I have been skimming therough the 2025 book by Bill Belichick titled The Art of Winning: Lessons from my life in football. A great brief story from it is on page 129 (and in Google Books):
“Carl Banks was a player who prepared at an elite level. Honestly, I had trouble keeping up with both Carl and Tom – they were very detailed in their preparation. Carl had the best key I had ever seen. When I was defensive coordinator for the Giants he found a tip on John Spagnola, who played tight end for the Eagles in the mid-eighties. Carl studied the stance of Spagnola and discovered that, incredibly, Spagnola wiggled his fingers on running plays and did not wiggle them on passes. When Banks told me about this, I thought it was a joke. It was not. I looked at all the end zone film and the key held up. I couldn’t believe it. After the first series of each game against the Eagles, Carl would come off the field with a big smile, saying, ‘He’s still doing it.’ Carl had incredible recall and would come into our Tuesday meetings armed with information: stats from every game our opponent had played that year (not to mention previous years) or memory of a play from ten weeks ago that he wanted us to have a game plan for.”
In poker that sort of gesture is called a Tell.
The cartoon was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.
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