So having gone through that, Saban could relay his experiences to Belichick. And they turned out to be invaluable.

"I’ve talked to Nick and other college coaches about those type of things, Xs and Os and scheme stuff, preparation things, how to work on it in practice, things like that," Belichick said yesterday, when I asked about it. "Yeah, Nick is real good at handling offenses and making defensive adjustments and all of that. We talk about a lot of things. ...

"It’s always good. It’s always good to talk to people. The biggest thing with us was that the second time, we had at least seen it the first time, so we did a little better job preparing for it."