New York Giants head coach Joe Judge learned from the best.
Judge earned his first opportunity as a head coach after spending the last eight seasons as an assistant coach under Bill Belichick with the New England Patriots. He was a special teams assistant for three years, special teams coordinator for four years and coached the wide receivers corp in 2019 as well.
He’s another branch of Belichick’s coaching tree and he accredited the legendary coach during his opening press conference with the Giants.
Judge began by revealing the advice Belichick gave him.
“I’m going to be honest with you, the only advice I really sought from (Belichick) in terms of this opportunity — he told me, ‘Just be yourself,’ ” Judge said, transcribed by NESN. “And that’s all I know how to be. I think one of the things people ask me a lot is, ‘You worked for Coach (Nick) Saban and Coach Belichick. What makes you different?’ Look, I’m myself. I’m going to be myself every time. If I’m anything else, everybody’s going to see straight through it. And if you lie to the team, you’re going to lose the team immediately.
“So I’m going to always be myself. And that’s a little bit different than other people, and that’s fine. I’m not trying to emulate anyone I’ve ever worked for. I’m trying to take what I’ve learned from them, match it with my own belief structure and do it with my own personality.”
Judge appears to have a grasp on the coaching technique he wants to implement, while taking pieces of knowledge from the historical figures he learned from.
“What I learned from coach Belichick was real simple: Be flexible within your personnel,” Judge said. “Don’t try to shove round pegs into square holes. Figure out what you have. Let them play to their strengths. Don’t sit in a meeting and tell me what you don’t have in a player. Don’t tell me they can’t do a certain thing. Tell me what they can do and then we’ll figure out as coaches, because that’s our job, how we can use that. That’s our responsibility. Everybody has something they can do.
“How many castoffs do you see around the league that end up on another team and everyone says, ‘Wow, how’d they get that out of him?’ Maybe they were just closing their eyes to what they could do. As a coaching staff when we get assembled, we have to make sure we’re sitting down, we’re patient with our players, we fully evaluate them, we find out what they can do to be an asset, and then we’re not foolish enough to not use that.”
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