Belichick, Bill

Bill Belichick, byname of William Stephen Belichick, (born April 16, 1952, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.), American professional gridiron football coach who led the New England Patriots of the National Football League (NFL) to six Super Bowl titles (2002, 2004, 2005, 2015, 2017, and 2019), the most for an NFL head coach.

Belichick’s father was an assistant collegiate football coach, primarily at the United States Naval Academy, who taught his son the finer points of the sport from an early age. The young Belichick attended team meetings and film sessions and knew how to diagram complex plays before he became a teenager. Although possessed of a precocious football intelligence, he was a limited football player who received no interest from top-division colleges and instead played centre and tight end at the smaller Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Upon his graduation in 1975, Belichick was hired as a special assistant for the Baltimore Colts.

He moved on to assistant-coaching positions with the Detroit Lions and the Denver Broncos before joining the coaching staff of the New York Giants in 1979. He served as special-teams coach and then linebackers coach before being promoted to defensive coordinator by head coach Bill Parcells in 1985. Capitalizing on the presence of future Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor, Belichick developed one of the NFL’s most dominant defenses of the 1980s. In four of his six seasons as coordinator, his Giants defenses ranked in the top five of the NFL in yards and points allowed and were integral to the team’s two Super Bowl victories (1987, 1991) during that span. As a result of his success with the Giants, Belichick was named the head coach of the Cleveland Browns in 1991.

After leading the Browns to just one winning season in five years as head coach, Belichick was fired shortly before the franchise relocated to Baltimore and became the Ravens. He then served as a defensive assistant and assistant head coach for Parcells with the Patriots (1996) and the New York Jets (1997–99). Upon Parcells’s retirement from coaching at the end of the 1999 season, Belichick was promoted to the Jets’ head coach, but he resigned after just one day at the job—rather notoriously doing so by writing “I resign as HC of the NYJ” on a piece of paper shortly before taking the podium at a press conference and announcing his departure—citing discomfort with coaching a team that was up for sale. He instead became the Patriots’ head coach less than a month later.

After posting a 5–11 record in his first season in New England, Belichick saw his team lose the first two games of the 2001 season as well as starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe to a season-ending injury. He then turned to little-used second-year quarterback Tom Brady, who proceeded to lead the Patriots to a 11–3 finish and an improbable postseason run that resulted in the team’s first Super Bowl title. That championship marked the beginning of a New England dynasty, in which the Patriots compiled consecutive 14–2 records in the 2003 and 2004 regular seasons, each of which ended in a Super Bowl title.

Although he did not serve as the Patriots’ general manager, Belichick was one of the franchise’s main personnel decision makers. He established a pattern of making smart, unconventional football moves and fielding teams made up of overlooked and lightly regarded players that would thrive in his system, such as Brady, who had been a sixth-round draft pick. In 2007, behind the record-setting play of Brady and wide receiver Randy Moss (who was cannily acquired before the season in a trade for a fourth-round draft pick), the Patriots became the first team in NFL history to go undefeated during a 16-game regular season. However, the team’s unprecedented run ended in an upset loss to the Giants in the Super Bowl. The team’s accomplishments that year were also somewhat overshadowed by a scandal that came to be known as “Spygate.” During the season-opening win over the Jets, a member of the Patriots’ staff was caught with illegal videotapes that showed the Jets’ sideline signaling. That discovery resulted in an unprecedented $500,000 fine for Belichick, the forfeiture of New England’s 2008 first-round draft pick, and questioning in the media and around the league of Belichick’s coaching ethics.

Belichick rebuilt most of the Patriots’ roster over the course of the following four years, and New England remained one of the premier teams in the NFL. Following the 2011 season, the team returned to the Super Bowl but again lost to the Giants. The Patriots advanced to the AFC championship game in each of the following three seasons, losing the first two contests before defeating the Indianapolis Colts following the 2014 season to advance to the sixth Super Bowl of the Belichick era.

However, that victory soon became another source of controversy for Belichick, as the Patriots were caught using deflated balls in the contest. The NFL found that 11 of the 12 balls that the Patriots had used in the game (opposing offenses use different sets of balls in NFL games) were significantly underinflated, which can make the balls easier to grip and travel farther when thrown. The NFL launched an investigation, but no action was taken before the Super Bowl, where the Patriots rallied from a 10-point fourth-quarter deficit to defeat the Seattle Seahawks 28–24 and win a fourth championship. The NFL finished its investigation into the deflation incident in May 2015, and Belichick was cleared of any explicit wrongdoing. However, Brady was suspended for four games of the 2015 season (which, after the appeals process ended, was served during the 2016 season), and the Patriots were fined and stripped of two upcoming draft picks for violating playing rules and not fully cooperating with the investigation.

On the field, the Patriots continued their dominant play under Belichick. New England again advanced to the AFC championship after the 2015 season (where they lost to the Denver Broncos), and in 2016 the team went an NFL-best 14–2 and cruised through the AFC playoffs en route to another Super Bowl berth. There the Patriots engineered the largest comeback in Super Bowl history, overcoming a 25-point third-quarter deficit to the Atlanta Falcons in overtime to win a fifth title, giving Belichick the most Super Bowl championships for an NFL head coach. The Patriots won another division title in 2017 and then advanced to the eighth Super Bowl of the Belichick regime. There the Patriots lost a back-and-forth contest to the Philadelphia Eagles to give Belichick his third Super Bowl defeat. Belichick led New England to a 10th straight division title in 2018, and the Patriots won both of their AFC playoff games to reach a third consecutive Super Bowl. In what was the lowest-scoring game in Super Bowl history, the Patriots defeated the Los Angeles Rams, 13–3, and Belichick claimed his sixth title. Led by the top-ranked defense in the league, the Patriots won an 11th straight division title in 2019, but New England lost its first postseason contest.