I knew I had some big shoes to fill with Tuesday’s Bill Belichick interview. Lou “The Cause for a Bill Pause” Merloni was out and I was in. I could feel the pressure mounting days before. Sleepless nights a result of my anxiety of trying to figure out how to make this Belichick interview, my Belichick interview, informing and entertaining.
How could I top Lou’s act of cultivating a 15-second pause from Bill followed by his razor response that he was done talking about his quarterback situation? Rather than tossing and turning, I got up, headed to the kitchen table and started writing down questions.
The key is to loosen up the victim, I mean guest, is to illustrate you have something in common with them.
“Bill, I’ve been fired three times, you got the axe once. How do you feel that the second time may be around the corner because you can’t draft skill players?”
Not bad I thought. But I’m not leading with that. Then a friend suggested I pull the backdoor routine on him and ask him to relive his changing quarterbacks in Cleveland, Kosar to Testaverde and Bledsoe to Brady in New England. And then I can hit him with the whammy, “Will Cam start against the Jets?”
But then I was blindsided. I didn’t see it coming. I had this sudden feeling of empathy for Bill.
While watching his post-beatdown by the Bills press conference Belichick looked and sounded like a beaten man. Like the former heavyweight who was just hanging on for the paycheck. How I so missed the arrogant swagger of a coach who had just pants the opposition into submission. Nope, that man wasn’t there, and he may not be there for a while.
At 3:01:45 Bill’s ready to go, late by just under two minutes. “He’s trying to ice me,” I thought.
I introduce Bill and start the interview with the standard soften ‘em question.
“Bill, you’ve won 17 AFC East titles, your loss to the Bills was a changing of the guard. How strange is it to be in this position?” Honestly, I don’t even remember the answer. I am not even sure how long of a pause there was, if there was one at all. Then it hit me. I was interviewing the greatest coach of all time, in any sport in my opinion, and I couldn’t help but still be in awe of him, even though I think is better days are over.
I did my best to refocus.
I asked what Stidham has to do to become a starter in this league. I got nothing. I asked if he needed to add people to his personnel department in the off season because of the importance of this spring’s draft. I got a real answer. He said it was too early to know who would be available to bring in. I asked if Cam and Stidham were let down by the lack of the weapons on this team. He said they would evaluate the roster at the end of the season. Hey, there wasn’t a pause! Okay, these were real small victories. Real small.
Then I blew it!
Me: Bill, you said Cam wasn’t the problem in the loss to the Bills.
What did he do well?
Bill: He did what we told him.
Then I froze and could not get my mouth to work. The simple follow up should have been, “Can you be more specific?” But noooo. I choked, panicked and pointed to Christian Fauria to take the next question. With good reason. The "F" in OMF looked at me as if I had just hung him out to dry, which had.
When all was said and done, I would give my interview grade a B-minus. I could have been tougher, but I’m no Lou Merloni.
