Wednesday, May 31, 2000

Patriots head coach Bill Belichick

"He told us when he first met with us it was going to be his way or the highway, and if you’re not doing it his way, by now you’re on a plane leaving here," S Larry Whigham said.

Among Belichick’s moves have been the releases of former Pro Bowlers Bruce Armstrong and Ben Coates, allowing Shawn Jefferson and Steve Israel to leave as free agents and this week’s release of S J’Juan Cherry, who allegedly was involved in a recent altercation at a Boston bar.

ProFootballWeekly.com asked contributing editor Joel Buchsbaum for his take on Belichick and the challenge he faces in New England.

Q: How will Belichick put his imprint on the Patriots?

Buchsbaum: What Belichick has done is he’s given the team an air of professionalism after Pete Carroll sort of made it one happy family. Belichick is firm yet fair. And the other thing he’s done is, he’s really upgraded the front office because league executives could not believe what a mess the Patriots had made of the cap and how poorly they had drafted and made free-agent signing decisions over the past few years. Very often, with regard to free-agent decisions, especially their own, the Patriots just bid against themselves. They gave players such as Todd Rucci twice as much money as any other team was willing to offer. People around the league were just shaking their heads — "What are they doing? Why give a guy twice as much as you have to? Why give a below-average player the type of money that you play an all-star guard, at a low-priority position?" It wasn’t something where if they had let Rucci go, they couldn’t replace him.

Now people say the true test will be this year, when the Patriots will probably have a losing record, and there will be tremendous pressure because the media there expects the team to all of a sudden be back to where it was under Bill Parcells. It just isn’t going to happen because the team has gotten a lot older, it has major cap problems now, as opposed to the Parcells team that was just adding young players like Drew Bledsoe, Curtis Martin, Terry Glenn, etc., to an already solid nucleus of players like Bruce Armstrong and Ben Coates, who at that time were in their primes.

Q: Everything didn’t go the way Belichick had hoped when he was the head coach in Cleveland. Is he someone who will be able to learn from the mistakes he made then?

Buchsbaum: Very much so. He’s a very bright individual, and he’s very receptive to learning.

Q: What will he do differently this time?

Buchsbaum: I think he’ll be much more player- and media-friendly overall without going too far. You don’t do some of the things Pete Carroll did like make choke signs on the sideline. You don’t go play basketball with your players, things like that. But Belichick will show more of a human side.

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1999 - 2000 Season