Bill Belichick was the trendsetter. Now he’s not.

Bill Belichick was the trendsetter. Now he’s not.

GuyWhoLikesSport

The New England Patriots are the worst team in the NFL in 2023.

They will make their very high first-round pick with a new man in charge.

The above passage is true.

Bill Belichick was ahead of the NFL for 30 consecutive years and set innumerable trends that define the modern game.

He is the greatest coach in the history of the NFL.

The above passage is also true.

The effort to discredit Belichick’s past achievements as being down just to Tom Brady’s specific greatness is absurd.

What you see today is not what was always the case, history happened.

The present does not wash away the past.

To make the point, let’s do a potted history of Belichick’s greatness.

I’m going to start in 1986, Belichick’s first Super Bowl as a high-ranking assistant, and go through to the present day, including all eight of his Super Bowl victories as a head coach or coordinator as well as his other innovations.

In 1986 Belichick was the defensive coordinator of the New York Giants.

He held the John Elway-led Broncos, the best offence in the NFL that year, to only 20 points in the game, the Giants held the Broncos to two net yards in the third quarter.

Giants win.

In 1990, still with the Giants, Belichick played Jim Kelly and the K-Gun Buffalo Bills, the most explosive passing game in league history up until that point.

What did Belichick do? He let them run the ball.

He devised a plan that had very few down linemen and populated the field almost entirely with defensive backs and the Bills only scored 19 points.

Giants win.

His game plan is in the Hall of Fame.

In 2000, Belichick goes to New England to be their head coach.

In 2001 they won their first Super Bowl, in 2003 they won their second and in 2004 they won their third.

The most interesting game plan from Belichick was in his first Super Bowl.

The Patriots played the St Louis Rams, nicknamed “The Greatest Show on Turf” and had the best offence of all time at that point.

That game plan was called the “bullseye” game plan.

Belichick’s defence was a hybrid defence full of versatile, athletic role players.

Virtually the entire second and third levels were smart and versatile, equally capable of covering and rushing.

Why was it called “bullseye”? Because they hit. Hard.

Belichick created pressure constantly, they mugged receivers at the line of scrimmage and hit them whether they caught the ball or not.

Every time Marshall Faulk went out for a passing route, the Patriots decked him.

Belichick’s philosophy was that they can’t flag everything.

The Rams were rattled.

Patriots win.

The Pats won their second and third Super Bowls differently, but what set the Patriots apart in the early years was their understanding of situations.

Belichick was the first coach to perfect the art of “situational football” where a team plays differently depending on clock, down and distance.

The Patriots won because they were better and smarter.

Let’s fast forward to the 2007 offseason.

The Patriots have just lost the AFC Championship game to the Colts with a receivers group led by Troy Brown and Reche Caldwell.

Belichick knew he had to get more explosive in the passing game, so he looked at college for guidance.

He sent his offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels to learn the “Air-Raid” offence.

Knowing that he was about to spread the field out, Belichick traded for star receiver Randy Moss and future star Wes Welker.

McDaniels brought his lessons with him and the Patriots proceeded to put up the greatest offensive season in league history.

They burned the league down.

After 2007, everyone copied the Patriots. The league got more spread out, faster. Offence became run and shoot.

In 2010, Belichick zagged again, He traded Randy Moss and drafted Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez in the second and fourth round, respectively.

While defences are defending the boundary, the Patriots got more condensed with Hernandez, Gronkowski and Welker dominating over the middle of the field.

That offence was almost as dominant in 2011 out of the lockout and overcame the league’s worst defence to go to another Super Bowl.

Even though they lost the Super Bowl in 2007 and 2011 but the imprint of those offences remains prominent in the NFL, even more than a decade later.

Moving on to 2014, the Patriots came up against the Seattle Seahawks and their Legion of Boom defence.

Seattle played only cover-1 and cover-3 with long cornerbacks and had a dominant pass rush, they played basically no-man coverage.

They, like the 2001 Patriots, hit hard, mugged receivers, and dared officials to throw flags.

Belichick was playing his own monster, 14 years later.

The Patriots ran only moving and crossing routes, nothing vertical.

They knew their receivers couldn’t win in the air, so they attacked the space underneath.

The one time the Patriots got man coverage, given away by KJ Wright following Gronkowski to the boundary, the Patriots understood the situation and capitalised with a touchdown on a go-ball.

But his real genius came on the Malcolm Butler interception to win the Super Bowl, one of the greatest plays in NFL history.

This clip speaks for itself.

Patriots win.

Atlanta was all Brady, especially in the second half.

There was no genius innovation from Belichick there other than having Brady and a defence that made a few plays at the right time.

We’ll skip that one and get to Belichick’s masterpiece.

The 2019 Super Bowl against the LA Rams and their wunderkind head coach Sean McVay, the Rams in 2019 was both innovative and classic.

Their offence was designed to get to the edges in the run the game with a wide zone and then set up play-action shots (usually in-breakers) out of condensed sets, always in 11 personnel (1 running back, 1 tight end).

The idea was for everything to look the same, right up until it was different.

They had barely been stopped the whole year.

Belichick changed everything to stop them.

The Patriots had played man for the whole year, Belichick played man for his whole career and the Rams expected man.

They got quarters match zone, two corners and two safeties each responsible for a quarter of the field.

This is an obvious passing-down defence for most teams, but the Patriots played it the whole game.

They took away the inside throws (slants/posts) that the Rams had gone to all season when they needed an easy button, this threw the Rams for a loop.

What was happening up front was just as confounding, and just as against type.

The Patriots lined up in 6-1 fronts. 6 down linemen, and one off-ball linebacker.

New England’s outside linebackers always lined up on the line of scrimmage, taking the width from the Rams running game, and the passing game had no answers.

It was like the scene at the end of Whiplash where Miles Teller had the wrong music.

From 1986 to 2019, that’s 33 years of Belichick being right.

It ended when his hubris let Brady walk, he figured he was right for 33 years so he’d be right once more after Brady.

His ego led him to that decision, and it led him astray.

Once he let Brady walk, the biggest advantage Belichick had, a computer at quarterback, was gone.

It meant he was playing catch-up at the most important position in football and could not focus his attention on the details that made him so excellent at coming up with bespoke game plans.

He tried to set more trends, like getting big on defence in the face of speed, but it didn’t work like it used to.

The Patriots were just too slow and got boat-raced by the Bills in the 2021 playoffs.

Then the Patriots brought in Matt Patricia and Joe Judge to run a “Kyle Shanahan style scheme” that elevates the quarterback by its very nature.

That brought new meaning to the word disaster.

Now here we are, the Patriots are bad and the man who sets trends can’t follow them.

It doesn’t mean that Belichick was never a good coach.

He was, and is, the greatest innovator in NFL history.

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