What is padding, and what makes it arduous?
When padding games, assistants are required to watch tape of a given game and — on every single play — draw the offense and defense on a sheet of paper, and map out the movement and assignment of each player on the field. They’re also asked to note everything from receiver and offensive-line splits to tendencies and protections, along with deeper observations about what players on each side are trying to accomplish on the play.
And when you consider that young assistants can be tasked with padding four or five games of an upcoming opponent — and NFL games average well over 100 total plays — it’s a task that is as intensive and difficult as it sounds, especially when Belichick’s famous predilection toward attention to detail is factored in.
For instance, all five Patriots assistants polled by Yahoo Sports this week said the task of padding a single game — especially in the early learning process — can easily last anywhere from seven hours to even a couple days.
“[You better] get a lot of sharpened pencils, with some caffeine and patience,” joked special teams coach Joe Judge, who joined the Patriots as a special teams assistant in 2012. “When you’re young in it and you’re getting used to the hours, it pushes you to the brink.”
“If you get it wrong, you’ve got to do a lot of correcting and the game could take 20 hours to do, and you’ve got to do four to six games per opponent, so you’re talking about an inordinate amount of hours spent doing that,” McDaniels said with a chuckle.
“But what it taught me was details are everything, every mistake, matters. Bill would hand it back to me and there would be 75 yellow sticky notes all over them.”
Fun or not, padding games is a task that Belichick has historically given his young assistants as a means of not only helping them learn the game better, but also helping them learn how he views the game.