Well, it is finally, officially over. After roughly a year of speculation, Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots have parted ways. Belichick, who has been the team’s Head Coach for 24 years, apparently wanted to come back, but owner Robert Kraft felt it was time to move on.
I’ve written about Belichick a lot this past year, so this is probably a little repetitive, but over and over again this week, I keep hearing the same refrain about Belichick’s future: He can still coach. Whenever the subject of what team will hire him for the 2024 season (assuming he doesn’t retire, which he could do although that seems unlikely), people repeat this refrain — He can still coach — as a reminder of why plenty of teams will be eager to have him.
To which I must say…. How do you know? The Patriots have not been good at all the last two seasons. (They weren’t really good in 2021 either, but they snuck into the playoffs thanks to an easy schedule and promptly got blown out.) His record over those seasons is roughly the same as Ron Rivera’s and nobody seems to think Rivera has much of a head coaching future. Why is everyone still convinced that Belichick can still coach when the results have been so bad?
Often, the He can still coach line is used to differentiate Belichick the coach from Belichick the GM. The idea is that Belichick undermined himself by being so bad at drafting and signing talent as head of personnel in New England, and that if he is paired with a real General Manager somewhere else, then he can just focus on coaching, and He can still coach. But even if you grant the hard and fast distinction between evaluating talent and developing talent which this implies… I’m just not sure this is a fair assessment of the issue.
It’s true that the Patriots’ roster has lacked talent the last few years — but the issues with the team go beyond just the roster. Frankly, they play like a poorly coached team: they commit dumb penalties and obvious mental errors; their offensive schemes are predictable and out of date; their players and even the coaches don’t have clear roles and responsibilities. And as for the talent, Belichick the coach ought to receive SOME of the blame: Mac Jones was a first-round pick who won a national championship in college and made the Pro Bowl as a rookie, and this year he lost his starting job to Bailey Zappe. Is that not a failure of coaching?
My sense is that the reason people keep saying He can still coach has to do with Belichick’s class position. It is very normal for a football player to gradually lose the ability to play at an elite level. When Peyton Manning retired, nobody said He can still quarterback. Even when Tom Brady retired last year, and there was a sense that he could have played another year, everyone knew he wasn’t as good as he’d been. A player losing his ability to play is normal.
But we think of coaches differently — we think of them as mental workers, not physical workers, so they don’t age the same way. This is a defining property of the professional class to which coaches belong. Members of this class are generally expected to work as long as they are enjoying the job. They can of course be derailed by serious mental or physical medical problems, but we usually trust them to be the judge of that (to a point that sometimes has serious public policy risks).
But the idea that they can simply lose their ability to do their job because circumstances around them change is not something members of that class are prepared to accept. And yet Belichick shows how true it is. I have spent the last year writing Belichick takedowns, but it’s not as if I am blind to his two-decade run of dominance through the NFL. Obviously he deserves credit for that. But this idea — He can still coach — is treated as an article of faith more than anything. It’s like his coaching ability simply exists within him like his blood type, and cannot ever be changed absent some natural disaster.
It’s no accident that most people saying this are also members of the professional class, like members of the media or football executives. They are also implicated by the idea that professional success depends on your material circumstances, and does not actually emanate from your DNA. It is important to justify unequal material outcomes that those outcomes be deserved — that they come from the deep down inside the individual. But more than that, many PMC members have invested much of their identity in their professional success. They don’t like acknowledging how big of a role is played by random chance and circumstance. Bill Belichick is a Good Coach, that’s his identity, so of course He can still coach.