| |  Belichick, Martz do have a human side
By John Clayton
ESPN.com
NEW ORLEANS -- Rams coach Mike Martz seems to revel in being considered an absent-minded professor. Likewise, for many years, players wondered if Patriots coach Bill Belichick had any sort of personality.
"When he was a coordinator, he didn't speak to me," Patriots linebacker Bryan Cox said of Belichick. "The only time he spoke to me was about a football play. It was not 'How are you doing today?' It was business, business, business. The second time around, what he's learned is to be more personable. He'll come over and smile. In New York with the Jets, I didn't realize he liked me until the end of the year when he said, 'Bryan, thanks for coming.' "
It's amazing to see these Super Bowl coaches on the podium. Martz has gray hair and the wise-professor look to him. Surprisingly, he's only 50 years old. Belichick is only a year younger at 49, but he has the boyish look that hasn't been altered from years of sleep deprivation and watching endless stacks of video tapes.
|  | | Mike Martz, the Rams' mad professor, admits that he can be absent-minded sometimes. |
Martz is the genius on offense. Belichick is the genius on defense. The chess match occurs Sunday in Super Bowl XXXVI. What might be better is to have the two review the game a day later. Belichick might not speak. Martz might not remember all the detail.
Still, the two are similar in one key attribute: Each places extremely high value on schemes and how those schemes can excite players. No offense has more fun than Martz's Rams. Receivers zip around the turf at super speed. No defense feels more prepared than the Patriots.
"I've been in the league for 12 years, and I came in as a guy to break down film for Bill," Patriots offensive coordinator Charlie Weis said. "Every game the players seem to know what other teams are doing before they do it. To do that, you have to have a plan."
Belichick is the best at figuring out how to stop offenses. He's a problem-solver. Take last Sunday's AFC championship game against Pittsburgh as an example. It was typical Belichick. The Patriots knew that Jerome Bettis would be rusty after missing eight weeks with a groin injury. His lateral mobility would be limited. So Belichick stacked his defenders in the middle of the field to force outside runs, take away Kordell Stewart's scrambling ability and force the Steelers to win the game by passing.
Where Belichick has grown as a head coach is how he relates to players. Players now see what assistants have noticed for years. Yes, he has a sense of humor. His jokes are quick, sometimes off color, and catch those who listen by surprise.
"Bill has a dry sense of humor," Weis said. "It's all those years in New Jersey. He has that Eastern sarcasm. What he's done is let his personality out. He's delegated more so that he could be more of a head coach. He just manages the team."
When Belichick first arrived as head coach of the Patriots, he let Weis work the offense while he handled all the defensive work. He didn't have time to be personable. This year, players saw more of him and they liked what they saw.
"He is such a student of the game," cornerback Otis Smith said. "He finds ways to break down offenses. I'm sure he's up at 4 in the morning and is probably there in the office at 12 at night. He probably doesn't get a lot of sleep. He's one of the better head coaches in the league."
But about those jokes? Ask five players about the best of Belichick's humor and you get two responses. The first is that they are unprintable. The second is that those jokes may not carry over to get a laugh out of outsiders.
"It's one of those things where you have to be there," linebacker Roman Phifer said. "I don't think he could do stand-up, I will say that."
Mr. Excitement, he is not.
"I'm kind of a detail-oriented person, and I don't mind doing the details," Belichick said. "But I found through time that I'm better off not getting involved in those things, so I can do a better job of managing the team. What I found out is that a lot of people do those jobs better than I would have done anyway."
Like Belichick, Martz is most comfortable in an office with a video recorder and some scratch paper. He loves drawing offensive plays. He's one of the best at doing it.
"I have a lot of quarterbacks who come up to me and ask what it's like to play in this system," Rams quarterback Kurt Warner said. "It's a system where a quarterback who loves to throw and make quick decisions can really have fun. Mike Martz is intense and innovative. He puts a lot of pressure on quarterbacks, and that's what you like. I couldn't be in a better situation."
|  | | This season, the Patriots saw a new side to head coach Bill Belichick, left. |
In many ways, Martz is to Warner and his offensive players what Don Coryell, the former Chargers coach who created this aggressive scheme, was to his players in the Air Coryell days. Players love Martz because his system works. He makes it fun.
And yes, he is absent-minded.
"You should ask my secretary," Martz said. "She has to put things in my car for me to take them home. At times, I've gotten in the car where there are three envelopes in there that are three or four days old. I forget to take them in the house."
Of course that's a lot better than Coryell, who once put a trash can in his car to take down to the end of his driveway. The trash can was still in the car when he arrived at work.
Martz isn't a professor of history, but he does love some of the strategies of the Civil War.
"General Lee exaggerated numbers about the size of his numbers so that the North felt that they were twice the size of what they really were," Martz said. "A lot of it has to do with the movement of the troops and where they were attacking. I suppose those are some of the things that we do."
Martz loves to deceive with his schemes. His receivers are fast even though they may not win track meets against the league's fastest receivers. He has them adjust their routes and get into their routes with a quickness that makes them play faster than their speed.
"We try to get defenses back on their heels," Martz said. "You want to test the structure of a defense and see how they respond to things. There might be about four or five plays on defense that are really indicative of what a defense is about."
He'll draw up play after play after play -- way too many for a practice week.
"Each week we don't know what's going to be in the game plan," Warner said. "Half the plays each week are going to be new. Some plays, we'll just write up on the board and never practice them. But he knows we have the confidence in us just to ball them and execute them."
Martz and Belichick may not be the life of a party, but they are the life at this Super Bowl party.
John Clayton is a senior NFL writer for ESPN.com.
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SB XXXVI Over/Under
Mind Games
