Choose your weapon

That's the way coach Bill Belichick likes it.

"I think you want to keep the other team off-balance, and more important from my standpoint, you want to be able to attack your opponent where they might be vulnerable," said Belichick. "That's going to be at the core of our game plan every week."

Although Belichick might be best known for defensive wizardry, one of the lesser inspected areas of his 32-year NFL coaching career is where his favored offensive approach was born. Before landing his first head coaching job in 1991 with the Cleveland Browns, Belichick had spent just one year on the offensive side of the ball, in 1977 with the Detroit Lions when he worked with the tight ends and receivers.

But his background on offense, not surprisingly, stretches back much farther than that.

Lee Corso remembers seeing a young Bill Belichick in the Naval Academy coaching offices, tagging along with his father, Steve.

"All the time, he used to come and watch films with me, and he'd be sitting there, talking about why we put players in motion, or what we were doing to find a mismatch," recalled Corso, the ESPN commentator who was Navy's offensive coordinator from 1966-68.

Belichick reflected on those early years this past week, noting that the first time he became conscious of offensive strategy was watching Navy in the early '60s, when Wayne Hardin was the coach and Roger Staubach the quarterback. He said Hardin and Corso were "two guys who kind of really got me started."

Because Navy lacked great athletes, the offense included a lot of motion and shifting of formations, with the hope that all that movement would force the defense to tip its coverage before the snap. Corso described the style as "survival" although Belichick saw it as something altogether different.

"I just remember how creative and innovative they were with plays and formations," he recalled. "Every week they had something new, and you wanted to see what the new wrinkle was. It was how they tried to play off what was successful the previous week or from other games, and made it look like something else, whether it was reverses, play-action passes, or off-running plays."