New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick isn’t a halftime adjustments guy. Why wait until the half when you could make the fixes in the moment and stop hurting yourself?
On Monday, Alabama’s Nick Saban, a close friend and former co-worker of Belichick, was asked about his strategy for making changes in-game vs. at halftime.
“I think it’s a combination of both,” Saban said. “I love Bill, don’t get me wrong, but I don’t always agree with him. I didn’t always agree with him when I worked with him. I’m sure he’ll say he didn’t always agree with me. Anyway, we’re making adjustments between every series. We’re going over the previous series, whether it’s offense, defense, or whatever — they ran this stunt, we didn’t block it right, or they ran this formation and we didn’t adjust to it correctly.”
Alabama has looked solid in the second half of games this season. The Tide was losing to Tennessee at the break on Oct. 21, but turned on the pressure late, winning 34-20
Against LSU, UA and the Tigers went to the locker room tied at 21. Alabama won that game 42-28.
According to Saban, the halftime stoppage can be used to make bigger changes than are possible during play.
“We also draw those things up as the game progresses,” Saban said. “So we can actually show the players those plays and some of the things that we did — as, maybe you’ve already covered it, maybe you didn’t have a chance to cover it, but we do both. If there’s something different we want to do, sometimes, you don’t like to do it until you can get everybody in front of you and you can explain it a little better than you can on the sidelines.
“There are occasions where we want to make adjustments to things when everybody can see it because it doesn’t just affect one group. Sometimes, if we change how we play things, it may affect the outside ‘backers and the inside ‘backers as well. I think both things are really, really important, and both things actually occur during a game.”
Leave a Reply