Friday Night Lights Head Coach Eric Taylor Inspired By New England Patriots HC Bill Belichick

He is one of the most popular fictional football coaches to ever hit the big or small screen. In case you never saw the show he is Eric Taylor from the television show Friday Night Lights, a series about small town Texas football based on the book of the same name. It was a tremendous show and if you ask any guy that ever saw it he would say it would be awesome to play for a guy like Eric Taylor.

That makes it kind of surprising to hear who the actor that played Eric Taylor, Kyle Chandler, drew his inspiration from.

He got it from the evil genius himself, New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, or to be more precise Belichick's biography:

“The irony, of course, is that Chandler had reservations about taking the Coach Taylor role. “Billy Bob [Thornton] played the original coach [in the 2004 movie], and I thought, ‘I’m not old enough, I don’t have that,’ ” he says. Plus, he wasn’t exactly a sports buff, much less an athlete. “He’s not that guy who’s going to sit down on Sunday and watch eight hours of football,” says Taylor Kitsch (who played FNL‘s Tim Riggins), with whom he bonded during long motorcycle rides. Chandler found inspiration in a biography of New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick…”

If Belichick can give speeches like Coach Taylor that could explain why the Patriots have been so good for so long.

[Hollywood Reporter]

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