and in-game manager of my generation, if not the history of the sport. Questioning my decisions is akin to telling Machiavelli how best to perpetuate a monarchy.
It is a Sunday night in mid-October and we are playing the Indianapolis Colts in a game that has been dubbed “The Greatest Rivalry of the Decade” by the acronymic network that is televising the affair. We are now in the fourth quarter; only two minutes remain and the score is 34-28 in our favor. We have the ball at our own 28 yard-line, but it is the fourth and final down and I am faced with what most coaches would consider an obvious punting situation. But I am not most coaches. I have twice been named the Associated Press’s Coach of the Year precisely because of the fact that I qualify as a so-called “out-of-the-box” thinker and I don’t cave to media pressure or the input of my own players and assistants. Very wealthy men have invested me with total autonomy over this team’s play-calling duties and as of yet my trend toward unconventionality has reaped very real and quantifiable rewards for them.
I am at present slightly disgruntled because my All-World quarterback and I have squandered our final two timeouts over the course of the last three plays. This mismanagement of the clock is what they should criticize me for, because if I had a timeout I would be able to challenge the debatable spot at which the referee will place the ball—short of a first down—after the upcoming play.
But of course the talking heads do not see things the way I do, and if they did they probably would be NFL head coaches rather than media puppets who answer to a producer and were only hired because the general public associates their faces and/or names with football and therefore believes them to be some kind of panel of experts who offer special insight with regard to the nuances of each play. They do not study game tape for countless hours every week and the sum of their comprehension of this particular game and of the concept of football as a greater system of calculated choices and risks would not qualify for a minor assistant coaching position on my staff.
So it is fourth-and-two and I have decided to, as it were, go-for-it, a term I’ve always hated because it connotes some degree of desperation or heightened risk, whereas really the decision is an easy one, predicated not only upon statistical probability—which dictates that the offense of a professional football team (especially one that has already scored 34 points in this game and two years ago broke every notable NFL scoring record) should be able to pick up two measly yards and subsequently end the game by kneeling down three times—but also upon my own intuition and the apparent flow of the current quarter, a quarter in which All-All-World quarterback Peyton Manning has suddenly flipped the killswitch that only certain world-class athletes have access to. The way I see it, punting would be an act of pure capitulation, a move the media would not criticize but that would almost certainly cost me the game and add to Manning’s legend.
When their criticism rains down tomorrow it will fall on deaf ears. I, of course, will be fast at work, sorting through stacks of unwatched game-tape and refining my unparalleled football genius, wondering when the next such situation will present itself and how I’ll make an equally brazen or jeopardous call. But this time we’ll succeed, and all the pundits will sing my praises from the pulpit of the broadcast booth or television studio and none will recall the time that Bill Belichick haphazardly went-for-it on fourth down and lost his team a relatively unimportant regular season game.
Role play with Walker at wloetscher@georgetownvoice.com.
Must be tough not being a Patriots fan.