Sickened by the politics of the NFL, Belichick aims for a college restart

THEY MET EVERY week, Bill Belichick and a handful of his former assistants with the New England Patriots. Matt Patricia, Michael Lombardi, Josh McDaniels, to name a few, men with whom he had won Super Bowls, all of them out of work. They'd chat over Zoom, and go through each NFL game, as they once did in Foxboro, as only they could. Teams. Trends. Salaries. Schematic shifts. Stuff only they knew to look for, questions only they knew to ask, a common language and way of thinking, once the envy of the NFL and beyond, from other sports to business schools, now valued less around the league. The subtext was unspoken, but understood: Which NFL teams might make a coaching change this year? And of those teams, which of them might be interested in a 72-year-old, eight-time Super Bowl champion? And of those teams, which would Belichick want most?

According to sources with direct knowledge, the group deemed that the Chicago Bears were probably the most attractive job, but that team brass was unlikely to consider Belichick. The group expects the same thing that most around the league do: that the Bears will go offense, hoping to give quarterback Caleb Williams a chance at a career, probably targeting Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson.

The New York Jets were a nonstarter; Belichick had issues with owner Woody Johnson back in 2000, before Johnson officially bought the team, and he had been critical this past season in his media roles with Johnson's horrific stewardship. Maybe the Giants, where he had spent the '80s, could work, but Belichick knew that it would be a rebuild, with the New York press at his heals. Plus, he believes the team would do best to retain its current coach, Brian Daboll. Dallas was a potential spot -- nobody can take a collection of talent and turn it into a team like Belichick -- but nobody knew if owner Jerry Jones would move on from Mike McCarthy, and if he did, if he'd want to hand over the team to Belichick. Jacksonville was another potential landing spot, but was it the right one? On his podcast, Lombardi took a shot at Tony Khan, son of owner Shad Khan who for years has run an analytics department emblematic of the problems with the current NFL. Additionally, there wasn't a lot of back-channel communication between anyone close to Belichick and owners; the league and three teams are almost two years into battling a discrimination lawsuit by Brian Flores.

Belichick's feelings toward the NFL have shifted he has told confidants. Look at the past year. Robert Kraft, whose life and legacy was forever altered by Belichick, fired him in January. Only one out of seven teams with openings showed interested in hiring him. The Falcons interviewed him twice, but when it came time for the team's brass to rank choices, Belichick failed to land in anyone's top three candidates -- in part, ESPN later reported, because Kraft helped torpedo his chances. Weeks later in February, "The Dynasty," the Kraft-owned Patriots documentary, launched on Apple and minimized Belichick's role in the team's historic run so roundly that former Patriots players spoke out against it. Belichick was entertaining in his myriad media roles, but the league seemed to move on without him. Owners spoke of him respectfully, but not desirably.

A few months ago, Belichick started to bring up college programs on the Zooms. He was spending a lot of time at Washington, where his son Stephen is in his first year as the Huskies' defensive coordinator. His former offensive coordinator in New England, Bill O'Brien, and longtime assistant, Berj Najarian, are at Boston College. Another former assistant, Joe Judge, served as a senior analyst at Ole Miss.

It reinforced and reaffirmed that there was another option out there. At first, the image of Belichick as a college coach made no sense. It was hard to picture Belichick sitting in a teenager's living room, in a hoodie with jagged sleeves, delivering his recruiting pitch. Nick Saban, one of Belichick's longest and closest friends, had retired from college football in large part because of the transfer portal and NIL. Tom Brady did an impression on television of Belichick last weekend: "Listen, you really wanna come here? We don't really want you anyway. I guess you could come. We'll figure out if you can play."

But something about ending his career by not chasing Don Shula's NFL wins record, but instead on campus, appealed to Belichick. When he agreed to terms with North Carolina, it was not only because of a new challenge after coaching only in the NFL since 1975, at a school where his father, Steve, had worked when Bill was a boy, and not only because his future in the pros was unclear.

It was because, in the words of a confidant, Belichick is "disgusted" in what he believes the NFL had become.

"This is a big f--- you to the NFL," another Belichick confidant says.

BELICHICK HAS ALWAYS cared about football's history, and his place in it. And he has always cared about leading a true football program. Unlike Bill Walsh's philosophy, it was not primarily based on a playbook; indeed, Belichick's schematic ideology is his lack of ideology, tailored and adapted to situation and circumstance. He has always wanted to build a team -- a true team -- despite the cultural and financial forces conspiring against that idea and ideal.

What became known as the Patriot Way was rooted in more than mutual sacrifice and mastery of situational football, ruthless decision-making and Brady's greatness. It was about teaching and education. Only Belichick's Patriots had full-team meetings in which players were quizzed not only on the opponent's statistics and playmakers, but the résumés of all of the assistant coaches. It was a football laboratory, augmented by some of the greatest players in NFL history.

Belichick was raised on campuses and has loved helping shape young minds. In April 2006, I watched him deliver the annual Fusco Distinguished Lecture at Southern Connecticut State University, on a stage that had also featured Colin Powell, Madeleine Albright and Christopher Reeve, among others. Like many, I worried that it would be a two-hour version of his news conferences. But he was in his element, relaxed and energized, speaking to students as they prepared to enter the real world. He told them to chase not money, but a job that was a continuation of a passion. One of the proudest moments of his life was when he passed on a career in finance and moved to Baltimore to do whatever the Colts asked of him.

When Belichick was fired by Kraft, despite it initially being presented as a mutual parting -- Kraft later cited trust and an eagerness to reclaim organizational power as factors -- he knew that his next job was not going to resemble the one he'd held for more than two decades. The NFL had moved away from the coach-centric model that Belichick learned under Bill Parcells. There are more layers now. Belichick insisted to the Falcons and made clear to other teams with openings last year that he wasn't seeking the total control of football operations he enjoyed for most of his head coaching career, both in Cleveland and in New England. He was willing to work with existing staff, whether it was Falcons general manager Terry Fontenot or Commanders general manager Adam Peters or Jerry Jones or Howie Roseman, if the Cowboys or Eagles, respectively, had decided to change coaches.

But something about it was always hard to buy -- and owners didn't. It wasn't that Belichick was disingenuous or too set in his ways; it was that if you hire Belichick, you hire him to do it his way. Belichick's system is him, from his player procurement program to contract incentives to the types of players he drafts. Because so much flowed out of his mind and because he almost always was the ultimate decision-maker, the Patriots were able to withstand the losses of key players and coaches -- everyone except Brady. How would Belichick, who ran a thin operation in New England, without many layers, handle running a team with a huge infrastructure? Was Belichick, who has had his share of player-evaluation whiffs but has also drafted the greatest quarterback and tight end ever, along with Hall of Fame defensive tackle Richard Seymour and several others who will join him in Canton, really going to abide by the philosophies of someone like Fontenot or Bears general manager Ryan Pace, if Chicago had hired Belichick after this year?

"Listening to Fontenot discuss drafting systems last January, as if he knew it all, bothered him," a Belichick confidant says.

All of those things were on his mind this fall. He told confidants that Shula's record mattered to him, but it wasn't the essential thing. It wasn't why he has worked hours that have come with a steep personal price. He has always competed as if his self-worth was tied to the result. Losses took on a life of their own. Imagine the throttled rage inside him all spring after a group of men who routinely botch their most important hire not only mostly ignored him but gloated about it, telling ESPN that he was "voted off the island." He never forgets. Belichick knew that he'd have to compromise if he got another NFL job, maybe even more than the year before, and also knew that he faced a league that was skeptical of him.

If he didn't fix his new team right away, he'd be dealing with a media narrative for the third straight year in coaching that he'd lost his fastball. College coaches have many headaches -- they essentially re-recruit their players daily -- but Belichick came to believe that he'd have the space to run his program, winning or losing on his terms, all he has ever asked for. He'll have what he had in New England: He'll be the football czar. He knows there are politics, the way there are politics in the NFL, and challenges to building a team, but they feel manageable and worth the risk.

Says a source with knowledge of his thinking: "I'll go be the highest draw in college football, and will have the greatest coach in the ACC, instead of you guys who don't want [him] anymore because there are people who don't deserve to be empowered. ... Everyone is running away from college football. I think Bill thinks this landscape is better for him. ... More transactional and less relational. In his mind, this is better for me."

Maybe the signs were there a month ago, when Belichick told "The Pat McAfee Show" of the horror stories of answering asinine questions from owners. He told a confidant within the past week that he's "tired of the stupidness" of the NFL. Unlike Brady, Belichick has always embraced his darker side, with actions more often than words, and made no secret of his grievances. He turned the postgame handshake into a spectator sport. He seethed at the piousness around the league after Spygate. After Deflategate, he walked out of a league meeting when commissioner Roger Goodell spoke. And then, after his unquestioned greatness was suddenly questioned and became talk-show fodder for two years -- How good is he without Brady? -- he watched owners display abject indifference to his services. "He's disgusted," a confidant says.

If we've learned anything about Belichick over the years, it's that he'll often do the unconventional thing -- and that when at a crossroads, he will take control of his career.

TWO DECADES AGO, legendary journalist David Halberstam wanted to write a book about Belichick. They knew each other casually. Belichick respected Halberstam but initially was cool to the idea; it would go against every fiber of his being if he turned the spotlight on himself. Halberstam rethought the pitch and gave it another shot: "I suggested that there might be a book in the education of a coach, especially since the most important teacher in his life was his father, Steve -- a coach's coach," Halberstam later wrote. "It was an idea that interested him, and eventually he agreed to cooperate." After Belichick had become the first coach to win three Super Bowls in four years, Halberstam spent more time with him than any reporter to that point, working on what would be an authorized biography. Later in 2005, "The Education of a Coach" was published. Halberstam hit the media circuit, promoting the book, and on a Boston radio show, he was asked, "Will [Belichick] ever get sick of this?"

At the time, Belichick was 53 years old. He had yet to be busted for Spygate. He had yet to coach a team to within a minute of an undefeated season. Had yet to tell a documentarian that he'd never coach into his 70s, then blow past it, knowing deep inside that he needed the game more than it needed him. He had yet to draft Rob Gronkowski, Julian Edelman, Devin McCourty, Matthew Slater, and Dont'a Hightower, had yet to win 11 games with Matt Cassel, had yet to deploy the "Baltimore" and "Raven" formations, had yet to pass Deflategate into Brady's lap, had yet to send Malcolm Butler into the final seconds of Super Bowl XLIX, had yet to look up at a Super Bowl LI scoreboard that read 28-3, had yet to curtail access for Alex Guerrero, had yet to be called the "biggest f---ing a--hole in my life" by Kraft, and had yet to win a sixth Super Bowl. He had yet to watch his daughter, Amanda, coach lacrosse at Holy Cross, had yet to watch Stephen coach at Washington.

"He's really a coach and a teacher," Halberstam told the hosts. "I mean, you could almost see him, when this is done, saying, OK, I've ... you know, if he's done it and won X rings, saying OK, I'm going to go and teach at an Ivy League school or something like that. I'm going to do something smaller, without as much pressure."

And without the NFL, which he left before it could leave him. Again.

Seth Wickersham is a Senior Writer at ESPN. His next book, "American Kings: A Biography of the Quarterback," published by Disney Publishing's Hyperion Avenue, is available for preorder now.