FOXBORO -- As far as their personal styles go, Bill Belichick and Brian Billick are polar opposites.

The Patriots' coach is reserved, studious and strictly business, at least as far as he cares to reveal himself to the public.

The coach of the Baltimore Ravens, meanwhile, is an admitted self-promoter who doesn't shy away from the spotlight.

``You have to stay true to your personality,'' Billick said last week via conference call to the New England media. ``What you call glib most people call being a smart aleck ... you have to stay true to your style and true to your personality. I'm a glib smart aleck and Bill obviously plays a little close to the vest.''

As the Ravens and Patriots prepare to play today (4:15 p.m.; Ch. 4, 12) for the first time since before Belichick became the latter team's head coach, neither coach professes to be terribly close to the other. However, for some reason that may be as trite as the confusion of their same-initialed names, people continue to confuse the two -- most recently, the public address announcer at the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis, where the Patriots' coach was announced as ``Brian Belichick.''

``Well, we chat,'' Billick said. ``We're certainly not (close) friends. I haven't been around Bill that much in the league meetings. At some point, whenever I'm out and about, at some point someone comes up to me and tell me what a great coach I am, and says, `Can I have your autograph, Coach Belichick?'

``One of us ought to be offended by that,'' he said. ``I'm not sure which, because Bill is a lot better looking than I am.''

Billick has no problem with putting either himself or his team in the spotlight.

After the Ravens' victory over the Giants in Super Bowl XXXV, Billick agreed for the Ravens to be the centerpiece of HBO's ``Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Baltimore Ravens'' miniseries the next season. But after the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI, Belichick rejected any notion of exposing his team's inner workings to a network television audience, and HBO turned to the Dallas Cowboys to fill the void.

From a viewer's standpoint. Billick's version of the show was preferable to the following year's presentation, dominated by the Cowboys' egotistical owner, Jerry Jones. Billick's enjoyment of the spotlight was obvious, but the insight he brought into the operation of a football team was unlike anything previously seen on the small screen.

Belichick, who clearly has his own way of doing things, basically took a ``whatever floats your boat'' attitude to Billick's approach when asked about it late last week.''

``I don't spend a lot of time looking at the way he does those kind of things,'' Belichick said. ``We spend a lot of time evaluating the Raven organization -- their acquisitions, their personnel, their player personnel department, their philosophy in building a team, the type of players they have, the schemes they use and all of those types of things. Personal styles of coaches, everybody has their own.

``I'm sure you would have a pretty broad sampling if you went on down the line and looked at it from your point of view,'' he added. ``I try to look at the overall (picture), what they are doing operationally, and understand that there are different managing styles, different coaching styles and different playing styles. You have to find one that works for you and one that you're comfortable with and build off of that.''