It seems crazy to question Bill Belichick’s coaching ability. The consensus among football fans is that he is, if not the greatest NFL coach ever, at least the best of this generation, up there with legends like Vince Lombardi, Tom Landry, and Bill Walsh. But Belichick has now coached ten seasons without Tom Brady as his starting quarterback — not a small sample size at all — and his record in those ten years is 72-85. His teams have had losing records in seven of them, and they missed the playoffs in eight. None of his non-Brady teams have won their division, and the only playoff game he’s won without Brady was on New Year’s Day 1995.
Of course, his reputation relies on the 19 seasons he spent WITH Brady as his quarterback, when he won 17 division titles, made 13 conference championship games, and won six Super Bowls. But in the three years since they separated, Brady has continued to win, and Belichick has not. Brady has not missed the playoffs without Belichick: He’s won a Super Bowl, and two division titles.
Meanwhile, the Patriots have looked decidedly mediocre. This Sunday, they had a chance to sneak into the postseason, and came up short in Buffalo. It wasn’t exactly surprising that they lost: The Bills might be the best team in the NFL, and they were playing with a particular level of emotion in their first game after the devastating injury to Damar Hamlin. But it was surprising HOW New England lost, committing three costly turnovers and giving up two kickoff return touchdowns.
These are things we expect from poorly coached teams, not Belichick teams, which are supposed to have the fundamentals nailed down. But, truthfully, the season’s Patriots have all the hallmarks of a badly coached team: dumb penalties, bad turnovers, awful performance in the red zone, and visible internal conflict. That last one seems to be the result of an anemic and predictable offense, stemming from Belichick’s decision to give play-calling duties to his friend Matt Patricia, even though Patricia has spent his career as primarily a defensive coach.
All this is to say that the Patriots don’t seem disappointing in spite of Belichick — they seem disappointing because of Belichick.
So maybe the conventional wisdom is wrong. Maybe it’s time to accept that Bill Belichick is simply not that good; he was just riding Brady’s coattails for two decades.
People don’t want to accept this. It seems like an intentionally provocative, extreme point, the kind of thing you’d see debated on First Take to fill time on a Tuesday morning or something. Obviously, the NUANCED and CORRECT opinion is that Belichick and Brady were each crucial to the Patriots dynasty, and that trying to pinpoint precisely who was responsible for what requires very fine-tuned analytical instruments. But I don’t know why it has to be any more complicated than Brady has kept winning without Belichick, while Belichick has failed to win without Brady.
I suspect that this stems from our cultural fascination with the managerial class. As I’ve written before, coaches are part of the professional-managerial class — the PMC — who are incredibly overvalued and overrepresented in our culture.
Bill Belichick in particular embodies so much of the mythos of the PMC. With his trademark hoodies and his taciturn press conferences, he comes across as cerebral, overly dedicated, rigid, strategic, and above all unemotional. The running joke about Belichick is that all he cares about his winning, above his players, family, God, and life itself:
All these attributes constitute the monomaniacal focus on success that make up our picture of “genius.” So when Belichick’s teams succeed, there is a tendency to attribute that success to this idea of genius. We are so accustomed to the cultural image of an uncaring authority figure bending workers to his will, whether it’s Belichick saying “we’re on to Cincinnati” or Steve Jobs’ “reality distortion field” or your annoying new boss telling you he wants everyone to be “high intensity” now. When we see these figures NEAR success, we assume they must be the CAUSE of that success.
But, in reality, it is the workers who do the work, and no amount of assholes in charge can make up for not having good or committed workers. The trappings of genius worn by overseers like Belichick fool us into thinking that workers are like raw clay, there to be molded by some brusque, single-minded visionary. In fact, workers have skills, and it is those skills that produce value.
Which is not to say that there is no role for coaches or managers, or that all managers are equally good. Coaching is obviously important for drawing out the skills of workers, and Belichick deserves credit for the success he had with Tom Brady.*
*Of course, it would also be a mistake to credit the team’s success singularly to Tom Brady. Brady was the one constant from 2001 to 2019, and he was the face of the Patriots dynasty, but he did not succeed alone. The team’s success was also built on Rob Gronkowski and Randy Moss and Lawyer Milloy and Rodney Harrison and Mike Vrabel and literally hundreds of other players.
But it is important to always remember the primacy of workers. We should resist the urge to attribute the success of workers to the manager, or even to default to some platitude like “we can never really know who was most important” or “they’re all equally valuable.” Workers do the work — they are where the value is. Tom Brady could have succeeded without Belichick; we know this because he has succeeded without Belichick. Belichick, on the other hand, has not been able to replicate his success without Brady.
There is an important lesson there. When you hear about a supposed “genius” manager, you are most likely hearing about labor appropriation. Some boss with an off-putting personality is claiming the skills of his works as his own, insisting that his workers are only successful because of his strategic insight. But this is just an example of management’s role in denigrating labor on behalf of ownership, and we should always and forever be skeptical of this bullshit.