When being a branch on a coaching tree that belongs to one of the greatest pro football coaches of all time, there is a presumption that you want to be just like the trunk.
However, Houston Texans coach Bill O’Brien doesn’t want to be like New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick.
“I said this when I was at Penn State, I’ve said this here for the last six years: you have to be yourself,” O’Brien told reporters Wednesday.
O’Brien was an assistant coach with the Patriots from 2007-11 with his first season being a nebulous offensive assistant who was “grabbing coffees for everybody.” In 2008, O’Brien took over as receivers coach and had Randy Moss and Wes Welker under his instruction. From 2009-10, O’Brien was the Patriots’ quarterbacks coach, working closely with Tom Brady, and really got a feel for the entire offense and working with Belichick as New England’s offensive coordinator in 2011.
In 2012, O’Brien was hired as Penn State’s head football coach and was tasked with turning around a program that suffered a severe sex abuse scandal.
“You have to take the things that you learn there and you have to try to go into whatever situation it was, whether I was at Penn State or here in Houston and just, you have to be yourself,” O’Brien said. “But, you have to take some of the core beliefs that — when I was there, we won 60-plus games in five years, so there were a lot of thing that we did well.
“You take some of those things and then you go to your own spot and you try to do as best as you can to be yourself.”
Among the Belichick assistants who have left the Patriots to take coaching gigs, O’Brien is currently the most successful with four winning seasons, three AFC South titles, and a wild-card playoff win. In trying to be himself and not Belichick is perhaps why O’Brien has found some measure of success where others have failed after leaving New England.