Patriots' Savant/Coach

Sundayjack · Feb 1, 2008

I had heard about this guy around the time Spygate was happening. Interesting stuff, regardless of your rooting interests.

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=adams

So here, in the ballroom of the Phoenix Convention Center, just six days before New England will attempt to complete a perfect season that Adams played a significant role in creating, I want to know what the almost-perfect Patriots think about their secret weapon: a guy with thick glasses and the sartorial sensibility of Mister Rogers; a guy who lived with his mother until she died three years ago.

Who, exactly, is Ernie Adams?

"I don't know what his job title is," linebacker Adalius Thomas says. "I didn't even know his last name was Adams."

"Ernie is a bit of a mystery to all of us," offensive tackle Matt Light says. "I'm not sure what Ernie does, but I'm sure whatever it is, he's good at it."

Finally, I approach receiver Wes Welker. "I'm writing a story about Ernie Adams," I tell him.

"Who?" he says.

"The guy who's always with Belichick who doesn't ever really talk."

"Oh," he says, recognition washing over his face. "Ernie."

He thinks for a second. "He's got to be a genius," he says, "because he looks like one."
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This brings us to the million-dollar question: Behind the quirks and the strange attire and the random attacks of sleep, what is it that Ernie Adams, you know, does? Years ago, Modell offered $10,000 to anyone who could tell him. No one could. A few years back, during a team film session, the Patriots players put up a slide of Adams. The caption read: "What does this man do?" Everyone cracked up. But no one knew.

In the broadest definition, Adams seems to be a man who loves to be in the background of greatness. Many things have his fingerprints on them, such as the game plan that engineered the upset of the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI. Yes, Adams and Belichick figured out how to neutralize Marshall Faulk on the plane ride to New Orleans. Adams is involved in a lot of surprising things; he's a kind of "Forrest Gump" of sporting success. Like, say, the best-selling book "Friday Night Lights," which documented high school football, and later became a movie and a television show. That's right. "I'm indebted to him because he really turned me on to Odessa, Texas," says author Buzz Bissinger, who went to Andover with Adams and Belichick.

Adams' contributions to the Patriots begin with film. Hours and hours of film, often in his darkened office. He has been doing this for years, first at Northwestern in the early 1970s, where he convinced coaches to let him go from student-manager to scout. "He was a prodigy," says Rick Venturi, an assistant on that Wildcats team.

By now, after years of evolution, Adams sees film differently. Not just as random actions, but a genealogy of the game of football. When a defender moves, he recalls watching or having read about the first time a defender moved like that, even if it was 50 years ago, and he knows why, which tells him how to counteract the move. He has a photographic memory. Perkins tells a story of Adams' memorizing the Giants' thick playbook. In one night.

So, every week, the Patriots get the kind of analysis that only high-powered hedge funds or, say, NASA can afford. "Nine times out of 10," Bissinger says, "Ernie sees something nobody else sees."

That memory and those hours of studying film make him an unparalleled resource for assistant coaches. Want to know what a team does, and why? Want to know what a team has done on third-and-short in the red zone in the past 10 years on the road? Ask Adams. He'll know.
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GreenGiant 32 · Feb 1, 2008

Nothing new here. Bill Belichick is a cheating sack of shit that takes credit for other people's work... and this is news how?

Cue the pathetically thinned skinned Pats fans' in 3... 2... 1...

Jetzz · Feb 1, 2008

Adams sounds like the Rain Man of football.

"Yeah, need my K-Mart underwear... breaking down film at 3." :lol:

Baron Samedi · Feb 1, 2008

He watches the signals on the other sideline and deciphers them, based on the film study of the coordinators on the oppsoing team. If he picks up on anything, he needs to be close by to alert Belichick.

Patriots' Savant/Coach

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