UNC head football coach Bill Belichick joined ABC’s “Good Morning America” Friday morning for an interview with anchor (and NFL Hall of Famer) Michael Strahan. The two discussed numerous topics, including Belichick’s new book, “The Art of Winning,” working with Tom Brady and his transition to college football after a career in the professional ranks.
Listen to the interview in full here, and check out a lightly-edited transcript of the conversation below:
Q: Your book is not only a playbook for the game of football, it’s a playbook for the game of life. I’m just curious: why now? Why did you decide to write this book?
Belichick: Well, I had an opportunity to do it. I thought about it several years ago. And when you’re in the moment, when you’re in the season, there is no offseason. You’re just running. You’re on the treadmill and you’re running. Last year I had a little more time to do it. I was able to collect some thoughts, and it brought back a lot of good memories. Some not-so-good ones of you sacking us. But it was a great opportunity to just get some thoughts on paper and put it together. And it’s not about how to live your life. It’s how I did my job. And if there’s a lesson in it for somebody, great. And hopefully there’s some entertaining stories.
Q: You’ve got a lot of lessons. You’ve got a lot of entertaining stories. You dedicate a few special pages to people along the way. Page 199 is dedicated to your 199th pick in the 2000 NFL Draft, Tom Brady. And you share a story about something that you heard him say or he said earlier that you’ve never shared before. What was that?
Belichick: Oh yeah, absolutely. After every game, Tom always was like, ‘We left a lot of points on the field. We can be better.’ We might win by 30, and it’ll be, ‘We could have won by another 20. I missed this pass. We missed that play.’ He is always striving for perfection. When you think about improvement, that’s really what football’s about. You play once a week. You’ve got six days to prepare, six days to improve and get ready for the game. Tom Brady was a fourth-string quarterback. Who has a fourth-string quarterback ending up being the greatest player of all time? That’s a lot of work, that’s a lot of dedication, and that’s a lot of commitment and discipline. He’s really the poster boy for improvement and consistency.
Q: You say in the book, ‘There’s no such thing as The Big Game.’ I’m trying to understand that one. ‘There’s no such thing as The Big Game.’ What do you mean by that?
Belichick: Well, we played in our stadium and practiced in our stadium [with the New England Patriots]. Everything was done in the stadium. So every time we walked into the building, it was the same every day: Do your job, work hard, pay attention to details and put the team first. And it didn’t matter whether it was OTAs [organized team activities] in the spring or whether it was the AFC Championship Game — our message and our job was the same every day: make the most out of every day. Work hard, be attentive, put the team first, and most importantly, do your job and do it well. And so we never felt like, ‘Oh, the moment’s too big for us. We haven’t been here before.’ A lot of the things we did in practice were harder than the game, like spraying the balls with silicone to make them harder to handle, turning up the noise so that you couldn’t hear anything, putting 30 seconds on the play clock instead of 40 so the offense had to operate quicker. We tried to make it a little bit harder in practice than it was in the game. And so when we talked about the big games, hopefully we’d already experienced something a little more difficult. The silicone balls, they hated those.
Q: It’s evident that you love coaching and you are a leader. And you always say that a leader doesn’t say what you need to say. You say what your team needs to hear. For somebody in their personal life or their professional life, how does that work? How do they know what the team needs to hear?
Belichick: As a coach, when things are going well, you’re getting a lot of praise. Everybody’s just heaping the praise on. And I was really the voice to bring things down. It’s like, ‘We’re not as good as everybody’s saying we are. Here’s all the things that we’re not doing well that we need to do better.’ And vice versa. If things aren’t going well, there’s a lot of criticism. Everybody’s upset. But actually, we’re doing enough things good enough to win, or we’re doing some things good enough to win, but not enough. And we’ve gotta get these other things up to where they need to be and then we’ll be okay. So I always try to be the balance on that. When things are bad, I try to be positive. When things were good, I had a way of trying to bring things down and say, ‘Look, don’t believe the hype. We’ve still got a lot of work to do.’
Q: Yeah, we’ve seen a lot of those interviews, Coach. You definitely knew how to bring it down sometimes. The University of North Carolina: you’re now the new head coach. Your dad was there from 1953 to 1955. How did it feel for you to follow your father’s legacy?
Belichick: It feels great. It really feels great. I grew up around college football at the Naval Academy and some of the great teams there. Great teams and great players there. [Roger] Staubach, Tom Lynch, Pat Donnelly. They were great leaders, great people and great inspirations to me. And I learned a lot from watching them. So I’ve always tried to make my teams look like those teams — the teamwork, camaraderie, communication, toughness and resilience that those guys had. And those were the days where you had two-way players, so you only had half as much practice time. The efficiency that the coaches had in practice to get a full practice in on offense, defense and the kicking game with the same guys was pretty good. I learned a lot there and so it’s great to be in college working with young kids.
New North Carolina football coach Bill Belichick holds up a UNC branded sleeveless hoodie presented to him during an NCAA college football press conference announcing his hiring, Thursday, Dec. 12, 2024, in Chapel Hill, N.C. (AP Photo/Ben McKeown)
Q: Do you have to change your coaching style from the pros to college?
Belichick: Not too much, because they’re so eager. They’re hungry. They have dreams, they want to be good. I want to help make them good, and I want to help make them good on a good team. It’s really been exciting to work with these guys. Some of them don’t have bad habits either, and you can start to mold some of them. Now, some of them don’t have some of the good experience habits that a great player has, but it’s great to work with them. They’ve been very enthusiastic, and we’ve made a lot of progress. Got a long way to go, of course.
Q: You’ve had a transformation since your coaching days with the Patriots. You’ve done some things I never thought I’d see you do before. Gigs on TV. You’re putting your personal life out on social media now. You went back to college to coach. What would the Patriots Bill Belichick say to the UNC Bill Belichick? What kind of advice would you have, if you had any?
Belichick: For me it’s all about learning. I learn every day, and I’ve learned so much being back in the college environment. Whether it be recruiting, the college game, the rules, the hash marks, some strategy, and just putting a team together. But I’ve learned a lot. I learn every day. I’ve got a great staff. [General manager] Michael Lombardi’s done a great job for me in terms of bringing the personnel side of it together and us having a shared vision, kind of like we had in the NFL. We have a coach-general manager model. So that’s been great as well to work with him and to go through the process of reacclimating to it. It’s still football, but there’s certainly some differences. It’ll be interesting to see how the House v. NCAA settlement comes out, with what the rules are with roster sizes and compensation for the players, NIL and all that. Trying to figure out how to maximize giving the players the financial rewards they deserve. And at the same time maintaining the competitive balance on your team, like we had to do with the salary cap in the NFL.
Q: A lot has been made of your personal life, because it’s spilled over into your professional life in a lot of ways. A lot has been made about your relationship with Jordon Hudson. It’s been getting a lot of attention. She isn’t here this morning, but what do you think about all the attention that your relationship has been getting?
Belichick: She’s been terrific through the whole process. And she’s been very helpful to me. She does the business things that don’t relate to North Carolina that come up in my life so I can concentrate on football. And that’s really what I want to do. I acknowledged her in the book. She was very helpful on that with the tribute pages, and also giving a perspective on the book from the business side. Sometimes I get a little ‘football technical,’ and she did a good job of keeping me on balance there.
Q: What does Jordon mean to you?
Belichick: Well, we have good personal relationship. I’m not talking about personal relationships Michael, you know that.
Q: I know that Coach, but I’m saying, are you happy?
Belichick: Yeah!
Q: You look happy. I never thought I’d see you doing yoga.
Belichick: I’ve got a long way to go.
Q: Well, I know a lot’s been made about all of this and if you’re happy, we’re all happy for you.
Belichick: I appreciate it, Michael.
Featured image via Todd Melet
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