It sounds like one of those chicken/egg things: Who means more to the Patriots — Tom Brady or Bill Belichick? But this is no stumper because we know the answer. In 2008, Brady hurt his knee in the season opener; with Matt Cassel as quarterback, New England still finished 11-5.
If we’d forgotten that, we were just given a refresher course. Owing to Brady’s deferred Deflategate suspension, Jimmy Garoppolo started this season’s first two games. The Patriots won both. Garoppolo hurt his shoulder. Jacoby Brissett, a rookie from North Carolina State, started against Miami in Week 3. The Pats won 27-0. Only in Week 4 (Brissett again) did New England lose, but only after playing .750 ball with its No. 2 and 3 quarterbacks. Nobody else does that.
It was said of Bear Bryant that he could take his'n and beat your'n and take your'n and beat his'n. Belichick has proved he can take Brady and beat you, but every so often he reminds us that he can, just for grins, beat you without him. (Not that Belichick is a grinner. After the 2013 regular season, Geoff Foster of the Wall Street Journal reviewed 114.5 minutes of postgame briefings and found that Belichick smiled seven times. He laughed once. This while going 12-4.)
As the Falcons prepare for the Super Bowl, there are Patriot names to know — Brady, duh, and Edelman and Butler and McCourty and Hightower and even Hogan — but there’s only one name that matters. It’s tempting to call Belichick the elephant in every room, but elephants tend to be obvious. Even in plain sight, Belichick is a stealth behemoth.
We don’t know how much money he makes from coaching the Patriots. We don’t know how long his contract runs. As much as we parse his public utterances for meaning, we find next to nothing therein. Not since Calvin Coolidge has an American been so famous for saying so little. Really, though, what’s to say? He’s the greatest coach in the history of professional football. On to Cincinnati, to cite a noted Belichick brush-off and end of discussion.
Vince Lombardi won five titles — three NFL championships, then two Super Bowls — but needed only nine playoff wins to do it. If you add the postseason victories for Lombardi and Chuck Noll, who’s the only coach besides Belichick to win four Super Bowls, you get 25. Belichick has 25 by himself. Lombardi took his five titles over seven seasons; Noll took his four over six. Belichick’s first came in the 2001 season; his fourth came 13 years later.
In an NFL where free agency and a hard salary cap undo teams with dynastic ambitions, the Patriots stand alone. They’ve won at least 10 games 15 of the past 16 seasons. (They were 9-7 in 2002.) They’ve won at least 12 games seven years running. Their last losing season was in 2000, when Dan Reeves was coaching the Falcons.
Because Belichick acts as general manager, he always gets what he wants. The Pats discard key parts with great force. Safety Lawyer Milloy, a pillar of Belichick’s first Super Bowl team, was cut five days before the 2003 opener; the Pats won the title again that season and also the next. They hire guys other teams won’t touch: Randy Moss was the leading receiver on the 18-1 team of 2007 that came within a helmet catch of going undefeated; LeGarrette Blount is the leading rusher on this Pats edition.
(OK, so sometimes the Pats err. Aaron Hernandez, once part of a tight end tandem with Rob Gronkowski, is serving a life sentence for murder.)
The two games that made Belichick’s reputation were Super Bowl takedowns of raging offenses — the 1991 upset of the fast-break Buffalo Bills when he was Bill Parcells’ defensive coordinator for the Giants and the 2002 shocker against the Greatest Show on Turf Rams. Those will stand forever as triumphs of coaching over skill, which is essentially the Belichick Method. He doesn’t care about amassing combine-dazzling talent. To use his words: He’s concerned with building a team, which isn’t quite the same thing.
Because his Patriots were penalized for Spygate (taping the Jets’ sideline signals) and then Deflategate, the suspicion lingers that the grump is also a cheat. The Boston Herald alleged that the Patriots also taped the Rams’ Super Bowl Eve walkthrough, a report the newspaper later admitted had been unfounded. Still, the cloak of mystery in which the Pats wrap themselves has made us wonder that the great coach is a malign force. Whatever he is, he’s the best there is at what he does.
It’s no coincidence that his collegiate counterpoint spent four seasons as Belichick’s defensive coordinator with the Cleveland Browns. Nick Saban has described those years as “the worst of my life,” which tells us everything: If you’re more manic in the pursuit of victory than King Crimson, you win the prize.
This happy season has seen the Falcons surmount massive hurdles — Oakland there, Denver there, Seattle in the playoffs, Drew Brees twice, Cam Newton twice, Aaron Rodgers twice. Comes now the ultimate test — Belichick with two weeks to scheme. We know he won’t while away the time on “SnapFace,” his sneering label for social media. We know he’ll think of something.
But these Falcons are no dummies. Maybe they’ll conjure up another helmet catch. Belichick doesn’t win every single time. Just, over the past 16 seasons, 76.1 percent of the time.
