Ron Borges

The late Steve Belichick, an assistant football coach and legendary advance scout at the Naval Academy for 33 years, always used to bristle at the notion that his son was a genius,' a title that often comes to successful coaches.

"Genius!'' the senior Belichick would snort when the suggestion was made. "You're talking about someone who walks up and down a football field for three hours.''

This in no way meant he did not respect the job his son, Bill, had been doing with the New England Patriots, winners of three of the last four Super Bowls. It was just that after having spent a lifetime as a coach himself, he understood that in many ways a coach's genius is directly proportional to the talent of his "students.'' In otherwords, a coach is only as good as the players he's coaching.

An extremely gifted and talented coach, like Belichick, could indeed maximize his players' talents. He could even concoct from time to time schemes to hide a particular weakness here and there, a skill not the sole provence of any one coach but a trait of all of the best ones.

But genius implies another thing. Genius implies a level of intellect and understanding vastly superior to his peers. Genius, by definition, means "exceptional or transcendent intellectual and creative power,'' according to the American Heritage Dictionary. A brilliant football coach may be many things, but the possessor of "transcendent intellecutal and creative power'' would seem not to be one of them, as Steve Belichick's disgust with the notion implied.

Once a coach Bill Belichick greatly admires, Denver's Mike Shanahan, was considered a genius. Although his passion and obsession was on the opposite side of the ball as Belichick's, Shanahan was touted in the late 1990s much the same way Belichick has been the past few years.

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Just as media members now imply that Belichick re-invented defense, Shanahan was seen as his offensive equivalent. This all came to a head when Shanahan's Broncos won Super Bowls in 1998 and '99. Who could match wits with such a coach? Clearly no one.

Then John Elway retired and Terrell Davis' knee fell apart, and Mike Shanahan is no longer talked about as a genius. Why? Because his teams haven't won a playoff game since Elway left the game. So who was the genius in Denver really? The coach or the quarterback?

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These days it is Belichick whose resume as the game's latest genius is coming up a bit short. With a team devastated by injury, his Patriots are 6-5 and have been crushed by the likes of the Indianapolis Colts and San Diego Chargers, and trampled by Shanahan's Broncos. Where once they believed in New England that no matter what happened Belichick had the answer, now they are beginning to finally understand that you need the players.

Does anyone really believe that suddenly Belichick forgot how to run a defense?

If it was simply genius that was necessary, wouldn't he have come up with adjustments and changes to shore up these problems?