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The following is an excerpt from Pat Kirwan’s excellent book Take Your Eye Off The Ball, chapter 11 FBI: Football Intelligence. You can purchase the book here. I highly recommend it. I plan on doing a full review of the book as soon as I finish it, which at this rate should be tomorrow.

Testing For Football Smarts

Everyone knows about Bill Belichick’s FBI. He has one of the NFLs best football minds and has been one of the game’s great innovators. But he know as well as anyone that ideas alone don’t equal victories. It’s not what Bill or any other coach knows-it’s what the players know. That is why Belichick places such a high priority on finding players who are smart enough to execute the scheme he’s running.

When Belichick is evaluating college players, he likes to give them a quiz. He’ll meet a prospect in a classroom on campus or in a hotel room at an all-star game, put the player in a chair just like a student, and talk through five or six or 10 things that the Patriots do. He’ll tell a defensive lineman, for example, that he’ll be down in a three-point stance on first and second down, and in a two-point stance on third down. He’ll diagram it all for them on a white board. Then they’ll take a break. When the reconvene, Bill will sit down, send the kid to the board and say, “Now tell me everything I just told you.”

From there he can make a judgement call on whether the player has shown the requisite FBI to succeed in his system.

When he went out on his college tour before the 2008 NFL Draft, Belichick ran Jerod Mayo through that classroom drill. Mayo went to the board and repeated everything he’d been told right back to Belichick. He could envision himself and identify his responsibilities in every play. Sold. Belichick drafted Mayo with the 10th pick of the first round. Mayo became the NFL’s Defensive Rookie of the Year and was voted New England’s Defensive Captain before his second season.

 More often, players reveal something during a Belichick test that makes them radioactive to him. I remember being with him at the scouting combine, sitting in a hotel room and waiting for prospects to show up for their interviews. A player would show up and bill would welcome him into the room with a short “Nice to see you, have a seat,” never giving the kid a chance to build rapport. Immediately, he’d shut the lights off and turn on the tape of the player in college, usually footage of the guy not playing great. He’d ask the player, “what was the call here?”. He was testing the player’s ability to recall specific situations, a skill that is essential in the NFL.

The players would have no time to prepare. He’d answer the question off the cuff, then Bill would watch another play and ask “Okay, what happened here?” He was trying to determine how the kid handled adversity. Was he going to admit he made a bad read, or was he gong to blame someone else?

I remember one prospect in particular who blamed his coaches for one of his bad plays. When the interview was done, the kid left the room and Belichick crossed him off his list of candidates. Bill knew that sooner or later, he would wind up having to correct that player in the locker room at halftime or make an adjustment on the sideline, and he already know how the kid would respond.