FOXBORO -- One wears a hooded sweatshirt and speaks to the media flatly. The other likes to surf and is enthusiasm personified.
Bill Belichick and Pete Carroll probably could not be more different in terms of their public personas. Carroll, as New England fans may remember from his three seasons here as head coach in the late 1990s, is perhaps the most excitable coach in the NFL. Belichick is not.
Though one might be hard-pressed to find any Belichick quote that includes the words "pumped" or "jacked," he does get excited from time to time. Seriously. He just does it in his own way, according to Vince Wilfork.
"Bill is old fashioned," Wilfork said Thursday. "Bill is laid back. Everybody have their own way of showing emotion or how they coach or how they play. It's just different. I try not to try to compare guys. It's different, but it's very exciting to see when you do something well that your teammates and your coaches get excited. Bill done that before. He done that before."
Belichick's baseline for emotional expression may be set a tad lower than Carroll's, but Wilfork said that when the Patriots coach is excited, it can give the team a boost.
"He might not show a lot on TV, but he'll come to the bench, high five us, tell us a good job, stuff like that," Wilfork said. "It's always exciting to have a coach who'll give you recognition on a play or certain thing that you do that you practice so much for and you finally get it right . . . We do that around here."