Ian O’Connor - Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time

Copyright 2018 by Ian OConnor

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: OConnor, Ian, author.

Title: Belichick : the making of the greatest football coach of all time / Ian OConnor.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018017251 (print) | LCCN 2018019659 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544786752 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544785748 (Hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Belichick, Bill. | Football coachesUnited StatesBiography. | New England Patriots (Football team)History. | Kansas City Chiefs (Football team)History. | Atlanta Falcons (Football team)History.

Classification: LCC GV939.B45 (ebook) | LCC GV939.B45 O25 2018 (print) | DDC 796.332092 [B]dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018017251

Cover design by Brian Moore

Cover photograph Maddie Meyer / Getty Images

v1.0918

To my kid sister Rita.

A Giant in life.

A lion in death.

People will long recall September 23, 2001, as a momentous date in National Football League history, and yet for a columnist who had reported from the smoldering 9/11 crime scene that was downtown Manhattan, this was no day to write about what transpired between the New England Patriots and the New York Jets. This was the first NFL Sunday after terrorists had flown hijacked planes into the World Trade Center towers, committing a mass murder of unspeakable depths. Some 60,000 fans had gathered inside Foxboro Stadium for a three-hour reprieve from the horror of it all.

I was standing on the sidelines with colleagues Adrian Wojnarowski and Gary Myers during the games final minutes, and my story for the next mornings newspaper was already set. Joe Andruzzi, a Patriots guard from Staten Island, had three firefighting brothers among the responders at Ground Zero, including Jimmy, who had evacuated one of the doomed towers and, by an estimated 45 seconds, had narrowly escaped the fate that claimed more than 400 firefighters, cops, and EMTs. Dressed in their F.D.N.Y. helmets and coats, the Andruzzi brothers were the honorary game captains, joined on the field by their father, Bill, a former New York City cop.

No, there wasnt a damn thing between the lines or on the scoreboard that could possibly rearrange my sportswriting priorities on this day. Not even the dawning of the greatest coaching career pro football has ever seen.

Bill Belichick would lose this game to the Jets by a 103 count and fall to 0-2 on the season, to 5-13 in his time in New England, and to 41-57 overall as an NFL head coach. Belichick was facing a potential sixth losing season in seven years of running the Patriots and the Cleveland Browns. No matter what he tried, the coach could not temper the growing suspicion that he was just another brilliant coordinator who didnt have the leadership skills and charisma to run his own team like his former boss Bill Parcells had.

But a second-year quarterback named Tom Brady, sixth-round pick, was leading that failed final drive, after the starter, franchise player Drew Bledsoe, had taken a vicious shot from Jets linebacker Mo Lewis. Id never heard a hit like that around any football field on any level; it sounded as if one of the dressed-up militiamen in the end zone had fired off his musket. As Bledsoes backup trotted onto the field in the fourth quarter, looking very Ichabod Craneish, I thought of Bradys underwhelming career at Michigan, of his lack of mobility and athleticism, and of Michigan coach Lloyd Carrs constant (if failed) attempts to replace him with the younger and more dynamic Drew Henson.

More than anything, I thought Bill Belichick was done as a head coach.

Frankly, I wasnt terribly surprised that Belichick found himself in deep trouble a mere 18 games into his Patriots career. Cleveland owner Art Modell had fired him after the 1995 season for his apparent lack of human relations skills as much as anything else, and had advised Patriots owner Robert Kraft that hed be making the biggest mistake of his life by giving him a second chance. In fleeing the Jets after the 1999 season, running from his contractual commitment to succeed Parcells, and reneging on his decision just 24 hours earlier to assume control, Belichick only notarized Modells feelings. He wrote on a piece of paper that he was quitting his position as HC of the NYJ. He handed in his chicken-scratch resignation and then gave his chickenshit reasons for it in the mother of all bizarre New York press conferences.

That public unraveling appeared to confirm the worst fears about Belichickthat he had a losing personality to go along with his losing record. Id written a column saying that Kraft would regret this hire, for reasons beyond the first-round pick he gave the Jets as part of the compensation deal. And in the immediate wake of the 0-2 start in 2001, with the Patriots down and Bledsoe out, that prediction looked as good as gold.

It now stands as commentary more absurd than Belichicks resignation note.

On February 4, 2018, when the Patriots lost Super Bowl LII to the Philadelphia Eagles, Belichicks baffling decision to bench cornerback Malcolm Butler, hero of Super Bowl XLIX, temporarily complicated his legacy. The move angered some Patriots and exacerbated Belichicks increasingly tense relationship with his two best players, Brady and Rob Gronkowski. The Butler move was a damaging unforced error, and suddenly people were back to questioning the depth of the coachs greatness.

But one ill-conceived decision on Americas biggest sports and entertainment stage could not alter Belichicks place among the games enduring icons. Belichick has won more Super Bowls (five) than Hall of Famers Don Shula and Tom Landry combined (four). He has won 28 postseason gameseight more than the next most prolific winner (Landry). Belichick has built and maintained a 17-year dynasty (15 division titles and an average of 12.29 regular-season victories over that period) at a time when the NFL uses the salary cap, the draft, the schedule, and free agency as weapons to prevent franchises from doing just that.

Belichick hasnt just reduced the rest of the AFC East to a perpetual punch line; he has made a mockery of the leagues commitment to parity. Along the way, he has surpassed Vince Lombardi as the best NFL coach of all time.

For me, as a 1982 graduate of St. Cecilia High School, in Englewood, New Jersey, and as a member of the last football team to reach the state finals at that storied school (it closed in 1986), those arent easy words to write. Lombardis first head coaching joband only head coaching job before taking over the Green Bay Packers in 1959was at St. Cecilia, where the Carmelite priests and nuns who lorded over my youth insisted on punctuality, good penmanship, a daily regimen of Our Fathers and Hail Marys, and a lifelong devotion to this one article of football faith: Nobody will ever compare to our own Saint Vincent.

Lombardi won five NFL championships in Green Bay, including the first two Super Bowls, and in 1969, his one and only year in Washington, he led the Redskins to their first winning season since 1955. Had cancer not claimed him at 57, Lombardi likely would have established records that no coach would ever touch.

Some observers view his nine victories in ten postseason games as proof that he still belongs at the top of any historical ranking of coaches, above Belichick, Paul Brown, Papa Bear Halas, Don Shula, Bill Walsh, and Joe Gibbs. But Lombardi ruled a league that offered its players virtually no rights. It was easier back then, through the NFLs restraint of trade, to keep together a powerhouse team.