The Patriots Are Bad, but Stop Trying to Rewrite History
“If you take away the best 19 years of Bill Belichick’s career, he really hasn’t been that great of a head coach.”
As ridiculous as this argument is (especially since it’s referring to the best 19-year run in the history of the NFL), it’s more or less what we’ve been hearing from around the football world now that the Patriots are one of the worst teams in the league.
The pitch forks are out. The mob is circling. “Belichick needs to go!”
“And he really wasn’t that good to begin with!”
Sunday’s ugly 10-6 loss to the Colts magnified many of the key issues with the current version of the Patriots. The talent is lacking up and down the roster. The performance on the field has been sloppy. The quarterback position is in disarray.
The rebuild since 2020 has officially failed. Since Belichick has been the architect of it all, he deserves the criticism for its failure.
So if you want him held accountable, that’s completely reasonable. If you want to say the game has passed him by, I’ll disagree with you, but I won’t call you crazy. That explanation is on the table.
But let’s stop being absurd. The Patriots being mediocre from 2020-22 and then bad this season does not mean that everything from the previous two decades needs to be revisited and viewed through a different lens.
We don’t need to strip Belichick of credit for his accomplishments, as many are trying to do right now. If you’re going to give him the blame for the current failed rebuild since he has his hand in every aspect of the team, then you have to give him credit for the two decades of success New England had for the very same reasons.
The attempt by many to rewrite history is rooted in a couple of things. From the media’s standpoint, they’ve been waiting a long time for this moment. Belichick has basically told them to go sit in the corner for 20+ years. Personally, I’ve enjoyed watching every minute of it. They haven’t, obviously, and now they’re more than glad to chip away at the aura that surrounded him for so long.
For the rest of the football world, the rewrite is based more on Belichick’s success with Tom Brady and his lack thereof without him. “Belichick is nothing without Brady” is basically the stance. There are a couple of problems with this argument, though.