You say you’re starting to OD on Bill Belichick lore? You think the media have been nipping at the Kool-Aid a bit too much? You think the Patriots really can’t be run that differently than anyone else?

Sorry. You ain’t heard nuthin’ yet.

Meet Don Davis, No. 51 in your program, and probably nowhere in your heart.

Unless you’re a true football junkie, you most likely were unaware of his presence on the team until he started popping up in those nickel and dime packages in the St. Louis game.

But Don Davis, a Kansas University product, is worth listening to, because Don Davis has been to football hell and back, and now he thinks he’s in football paradise because he is a member of the New England Patriots.

Before the 2001 season, Don Davis had a choice. His time was up in Tampa Bay. Would he like to be a St. Louis Ram or would he like to be a New England Patriot? It took him about 1.7 seconds to decide in favor of St. Louis.

“I said, ‘I ain’t gonna play for the Patriots. It’s New England. It’s cold. And that coach had a reputation. Hard-nosed. Tough practices. Didn’t treat the players well.'”

And now that he has been here for two full seasons?

“Every myth I had heard was totally blown out of the water,” he declares. “Now I can’t imagine playing anywhere else.”

His mental turnaround began just prior to the 2002 Super Bowl. Davis was a starting outside linebacker for the Rams that evening, and he relished the feeling of being introduced at a Super Bowl.

“I was standing there, feeling great, and then they introduced the Patriots,” he recalls. “And they came out as a team, and I remember being struck by it. You just take a brief picture of it in your mind, but it stuck with me.”

As we all know, the underdog Patriots won.

“We had a certain amount of arrogance on our team, and we just couldn’t understand how that team had beaten us,” he says.

Now, of course, he knows why they won, why they won last year and why they probably should win again this year. They win because they have some excellent players and because Bill Belichick and his staff can take some of the lesser talented players — in other words, players such as Don Davis — and reinvent them as the situation warrants.

To the question, “Do some coaches simply possess substantially more empirical knowledge than others?” the answer is most emphatically “Yes,” and Don Davis is here to give you an example.

Go back to the time of the defensive backfield crisis following the Patriots’ loss on Halloween at Pittsburgh.

Davis, a 240-pound linebacker, was being asked to play safety, a position he hadn’t played since he was tearing it up at Olathe South High many years and pounds ago. This subject first had been broached during training camp, but now it was no longer an abstract and Davis admits to being intimidated.

“Bill Belichick called a DB meeting,” Davis explains. “Just him and the defensive backs — no assistant coaches. He got up there and he went over things. He said in this situation you watch for this and in this situation you watch for that. He broke it all down from point A to point Z. It was amazing. And I came out of that meeting feeling really confident. I cannot imagine there is anyone, anywhere, who has more knowledge about the X’s and O’s than Bill Belichick.”

It takes a savvy veteran such as Davis, who is now playing for his fourth NFL team, to appreciate the difference between the contemporary experience and some other, shall we say, less-desirable experiences the NFL has had to offer.

“I plan on being around Bill Belichick for a long time,” he says. “In whatever capacity that is.”

It will be a winning capacity; that much we know.