Don’t worry, everyone. Bill Belichick didn’t really mean it!
By “it,” I mean the four-word answer he offered at the NFL owners meeting this week as to why fans should be optimistic about the team’s future: “The last 25 years.”
In a follow-up conversation with the Boston Globe’s Jim McBride at LSU’s Pro Day on Wednesday, Belichick made sure to clarify a couple of things.
“We’re not resting on our past laurels; that’s not the message to the team or the fans,” Belichick said, via McBride. “We have never operated that way and aren’t now.
“I think we’ve been pretty competitive every year that I’ve been here with the Patriots. That’s our overall plan,” he added. “So, I expect it to continue that way. I think the team has been managed pretty well over the last 20-however-many years. So, I think we’ll continue managing it the way we’ve been competitive every year. I expect we’ll continue to be competitive.”
At some point, it must have gotten back to Belichick’s ears that people were accusing him of having a double standard or diminishing the team’s expectations: preaching a culture of going above and beyond for his players while dogging it from a coaching/roster-construction perspective.
The real message reads more like this: “We know how to win, everybody. Trust us.”
If only it were still that simple.
Of course, any suggestion that Belichick is “fine” with his six Super Bowl rings and isn’t sufficiently interested in competing for more titles is utter nonsense. The day Belichick doesn’t care about winning football games anymore is the day he hangs the headset up for good.
But he proved his capacity for being untrustworthy last year with his handling of the offensive coaching staff. Even if he did what he did with Matt Patricia and Joe Judge because he knew he couldn’t get Bill O’Brien until next year, Nick Caley or Troy Brown was sitting right there for you to use as well — guys who’d actually coached offense before.
But hey, why not? Any coach worth his salt can coach any position, right? That’s how we’ve done it for the last 25 years, after all.
Then, you pan out and see that the last four years haven’t yielded a playoff win for various reasons: expecting Tom Brady to be Superman with a busted supporting cast (2019); the Cam Newton/let’s-tank-without-tanking year (2020); building a high-floor/limited-ceiling roster and watching it get folded down the stretch (2021); and trotting that same roster out there in 2022 with doofuses running the offense.
The last 25 years of the New England Patriots are still overwhelmingly defined by success. You can’t discount that. But Belichick has yet to prove he can recreate the conditions that led to said success with Mac Jones or another quarterback at the helm.
As much as complementary football helped out the Patriots in position to win those first few titles, especially, empowering their quarterback to grow and in turn lift up his team when it mattered most was an indispensable part of those wins.
Do you think Mac Jones feels empowered by what the Patriots have done with him so far?
Ultimately, a lot of the talking points surrounding the team — “Does Bill Belichick even care about titles anymore?” and “Should we blame him or Robert Kraft more for not making every single high-priced, Madden-level move we think we should make?” — are pointless.
But there’s no denying that Belichick has squandered the capital needed make a comment like “the last 25 years” even in passing.
The NFL is all about “what have you done for me lately,” and Belichick has operated that way for his entire tenure in New England. He claims he still does — and I believe him. He and Kraft identified the biggest issue with last years team (offensive coordinator) and moved swiftly to fix it by hiring Bill O’Brien, who should get more out of Jones.
But the work isn’t close to done, and this team still isn’t near competing with the best of the division or conference. What Belichick does about that between now and training camp — and what that approach yields — could determine whether or not the goodwill he built up over two-plus decades is put to the test.
