Here’s the thing: Belichick followed his dad around, while his dad coached the US Naval Academy football team as a DC, and while Bill was a teenager. The Naval Academy, if you don’t know college ball, is made up of guys who can graduate and work on submarines (or ships, or planes). In the modern era, sure they have a few man-mountains who get weird waivers… but basically Navy has always been an undersized team who run Triple Option against whoever they play, be that West Coast, pass-first, whatever. Navy’s going to run the damn ball. Which means their defense better be pretty good.

Belichick’s dad coached that defense, and wrote the book that most coaches cite as their favorite football book (Football Scouting Methods, about how to spot your adversary’s weakness. I’ve read it. It’s great.)

If you’ve ever been a teenage boy and laser-focused on something because you were passionate about it, or worked your ass off because you wanted your dad’s approval… you know what’s coming. Bill Belichick started becoming Bill Belichick when he was a teenager, watching film with his dad, laser-focusing as only a teenage boy can, working his ass off for his dad’s approval, building neural pathways with tireless mental reps. He watched how his dad shaped Navy’s defense week to week, trying to teach brilliant-and-determined-but-undersized engineering students how to brutally disassemble an opposing offense of meatheads.

You want to go into a laboratory and build a head coach who understands leadership, motivation, and football defense… you drop him into Annapolis – one of the premier leadership schools in the world – and you attach his father’s approval, his possibly-on-the-spectrum-levels-of-focus, and his passion to the game of football, and then you give him 10,000 reps before he’s 25.

Anyone who believes that guy got carried by a quarterback for two decades is delusional.