New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick has some great ideas. In fact, the league offices should just stop everything when he speaks because they're inevitably going to steal his ideas anyway.
There were some questions surrounding the Patriots decision to defer in overtime after winning the coin toss against the Jets, but the reasoning made sense. The offense was awful and couldn't be counted in picking up 80 yards to win the game. The defense, on the other hand, was stifling, and a big stop could get the Patriots the ball back needing just 40 yards for a field goal. New England lost, but Belichick's thought process on the coin toss made sense.
It turns out that the rest of the league is still trying to catch up with Belichick when it comes to coin tosses.
The NFL changes the rules in 2008 and allowed teams to defer their decision to the second half. In the first year of the rule, teams still received on roughly 94% of coin tosses; Belichick opted to defer on three of his four decisions.
MMQB's Robert Mays made a deep dive into Belichick's decision to start deferring to the second half and how the Patriots' head coach was the first to take advantage of the now-expected double-whammy. Mays highlighted the foot-dragging by the old coaches around the league.
Many opponents of the rule were members of the old coaching guard, long-entrenched figures who were interested in keeping the status quo. The initial pushback against deferring helps to explain why the league was slow to catch on, but the reasoning for why the shift began isn't hard to pin down either: Like most systemic changes in the NFL, coaches started to emulate teams having success.
No team has been more successful than the Patriots, and part of that is due to Belichick's willingness to adjust to the newest trends to remain ahead of the competition.
CSSNE's Phil Perry went far back into the head coach's history to discover the root of Boxin' Bill's desire to lead the pack and found inspiration in Belichick's time at Navy.
"I was young so I didn't really know anything, but you could tell when something was different," said Belichick, who was 7 years old when Navy played its first game with [head coach Wayne Hardin] at the helm. "You could tell when something was new. I'd say I learned from him that there's nothing wrong with being aggressive."
I highly recommend reading both articles.