Top 88 Quotes & Sayings by Bill Belichick

My job as a coach is to make good decisions. It's not to go out there and block or tackle.

I grew up watching my dad scout games live. They played on Saturday. Sometimes they wouldn't get the films until Monday. Sunday air shipping from wherever the college team was located - Starkville, Mississippi, or wherever the film was coming from. It took two days.

I think that's part of building your team is trying to anticipate where your team is going and to a certain extent where, especially defensively because you have to react to what they put on the field. Defensively you have to be able to defend those things.

I think your team evolves every year. The more you know about it, the better you can coach it.

What we can control is our performance and our execution, and that's what we're going to focus on.

I think it's important for us, as a team, to know each other. Know our teammates and our coaches. To interact with them is more important than to be 'liked' by whoever on Chatrun.

You have to go with the person who you have the most confidence in, the most consistent. And if it doesn't work, it doesn't work, but I'm going down with that person.

As you know, I'm not on SnapFace and all that, so I don't really get those. I'm really just worried about getting our team ready to go.

If you're well-prepared, you know what you're doing, and you have an idea what the opponents can do - what their strengths and weaknesses are - once you get into the game, those adjustments will be - I won't say easy, but relatively easier and more manageable.

The more you and the organization can help take care of personal situations, the smoother the ship runs on the football end.

Bavaro's probably as tough of a - physically and mentally as tough a football player as I've ever coached. So, I would put him in the rare category there.

I love Annapolis. This is home.

You go to the draft board and think, 'Here's a nose tackle. Who needs a nose tackle?' Well, eight teams in front of you need a nose tackle, and there's two nose tackles. It's something you have to figure out where you can get the players to play in your system.

I can honestly say that I never 'enjoyed' our meetings, but the respect I have for Peyton Manning as a competitor was, and will likely remain, second to none.

Game management, game decisions, adjustments, seeing things during games - it's all important.

We don't talk about next year. We talk about today, and we talk about the next game. And that's all we can really control. The rest of it will take care of itself.

Ultimately, the team has to come first even though we all have individual goals and preferences.

Things happen so quickly. We don't have time for one person to tell everybody what to do. Everybody needs to know what to do in those situations.

A lot of performance is based on confidence, knowing what you're doing, and being familiar, and not thinking too much and trying to play at confident game speed.

It's not all about talent. It's about dependability, consistency, and being able to improve. If you work hard and you're coachable, and you understand what you need to do, you can improve.

There's no medals for trying. This isn't like eighth grade where everybody gets a trophy. We are in a professional sport, and it is competitive to win. That's what we do.

Every single player matters. Every single player can change the course of the game.

I like what I am doing. I enjoy all parts of the game - the team building, training camp, game days, the excitement of Sunday... it beats working.

If there is something that's your passion when you're young, do it. Let everything else take care of itself.

To me, if you see a play that's just a bad play, it's just a missed call, I think, as a coach, you should be able to challenge that.

I'll refrain from making any more comments on any ongoing people involved in the judicial process.

I'm not really worried about the other 31 teams.

The less versatile you are, the better you have to be at what you do well.

That has never been a priority for me and I want the players to deal with a harder situation in practice than they'll ever have to deal with in the game. Maybe that's part of our ball security philosophy.

We'll continue to work hard to do a better job in every area going forward. I don't know where those little things will come from but we'll continue to be diligent on them.

Talent sets the floor, character sets the ceiling

My overall knowledge of football specifications, the overall process that happens on game day with the footballs is very limited. I would say that during the course of the game, I honestly never - it probably has happened on an incomplete pass or something - but I've never touched a game ball. It's not something I have any familiarity with on that.

You definitely go through a stage, most coaches do, where you see a good player and you get enamored, you really like what the player does, but then when you put him into your system, it's not quite the same player that he was in another system. He has some strengths, but you cant utilize all those strengths. If you try to utilize all his strengths, you end up weakening a lot of other players who are already in your system.

I think it's relatively easy to play defense against a team that can only do one thing. Unfortunately, that's not what we're talking about here with Seattle. They have a great running back - they have a great group of running backs - but Lynch obviously is really kind of in a class by himself. The quarterback's a problem, the receivers are a problem, they have a good offensive line.

My personal coaching philosophy, my mentality, has always been to make things as difficult as possible for players in practice, however bad we can make them, I make them.

In short, we accumulate all the information that we can accumulate, wherever that information comes from, and try to analyze it and make the best decision we can make for our football team on a case-by-case basis. It's the same for every single player; the process is the same.

You can play hard. You can play aggressive. You can give 120% but if one guy is out of position then someone is running through the line of scrimmage and he is going to gain a bunch of yards.

Some guys are football smart and they're not smart in other ways. Other guys get 1500 on their SATs and can't get a double-team block right. No, that definitely, in my experience, sometimes it correlates, sometimes it doesn't. I don't think you just take it for granted.

You get the job done or you don't.

There are no shortcuts to building a team each season. You build the foundation brick by brick.

I don't Twitter, I don't MyFace, I don't Yearbook...

If you sit back & spend too much time feeling good about what you did in the past, you're going to come up short next time

I cannot comment on any player who has ongoing criminal charges and legal situations.

We're always trying to do a better job on that and that's what we'll continue to do.

When you get wet, it usually means something good.

I'm a football coach. I'm not a doctor ... They don't call plays, I don't do surgeries. We have a great deal here.

I don't think there's anybody in this organization not focused on the 49ers...I mean Chargers.

We're not polishing fine china here.

I am who I am. In the end, I feel that what I'm accountable for is doing a good job as a football coach.

I think a good quarterback or a good linebacker, a good safety, even though you have a lot of bodies moving out there, it slows down for them and they can really see it. Then there are other guys that it's a lot of guys moving and they don't see anything. It's like being at a busy intersection, just cars going everywhere. The guys that can really sort it out, they see the game at a slower pace and can really sort out and decipher all that movement, which is hard. But experience certainly helps that, yes.

Mental Toughness is doing the right thing for the team when it's not the best thing for you.

For a team to accomplish their goal, everybody’s got to give up a little bit of their individuality.

To live in the past is to die in the present.

It's time for the New England Patriots to move on and that's what our job is. And as I said, our goal is the same: to have a winning football team, to be a pillar in the community. That's what our direction is; that's what we're going to do.

Whatever success I've had it is because I've tried to understand the situation of the player. I think the coach's duty is to avoid complicating matters.

The linebacker has to make multiple, multiple decisions on every play. Not only what his assignment is and what the play is, but all the way along the line, different angles, how to take on blocks, how to tackle, the leverage to play with, the angle to run to and so forth, the technique. So many different things happen in a split second during the course of the play, just like it is for a quarterback. The more of those things that you can do right, slow down, get the most important things, not get distracted by all the stuff that's happening, but just really zero in on a target.

I think everyone is a case-by-case basis. Whatever the circumstances are that come with any individual, they exist and you have to make a determination as to what your comfort level is with that person and the characteristics that they bring.

There is an old saying about the strength of the wolf is the pack, and I think there is a lot of truth to that. On a football team, it’s not the strength of the individual players, but it is the strength of the unit and how they all function together.

I think that we'll continue to try to look at ourselves in the mirror and see where we can do a better job, maybe where we can improve the process. But I think the fundamentals of the process will remain the same.

I think a smart guy can learn. Some guys learn - it's just like all of us - some guys can learn electronics, some of us can't. Some people can learn something else, some of us can't. I mean, we're all wired differently.