Belichick and Saban: The Stories Behind Football’s Most Powerful Friendship

Sports Illustrated ^ | 1/18/18 | JENNY VRENTAS

[OneVike]

This is a must read for both college and pro football fans.

The best NFL coach of this generation has been friends for more than 30 years with the best college football coach, a fact that is remarkable but not entirely surprising. This is the story of a friendship that has made a lasting impact on the sport.

They agreed to meet in West Point, N.Y., at a little hotel with a name neither can remember. For two men with deep connections to Navy, the locale was a surprising choice. All the better.

This was in the late 1980s, summertime; they were both a couple years away from turning 40, and neither man’s name meant then what it does today. Nick Saban flew in from Houston, where he coached the Oilers’ defensive backs. Bill Belichick, then the Giants’ defensive coordinator, drove up from New Jersey with 16-millimeter film canisters and a projector stashed in his car.

[OneVike]

These are two of the greatest coaches in both College and Pro football. What they have accomplished is already historical, and by the time they walk off into retirement, they will have rewritten the record books.

[Vaquero]

NFL? Wazzat?

[blam]

Screw the NFL!

- Roll Tide -

[Vinnie]

Belichick to Saban..
“Here’s how you cheat without getting caught.”
“And believe me, I’ve been caught before so I’ve refined the techniques”

[mquinn]

It’s sad that people who otherwise give off the airs of being intelligent actually believe this.

Filming the other tams practices is akin to stealing signs in baseball. “Deflategate” was Jerry Jones screaming at Goodell behind the scenes to nail Kraft and his team by any means possible, mushrooming what by the books is a $25k equipment fine into a mului-million investigation and a 4-game suspension.

[Vinnie]

And hiring lip readers to read plays, etc across the field. Sneaking cameras into the opposition practice fields.
I’ll bet you he’s listening to talk between the press box spotters and the field.
Yeah /s

[Vinnie]

And BTW the Patriots have a history of that dating back to the 70s’ and Don Shula days at Miami.
Remember the Field Goal on the snow covered field? Tractor comes out, cleans the holder’s spot, against rules.
1982 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s_MS4ASXe18
Yes, I have a long memory.

[lonerepubinma]

And the league realized it was wrong an offered the same thing to Shula shortly after. Shula said no and the kicker shanked it. Gotta check that memory.

[lonerepubinma]

Can’t be against the rules if the next year they created a rule against it.

[lonerepubinma]

http://m.thepostgame.com/blog/throwback/201312/john-hannah-new-england-patriots-offensive-conduct-dolphins-snow-plow-nfl

I trust the Hogs memory.

[Vinnie]

‘Dolphins coach Don Shula, angry with the move and believing it to be against the league rules, pointed out that the league’s unfair act clause allowed the league to overturn the game result. He met with NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle several days later concerning his protest, and although Rozelle agreed with Shula that the use of the plow gave the Patriots an unfair advantage,...’

And I’m skeptical Shula was offered like advantage. However even if he was he had too much integrity to do something underhanded.
Case closed..

[OneVike]

It wasn’t against the rules. That moment will live forever in my memory. I mean, when something happens that has never happened before, you cannot blame the ones who did it. All you can do is wonder why you didn’t think of it first.

Think about it, it took almost 20 fir the NFL to make a rule that you could not grab the face mask bar to rip the opponents head off.

Things evolve, but it takes a play that really passes of people to get the league to make a rule about it.

Consider the horse collar tackle, it wasn’t until one of the NFL most hates players got hurt till it was made illegal.

Hell, it took the Vikings to lose in overtimes with Favre that the league changed the T rules so that the team winning the coin toss didn’t always win with a mere field Goal.

As a Viking fan of 50 years, I have seen it all. Nothing, nothing surprises me.

Well, other than my Vikings actually being on the winning side of a last second playoff miracle TD for once.

[SparkyBass]

Faulk says the Rams installed new plays for the game against the Patriots, and that the Patriots seemed to be so perfectly prepared for them that Faulk believes they must have used espionage.

“I understand Bill is a great coach,” Faulk said. “But No. 13 [Kurt Warner] will tell you. Mike Martz will tell you. We had some plays in the red zone that we hadn’t ran. . . . And a couple of plays on third down that we walked through also . . . And they created a check for it. It’s just little things like that. It’s either the best coaching in the world when you come up with situations that you had never seen before. Or you’d seen it and knew what to do.”

Faulk seems to believe Belichick and the Patriots got off easy for Spygate.

“Am I bitter about how the league handled them taping people? If Bountygate was that bad and Sean got suspended for a whole year? If we want to talk about some unfair assessment of how we’re assessing things? Man. If you lost a game and your brother cheated you, you’ll remember that.”

[OneVike]

Bounty-gate was worse, because the NFL knew it was happening as the games were being played, and allowed it to happen. Nit in one game, but in three.

They ended the career of Warner, Favre, and forced Manning to have four neck operations. There is no way the NFL wasn’t behind the whole bounty-gate scandal.

The NFL referees even held back from tossing flags. Watch all three games, it would take a frigging idiot to not know what roughing the passer is.

It’s one thing if they just let them play, but the Cardinals, Vikings, and the Colts were all getting roughing the passer flags while the saints were not.

The NFL decided that New Orleans would win it all, because of Katrina, and nothing, not even the rules were going to stop them.

The Saints should have received the equivalent of the College Death Penalty. No playoffs for three years, no draft picks for 3 years, and loss of the trophy, while both the defensive coordinator and the head coach should have been banned for life.

Sorry, but Spy-gate, Def-late gate are no even close to the travesty of Bounty-gate!