
Bill Belichick Might Be a Mac Guy - specialp
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/19/sports/football/bill-belichick-patriots-might-be-a-mac-guy.html
======
dchuk
This article literally doesn't mention Macs beyond the title, and in fact
states that Belichick is going back to printed photos rather than any
technology option. I realize the title is a play on the "guy hates windows so
he must be a mac guy" but in this case it's just plain wrong and clickbaity
BS.

~~~
sigmar
Agreed. Furthermore, the Arstechnica article seems to point to the WiFi as the
main issue.

>Microsoft's hardware isn't necessarily the culprit here, merely the victim.
The NFL uses a lot of wireless hardware—communications headsets, public Wi-Fi
networks, private networks for the tablets, networks for the press, and more.
Moreover, key portions of the infrastructure, including the tablets
themselves, are owned by the NFL itself. Belichick said that although the
Patriots' IT person, Dan Famosi, did a "great job" of handling all the
systems, he had no power to diagnose or fix problems with the league-provided
equipment.

[http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/patriots-bill-
belichi...](http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2016/10/patriots-bill-belichick-
dumps-surface-tablets-in-five-minute-rant/)

~~~
robalfonso
I've got a friend who does wifi installs in stadiums and other large event
spaces. This kind of install is the very definition of hostile networking
environment. It cannot be easy to use lots of wifi devices with so many radios
all blasting signals in a giant bowl.

Whats more egregious is the short time span given to fix things. Either the
NFL needs to open that up, or have a whole ops team who does it for the teams
and has a SLA related to making it work.

If I'm dealing with the pressure to perform that goes with running a NFL team,
networking and communications infrastructure is about the last thing I'd want
to worry about. Belichick is being quite restrained if he's only throwing the
tablets. I'd probably crack it over my knee!

------
specialp
It seems that the bulk of his complaint was not with the Surface, but with the
unreliability of the whole tech stack. There are a whole myriad of
communications systems set up and he said in his full comments that they often
do not get the stack until hours before the game. So when there are problems
it is often too late to properly test and fix everything.

His full comments are here:
[https://twitter.com/ZackCoxNESN/status/788411998006603776](https://twitter.com/ZackCoxNESN/status/788411998006603776)

~~~
WayneBro
Then why did you re-title it to "Bill Belichick Might Be a Mac Guy" when you
posted it?

That's not the original title of the article. Macs are not mentioned anywhere
in the article. It seems like you were the only one saying this...

~~~
specialp
I didn't retitle it, that was the original title. NYT changed it realizing it
was clickbait.

------
slg
This is a great example of the principal-agent problem [1] that is so common
in the enterprise IT world. The NFL is in charge of the hardware purchased and
support of said hardware yet the teams are the ones who actually use the
technology and suffer when it doesn't work correctly. The NFL doesn't
particularly care about it because it has little impact on their end product
or their bottom line (they are already cashing their sponsorship checks from
Microsoft). The result is as Belichick suggest, there is little urgency for a
fix from the NFL and the teams end up just abandoning the technology
completely.

[1] -
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_proble...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal%E2%80%93agent_problem)

------
douche
I think it is more likely that Belichick is just a Luddite, or to be more
charitable, that the tech just isn't very good. In the ESPN article[1], he
comments that nothing in the communication stack works reliably, whether it is
the tablets, or the in-helmet comm systems, or whatever. People have tried to
spin these tech failures in New England as something nefarious along the lines
of what Auerbach used to do with the visiting locker room at the old Garden,
but these outages hit the Pats often enough that I'm not convinced Belichick
is Sauron, Spygate be damned.

[1] [http://www.espn.com/blog/new-england-
patriots/post/_/id/4796...](http://www.espn.com/blog/new-england-
patriots/post/_/id/4796733/bill-belichick-im-done-with-the-tablets-just-cant-
take-it-anymore)

------
imjk
He's notoriously bad with all technology. I love this clip of him talking
about, and then trying to change the clock in his car for Daylight Saving
Time: [http://www.nfl.com/videos/new-england-
patriots/09000d5d8226f...](http://www.nfl.com/videos/new-england-
patriots/09000d5d8226fa64/A-Football-Life-Car-trouble)

