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Are you trying to pretend Brady didn't give Bill a significant advantage over his peers?
What you've proven is that Belichick is an elite defensive mind. What you haven't proven is that he's actually a good HC. Paired with the GOAT QB, his defenses won them Super Bowls. Without the GOAT QB he's a losing HC with an elite defense.
Belichick is a great coach, but he's not a take vendor. Since he spent his entire career treating the take writers with disdain, he shouldn't be shocked these same people aren't being overly charitable to him now. That's just common sense.
Personally he seems like a pretty miserable dude, and as a hater of nepotism I'm really enjoying watching his sons fail.
People acting like the only stat that matters is Bills record without Brady is the coaching equivalent of the Mahomes “if you arbitrarily ignore his good stats he’s actually average”.
Bill took Matt Cassell to an 11 win season. Matt Cassell.
Reality is they kept pushing back the cap and bad contracts while Brady was there and it took time to clean that up. He whiffed on the QB which is killing him. Wouldn’t be shocked if he trades or signs a vet QB. Shit might see DJ there next year
My issue with Belichick isn't that he can command a great defense. It's more on the personnel side. He needs a GM who is a better drafter and who will challenge Belichick when he wants to draft a 4-5 round player in the first, for example. And not let him have his dog on camera during draft day.
“Bill wasn’t good it was the players that he brought in and coached that were good”
I swear well be getting unironic “bill didn’t score a single TD. He did nothing” takes by the offseason
I think that the Patriots should keep him until he dies. It will help the rest of the league.
System QB narrative has flipped lol.
"Is he good, or is he a system HC?"
I think most of the slander comes from his extremely outdated and conservative doing as a GM
one poor season
*seven poor seasons
Bill really is an all time great, but I think he needs to finally hand the GM position off to someone else. He built a legacy, but the offense has only gotten worse every year for Mac Jones since his rookie season.
While Bill is great with defense, his lack of offensive tactics or talent to mask his weakness of offense has been bland and mediocre. He can still work with a GM on getting defensive players but someone else needs to draft/scout for the offense.
Bb is a good coach no doubts about that. But his record is 81-94 without Brady. That sample size is large enough to say he’s good not great and Brady did make him
The slander is very deserved. He’s an absolutely below average GM but insists on holding onto that power. It’s his own doing, but I agree it doesn’t discredit his work as a HC and especially as a GOAT DC.
From a coaching perspective, spectacular, From a talent scouting standpoint, I think he should have gotten help a long time ago.
Reason being, he is constantly drafting these random players past the consensus talent evaluation that not only the general viewing public with little to no organized football experience, but also active NFL GMs and Scouts. I think with the talent of other teams he could still be making the playoffs year after year. But with the departure of Brady they don't get the proven free agent recruits they used to, and they just don't draft at the same level as other teams.
I just have to roll my eyes when I see people say it was all Brady. Those first three super bowls are all Bill, elite defense, elite special teams. There's a lot of Josh McDaniels slander too given his accomplishments.
Bruh Belicheck is just waiting ominously for an opportunity to show how much more tricks he has in the bag.
One poor season in 23 years
I'm so confused..
The Pats were 3rd in their division in 2020 and 2022, and then made the playoffs by the skin of their teeth in 2021 (where they were blown out by the Bills).
Every season without Brady has been poor, that's the whole point.
Where are you getting "one poor season" from?
Bill is the GOAT, end of discussion.
He's a great defensive coach and is a lock for the hall, but if the question is does he deserve to be called the greatest ever on his own merit I think it's fair to disagree. He had the best quarterback ever for the lions share of his big success
If Bill was just an average coach despite having many years with a hall of fame QB he’d be….Mike McCarthy.
Agreed. People have gone waaay too far with the Belichick disrespect.
The fact of the matter is that very few coaches in NFL history can win SBs without franchise level QBs. On the other hand..even legendary QBs generally need great Coaches to win SBs.
Football is a team sport. As much as we like to boil it down to a singular factor, it's not tlike that.
Both BB and TB12 are GOATs and being together helped each other reach that status..none of them would be as successful without the other.
IMO, the greatest defensive performance by ANY team in NFL history was that 2004 AFC Divisional rd game where the Pats held the record setting Colts offense to just 3 Pts.
I remember Manning having barely any time to throw in that game and the WRs were covered when he did have any time to pass
Belichick is a great coach but the question is he the GOAT head coach and the jury is still out on that. Other head coaches have had great success with multiple qbs. Bill hasn’t had that yet. Bill still has time though.
Agreed the disrespect is genuinely baffling to me, you don’t see anything like this with pop during the spurs recent bad years for example. Idk wtf is going on
has gone*. Please.
Tbh.. a very good qb makes those around him better. So if you stack the D .. where the qb cannot make the D better you have a great team. Brady doesn’t win as many games without the top ranked D he had because it’s hard to win shoot outs week in and week out. Ex: pat mahomes right now with a top ranked D or burrow with a top ranked D are such terrifying teams. Ravens also. Because they have a QB that can make the players around him on O better. Those are the kinda teams that maintain success.
Bill is an Average coach borderline one of those people who are meant to be coordinators and not head coaches. He just happened to luck into Brady and has been coasting since dude can't coach a full team to save his life.
I would hope he could put together some good defences when he gave Brady the junk he found on his balcony for offensive tools. Everyone talks up mahomes and rightfully so but let’s not pretend he didn’t have weapons Brady could only dream of in his 2 decade+ career.
BB is still a good coach, but BB as a GM, not so much.
Without Brady, BB would have been a prolific DC. The Monte Kiffen of the modern era.
I'm sorry but when he's comfortably under .500 in his career without the greatest QB of all time, both before and after, I think the skepticism is warranted.
We all wanted the natural experiment of what they'd each be like without each other, and the results are pretty striking.
when you realize that /r/nfl is filled with 14 year olds, things start making a lot more sense.
I think I would maybe try hiring a GM first and let BB focus purely on coaching. His drafting isn't exactly amazing, and he hasn't hit on a ton of really good FAs lately. It's clear that his coaching isn't the problem, in my opinion.
People are slandering BB? He was coaching the 86 and 90 Giants defense two of the best all time and that was almost 40 years ago
His GM skills are criminally underrated, right now. Attaining success is hard enough but maintaining it when you’re typically drafting your 1st pick in the 28-32 range every year really hasn’t been done. He has a knack for finding diamonds in the rough farther down the draft board.
Revisionism is thinking he’s had one poor season in 23 years
I think most Pats fans (including myself) realize the contributions he’s given to the franchise, and we probably don’t win 6 super bowls without him, but the slander is more so geared towards the arrogance he’s illustrated as a GM and to a lesser extent as a coach (ex: Malcom Butler Super Bowl benching). I’ll forever be grateful for him, as I’ve been here since the beginning, but it’s time to start fresh because this was inevitable with some of the moves he’s made the past 4-5 years.
Every sports memory I could possibly dream up actually happened in my lifetime because of a team coached by this guy. It’s not going well right now but I think I forgot about 2001 to 2018 is insane
One of BB"s best coaching jobs was coaxing a team with the corpse of Cam Newton at QB to a 7-9 record.
It isn’t easy in this league to escape from 8-8 hell without a franchise QB.
Hell, it's not that easy to escape 9-8/8-9 hell even with a franchise QB gestures at flair
Bill and Tom were just a perfect pair. Brady would win with any good coach and team for sure. But you can’t have 6 super bowls over 20 years and be a bad coach
People are legitimately stupid as fuck and cannot even comprehend the simple reality that coaches have primes and shelf lives too. Belichick is fucking 71 years old. Do you people not interact with your families? Go talk to a 70+ year old family member, you will have to start explaining shit real slow and a little louder than usual.
You don’t even have to be a grandpa like that. Look at Mike McCarthy. One of the top elite coaches in the early 2010s and seemingly overnight he turned into a dumb fat moron and never got better.
Coaches can only be good for so long, eventually the juice runs out just like a player.
I don't think anybody doubts that Bill Belichick is a brilliant defensive coach. And his culture of business first just worked so perfectly with Tom Brady being a psycho who put football over literally everything else in his life.
But it never really seen a Bradyless Bill Belichick really put it together on offense..
What I will say is this. The argument that he's so legendary and brought them six Super Bowls and they should give him extra leeway because of that. I just don't think that holds any water. Nobody gets to coast in the nfl. Nobody. NADA no one. You do not get to coast in the NFL.
They can't keep Bill Belichick around for two more seasons so that he can squeeze out the record for wins. If they really want it so bad they can give him one more year. And he either starts adding a significant number of wins to the amount he has left to match the record or he's gone
Tomlin lost Roethlisberger and he's still cruising to an above 500 season like he's done his entire career. If Bill can't do the same he doesn't deserve a job
NFL reddit having terrible takes is nothing new, but calling Bill Belichick a bad coach is clown shit for sure. He's such a good coach that he made other teams think Patricia and McDaniels were worth head coach positions.
And he was the GM!!! People forget that.
Brady is the luckiest an of all time.
People really forget those early championships with Brady. While he was still a good quarterback, he definitely wasn't the greatest. He was able to win a lot of games thanks to great defense and special teams. Really it wasn't until the Moss year that he had an elite offense.
The initial wave of "Belichick needed Brady more than Brady needed Belichick" always seemed to me like a playfully exaggerated response to the ridiculous "Brady was a system QB" narrative.
But the fact that people are now taking it seriously and acting like Brady carried Belichick with raw talent despite being a 6th rounder that Bill developed is insane lmao. They're the best collaboration in NFL history and needed each other
People in here have very short term memories. However a team or player is playing this year is how they have always been.
Bill has always been a slightly above average head coach who lucked into a few more super bowls than he deserved. He isn't an awful coach or anything, but he's also nowhere near one of the best.
This is a fair and correct assessment.