New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick has been called a lot of things during his decade and a half run at the helm of the NFL's most successful franchise - a winner, a loser, a cheater, a Super Bowl Champion, an evil genius, the NFL's very own Darth Vader. As is often the case with the world's most interesting and successful characters, all of those monikers have been applicable at some point and have also, in most cases, been well-deserved. Under Belichick's guidance, the Pats have enjoyed an unbelievable run of NFL success, reaching the playoffs 12 out of 15 times since Belichick's first season, 2000, appearing in six Super Bowls, and winning four Lombardi Trophies. Of course, that success has also come with a fair amount of scorn and quite a bit of controversy, as the Spygate, Deflategate, the Tuck Rule game and even whispers of espionage, regarding the alleged bugging of the visitors' locker room in Foxborough, can attest.
But never before has Belichick's dastardly win-at-all costs efforts involved something as simple as the pre-game coin toss.
Until now, that is.
As noted by various reports, from the Boston Globe, Yahoo Sports and CBS, the Patriots, entering Sunday's game against the Washington Redskins, had won 19 of their last 25 coin tosses. With coin tosses being a 50-50 proposition, the probability of such a favorable outcome is, as CBS notes, 0.0073 or, less than three-quarters of one percent.
That's pretty lucky. But for the usually tight-lipped Belichick, the coin toss, just likely every other facet of pre-game preparation comes with a significant amount of consideration. That's right. Don't dare ask Belichick about the inflation level of footballs or the week's injury report, but get him going and he'll talk your ear off about how the team decides what to do with the coin flip. In minute detail, no less.
"Games that are weather games, that could affect our decision too,'' said Belichick, via the Globe.
"How you want to start the game. What your offense is, what the defensive game plan is. Maybe not the first play, but in general, here's how we want to start the game. Maybe that affects it.
"There can be a lot of factors, so we try to consider them all and try to do what's best.''
What's best for the Pats and Belichick - as it is for most teams - is to defer receiving the ball until the start of the second-half. It's obviously a formula that's worked, as the Pats are currently averaging the most second-half points of any team in the NFL thus far into the 2015 season. Now, whether that's directly linked to starting the second-half with the ball and therefore winning the coin toss, is difficult to say.
But it's another in a long line of factors that likely contributes to the overall success of the NFL's New England-based franchise - a franchise that is playoff-bound and primed for a deep postseason run yet again.
Does Belichick cheat to win coin tosses? No. Does it likely enrage fans of other teams that the Pats are "impossibly" good at yet another thing? Yes. But there's really no explanation for the Pats' coin toss dominance other than luck.
