On Thursday, Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots, his fiefdom for 24 years of terror, mutually parted ways after a 4-13 finish; the team’s third losing season in four years. Belichick’s teams post-Tom Brady, his longtime partner in crime, have been uninspired at best, dreadful at worst. Brady, on the other hand, won another Super Bowl after leaving the Pats, contended for an MVP, and then said goodbye to the NFL at something resembling the top of his game.
Every time one of Belichick’s ex-assistants gets canned by a team that just missed the playoffs, a crop of articles appears to ask the question: Why is this dude’s coaching tree so terrible? The answer usually comes back the same every time: because you cannot teach monomania, and that’s all there is with Belichick. Other great NFL coaches all bring something to the table you can name: some flair for offense, a defensive innovation you can point to, a way with people.
Belichick has none of those things. He just has an endless appetite for grinding, watching film and breaking it down, and a personality that shamelessly extracts, bleeding as much as he possibly can from people without giving warmth or wisdom in return. He reportedly underpaid video guys and lower-level assistants and supplemented their incomes by tossing cash at them whenever they did a good job, ostensibly because it was easier for him to give someone a mushed-up $20 bill than a compliment or a pat on the back. Everyone works as much as possible, Belichick especially: He routinely arrived at the practice facility at four in the morning, slept in his office, and demanded the same level of commitment from everyone else. His only real management innovation was a comical proclivity for trading back in the draft, a masterful tactic that also ensured he rarely had to work with a young person with too much self-esteem.
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Thankfully for Belichick, he found Tom Brady. On their own, both of these guys would probably have had unremarkable careers. Brady would have been a West Coast-style slant passer who made the Hall of Fame and was known far and wide for his vaguely alien personality, but he would not have won seven titles and made himself into the default answer for Greatest Football Player Who Ever Lived. Belichick would have repeated his stint with the Cleveland Browns, where his terrible personality got him fired within a few years; great assistant, it was said, but you needed a human being to manage other human beings, and Bill wasn’t really one of those.
But Brady, doubted by everyone who ever saw him play before he made the NFL, had a symbiotic approach to Belichick’s. He worked like a maniac, never felt that any degree of preparation was good enough, took on the same dead-eyed, process-oriented approach to game day, and willingly preached a similar culture to everyone who played beneath him. Belichick couldn’t have done it without Brady, and not only because the QB was world-historically good at throwing slant passes and never losing control on the field. Brady was also the only other guy in the world who could put up with the wave of shit that Belichick heaped on him, his teammates, other coaches, even ownership. For a decade, Brady fueled and enabled a culture that allowed someone as maladroit as Belichick to not only function, but to excel.
During the Brady-Belichick years—a dynastic era that lasted from the 2001 to the 2019 season—the Patriots were the ultimate American sports team. They won and won and won, over and over, plunging their opponents into hell in increasingly irritating ways. Belichick’s war cry was not “Go give it your all,” or “Do it for the Gipper,” but instead “Do your job,” a top-down, highly authoritarian approach to the game that emphasized the functionality of a man over genius, innovation, or humanity. In a time when Jeff Bezos was building an empire by abusing employees up and down the chain of command, the Patriots were the manifestation of the American labor grind, taken to its furthest extreme on the field, and it won and won and won.
In the back half of their time together, Brady began to recognize his own value to the franchise, and demanded he be respected for his contribution. He did this by imposing a pseudoscientific training regimine on the Patriots, which Belichick wasn’t crazy about, both because it was really weird and also a threat to his total authority over the entire franchise. It was about more than that, though. Even in winning, the atmosphere was stultifying and miserable; Belichick reportedly showed Brady no deference or warmth in practice, constantly screaming at him. Brady, a 40-year-old man who was still playing at the top of his game, decided he was sick and tired of that, and left for Tampa Bay, where he won another Super Bowl. He retired at the age of 44, still playing pretty good out there, and succeeding without being screamed at every day.
Belichick, on the other hand, floundered on a series of subpar teams who couldn’t win a championship in his toxic environment. Eventually, like Brady before him, Patriots owner Robert Kraft decided this was all very counterproductive and shepherded a “mutual exit,” allowing everyone to save face.
And yet, Belichick is almost certainly not done. He is a measly 15 games away from the NFL’s all-time wins record, and he surely wants to take it from the late Don Shula, who occasionally ribbed the Patriots in the press for their weird cheating scandals. Belichick will probably get there because other teams will be dying to give him the chance to do it in their colors. But is this the guy you really want for your team if Tom Brady isn’t around to launder his bullshit?
