Sort of like saying Bill Belichick has a skill gap because he’s not a top NFL player. AFAIK he never played pro ball at all (and college wasn’t at a top D1 program). Bit, he’s undeniably one of the most successful coaches in the business.
Putting out Run-DMC – Raising Hell, Slayer – Reign in Blood and Beastie Boys – Licensed to Ill in the same year is completely insane but things are probably much different if he is 20 years older or 20 years younger. '
He was in the perfect place as hip hop and metal were taking off.
I pay a lot of attention to football as a hobby (and a gambling outlet) so these next two seasons at UNC for ‘ol Bill will be really telling.
Honestly, it’s hard to imagine they’d have been anywhere near that successful if the answer wasn't just "both."
You see plenty of examples of great coaches stuck with lousy rosters (Parcells with the Cowboys), and also great players on poorly run teams (Patricia-era Lions). Usually when a team only has one or the other, they continually flame out early in the playoffs.
> these next two seasons at UNC for ‘ol Bill will be really telling.
I wouldn’t read too much into that. He’s 73, the game’s evolved a lot, and coaching college is a whole different thing from the NFL. It’s incredibly rare for someone to excel at both — guys like Pete Carroll being the exception that prove the rule.
Everyone has always said Belichick is basically an encyclopedia of football knowledge.
I don’t give belicheck the credit for teaching Brady, you can’t teach that. It’s not stupid at all if you’re a fan of the sport.
What GP is saying is not that Rick Rubin has no skill anywhere, but that he recognized he has 100/100 taste and instead of trying to become a hip hop artist, instead became a producer for other artists.
In the same way, you’ve described how Bill Belichick recognized his taste in what makes a player good is not enough to make him also a good player, so he positioned himself to take advantage of his 100/100 taste rather than whatever skill value he may have.
Most of the time when you chase taste you are working on splitting hairs. Or it will look like that to an outside observer.
I imagine this is a large part of why tooling and language wars are still compelling throughout decades of computing. No amount of lecturing on the joy of e.g. Rails vs. Node will really convince anyone to use an “outdated”, slow, dynamically typed language like Ruby in 2025 — even in places where it’d be a major win.
He can't really play an instrument, but he knows exactly what works and what doesn't and can articulate it.