Bill Belichick’s message to Nick Saban: “Let the players play”
When Bill Belichick and Nick Saban were both on the Browns coaching staff, Saban says Belichick “would chew (his) butt out” over letting the players play.
The long-lasting friendship and mutual respect between Patriots head coach Bill Belichick and Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban is well-documented. Belichick still regularly visits Saban, either to speak to current Alabama players or to take in their pro days before the NFL draft.
Apart from being the current active leaders in championships won at the professional and collegiate football levels, respectively, Belichick and Saban spent time together in Cleveland on the Browns coaching staff. Though Saban has been quoted as saying those four years spent as Belichick’s defensive coordinator “were the worst of (his) life,” he’s also quick to point out the lessons he learned working under Belichick.
After Wednesday’s football practice, Saban shared one such lesson with the assembled media.
"“I think good coaches are trying to reinforce players in practice after every play,” Saban said. “So they’re telling them, ‘You did this well,’ or ‘You need to do it this way,’ or ‘You made a mental error,’ or ‘You’re getting corrected,’ or ‘You did a good job,’ or whatever. You’re trying to reinforce guys on every play. Sometimes players are depending on that reinforcement all the time in practice. In a game, they got to know what to do, they got to know how to do it, they can’t depend on somebody else to make a call for them, [and] they can’t depend on somebody else to recognize things for them.”"
Saban credited the source of this lesson as being something he learned directly from working with Belichick in Cleveland.
“Belichick would chew my butt out, man, and say, ‘Let the players play,’” Saban shared. “And I was like, ‘Wow, I’ve never had my butt chewed out before for coaching [and] teaching.”
His point, of course, is that good coaches must realize when it’s appropriate to come down hard on a player, when it’s appropriate to praise a player, and when it’s best to just keep your mouth shut and let the players figure out for themselves what they need to learn. That’s the hard part of coaching: knowing when to be hands-on versus when to be hands-off.
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It sounds like Saban has really absorbed and mastered that lesson since his time working with Belichick. It also stands to reason that Belichick probably practices what he preaches as well, and knows when to back off his own players during New England practices.