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While Bill Belichick has made a surprising decision to become the North Carolina Tar Heels head coach, he’s most well-known for his NFL coaching career, particularly when it comes to his stint in charge of the New England Patriots during their multi-decade dynasty. Belichick is notorious for having his players focus solely on football, but before the Patriots took on the Carolina Panthers in Super Bowl 38, he offered a surprising message to his team.
At this point, the Patriots were not the dynasty that they are known for now, and the Panthers were talking up a storm in the media. Whereas Belichick would typically tell his team to ignore the chatter, he offered a different plan of attack this time around. According to two of his former players, Rodney Harrison and Christian Fauria, Belichick encouraged his team to fight back and trash talk Carolina.
“Coach Belichick was like, ‘Hey guys, we’re gonna focus on us. We’re not gonna, you know, respond to anything.’ And we kept receipts. If you talking trash in the media, ‘OK, we gonna get his a**.’ We took it personally … We had some dogs. We didn’t self-proclaim anything, but we had some bad boys on that team,” Harrison said on the upcoming episode of “Brady vs. Belichick: The Verdict,” a series airing on Vice TV.
“I remember him saying, ‘I’ve told you guys to keep your mouths shut, but that’s over … Now, start talking.’ I’ve never seen a more reserved group of guys go bats*** crazy .. If you go back and you play the tape, the entire team was at the 50-yard line. We came to meet them in the middle of the field because he had said, ‘Go ahead,'” Fauria later said in the episode when discussing Belichick’s request for Super Bowl 38.
Belichick ran a very tight operation while in New England, so to see him actually tell his team to fight back and talk trash to the Panthers is somewhat surprising. However, it ended up paying off, as the Patriots would go on to win this game by a score of 32-29, securing the second Super Bowl title of their young dynasty.
While Belichick’s time with the Pats didn’t end the way everyone expected it would, he’s attempting to start a new program of success in the world of college football with the Tar Heels. And who knows, maybe he will let his players have a bit of a longer leash after hearing Harrison and Fauria recall how successful this strategy was for Super Bowl 38.
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