Former Patriots Player Brandon Meriweather Once Got Bill Belichick to Pick Up Bar Tab and Lived to Talk About It

Brandon Meriweather somehow survived an interaction with Bill Belichick where Meriweather asked the coach to pick up his bar tab.

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If we were to make a list of the things that a young NFL player should never do, assuming their head coach would pick up a bar tab would be damn near the top. During his first Pro Bowl appearance in 2010, former New England Patriots safety Brandon Meriweather was tricked by teammate Matt Light into thinking that it's normal for a coach to pick up a bar tab as a way of rewarding the players for making it to the Pro Bowl. Mind you, the head coach for the AFC that year was Bill Belichick, so you already know that this wasn't going to end well for Meriweather. 

“[Meriweather]’s kind of the young guy, kind of the odd man out, and he’s not saying much," Light told CSNNE.com in a recent interview. "He’s just laughing, joining in the festivities, and I walked over to him and—I [had seen] him order a drink from the waitress—I said, ‘Hey man, you do know that you can put all this on Bill’s room, right?’" Right then and there, the red flags—or, in this case, the yellow flags—should've been waving. We don't know Belichick on a personal level, but we would never be so crazy to even attempt something like that.  

But what do you know, Meriweather walked over to Belichick with his bar tab in hand. “Fast forward like four or five hours,” Light said. “I literally witnessed him walk up to Bill with his check, like the little card that has your bill in it, and hand it to coach Belichick and say, ‘Hey, thank you coach. I appreciate you,’ in a way only that he could do it. Like you could imagine what that conversation looked like." 

Luckily, Belichick's girlfriend, Linda Holliday, was there to save Meriweather. “And I’ll never forget—Bill’s looking at him like, ‘What are you talking about?,’" Light recalls. "But Linda’s like, ‘Go ahead, take care of the tab. Help him out, right?’ It was the most uncomfortable awkward moment I’ve ever witnessed with coach.” 

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