Waving Bye to Belichick
The end of the best run in history seems nearer than ever
I had a plan going in this week. I wanted to write about how Texas football might be back — well and truly back — for the first time in a long time.
But then Texas (deservedly) lost the Red River Rivalry game against Oklahoma and, just for good measure, the Cowboys embarrassed themselves on Sunday night against the 49ers. Stephen A., eat your heart out.
Now, you could argue that Dallas had the worst performance of the weekend. The Cowboys were supposed to be contenders. Surely a dud like that all but assures the LVP award, right?
Wrong! Wave hello to the New England Patriots, led by who I take to be the greatest football coach ever, an endearing grump named William Stephen Belichick.
He watched from the sidelines as his team lost a 34-0 shutout to the Saints, a team that has no business beating anyone by 34 points.
The Saints have not been good. Their point differential before Sunday was -12. The only blowout they’d been a part of before was a home loss to the Baker Mayfield Bucs. Before that, they blew a big lead to Jordan Love and just barely beat Ryan Tannehill and Bryce Young. Dire.
But nothing brightens the horizons quite like seeing the Patriots, for whom Sunday’s shame parade was a new low.
It is well-established that Belichick has his eye on the all-time wins record. He currently has 329, good for second in history, behind only Don Shula’s 347.
Bill does not appear likely to add much to that total this season. The Patriots are probably not the very worst team in the league, but they’re making a case.
In the twenty-plus years that he’s been at the helm in Foxborough, that’s unheard of. Belichick took over in 2000. The Patriots went 5-11 that year. Not great, but his first season was his worst, and it can be forgiven considering that his second season brought New England the first of six Super Bowls.
Under Belichick, the Patriots have won their division 17 times. They have made the AFC Championship 13 times. They have won roughly two-thirds of all their games over an astoundingly long period.
All of that is, to massively understate it, impressive. It’s a run of sustained excellence unlike anything in the sport’s history, and it’s why many consider Belichick the GOAT. I do too.
That level of success is now pretty clearly over. Patriots fans had hoped last week’s 38-3 loss to the very same Cowboys who just got rocked in the Bay would be as bad as it got. Not so. This is ugly and getting uglier.
Iron Fist
What, then, is going on here? How does a coach this accomplished oversee this degree of plain bad?
Some will be tempted to say this happened suddenly. When it ends, it ends quick. Sort of like watching Peyton Manning try and get the ball downfield in 2015. It just wasn’t there anymore.
I would say the opposite. This strikes me as a gradual accumulation of mistakes — some small, some big — which Belichick seems less equipped to overcome than ever before, and they primarily come down, in my view, to personnel decisions.
See, Belichick is not just the coach. He is also the GM, and has been for the entire time he’s been the coach in New England. That combo often doesn’t work.
Bill O’Brien, the Belichick disciple who’s now back as the Patriots’ offensive coordinator — and not exactly covering himself in glory this year — is probably the worst recent example in the NFL, after memorably trading away star WR DeAndre Hopkins in an all-time blunder.
Basketball, too, has its examples. Doc Rivers, anyone?
For a long time, though, Belichick made the improbable work. Owner Robert Kraft let him run the show, and his trust was greatly rewarded.
That’s not to say Belichick has ruled without error. He’s always had some glaring misses on his resume, whether those were errant draft picks, questionable trades or signings, or letting talented players walk.
But I’m willing to chalk that up to 20+ years on the job. At least in the earlier years, he had a lot more hits than misses. For every Adalius Thomas, there was a Rob Ninkovich and a Dion Lewis. For every Chad Jackson, there was a Gronk, an Asante Samuel, a Julian Edelman. Even some hunk named Tom Brady.
He had a sterling if not faultless track record, earning a reputation for elevating relatively modest rosters above their level of talent on paper and churning out excellent teams — especially defenses — without a ton of elite contributors on the payroll.
Think how low this team sat in the draft order for much of Belichick’s tenure. They were often too good to grab the top-end blue chippers. He made it work anyways.
The Downturn
Now, he doesn’t. And if there’s one clear place to point, it’s a long history of consistent hits turning almost purely to misses over the last four to five years. They haven’t had much success at any of the three ways a team can add new players: drafting them, signing them, or trading for them.
He’s brought in a frankly staggering number of skill players who didn’t demonstrate a ton of skill.
In 2019, the year after their last Super Bowl win (the 13-3 barnburner against the Rams) he reportedly overruled his scouts to spend the team’s first-round draft pick on N’Keal Harry rather than A.J. Brown or Deebo Samuel. Doubly weird is how much better both of those last two guys would seem to align with Belichick’s hard-nosed sensibilities.
The same year, he traded for Mohammed Sanu, who didn’t make much of an impact either. An older Brady didn’t have enough in the way of weapons, and they lost in the first game of the playoffs to the Titans, again scoring just 13 points. Tough one.
Looking to shift that dynamic, they went on a historic spending spree in the offseason before the 2021 campaign, a strange sight for the usually thrifty Belichick. People were excited to see the checkbook opened up.
Too bad, then, that relatively few of those signings have panned out. Hunter Henry’s been solid, but Jonnu Smith was not. Kendrick Bourne started pretty well only to tail off. Nelson Agholor didn’t do even that well.
The next year, it was DeVante Parker. This year, it’s been JuJu Smith-Schuster.
You can see the theme. This team can’t seem to put above-average receivers on the field as they employ a well-below-average QB in Mac Jones, who needs all the help he can get.
Mac is hard to watch at this point, so it’s not like we can just entirely set that aside. Much of this incompetence comes down to him. He’s prone to the sorts of dumb mistakes that Belichick has historically not tolerated, nor had to deal with much in the Brady years.
The quick counter to that one, though, is that Belichick drafted him too, and that’s tough to get past.
I haven’t even gotten to the confounding coaching decisions. He continues to employ his son Steve, who, in an inspirational speech for the ages, declared to his safeties upon taking the job: “‘Yo, I’m going to be honest with y’all. I don’t know what the eff I’m doing right now. My dad told me two weeks ago that I was even going to have this job.’”
He had Matt Patricia serving as offensive coordinator last year, his first time doing so, which showed. That never made much sense either.
This team doesn’t look sharp in the way it used to. It looks sloppy, and eventually you have to chalk that up to the coaching.
This has not been good, and I really don’t mean to dunk on the guy. I realize I’m not the only one pointing out that he’s been fading.
But I suspect Belichick could be done after the year, and as much as the Patriots were the villain of the NFL for the last two decades or so, he deserves a fond farewell on his way out. I intend to give him one.
So cheers, Bill. On to Canton.
Also, This
Carnage confirmed. If you want evidence that baseball is chaos, look no further than this handy-dandy number: the teams with the five best records in MLB this season have won a grand total of one game this postseason. They are 1-12, thanks only to the Braves, who had to mount a comeback to nab even that one, and are still on the verge of crumbling against the Phillies.
((UPDATE: it’s official. The Phillies are through, so make that 1-13.))
The rest — the Orioles, the Dodgers, the Rays, and the Brewers — won not a single game among them before all getting eliminated. Mayhem! I rest my case.
Connor Bedard has officially landed in the NHL, and people are stoked. It’s good to see a bright new megawatt star making himself known. Wheel, snipe, celly, boys!
We’re finally into the elimination stage at the Rugby World Cup, and this weekend has some huge ones — mainly Ireland vs. New Zealand and France vs. South Africa. They’re the four favorites to win the whole thing, in whatever order you subscribe to. We’ll have some more clarity on that front soon.
The Las Vegas Aces are on the brink of a repeat WNBA title, after two dominant wins against the New York Liberty. It’s not over yet, buuut it might be. A’Ja Wilson, Kelsey Plum, and co. have all the makings of a historic dynasty. The house wins again.