Perspective | Smart NFL owners should be lining up to hire Bill Belichick
Football is not business, and business is not football. The job of NFL coach has no real managerial parallel. It’s a mix of hard technical proficiency and pervasive authority in which basic managerial precepts are turned on their heads. Predictability is death, unpredictability is a virtue, and the competition is equally protean. The roster changes not just seasonally but within seasons; injuries mean combinations are constantly reshuffled. And that’s before you’ve addressed the opponent. One man has prevailed over these peculiar instabilities better than any in modern league history: Belichick. Yet on Thursday, he was released by a football amateur. That’s the nature of this strange nonbusiness.
At 71, Belichick still has ambition and energy. Relationships can run their course, and his partnership with New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft certainly had, but parting with Belichick is handing a gift to seven other owners looking to hire a transformative winner. For all of Belichick’s idiosyncrasies, he’s still the surest shot in the field, winner of a record 31 playoff games and one of the strongest bricklayers of locker room culture the game has ever seen, in no small part because he’s one of the few men in the league who knows what culture really is and how to foster it. Drab, hooded, laconic, withholding, he personified it even in his worst season, adhering to his own precepts, resisting the narrative of the moment and the corrosions of star-coddling.
“If I favor one, I don’t favor 52,” he once said. “I try to give everybody what they earn.”
The narrative of the moment is that the Patriots’ 4-13 record was a mess of Belichick’s own making, his insistence on control and penchant for underpaid overachievers biting him with failed drafts and staff dysfunction. There’s some truth to that, but it’s also an oversimplification. The Patriots are still paying the tab for a run of three Super Bowls in five years through 2019, when they aged out with that crew of all-time greats, the Julian Edelmans and Devin McCourtys, not to mention Tom Brady. They began this season with 38 players who had two years of experience or less in the league, and without an established quarterback, and their offensive line coach stepped away due to illness in November. Sometimes it’s as instructive to follow a struggling team as a winning one — what it does when it’s down on a collective knee is as telling as what it does on the trophy platform. The Patriots played with such weekly commitment that they lost eight games by a single score. Somehow, Belichick coaxed his players to pour their hearts into the job with little or nothing at stake into the 17th week, when they lost to the hottest and most surging team in the league, the Buffalo Bills, by just 27-21.
It’s as difficult to find a head coaching great as it is a dynastic quarterback: Just 13 quarterbacks have won multiple Super Bowl rings, and just 14 head coaches. They come along only generationally, say, every 10 years out of a hundred. Kraft, one of most insightful owners in the league, found one.
Here is what the Patriots gave up: a strategic maestro with uncanny diagnostic perception. Who has an appreciative eye for the integral player who competes as much for a life-altering sense of accomplishment as for generational wealth. Whose teams from 2000 to 2019 were continually considered undermanned by experts yet who won a higher percentage of games than any other American franchise, in any sport, and racked up a record of 31-13 in the playoffs, along with those six Super Bowls.
The game as Belichick coaches relies on interdependence, and that made his best teams so intimidating and difficult to beat. When the Patriots played well, the opponent simply couldn’t find a crack in the wall. He defeated the sheer fluidity of the game, the variables of behavior and reactiveness, and made fool’s gold out of probabilities with the Patriots’ executioner’s excellence. It’s said that Belichick can proficiently coach every single position on the field. How hard that is to do. How much harder than simply X’s and O’s. How nonaccidental. How rare.
Wrapped up in the stony demeanor come impressions not necessarily true: that he is merely a utilitarian, chilled and ungenerous at his center. Belichick is certainly a supreme machinator. But withholding and strategic does not mean cold. He has a deep if buried loyalty for players, especially the most selfless and deprecating ones, such as longtime special teams captain Matthew Slater. But he seems constitutionally incapable of conceding to other powerful figures, and that can wear out his connections with peers, as it did with Brady and perhaps with Kraft. He is constitutionally incapable of kissing rings, and that can wear out his connections, as it did with Brady and perhaps with Kraft. Mostly, he simply despises “verbal vomiting” and doesn’t believe in exhibiting his insides.
It’s a kind of proof of Belichick’s deep suspicion of popularity that a single low sequence after 23 years resulted in such doubt and indictment of his abilities. Lately, you sense that Kraft tolerated Belichick more than appreciated him — and vice versa, that Belichick failed to appreciate the most supportive and stable owner in the league. The Patriots are in a bad cycle that ownership has every right to bemoan, and they surely need a front-office fix and a quarterback. And yet the franchise Belichick served so well for so long might learn that a coaching search is a dive into murk, if not blackness, for owners who are out of their element.
As Belichick has always known better than anyone, the real answer to the vagaries of the league — salary caps, rule changes, injuries, constant change — is a strong locker room culture. It’s the story your people tell themselves about who they are in the arena as they execute your decisions. Strategy designates actions, but it’s Belichick’s culture that inspirits them. So many NFL franchises flounder because coaches, owners and executives internally contradict their stated culture. For instance, it does no good to identify your workplace as a “meritocracy” if you reward paycheckers over passion players.
Belichick has never done that — there is no internal crack between his stated beliefs and actual practice. That the Patriots refused to gear down their effort this season even in the dregs was a sign that his culture was largely intact, even as other factors were in high churn. It’s his real, abiding strength, and the next owner who realizes it is the smart one.
