Bill Belichick is a legend — and a relic

Every player, NFL referee and media member who’s come through Foxborough for the last 24 years knows a simple truth: This is Bill Belichick’s world, and you’re just living in it.

When you’ve won at and influenced the game of football as much as he has, you earn that kind of respect.

Belichick has been prowling NFL sidelines since the Gerald Ford administration, learning from some of the best coaches ever along the way, and even failing as a head coach with the Cleveland Browns before the Patriots took a chance on him. Then, for more than two decades in New England, his self-crafted method — “the Patriot Way” — fostered a winning machine and a persona unlike any other.

The man’s scowl and love of hoodies draws comparisons to Darth Sidious. He once infamously stiff-armed a young Detroit Lions fan who wanted a high-five. But no one cares, because he coaches the game of football as well as — or better than — anyone in history.

The numbers don’t lie: 17 division championships, six Super Bowl titles and three Coach of the Year awards. I arrived in Boston in 2018, just in time to see Belichick and the Patriots win the latest of those championships.

After that, the empire slowly began to crumble. The departure of Tom Brady. The inability to groom a successor. The talent gap between the Patriots and their division rivals growing with each passing year. I’ve witnessed some of the most significant moments in recent franchise history as a reporter. And one thing seems clear: The decline of the Patriots lies clearly at Belichick’s feet.

That’s why it’s time for him to go.

To understand why, it helps to see football beyond the ostensible absurdity of grown men wantonly smashing into each other. Football has a lot of that, of course. But it’s also chess, psychology, espionage and economics all rolled into one. Why else do you think Belichick loves Sun Tzu’s famous book “The Art of War”?

Being a great coach or executive in this game requires Ph.D.-level knowledge of all these factors. For more than two decades, he has done both at a higher level than arguably anyone in football history.

Belichick is still an extraordinary football strategist who can cook up a game plan better than nearly anybody. But he also buys himself the groceries (aka the players), and it’s become a lot harder to make a gourmet meal these days.

The old recipe for success — don’t make mistakes and take advantage when the other team does — helped drive the team’s first three Super Bowl wins in the 2000s, when Tom Brady was still a young, fledgling quarterback and the defense still won championships.

[Belichick] also made savvy, if sometimes gut-wrenching, decisions to cut or trade well-liked or productive players in order to save money.

Then, as Brady morphed into the greatest quarterback ever to play the game (and had to get paid like it), Belichick worked magic with the NFL’s salary cap rules. He proved adept at finding undervalued cast-offs from other teams or convincing good players to take less money for a chance to chase rings, relying on Brady and the coaching staff to make the pieces fit. He also made savvy, if sometimes gut-wrenching, decisions to cut or trade well-liked or productive players in order to save money.

No one, not even Brady was truly safe, from Belichick’s scrutiny. So when a 42-year-old Brady struggled with a less-talented team than usual in 2019, Belichick let the quarterback sign with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in 2020, instead of trusting Brady could stay productive well into his 40s.

Oops.

Brady immediately won a Super Bowl with the Bucs while Belichick’s Patriots stumbled to their first losing season since he took over the team in 2000.

After an aimless 2020 season, it looked for a moment like Belichick would start the dynasty back up when he drafted quarterback Mac Jones in 2021 — and immediately got the Patriots back to the postseason. Jones wasn’t Brady, but he was smart, efficient and fit the Patriots system.

Until he didn’t — which is also Belichick’s fault.

Football insiders know the gory details, but in layman’s terms: Belichick’s overconfidence doomed his quarterback. He failed to secure good pass-catchers and blockers to support Jones, and he hired two underqualified yes-men, Matt Patricia and Joe Judge, as his key offensive coaching assistants to nurture the young quarterback. The results were horrible to watch from the very beginning. Mac Jones swiftly went from a promising young player to a broken, unconfident one.

Somehow, the man who drafted and nurtured the greatest quarterback ever to play put on an epic masterclass in how to ruin one.

For years, Belichick has been able get away with anything — an acerbic personality to media, head-scratching personnel decisions, cheating scandals — because his team won year in and year out and all the buttons he pushed seemed to work.

But Brady’s departure revealed just how much rot the quarterback covered up, and how unprepared Belichick was for life without him.

[Belichick's] the star of the team more so than any current player, and he knows it.

If you want to boil down the Patriots’ need to move on from Belichick to one all-encompassing reason, let’s put it this way: Whether you’re a football fan or not, who’s the first non-Tom Brady person you think of when the New England Patriots come up?

The answer is probably going to be Bill Belichick. He’s the star of the team more so than any current player, and he knows it. Teams need great coaches, of course, but they need great players even more. Without them, the “Patriot Way” can’t win games on its own, no matter how much its coach doubles down on it.

Belichick has officially become a relic of a Patriots era that no longer exists and can no longer be recreated — nor should it be.

As Slim Charles tells Bodie Broadus in “The Wire,” when Bodie pines for the “old days” of hustling on the streets of Baltimore: “The thing about the old days [is] … they the old days.”

It’s time for something new. It's time for the New England Patriots to say goodbye to Bill Belichick.

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