Dear Sports Fan

Russell Wilson, the Seattle Seahawks quarterback, has as clear an image as any public figure I’ve ever read or written about. He never wavers, he never blunders, even when he plays poorly. As much as we can tell about anyone from afar, Wilson seems to be who he seems to be. It’s refreshing, heartening, and a little boring, to be honest.

What is Russell Wilson’s background?

Wilson was born in Ohio and raised in Virginia. His father was a lawyer and his mother had the interesting job of using her expertise as a nurse to consult on medicine related court cases. The Wilsons were and are an athletic family. His grandfather was a college football and basketball player before becoming president of a university. His father played football and baseball at Dartmouth and almost made it into the NFL as a wide-receiver. Wilson’s older brother played college football and baseball and his little sister is one of the top high school basketball players in the country. Harrison Wilson III, father to Harrison IV, Russell, and Anna, died in 2010 of complications from diabetes.

Like his Super Bowl counterpart, Tom Brady, Russell Wilson excelled at multiple sports in high school and college. If anything, Wilson was more distinguished as a baseball player and football player than Brady. In Collegiate high school in Virginia, Wilson won the state championship as a football player and served as class president. He went to college in nearby North Carolina State University. There, he sat out his first year, won the starting job part of the way through his second year and played so well that he became the first ever freshman (players can sit their first year and still be considered freshman) to be named as first-team All-ACC quarterback. His next two years went according to plan, with Wilson starring on the football field and the baseball diamond, as well as graduating a year early and taking graduate level courses.

In 2010, things took a turn when Wilson got into a dispute with NC State’s football coach over whether or not he would be able to continue to pursue baseball in addition to football. Wilson had been drafted by the Baltimore Orioles in 2007 and later by the Colorado Rockies in 2010 (don’t ask me how that works… well, I guess if you’re not going to ask me, who would you ask? Fine, ask me later!) and was determined to keep his options open. The dispute was not to be mended. Wilson decided to leave NC State and transfer to Wisconsin. In his first year at Wisconsin and his last eligible year in college football, he led the Wisconsin Badgers to a Big 10 title and a place in the Rose Bowl. Wisconsin lost but the season had been a success.

Again, similar to Tom Brady, Wilson was not drafted high in the NFL draft. For Brady, the knock was that he was neither experienced, nor athletic enough to succeed in the NFL. The criticism of Wilson seems even stupider in retrospect. Wilson was drafted in the third round of the 2012 NFL draft with the 75th overall pick because teams thought he was too short to succeed. That has obviously not been the case. Wilson won the starting job in his first preseason camp. In three seasons, he has won 36 games and lost only 12 games in the regular season. He has been to the playoffs every year and has so far only lost a single game. Last year, he won the Super Bowl.

What’s he all about?

Russell Wilson is a devout man. According to Wikipedia, he “became a devout Christian at age 14 when he said he saw Jesus in a dream.” His Twitter profile refers to John 3:30 which states, “He must become greater; I must become less.” He also proclaims himself to be “too blessed to be stressed.” When not tweeting bible verses, Wilson is an enthusiastic promoter of his team, his teammates, the companies he endorses, and, most charmingly, his little sister and her basketball career. He caused a slight controversy after the Seahawks game against the Packers, when Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers objected to Wilson’s post-game attribution of the win to god by saying, “I don’t think God cares a lot about the outcome.”

Controversy is one thing that Wilson has pretty much avoided so far in his career. His image is clean and controlled. He has very few friends other than a tight group of people he knew before stardom that help him manage his life and career. The only small to-do that Wilson has been involved with was the insinuation earlier this year from some of his teammates as reported by Mike Freeman, that he may not be “black enough.” That insinuation probably deserves its own essay written by someone more authoritative in sociology than me. It’s worth reporting that shortly after that story, the Seahawks traded wide receiver Percy Harvin, rumored to be one of the players cited by Freeman, to the New York Jets.

On the field, Wilson is a menace to opposing defenses. He is an accurate passer and moves well to avoid being sacked by defenders. When deployed in zone-read plays, where he is given the option of handing the ball to his running back or running with it himself, Wilson is deadly. He led all NFL quarterbacks this year in rushing with 849 yards and six touchdowns. Those stats would put him tied for 16th as a running back, much less as a quarterback. There’s great debate about whether clutch play actually exists but if it does, Wilson has it. He seems to get better as the game goes on and plays with more poise and determination when his team is losing and needs him the most.

What will it mean if he wins? What will it mean if he loses?

There are only eleven quarterbacks who have won more than one Super Bowl. Russell Wilson joins that group if the Seahawks win this game. He’ll also join an even more elite group of quarterbacks who have won consecutive Super Bowls. Of this group, only his opponent, Tom Brady, isn’t already in the Hall of Fame. It’s tempting to say that Wilson will have more chances, even if he loses, but things change fast in the NFL and nothing is certain. What is likely though, is that Wilson has many years of productive football ahead of him. He should be able to overcome the setback a loss would pose to how he is seen as a quarterback.

Prepare for the Super Bowl with Dear Sports Fan. We will be running special features all week to help everyone from the die-hard football fan to the most casual observer enjoy the game. So far we’ve profiled Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll, New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, and New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady. If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter or either of our Football 101 or 201 courses, do it today!

You rarely hear someone refer to Tom Brady without following his name with the phrase, “the golden boy.” Brady is the prototypical quarterback. He’s tall, handsome, and athletic. He’s an unquestioned leader. He is successful on the field and off the field. He inevitably evokes a strong response from people. Either you want to be him or want to be with him or you can’t stand his smug, arrogant ways and you are annoyed that one person (other than you) could be so lucky.

What is Tom Brady’s background?

Tom Brady was not the star athlete in his family as a child. Nope, that was his three older sisters, Maureen, Julie, and Nancy. Each of them played sports and Tom went along with his parents to cheer them on. Jeff Arnold describes the family in his 2012 article on The Post Game as being extremely close. It certainly sounds like that was true. As a child, Brady loved football and convinced the family to go to San Francisco 49ers home games, just a short drive from their home in San Mateo, but his first sport was always baseball. He was good enough at baseball to be selected by the Montreal Expos in the 1995 Major League Baseball draft. Instead of committing to baseball, Brady chose to go to the University of Michigan as a quarterback.

This turned out to be a great decision but it may not have seemed like one at the time. According to Wikipedia, when Brady first went to Michigan, he was seventh on the quarterback pecking order! For the first two years of his college career, he sat while the incumbent quarterback, Brian Griese led the team. After Griese left, you might have thought the job would go exclusively to Brady, but it did not. Although he started every game, he continuously had to battle another quarterback, Drew Henson, for playing time. Michigan’s coach at the time though it was a good idea to rotate quarterbacks during the game. Despite this, Brady played well and became an acclaimed and successful college quarterback.

Given his success in the NFL, you would be forgiven for assuming that Brady was a high draft pick. He was not. The New England Patriots drafted Brady in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL draft as the 199th player selected. Why so low? To start with, very few successful NFL quarterbacks have trouble winning the starting job in college. Brady did. On top of that, Brady performed poorly at the annual NFL combine where players are measured on physical attributes and perform drills to measure their athleticism. Brady was relatively slow and weak. It’s actually pretty remarkable. If you watch the videos from back then, Brady looks slow and somewhat awkward not just in the context of football. It almost looks like you or I could beat him in a race.

New England saw through that and selected him anyway, even though they had a starting quarterback in the prime of his career. Brady, familiar with the bench from his college days, went right back there in his first year as a professional. Then, in the second game of his second year, the Patriots starting quarterback, Drew Bledsoe, took  a bad hit to the ribs, suffered internal bleeding, and had to be removed from the game. Brady went in and the rest is history. Or… almost. Brady wasn’t an immediate success, but it was close. His first two games as a starter were only so-so. From then on, he’s been very close to great his entire career. He took the Patriots to the playoffs and won the Super Bowl in his first, third, and fourth years as a starter. At that point, in 2004, he was 9-0 as a playoff starter, and already being talked about as one of the greatest quarterbacks in NFL history. He’s been back to the Super Bowl two times since then but lost twice, both times to the New York Giants. He survived an ACL tear in 2008 and now, in 2015, at the age of 37, is still going strong.

What’s he all about?

Tom Brady perfectly epitomizes himself in the way he plays quarterback. When he drops back with the ball in the pocket (protective area his offensive linemen endeavor to create for him) he is more still than any other quarterback. Most quarterbacks bounce around in there, moving up and down, side to side as they look for someone to throw the ball to and prepare to be hit or take evasive action. Brady just stands there. Still, calm, collected, he stands. This behavior expresses what seems to be the core of Brady’s personality. His focus on football and winning is totally relentless. His confidence in his own abilities is limitless.

As evidence of his focus on football, consider how Brady, who is married to Gisele Bundchen, often referred to as the world’s number one model, prioritizes his time with her. In a 2009 profile of Brady in GQ by Adam Rapoport, Brady says “Gisele understands the job requirements. I get some time with her on my day off, Tuesday, and then Wednesday, Thursday, Friday nights. Probably after wins I’m more with her. After losses, I don’t think much of anything other than the game. This morning at breakfast, for instance, I was talking to her, but I just wasn’t there.” Brady has crafted his entire life around his devotion to football. He goes to bed at 8:30 every night, (presumably except for evenings with Patriots night games) and has put himself on a strict seasonal diet that is “80 percent alkaline, 20 percent acidic” according to Greg Bishop in Sports Illustrated. In a recent profile of Brady in the New York Times, Mark Leibovitch writes that Brady “used the word ‘grieving’ to characterize the period that follows postseason losses. He described losing as a “quality-of-life issue” for him.” Brady is determined to play for as long as he possibly can, saying only that when he “sucks” he will retire. Along with his diet and schedule, Brady is devoted to his body to the point of obsession (kinda makes sense that he would develop a relationship with a model, no?) His consiglieri in this obsession is Alex Guerrero who Brady describes as his “body coach.” Here is Leibovitch’s wonderfully pithy description of Guerrero: “Guerrero, 49, is a practicing Mormon of Argentine descent with a master’s degree in Chinese medicine from a college in Los Angeles.” Brady believes in Guerrero’s techniques and his own abilities implicitly. He openly talks about playing deep into his forties. His father, when asked, had an even later estimate of Brady’s true desires: “It will end badly,” he said. “It does end badly. And I know that because I know what Tommy wants to do. He wants to play till he’s 70.”

Despite Brady’s very high-profile job and marriage, he has managed to hide his personality fairly well. Either that, or there isn’t actually anything underneath the veneer of competitor, husband, and father. One great moment in Leibovitch’s New York Times profile was when he gives us a glimpse into Brady’s thoughts on religion: He marched me back into the house, through the kitchen and past a shelf that displayed a large glass menorah. “We’re not Jewish,” Brady said when I asked him about this. “But I think we’re into everything. . . . I don’t know what I believe. I think there’s a belief system, I’m just not sure what it is.” I suppose we’ll understand more once we see what Brady does once he finally retires. It seems likely that he and Guerrero will continue their mission to train and prepare bodies for peak performance, just with other people’s bodies. When that time comes, maybe Brady will allow himself the occasional beer or ice cream made of something other than avocado… but I doubt it.

What will it mean if he wins? What will it mean if he loses?

The result of a single game is a funny thing. On one hand, it shouldn’t mean much for anyone’s legacy, certainly not someone as accomplished as Tom Brady. It does though, and maybe for Brady more than anyone else. If the New England Patriots win this game, Brady joins Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw as the only three quarterbacks with four Super Bowl wins. He puts an end to some of the Deflategate fueled talk that attributes his winning to Belichick’s coaching or the Patriots’ nefarious ways.

If the Patriots lose, Brady will drop to 3-3 in Super Bowls with all his success having come early on in his career. The last ten years of his career will be devalued slightly and the controversy swirling around his football’s pressure will gain steam.

There’s one last note about what a win or a loss might mean to Brady. Earlier this season, Brady restructured his contract with the New England Patriots. On the surface of things, this looked like a routine move by a loyal player to help his loyal organization by freeing up cash to use on surrounding him with even better teammates next year. Some people, Patriots fans in particular, read the small print and realized that what Brady got back in return for his financial largess was flexibility. This has set off a round of speculation that Brady might leave the Patriots after this year. Given Brady’s character, it seems like a loss in the Super Bowl might make him more likely to stay and plot his revenge with coach Bill Belichick. At this point, it is all speculation. We’ll have to wait and see.

Prepare for the Super Bowl with Dear Sports Fan. We will be running special features all week to help everyone from the die-hard football fan to the most casual observer enjoy the game. So far we’ve profiled Seattle Seahawks coach Pete Carroll and New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick. If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter or either of our Football 101 or 201 courses, do it today!

In this morning’s post about Pete Carroll, the Seattle Seahawks head coach, I described Carroll as “an oil salesman” and wrote that it was “up to you whether you believe he’s selling snake oil or the best crude out there.” The subject of this post, is the head coach of the New England Patriots, and Carroll’s key opponent in the upcoming Super Bowl. Bill Belichick would be the world’s worst salesman, of oil or anything else. He is a complex, intriguing man whose brilliant talent for football is only matched by his apparent contempt for everything he feels is non-essential to winning football games. Whether you think he is simply a porcupine without the desire or talent to cloak himself in the skin of a cuddlier animal or you think he is a teddy-bear wearing chain-mail probably has a lot to do with whether you root for the New England Patriots and vis-versa. Bill Belichick is the single most powerful man in the New England Patriots organization. Trying to enjoy the Super Bowl without learning a bit about Belichick would be like watching the game on a standard-def, black and white TV.

What is Bill Belichick’s background?

In perhaps the least surprising biographical detail ever, Bill Belichick is the son of a football coach and military man. Bill Belichick was raised in Annapolis Maryland while his father served as assistant coach of the Navy football team. He played football as a young man but it was clear early on (and probably to Belichick as much as to his coaches) that his future would be as a coach, not a player. He went to college at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, a school known more for its music department than its football team. Belichick played as a Center and Tight End but was perhaps more known as a guy-around-campus than an athlete. A college teammate of Belichick’s described his role as president of Wesleyan’s Chi Psi fraternity, a notorious group of drunken pranksters by saying ‘‘It wasn’t that Bill didn’t like to have fun and party,’’ Farrell said. ‘‘He just wasn’t going to be the stupid one.’’ Hold on to that thought. If the NFL today resembles a frat party, Belichick still plays that role to a T.

After college, Belichick went right into NFL coaching, taking minor jobs with the Colts, Lions, and Broncos. Then in 1979, Belichick was hired by the New York Giants and his career took off. The Giants at that time were led by a legendary head coach named Bill Parcells, who was perhaps the opposite of Belichick in terms of outward presentation. Nonetheless, he saw something in Belichick, and by 1985, had promoted him to defensive coordinator. In 1991, Belichick was hired as head coach of the Cleveland Browns. This did not work out well. He spent five years with the Browns during which the team only had a winning record and made the playoffs in one year. Belichick angered fans of the team so severely when he cut quarterback Bernie Kosar from the team, that by the end of his time in Cleveland he was receiving FBI protection. In early 1996, in the midst of moving the team to Baltimore, where they were to become the Ravens, Belichick was fired.

As devastating as that failure must have been, it didn’t take long for Belichick to get swooped up by another team. His old mentor, Bill Parcells, at that time head coach of the New England Patriots, hired Belichick back on as an assistant head coach. The team thrived under their leadership and went to the Super Bowl in 1996. Despite their success, Parcells left shortly afterwards because of a dispute with team owner, Robert Kraft. Parcells felt he should be given authority as a general manager to make decisions about what players to draft or acquire through free agency or trades. Kraft disagreed.

After two hard-to-explain stints as the head coach of the New York Jets, neither of which lasted for longer than a day, Belichick was hired as the head coach and general manager of the New England Patriots in 2000. Almost immediately, the Patriots took off an a streak of winning unprecedented in modern NFL history. In his second year as head coach, the Patriots went 11-5 and won the Super Bowl. In his fourth and fifth years, the Patriots went 14-2 and won the Super Bowl both times. Three Super Bowl wins in four years made Belichick a success. Since then, he has kept the team running at an amazing clip, winning more than 10 games every year and making the playoffs every year except for one. How does he do it? What is his secret?

What’s he all about?

The writer David Halberstam described Bill Belichick as “the ultimate rational man.” Charlie Pierce described him as “the last NFL anarchist, the Lord of Misrule.” It’s very possible that they are both right. I think Belichick is one of the most carefully divided people around. He seems to be able to completely separate his personal life and his professional life; his emotions from his logic. Here’s what is undeniably true about Belichick.

• He tries to be smarter than everyone else and often is. For years, Belichick has been “trading down” in the NFL draft. This means he trades the right to choose players earlier for the chance to select more players. He knows that accurately predicting player performance is a fool’s game and refuses to play it.
• He has frequently cut or traded players, even well-respected veteran leaders, from his team before any decline in their performance was apparent to teammates, fans, and analysts.
• He is unconventional in many ways. I wrote a whole post about this the other day. Belichick is a free-thinker in a league of copycats. He plays offensive players on defense sometimes, he will not hesitate to run the ball 50 times in a row if it is working or throw 60 times in a row. He feels no need to do what everyone else is doing. More than any other coach, he seems to plan his team’s tactics each week based on what his opponent’s strengths and weaknesses are.
• He has been punished by the NFL once for cheating, in 2007 when the Patriots were caught filming opponent’s practice sessions, and is currently embroiled in a controversy over whether the Patriots illegally deflated footballs during their game against the Colts.
• He seems to distain either the media or the expectations of an NFL coach to be a public figure. He says as little as possible in press conferences and seems to be annoyed most of the time. He wears informal clothing, verging on the sloppy, most of the time, including a cut-off, hooded sweatshirt look that he has become famous for.

Bill Belichick is an uncomfortable reminder of the underlying truths of professional football. Winning is everything, players are commodities, and the narratives surrounding the game are not directly connected to the people who work within the sport, no matter how much we like to think they are. For as lucrative a business as the NFL is, it’s owners, coaches, and GMs are often sloppy and inefficient in the way they think. They fall into following conventions far too often. Belichick is the guy who points out that the emperor is naked, that the company’s revenues will never match its losses, and that you are not seeing things clearly. Coaches matter more in football than in any other sport, so it’s no surprise that Belichick has been so successful. He seems to be the best coach in the NFL.

What will it mean if he wins? What will it mean if he loses?

Unfortunately, the Belichick narrative right now is caught up in #DEFLATEGATE and #BALLGHAZI. If Belichick wins, it will confirm the age-old wisdom, “if you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.” If the Patriots lose, people will see this as them getting their just desserts for having cheated.

With time, the furor over the footballs will die down. Later, a win will be seen as an unneeded but much appreciated confirmation of Belichick’s era as head coach of the New England Patriots. If they die, the Patriots dynasty will be remembered more as “three-super bowl wins in four years” than fifteen years of sustained excellence.

Prepare for the Super Bowl with Dear Sports Fan. We will be running special features all week to help everyone from the die-hard football fan to the most casual observer enjoy the game. If you haven’t signed up for our newsletter or either of our Football 101 or 201 courses, do it today!