It takes everyone in an NFL organization, from top to bottom, to win a Super Bowl.
Bill Belichick knows this, and he apparently stresses the notion to his Patriots players.
A pair of former Patriots recently chopped it up when Chandler Jones joined Logan Ryan for an episode of “The NFL Players Podcast.” Jones, who played his first four NFL seasons in New England before joining the Arizona Cardinals, revealed an important lesson he learned from Belichick early in his Patriots tenure.
“One thing I really admired about Coach Belichick is that I felt like he didn’t just care about the football player part of you. He made sure that you understood the importance of the people around you,” Jones said, as transcribed by Audacy. “And not just your teammates, but also the janitors. Bill, when we first got there, he would put pictures of these people up on a screen. And these would be the janitors, the people that worked in the cafeteria, the nutritionists, and he would ask the rookies and the new people around the facilities, ‘Who is this?’ He made sure the rookies knew who the janitor was, what was their name, where are they from.
“I think doing exercises like that, it goes a long way — I carry that to this day. That’s all I do, and that was instilled into me as a rookie, and even to this day I sit there and I talk to the janitor and I have a conversation just coming from that exercise, and I’m 10 years in. So I’m pretty sure there are a lot of different exercises that he did that kind of carried with me to this day to other teams and it kind of spreads throughout the organization.”
There’s a chance Jones will go through the same exercise in Foxboro later this year. The four-time Pro Bowl selection will officially become an unrestricted free agent next week, and the Patriots have been identified as a logical fit.
