'Every Detail Was Important' - Ronnie McGill Provides Insight into the Belichick Way

Ronnie McGill knows what it’s like to work for a Bill Belichick organization. After all, he did it for more than a decade.

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McGill, a former Tar Heel standout who totaled 2,393 rushing yards from 2003-06, was part of the New England Patriots’ scouting department from 2010-21. He joined Inside Carolina’s Tommy Ashley and Joey Powell to provide a behind-the-scenes look at what it was like to work within a Belichick-led team.

“The work atmosphere, the first impression of that is it was just different,” McGill told Inside Carolina. “It’s different when you get in there, if you come from somewhere else, if you’ve never been anywhere else, and that was your first place working, then you don’t know the difference. But me, coming from Tennessee, I could just feel that it was different from the first day that I got in there, first minute, first day. Everything was just really buttoned up, really in detail. You always had to be on your P’s and Q’s in that building.”

“You can try to describe it as much as you want to, but you’ve got to be there and you’ve got to be in it to really understand. The way that they do things up there, the way that we did things up there that whole season where ‘do your job’ was the motto, that’s really it. You come in every day and I would not know what the person in the office beside me was doing. All I know is that I had one assignment or two assignments, and I needed to make sure those assignments were completely buttoned up to the point where if I just wrote something on a piece of paper and I took it over to the director of player personnel (Dave Ziegler), if I took him that piece of paper and he liked it, I had to assume that it was going to make it to Bill.

“Bill wants to see it, he just loved information. So everything that I did, I had to act like it was going to Bill Belichick. … It was really just everything about your job, you had to make sure that you were on top of it, from the smallest detail to the biggest detail. And he used to always say, nothing too small is not important. Every detail was important to us.”

McGill specifically delved into Belichick’s philosophy regarding NFL free agency and roster building. McGill pointed to Belichick’s keen eye and emphasis on certain traits as a way that helped build out the Patriots’ roster on an annual basis.

“It’s not that he tries to coach the guys that nobody wants, he coaches the traits that a player has that another player might not have,” McGill said. “So for instance, we’re watching a player in free agency one year, and we really didn’t like the player. As a group, we kept watching him, kept watching him, kept watching him. And he (Belichick) came back and he said, ‘quit telling me what the guy can’t do, and tell me what the guy can do.’ He said, ‘watch him from this angle, and see what you think about him from that way, which is what we did.’ We ended up really liking the player, and then we ended up signing the player.”

“We watched Jamie Collins at Southern Miss, he was rushing the passer, or he was doing something different than he did when he got to New England. So we’re watching him, and we gave him a lower back up grade. And (Bill) really liked him. And he came in and we were talking about it and he said, ‘look at him as an off-the-ball linebacker who can play on the edge of the line.’ And we did it and he ended up just going up and up and up the board. And then when he got to Foxborough, he did the stuff that Bill wanted to do instead of the stuff that he was doing in college, which we didn’t necessarily like, but Bill saw the stuff that he could do and then he became a force. Bill saw it, and he knew what he could do.”

Carolina opens the new season on Sept. 1 against TCU, in a spotlight home contest on Labor Day. The 73-year-old Belichick, who won eight total Super Bowls across his storied NFL coaching career, never has coached in the college ranks.

Belichick’s hiring ushered in a complete upheaval of UNC’s roster. This season, the Tar Heels are welcoming in over 70 newcomers, including 42 additions from the transfer portal. It’s the second-largest transfer class among Power 4 teams and ranks eighth nationally, according to On3.

“I think what you do is you don’t worry about what the value of the player is,” McGill said. “And this is what I’m going to assume that he’s thinking similarly, because that’s what he did in the NFL. You don’t worry about the value of the player, you worry about how good the player is first. If the player is great, then you can worry about how much you have to pay to get that player. You shouldn’t go into it thinking, ‘oh, this guy is on the ESPN top 100 so he’s automatically going to start out at this price range.’ I think each team should look at the player and see if that player is good enough to validate whatever value they’re going to assign to him, not the opposite way around. …

“What we never really missed on, and this is credit to the way that Coach Belichick basically built up our personnel department, because it wasn’t the same when I first got there, and then he got a little bit more hands on. What we did a really good job on is not missing too high. Very rarely did we go out and we signed somebody to one of those top contracts, and then that person didn’t perform. Teams do it all the time, and teams screw themselves up and they set themselves back because they overvalue players, and they overvalue a skill.”

“People looking at UNC’s recruiting class, if there’s not that many five stars, ‘well, I thought Coach Belichick is going to get all the five stars in here.’ Coach Belichick doesn’t care about the five stars. Coach Belichick has always cared about the skills. And if he thinks the skill of a three star is as valuable to the roster as this five star, then I can see him going out and getting those guys, because that’s the way we operated. And it worked in the NFL. I don’t really see why it wouldn’t work in college.”