Bill Belichick’s father, Steve Belichick, wrote the literal book on football scouting in 1962 and a Twitter user was fortunate enough to ask the New England Patriots head coach if he would update or change anything about his father’s book after all of these years.
“I think I’d just let it stand,” Belichick answered with a smile. “I think what he wrote about was live scouting and those are back in the day when the film you got from the opponent was limited and when you did get it from the most recent game it wasn’t until the middle of the week just because of the whole transportation and shipping process back in the 50s and 60s. The importance of live game scouting at that time was a lot more than what it is now with video and how quickly we can load it, and rewind it, and re-run it, there was no replays in those days, there was no video scoreboard, whatever you saw you had to get live and capture it and bring that back to your team for the games.
“It certainly teaches you a lot about watching football and with one look at the play how to get the most out of it, and how to see what everybody is doing from a technical [and] strategic standpoint, but it’s a little outdated just because we’re not in that world anymore.
“Except as a coach when you watch your team play on game day, that’s really what you’re watching. You get one look at it, I mean you get the video replay, but you get one look at the play and being able to quickly identify is it a run? is it a pass? do I want to go to the coverage? do I want to go to the blocking scheme? do I want to go to the run force?, what do you want to watch on the play because it’s hard to watch all 22 so you kind of have to go from one spot and shift your eyes to a secondary spot based on what you’re looking at. It taught me a lot about that.”
Hopefully whenever Bill retires, he’ll write the new book on scouting and football.