Belichick doing one of his best coaching jobs

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It's now Halloween, in the middle of the NFL season, and the New England Patriots are 5-2. Sometimes the best coaching jobs have nothing to do with how many games you win. For who would have believed they now would now be 5-2, very much in the AFC race, back in the third week of the season? That was back when we all knew Tom Brady was out for the season, the day the woeful Miami Dolphins came to Gillette Stadium and revealed to everyone that the emperor no longer had any clothes. The day the Pats got beat by 25 points and looked like they were in a free fall, a young quarterback thrown to all of those wolves disguised as pass rushers, a defense that looked like it had showed up expecting a flag football game, a coach on the sideline looking like just another guy with no answers. This was the team that ran the table in the regular season last year, that came within a couple of minutes of its fourth Super Bowl title? On that sunny September afternoon, it sure didn't look that way. What a difference five weeks makes. And that's coaching. There are other factors, certainly. There has been the development of Matt Cassel, the evolution of a young quarterback, someone who keeps getting better. We see a defense that's now played well in two games, after looking old and tired and awful against the San Diego Chargers. Most important of all, we have seen the Pats get better, a team that three weeks ago seemed as if it was going to spend the season turning its lonely eyes to Tom Brady. That's coaching, too. A record measures a team. But it doesn't measure coaching. Coaching is full of variables, and the record depends on many of them, not the least being talent. Rest assured, it was easier to coach last year's Pats than it is this year's version. Rest assured, it's easier to coach a team with Brady at quarterback than one with Cassel as the signal-caller. Rest assured, this also was a team that could have gone either way three weeks ago when it was trampled in San Diego, spending much of the second half as if it couldn't wait for the season to end. That the Pats bounced back is a tribute to the character of this team, one that's rebounded from not one, but two embarrassing losses. It's also a tribute to Bill Belichick. He would never admit it, of course, but he just might be doing a better coaching job this year than he did last year, as ridiculous as that might seem on the surface. But, in many ways, last year was the football equivalent of a basketball coach who simply throws out the ball to a great team and gets out of the way. Simplistic? Sure. But last year, Belichick had the MVP of the league at quarterback, an offense that went through opposing defenses like some invading army, and an experienced, veteran defense that knew how to win. This year is more complicated. Don't believe it? Look around the league. The NFL is full of supposedly very good teams that are struggling. The Indianapolis Colts are 3-4 heading into Sunday's game with the Pats. So far, they are a shell of what they've been, betrayed by too many penalties, too many injuries and a Peyton Manning who looks like a discount-store version of the Manning we've come to know. The Chargers are 3-5, on the verge of this season getting away from them. All of which makes the Pats' 5-2 record more significant. If we've come to know anything about Belichick, it's that he is the ultimate coach, someone born to game-plan, someone whose life has been spent inside the game, football as the centerpiece of his family's life. And if it's true he's now succeeded in ways that would have been unimaginable back when he was a kid following his father around Navy's football team, one senses that he could be just as happy coaching some small-college team. And coaches know it's all about the present tense. Today's practice. Today's game. And if you do these things well, the future takes care of itself. This is what Belichick has been able to impart to this team - the intangible that allows the Pats to recover from being embarrassed at home by the Dolphins and being humiliated on the road in San Diego, the day when you looked at this team and figured it wouldn't be all that long before it became just another NFL team trying to keep its head above water, all of the preseason dreams little more than dust floating in the wind. That's what's so remarkable about this team being 5-2 and in the middle of the AFC playoff race. Because we know it could be different. The two losses told us that. That was a little sneak preview of what could have been on this day before Halloween. That it's not is a tribute to several things, certainly. And none more important than coaching. E-mail Bill Reynolds at breynold(at)projo.com(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)