Bill Belichick Might Be a Mac Guy | Hacker News Reader

Bill Belichick Might Be a Mac Guy

nytimes.com

14 pointsspecialp12 comments

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.

To that point: every photo or video of Gillete Stadium's offices I've seen has shown he and the entire coaching staff uses PCs.

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...

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!

I agree with you, but to be fair even if he wanted to use a mac(or more appropriately an ipad), he probably wouldn't be allowed to because of the deal that the NFL made with microsoft.

Totally. This is a league that fines players for wearing cleats or sweatbands that are in non-sanctioned colors.

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

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...

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

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...

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...

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...

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