The ESPN article mentioned by riboflav earlier mentions David Halberstein’s book The Education of a Coach, but should mention the 10,000 hour rule which in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers theorizes that any skill can be mastered within 10,000 hours of correct practice. In applying the Phil Savage quotes, BB may have analyzed 10,000 hours of film (correctly) by the time he left Anapolis for prep school.
The chess vs checkers analogy should be Grandmaster vs Experts. Some NFL HC’s are there because of a combination of coaching ability, game planning, ability to motivate, etc. Varying strengths in each of these areas. BB has mastered all of these skills in addition to roster construction. In the movie Searching for Bobby Fischer, there is a scene where a teenage Bobby Fisher is playing several games at once. He would stop at each table for a few seconds and make his move and go to the next game. That’s the analogy I see is the difference between BB vs other HC’s not the chess vs checkers analogy.
On some message boards there is the BB could not make it without TB or variations such as BB being lucky to draft TB or he would have been a mediocre coach. The quote by Rick Venturi describes it better than anyone to date. " When you get a guy like Brady that late in the draft, that's just lucky. But the Patriots kept four quarterbacks in 2000, which is pretty rare. So maybe the brilliance wasn't in drafting Brady but in Bill's recognition right away that he had something special when no one else knew it."
