The Education of a Coach

He understood that the key to success, the secret to it, was the mastery of the grunt work, all the little details.

The Patriots had picked Brady in the sixth round, and he soon turned out to be one of the two or three best quarterbacks in the League, and absolutely perfect for the Belichick system and for the team's offense. So, as the team continued to make a series of very good calls on other player personnel choices, there was a general tendency to talk about how brilliant Pioli and Belichick were, and to regard Pioli as the best young player personnel man in the League. Just to remind himself not to believe all the hype and that he could readily have screwed up on that draft, Pioli kept on his desk a photo of Brady, along with a photo of the team's fifth-round traft choice, the man he had taken ahead of Brady: Dave Stachelski. He was a Tight End from Boise State who never a played a down for New England. Stachelski was taken with the 141st pick, Brady with the 199th one. 'If I was so smart,' Pioli liked to say, 'I wouldn't have risked an entire round of the draft in picking Brady.

the little things were not little things, because it was the accumulation of little things that made big things happen.

With that Shula apologized, and there was no job offer—it was an interesting lesson; Belichick had been rejected for being able to do something important too well.

That year Agase was a little surprised when he received in the mail, unsolicited, an unusual document, beautifully bound as if it were a college thesis.

Was he the kind of man you wanted next to you in a foxhole?—a saying used almost always by men who had never been in foxholes about other men who had never been in foxholes either.

If you have to write it down, you don’t know it well enough,