Football Footnotes: Is this the end for Bill Belichick in New England?
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Two things seem pretty obvious heading into the latest edition of Steelers-Patriots on Thursday night at Acrisure Stadium:
1. There won’t be many points on the scoreboard at the end of the night.
2. No one is going to be confusing this game with any one of the classics involving these two teams between 2001 and 2018.
Nope. Once proud powerbrokers of the AFC for the better part of two decades, neither the Steelers nor Patriots appear to be Super Bowl threats any time soon now that future Hall of Fame quarterbacks Tom Brady and Ben Roethlisberger have faded into retirement.
Now the franchises’ long-time coaches are learning how the other half has lived for the past 15 to 20 years. Mike Tomlin’s Steelers have managed to stay afloat by mastering faux-competitive mediocrity. Meanwhile, Bill Belichick’s Patriots have sunk to last place in the AFC East with a 2-10 record.
While Tomlin is just now finally starting to take a little heat for what has become a six-year stretch without a playoff win, the vultures are gleefully circling around Belichick, waiting to see if this collapse in 2023 will bring his reign in New England to an end after 24 years.
Christopher Price joined me on the “Breakfast With Benz” podcast Wednesday. He covers the Patriots for the Boston Globe. For this week’s “Football Footnotes” (a day early, thanks to the Thursday night game), we talked about what may prove to be the waning days of Belichick’s tenure in Foxborough.
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• Price sees a decisive point looming at the end of the season between Belichick and Patriots owner Robert Kraft. If Belichick isn’t willing to relinquish personnel duties and embrace working with someone in the role of a general manager, Price sees that as potentially being what ends Belichick’s time at Gillette Stadium.
“There’s a lot of talk up here, ‘Is this Belichick’s last season? What’s going to be his future with the franchise?’ I don’t think Robert Kraft wants to fire him. But I do think Kraft is gonna bring him into his office at the end of the year and say, ‘Look, you need a GM.’ And if Bill says, ‘I don’t want a GM,’ then I think that’s the first conversation in a series of longer conversations that ends with him leaving the franchise. If they bring in a GM, and Bill agrees to work with him, I think there’s an opportunity for Bill there going forward.”
• Debates about Belichick’s approach as a general manager have been going on for years — dating back to that gap of time between the end of the franchise’s near-perfect season in 2007 and their eventual fourth Super Bowl Championship in 2014.
The perpetual question always was, “How many shortcomings on the roster was Brady able to overcome just by being Tom Brady?”
But Price says with No. 12 now four years removed from the franchise, those issues are far more pronounced.
“I think he has blind spots at a couple of positions,” Price said. “For whatever reason, he can’t seem to properly judge wide receiver talent. … He swung and missed on almost every single offensive line prospect that he’s either gone after in free agency or the draft the last couple of years. And I think that is a major reason why the offensive line has struggled.”
Then, of course, there is the big one.
“It all comes back to the fact that they botched the Brady dismount after he left. Whether you’re signing Cam Newton late, drafting Mac Jones, Bailey Zappe — how he’s handled that this year. ‘Bill the GM’ still does really well on the defensive side of the ball. ‘Bill the GM’ does not do so well with a lot of positions on the offensive side of the ball,” Price said.
• Price also says some erosion on the coaching staff around Belichick has played a role in the franchise’s decline.
“This organization has suffered some brain drain in the last few years. And we aren’t just talking about (former offensive coordinator) Josh McDaniels. But guys that Belichick really trusted to get his position players to play the way he wants them to play have left the organization — whether it was running backs coach Ivan Fears, or offensive line coach Dante Scarnecchia. That impacts on the offensive side of the ball,” Price said.
• If Belichick does leave New England, Price doesn’t see the 71-year-old retiring so close to surpassing Don Shula for the all-time NFL coaching wins record. The late Miami Dolphins and Baltimore Colts icon retired with 347 victories (including playoffs). Belichick has 331.
“Football history matters a lot to him,” Price said. “And I also think he’s driven to surpass Shula because of Shula’s comments in the wake of Spygate. Shula was not very complimentary, and (Belichick) was a kid growing up in eastern Maryland. He worshiped at the altar of Don Shula. Shula was everything. For him to say that, I think the approach now with (Belichick) is that, ‘Look, if I can’t wipe you off the record books with the perfect season (18-1 in 2007), I’m gonna push you down to No. 2 on the all-time wins list.”
• So what happens with Belichick in January when the Patriots season is over? I asked Price to give me his best prediction.
“I think if he accepts a GM, he’s coaching in New England. But I think if he does not accept a GM, he’s coaching somewhere else. I think that he is driven by the idea of breaking Don Shula’s all-time wins record, and he’s gonna get it wherever he can.
“If he was on the market right now, as a free agent, I think that there’s no less than 10 teams that would line up to sign him as a head coach. It’s gonna be fascinating to see what he does this offseason and how the Patriots try and go about building it all back together again.”
Also, in the podcast, Price and I discuss Thursday night’s game, the Patriots’ historic offensive problems, their surprisingly effective defense, and the mood surrounding the Patriots in New England as they are facing NFL struggles that the region hasn’t seen for more than 20 years.