Cole: Why are there so many bad teams around the league this year?
Belichick: Here’s the only thing I’ll say: I think to have a really good team in this league, you have to make a lot, a lot of good decisions. You have to have a lot of good people, players, coaches, whatever. You need a lot of those. Conversely, to not be competitive, you would have to have a lot of bad decisions. One bad decision is not going to do it, one bad player is not going to do it, one bad coach is not going to do it. You’re going to have to collectively, over a cumulative period of time, make a long series of bad decisions and accumulate a lot of players who are substandard for their position. There have to be a multitude of things that go wrong.
Cole: Because you can keep yourself average for a long time?
Belichick: That’s the system. If you don’t have good players, you have money to spend on players. If you have a bunch of good players, you eventually run out of money and you can’t keep them all and somebody else gets them. That’s the system, it keeps everybody average. We’ve seen teams be really good just on coaching. We’ve seen teams be competitive with just a few good players.
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Q&A with the Hoodie. An excellent interview with Yahoo!'s Jason Cole, the kind of peek under the hoodie that makes you hope he writes it all down at some point.
The media are going to focus on the juice, things in here like "everybody is available at the right price." But even the context of that quote reveals the complexity of managing a roster. Comedic.sans had some excellent points about this in comments the other day, and they were borne out perfectly in the quote above.
There's more -- what makes a quarterback, what makes a team, competition, priorities. It's a jam-packed quick-shot -- go forth and read it.
Mad props to
bforce3, whose fanshot scooped this and I failed to see it. Well done, Pulpiteer.
