UL Coach (1943-44) Steve Belichick

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UL football coach 1943 Steve Belichick
Louisiana's Acadien

Before launching his coaching career at the University of Louisiana in 1943, Steve Belichick was an NFL running back for the Detriot Lions in 1941.

For the 41 Lions he played in 6 games,

had 28 carries for 118 yards

averaged 4.2 yards per carry.

scored 2 touchdown rushing

Had 1 reception

gained 13 yards receiving

returned 1 punt

gained 77 yards on his 1 punt return

scored a touchdown on his 1 punt return

returned 1 kickoff

gained 36 yards on his kickoff return

had 1 interception

returned the interception 10 yards

tackles not recorded

After his short PRO career was cut short by war coach Belichick came to UL as an Ensign in the Navy.

While at Louisiana he served as an assitant football coach, the team went 5-0-1 The 1943 season

He later became an author and head coach at Hiram College, before his 33 year stint as assistant and scout for Navy.

scouting philosophy

His son who learned football on his fathers knee, would later go on to win 2 make that 3 Superbowls . . . as an NFL head coach.

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Invincibility of Belichick enhanced by his invisibility

Paul Brown, now there was a football coach. Best football coach of all time, Steve Belichick will tell you. They would play golf together, and Belichick would attend all the camps Brown ran after the war was finally won.

"But as great as Paul was," Belichick said, "I don't think he ever walked into a room and took it over."

It didn't matter back when Belichick introduced Brown to his teenage boy, Bill. For 33 years Steve Belichick, Navy veteran of Normandy and Okinawa, was an advance scout for the Academy, an aide who wrote Heisman-winning game plans for Joe Bellino and Roger Staubach.

He worked X's and O's in simpler times, a black-and-white age better suited for his colorless son.

"You didn't have to be a personality in the old days," Steve Belichick said before noting that television called an audible on that. "It changed the whole picture. Now you have to be a storyteller or have a TV presence in order to get hired."

Not anymore. Not after Steve Belichick's boy changed the rules of sideline engagement. You don't have to be as cute as Jon Gruden, as commanding as Bill Parcells, as cool as Joe Torre, as dramatically pompous as Phil Jackson or as perfectly polished as Pat Riley.

In this American Idol day, you can actually be Bill Belichick, a charisma-free testament to robotics, a master of monotony, a 50-something guy in a soaked and sorry-looking sweatjacket who could stand among the Parcellses, Shulas, Walshes, Lombardis and, yes, the Paul Browns.

"And he was an idiot five years ago," his 85-year-old father said by phone.

Nah, Bill just acted that way sometimes. In Cleveland, he tried and failed to bully people à la Parcells. In New York, Belichick turned his would-be Jets coronation into a forum for sheer madness: with bad hair, a bad tie knot and a worse delivery; he quit by reading some chicken-scratched, abbreviation-filled statement that sounded like a cry for help and read like a ransom note.

Now look at him. The defensive coordinator who stopped John Elway in Super Bowl XXI and the breathless Buffalo offense in Super Bowl XXV has become the head coach who stopped the St. Louis machine in Super Bowl XXXVI and the relentless Peyton Manning to get to Super Bowl XXXVIII. How did this happen? How did a film-fried coach with an undertaker's comportment — Belichick has never told a joke, his father confirmed — find the means to motivate fairly routine athletes to play a mile high above their (and everyone else's) heads?

Start with 2% of the secret: luck. Belichick had it long before Tom Brady fumbled, but didn't, in that charmed, snow-kissed run two years back.

"We were at the Academy's graduation ceremonies when Bill was 8," Steve Belichick recalled, "and when the cadets all threw their caps into the air he just walked over and picked one up without looking. There must have been 700 caps on the ground, and he picked out his idol's, Joe Bellino's.

"Bill finally gave it back to Joe this year so he could give it to his grandchildren."

Now consider the 98% balance of Belichick's success: design. Bill was 6 when he memorized Navy's plays. At the same age he could tell his father whether an oncoming car was a Ford, Chevy or Dodge before Steve could gauge the make. Bill was in fourth grade when he started breaking down Navy game films. On Monday nights he would join his father for the scouting report sessions he'd hold with Navy players.

Steve Belichick didn't know it, but he was raising his son to alter the NFL landscape the way Earl Woods would raise his to change the face of golf.

The rest of the story

Ian O'Connor is a Gannett News Service columnist.

© copyright 2004 Gannett News Service

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HOUSTON -- You look at Bill Belichick, coach of the New England Patriots, and who do you think about?

I think about Tiger Woods.

Tiger Woods?

Well, if you accept a fact of history, that the best golfer in the world was on television swinging a club as a 5-year-old prodigy, you now have a 51-year-old coach telling you: "Let's see, I guess I wanted to be a football coach since I was 10."

At the time, Steve Belichick, Bill's dad, was coaching the Naval Academy (he was there for 33 years) and his son was wearing a jersey of his hero, quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Roger Staubach.

And that's not all.

Young Bill was accompanying his father on scouting trips, listening in when Navy's assistant coaches came to the Belichick home to talk football during the offseason, reading books on football strategy, watching game film (sometimes giving players a Bill Belichick grade), also coming up with imaginary game plans.

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Times Picayune
Peter Finney

Peter Finney can be reached at pfinney@timespicayune.com or (504) 826-3802.

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DID YOU KNOW? The recent National Football League Hall of Fame (Canton, Ohio) event held a special salute program to Veterans that was conducted in the Hall's NFL Films Theater that featured former Naval Academy football coach World War II veteran Steve Belichick. The father of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. Steve Belichick played fullback and linebacker for the Detroit Lions in 1941. Steve Belichick was one of the featured speakers at the Hall's Salute to Veterans celebration.

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Belichick learned early from father


Struthers native Steve Belichick was a long-time assistant football coach at Navy.

HOUSTON (AP) — They are expected to know the plays. When your father and grandfather are both football coaches, that's just the way it is.

Three fingers is an "out" pattern. But when the quarterback flashes three fingers, that means "out-and-up." Bill Belichick's sons know this, even though they are just teenagers playing touch football with friends.

"It is great when we do it against other kids that kind of don't know the plays. In touch football, we never lose. We never lose," the New England Patriots coach said. "We are not playing for the Super Bowl out there. We are just having fun."

A rare smile comes to his face as he says this. So you can only imagine Belichick's emotions when it isn't touch football with his kids, when it really is for the Super Bowl, like it will be today when New England plays the Carolina Panthers for the NFL championship.

"He's football, man. He's hardcore football," Patriots offensive lineman Damien Woody said. "It doesn't surprise me one bit that he's designing plays for his kids. It doesn't surprise me one bit."

Helped his father

The son of a Detroit Lions fullback and 33-year Navy assistant coach, Steve Belichick, a native of Struthers, Bill Belichick went into the family business early on.

Bill began breaking down game film as a kid to help out his dad, who was chief scout for Navy.

Steve now is 83 years old and lives in Annapolis, Md., home of the U.S. Naval Academy.

Bill was a three-time letterman in football and captain of the Wesleyan lacrosse team, but when he graduated there was no doubt about his best route to the NFL.

Belichick was 23 when he was hired as the lowest assistant to Baltimore Colts coach Ted Marchibroda, getting $25 a week ("before taxes," Belichick noted). There were only eight coaches on the staff in 1975, half as many as the Patriots have these days.

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Saban and Belichick: Friends draw line in sand

Steve Belichick was an assistant coach at Navy for 33 years. Nick Saban was an assistant there for one, in 1982.

But Bill Belichick's father remembers Saban well.

"Nick was very intense," Steve Belichick, a football scout for most of his 86 years, was saying from his Annapolis, Md., home this week. "He was very nervous. He couldn't sit down to take a phone call. I remember saying he'd tear up 10 miles of carpet in a three-minute phone call. He'd bite his finger nails."

Saban ran Gary Tranquill's defense, and after a 6-5 season he was off to become Michigan State's defensive coordinator. But Saban never lost contact with either of the Belichicks, especially the youngest, whom Saban considers among his closest friends.

In 1982, Bill Belichick was coaching special teams and linebackers for the Giants. He has since led the Patriots to two Super Bowl wins.

The sharing of information will stop now. Belichick coaching the Patriots and Saban coaching the Dolphins will have such an effect.

"You can put money in the bank Nick will be successful," Steve Belichick said.

But... against the Patriots?

"Bill isn't looking forward to this, I know," Steve Belichick said. "Bill has great respect for Miami's defense, for Nick, and for Jim Bates, who was running that defense. We just wish Nick would have gone to the damn NFC West or something."

But the Belichick family has known this was a possibility for more than a year. In fact, Steve Belichick recalled a conversation in the winter of 2003 between the coaches' wives.

"If you come to the NFL," Debby Belichick told Terry Saban, "I just hope you don't come into the AFC East."

Well, they are.

And it's no mistake that Dolphins owner Wayne Huizenga hired a man who is considered a Belichick clone — or, as some have said, Belichick Jr. — to try to bring down a pending dynasty.

"I watch Nick on TV and I see Bill," Steve Belichick said. "They're very similar in their demeanors and priorities. Nick was never one to have a whole lot of laughs. He's no stick in the mud or anything. I mean, he is a very impressive person."

Steve Belichick, an ebullient man, was telling stories about all the accomplished coaches with whom he has worked.

"Six head coaches at the NFL and 23 assistants and 10 head coaches at major universities," he said. "I saw my first game in 1924, at the age of 5. The only year I didn't see a game was 1945, when I was in the Navy and out in the Pacific. For at least 25 years, I saw 25 games. Imagine."

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By Joe Schad
Palm Beach Post Staff Writer

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After helping the University of Louisiana win the Oil Bowl and go undefeated in 1943-44 there was no Gatorade shower for assistant coach and football guru Steve Belichick.

Judging by the farewell article that the Vermilion printed in 1944, it is possible that Steve Belichick enjoyed as high a Q Rating as any coach that has ever coached at UL.

Still he didn't get a Gatorade shower.

That all Changed last Sunday when Steve was in the right place -talking to the son he mentored- at the right time to receive the career shower he deserves.

Thanks Steve.

[DaddyCajun]

That is very cool Turbine, uh no punn intended?

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Steve Belichick, a college football coach and celebrated scout for 43 years and the father of New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick, died of heart failure Saturday night at his home in Annapolis, Md. He was 86. "I found out about it the middle of last night," Bill Belichick told The Associated Press yesterday after the Patriots defeated New Orleans, 24-17, in Foxborough, Mass. "I coached this game with a heavy heart." Bill Belichick said his father watched Navy's 38-17 victory over Temple in Annapolis on Saturday, then watched more college football on television. "He went peacefully," he told The A.P. Belichick and his father stood together on the sideline last February in Jacksonville, Fla., where the Patriots won their third Super Bowl in four years. The elder Belichick was an assistant coach for 10 years at Vanderbilt and North Carolina, then for 33 years at Navy. He seldom saw Navy play because he spent most football Saturdays scouting Navy's next opponent. "He was a genius," Joe Bellino, Navy's Heisman Trophy winner in 1960, told The New York Times in August 2004. "On Monday nights, he would give us his scouting reports, and even though we were playing powerhouses, I always felt we were prepared because he found a way for us to win." Wayne Hardin, one of seven head coaches during Belichick's tenure at Navy, recalled a game against Michigan. "They had an all-American back who played offense and defense," Hardin said. "Steve said, 'When he's on defense and you run an off-tackle play, that guy will get right up in the hole, so you can throw behind him.' Late in the game, we faked a run off tackle, he comes running up and we throw over him for a touchdown and win the game." Hardin said Belichick would have been too nervous to watch Navy games. "He could watch the Army-Navy game," Hardin said, "because it was the last one of the season, but he wouldn't go. Finally, we got him there because we had an end-zone box with no other people, so he could be by himself. There was also a phone there, and we said if you see anything we should know, you can call us. He called." In 1963, Belichick wrote a book, "Football Scouting Methods," which Houston Texans General Manager Charley Casserly called the best book on scouting he had ever read. Stephen Nickolas Belichick was born in 1919 in Monessen, Pa., and he grew up in Struthers, Ohio. After graduating from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland in 1941, he wanted to become a high school coach, but he faced the prospect of military service. He got a job as an equipment man for the Detroit Lions of the National Football League. There was no salary, but each player put a dollar a week into a pool to pay him. The Lions had the same single-wing, fullback-oriented offense used by Case Western Reserve, and Belichick helped coach the Lions' fullbacks and started running the plays. When the team started 1-2-1, he was activated as a player and was paid $115 a game. He was the blocking back for Byron White, who would become an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court. Belichick had no complaints about his job. The rest of the story By FRANK LITSKY