I don’t mind that he huffs his own farts. I’m just upset that the national sports media are bottling them up and making me sniff them.

Aaron Rodgers is an attention whore and ESPN and the NFL love the headlines he generates. He’s not going to play QB again this year.

Win percentage is one interesting metric, but correlating calls-to-WP seems convoluted… fraught with the potential to identify correlation without causation. Could you take the before-and-after outcomes, and look at the change in that play’s EPA or instantaneous WP?

For instance, a sack on 3rd down in the red zone turns the EPA (4th down, ~20 yards out) into a solid +2.5 points – there will be a FG and a change of possession – but if that sack is overturned by roughing, it turns into basically first and goal, an EPA of +6.0 (TD likely). That’s a single call, pure judgment. Deep-ball DPI is another one in the same category.

Those high-leverage calls make the game no fun for either team – it robs the winner of believing they were victorious through skill, and robs the loser of any hope that skill could have won the day.

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.