Bill Belichick's NFL Legacy
Bill Belichick’s move to Chapel Hill and college football very likely marks the end of his time in the NFL. Yes, his contract does appear to leave open the opportunity for a return, but let’s assume for now that it’s over and we can finally assess the totality of his NFL career.
And here’s that final assessment: He’s the best head coach/GM ever to do it (His career as a defensive coordinator is somewhere near the top as well).
There’s really not much of an argument otherwise. We can argue about the greatest individual players at their respective positions. One player might have the best individual stats but not quite as many team accomplishments. For those that do, it’s tough to precisely assign credit to wins and championships (or lack thereof) since each plays on a different team, with different players, different schemes, and different coaches. So whatever the consensus might be for each position, there is room for discussion:
“What if quarterback X played with that team?”
“What if running back Y played behind that offensive line?”
But for a coach or GM (or someone who’s a combination of the two), there is only one thing they’re responsible for - winning championships. It doesn’t matter how they do it. There is no “yeah but.” It is simply “how much did they win?”
In that department, no one has been better than Belichick.
The Best Two-Decade Run in NFL History
Belichick won 6 Super Bowls with the Patriots as the architect and orchestrator of the team. He presided over the greatest 19-year stretch in NFL history. Here’s what New England accomplished during that time:
6 Super Bowl wins
9 Super Bowl appearances
Regular Season W-L: 232-72 (Best in NFL)
Playoff W-L: 30-11 (Best in NFL)
17 division titles
13 AFC Championship Game appearances (8 consecutive from 2011-18)
Most points scored
Fewest points allowed
Fewest turnovers
Most takeaways
3rd in return TDs (Kick, Punt, INT, Fumble-Return, Other)
Belichick won with defense-first teams. He won with explosive offensive teams. He won with special teams. He navigated the salary cap expertly. And for most of his career, he was two steps ahead of the league, whether it was via his scheme or personnel decisions.
Opponent-Specific Approaches
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Belichick was his ability to use completely different gameplans and approaches from week-to-week based on the opponent. He found unique ways to make teams play left-handed.
A few unconventional gameplans and strategic approaches come to mind:
Having edge rushers hit Marshall Faulk on almost every pass play before rushing the quarterback in order to disrupt the “Greatest Show on Turf” in Super Bowl XXXVI.
Taking away the Colts’ outside zone stretch play with the alignment of outside linebackers Willie McGinest and Mike Vrabel. That also shut down their play-action off of it, which was a bread-and-butter play for those Peyton-Manning-led teams in the 2000’s.
“Cover-1 double jersey #” coverage and taking away receivers like Tyreek Hill by double-teaming them with his #2 corner and a safety and then using his best corner to shut down the offense’s #2 receiver.
The way he would match up personnel based on skill-sets instead of status. For instance, he used Kyle Arrington instead of Darrelle Revis to take away the Colts’ best receiver (T.Y. Hilton) twice during the 2014 season, including the AFC Championship Game. Arrington was then benched midway through Super Bowl XLIX vs. Seattle and replaced with Malcolm Butler…
Holding Sean McVay’s Rams offense to 3 points in Super Bowl LIII using a combination of a 6-1 front to stop their zone runs and having cornerback Jonathan Jones play as a deep safety (often out of quarters coverage) to be able to better match up to L.A.’s intermediate-to-deep route combinations.
What’s so impressive about the examples above is that he didn’t just come up with the idea to utilize these unique approaches. He had to coach them as well. His coaches had to understand them. His players had to understand them and be able to apply them on the field.
There are plenty of other approaches and in-game decisions we could talk about as well. Like his decision not to call a timeout at the end of Super Bowl XLIX when the Seahawks were about to score the game-winning touchdown and had the ball at the 1-yard line. Belichick saw chaos on the opposite sideline. He didn’t want to bail them out. On the very next play, Malcolm Butler picked off Russell Wilson, and the rest is history.
Belichick also wasn’t reliant on one or two great defenders during his 24 years in New England. He didn’t have an all-timer on defense at any position. He didn’t have a Ray Lewis or Ed Reed or Troy Polamalu. In fact, to date, the Patriots have only had 4 Hall-of-Famers from Belichick’s Patriots defenses. And most weren’t on the team for long during his tenure:
Ty Law (5 seasons, 69 regular season games)
Richard Seymour (8 seasons, 111 regular season games)
Junior Seau (4 seasons, 38 regular season games)
Darrelle Revis (1 season, 16 regular season games)
Despite the lack of stars, his defense allowed the fewest points in the NFL from 2001-19. During that stretch, they finished in the top-10 in points allowed 16 times, which included 8 top-5 finishes and three seasons as the top scoring D in the league.
Building and Re-Building the Patriots
The way he continually re-shaped the team, particularly on offense, in order to stay ahead of the league played as big of a role in the Patriots’ success as anything.
The Patriots went from a defense-first team with great special teams and timely offense during their first 3 Super Bowl wins from 2001-04, to a team that attacked with one of the best passing games in the league after the NFL put an emphasis on calling illegal contact and basically outlawed defense in 2004.
Belichick traded for Randy Moss when everyone thought he was done. Of course, he set an NFL record for TD receptions in his first season with the Patriots.
But it wasn’t just 2007 with Moss. Belichick also spotted something in Wes Welker (when no one else did) and engineered the passing game around him and his unique abilities in the slot. He spotted the same thing in Julian Edelman despite the fact that he was a quarterback in college.
The passing game morphed into one based primarily on matchups in the 2010’s - with tight ends like Rob Gronkowski and running backs like Shane Vereen, Dion Lewis, and James White, etc. who could align on the perimeter and either become mismatches or help define the coverage. He zigged when the league zagged, and that helped lead to the Patriots’ sustained success.
Tom Brady
One of Belichick’s greatest accomplishments as a coach, which he doesn’t get any credit for, was his development of the player that many consider to be the greatest quarterback and football player in NFL history - Tom Brady.
For some reason, Brady is always listed as a negative on Belichick’s resume. Many try to make him wear Brady’s career like an albatross around his neck. As if this was a situation where Brady and Belichick never talked. Brady took the offense, Belichick took the defense, and they met at the field on Sunday. And then Belichick wasn’t that great, he was just carried by Brady.
That, of course, is a completely ridiculous assumption.
First, it’s built on the premise that Belichick just inherited a Hall-of-Fame quarterback and went along for the ride to 6 Super Bowl titles.
Second, it assumes Belichick wasn’t involved in Brady’s development.
Third, it implies that Belichick had nothing to do with Brady becoming the team’s starting quarterback in the first place - as if the answer was so clear early in his career and there was no major decision to make.
Each of these are demonstrably untrue.
Brady Wasn’t a Great Quarterback Right Away
All you have to do is go back to those 2001-04 seasons to disprove the idea that Brady arrived in Foxborough with his Superman cape and led New England to victory after victory.
He didn’t “cover up for Belichick’s mistakes” as some have suggested. It was actually more the other way around. Those were defense-first teams with great special teams, and both helped cover up many of the offense’s blemishes.
The Patriots ranked 6th in points allowed in 2001, 1st in 2003, and 2nd in 2004. They didn’t just prevent other teams from scoring, though.
In fact, during those 3 Super Bowl winning seasons, the defense and special teams combined to score 24 touchdowns and 172 points of their own (not including field goals). Those aren’t typos. 24 touchdowns and 172 points…More than any other team in the NFL during that time.
That might explain why the Patriots were able to win regardless of how the offense performed. For instance:
The Patriots offense failed to score 14 points in 11 of the 55 games Tom Brady started in 2001, 2003, and 2004 (including the playoffs). They still went 8-3 in those games.
The offense failed to score 20 points in 20 of those 55 games. They still went 16-4.
For context, Peyton Manning’s offenses only failed to score 20 points in 11 of 53 games during those seasons (20.8%). The Colts went 2-9 in those games.
The Patriots’ results were similar when you look at Brady’s individual performance as well:
Brady completed less than 60% of his passes in 22 of his 55 games during those Super Bowl winning seasons. The Patriots still went 19-3.
He threw for less than 200 yards 18 times. The Patriots still went 14-4.
He failed to throw a touchdown 14 times. Again, it didn’t matter. The Patriots still went 12-2.
In nearly half of those games (27 of 55), Brady threw as many or more interceptions than touchdowns. The Patriots still went 20-7 in those games.
If we focus on those postseasons, we’ll see much of the same thing.
2001 Playoffs
New England’s first title run with Brady at the helm is the best example of how it was Belichick’s program that was the driving force behind the Patriots’ success, not any individual player.
Brady didn’t even play most of the AFC Championship game after getting knocked out in the 2nd quarter. New England still beat the #1-seed Steelers on the road.
For the 10 quarters that Brady was on the field that postseason, the offense scored just 29 points (an average of 11.6 points per game). Not to mention, the defense and special teams combined to score more touchdowns (3) during that postseason than the Brady-led offense did (2).
In Super Bowl XXXVI, the Patriots won despite scoring just 13 offensive points. That was the lowest total ever for a winning team in Super Bowl history. It’s only been tied once since then…by the 2018 Patriots (surprise, surprise).
Dominating the MVP’s
If you want to know how good Belichick’s defenses really were from 2001-04, you can just look at how easily they handled the league’s best signal callers.
4 of their 9 playoff games during that run were against quarterbacks who had won the MVP that season. These games were all won by the Patriots, and it wasn’t because Brady out-dueled those QBs in a shootout. Quite the opposite in fact.
Here’s a list of the game logs from those 4 matchups:
An average of 12 offensive points per game, a 3-8 TD-INT ratio, and a 65.5 combined passer rating. Gross. But that’s what the Patriots did to opposing teams back then. They made them look bad and they won ugly.
Which you can also see from Brady’s numbers in those games:
18 offensive points per game, a 58.3 completion %, and an 80.6 passer rating. Again, none of these games would go down in the annals of NFL history as classic duels between two gun-slingers. Punting was a viable option for the Patriots. Never a bad thing. Just manage the situations of the game, protect the ball, and lean on the defense.
I’ll pause here to say that I’m not trying to make Brady out to be Trent Dilfer or some glorified game manager that the team won in spite of. He provided steady performance at the most important position on the field. And he came up big in several key moments along the way, as we all know.
But I do think it’s fair to point out that most quarterbacks don’t normally get the opportunity to still be in a game against the best team in the NFL when his offense has scored just 10 points (all off of drives that started in opponent territory), and he’s thrown for just 92 yards through the first 58 1/2 minutes of the game. That was the case in Super Bowl XXXVI vs. the Rams (bet you forgot about that).
But Brady deserves all the credit in the world for his game-winning drive at the end of that Super Bowl, which was truly an amazing thing to watch live.
He also led the Patriots on game-winning drives in the 4th quarter of all three of those Super Bowl wins from 2001-04. His performance against the Panthers in Super Bowl XXXVIII was the one game where he really did take over and lead the Patriots to a win, getting a well-deserved MVP.
But he wasn’t dragging this team to win after win back then as some today will have you believe. Brady was one big element of a team that won in numerous ways. He was a product and executor of Belichick’s “Patriot Way” approach, not the creator of it.
Belichick Helped Develop Brady
The other problem with the “Belichick is nothing without Brady” argument is that it assumes Belichick had nothing to do with his quarterback’s development. Again, this couldn’t be further from reality.
Do you really think the man who has control over everything would have just left the most important position on the field alone for 20 years? Common sense alone should tell us how instrumental Belichick was. Brady has also confirmed as much on multiple occasions.
We can go back to 2001 to confirm this as well. That year, Patriots quarterbacks coach Dick Rehbein died unexpectedly during training camp. Belichick then “took control” of the regular quarterbacks meetings, as Ian O’Connor highlighted in his book, Belichick. That was during Brady’s first season as the starter. A formative year in his NFL career.
The tutelage of Brady didn’t stop after year 1, though. As Brady said in the Man in the Arena series covering the 2003 season:
“I had Coach Belichick there to teach me. Every Tuesday we would meet and go through the entire defensive starting lineup and their strengths and weaknesses. What we could attack. What he was watching and how I could see the things that he saw so I could gain confidence and anticipate.”
Even outside of their regular meetings, Belichick’s knowledge of the game and attention to detail created benefits that other quarterbacks around the league didn’t have to the same degree. One example came prior to New England’s final game of the 2003 season against the Bills. Belichick found something and relayed it to his quarterback.
In Brady’s words:
“Coach Belichick saw something Friday night. ‘Okay they’re doing a little more of this as the season went along. It’s the last game of the year. F—k it, they’ll probably run it […] If we’re in this formation and they start to rotate, you’re gonna see these three guys move all at the last second. And if they do that, this is how they’re going to play it."
Brady would go on to say that this was exactly what happened that Sunday:
“I saw all three move at the same time, and right in my mind I’m like, oh, I gotta change this [play]. And then [I] was able to throw a good pass to Troy who made the catch for the touchdown.”
It’s safe to say that this type of thing wasn’t a one-time occurrence.
Then you have this statement from Dean Pees (Patriots linebackers coach from 2004-05 and defensive coordinator from 2006-09) while on the “Make Defense Great Again” podcast with Coach Chris Vasseur:
“He spent [his time] with Tom Brady telling Tom Brady, here’s what those defenses are doing against you. Which was perfect. He sat in the meeting room with Tom every day in individual meetings, in unit meetings. […] He did an incredible job of sitting with Tom, and like, we’re playing the Jets or something, and he’s telling Tom, here’s what to look for. Here’s what that safety’s showing you. Here’s what the linebacker’s showing you. I mean what a great tool to have a guy like that with that experience sitting with your quarterback teaching him how to read defenses. That’s why we were so daggone good. […] When I was there in New England, I was there 6 years total […], he spent 90% of his time with Tom Brady.”
If you think Brady is the greatest quarterback of all time, then you have to acknowledge that Belichick developed the greatest quarterback of all time. You can’t separate the two.
Choosing Brady
Somehow, what’s also lost in history is how Brady became the Patriots starting quarterback in the first place.