“This is not about control,” Michael Lombardi said last Friday after news broke that Bill Belichick was mulling a move to the University of North Carolina. “I don’t want anybody to misinterpret this.”
That addendum from Lombardi came near the end of a four-plus-minute explanation of why Belichick was all set with the NFL and probably headed to college.
The other four-plus minutes of the explanation? They were spent laying out precisely why this move was indeed about control.
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Less than a week later, Belichick sat at a dais in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and was unveiled as grand poobah of college football. The greatest coach in NFL history -- arguably in the history of American pro sports -- will finish his unparalleled career at a mid-tier college program.
Why? Because too many snot-nosed kids wanted to get into his sandbox and play with his trucks. They’ve ruined EVERYTHING!!!
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When ESPN’s Seth Wickersham took a galloping stab at explaining why Belichick is out of the NFL likely forever, one Belichick “confidant” told him Belichick is "disgusted in what he believes the NFL had become."
Another confidant said, "This is a big f--- you to the NFL.”
But it’s not really a “f--- you.” Belichick already got that directed at him over the past year.
What Belichick is mustering is this:
“F--- me? Yeah? Well f--- you, too! And f--- your collaboration and your owners and your owner’s offspring and your halfwit executives and your holier-than-thou initiatives and everything else that made the league I joined great 50 years ago when most of you were still crapping your diapers.
“Wallow in the billions I helped make you because of what I -- William Stephen Belichick -- built and sustained for 24 years before everyone had to get their hands in the soup in the great credit grab. You know who the NFL’s Bird and Magic were? Me and Brady. Don’t believe me? Your salary cap was $62 million in 2000. Now you’re paying s--- quarterbacks that much for a year of s--- play before they get hurt.
“Turn your backs on me? Fire my ass in New England? Make me go hat-in-hand down to Atlanta only to get humiliated by Nosferatu-looking Arthur Blank last January? Pissed on by minions scared that a guy who won six Super Bowls was possibly going to notice they didn’t know what the f--- they were doing? So you hire Raheem Morris?!?! You think I’m going to sit for the slappy McCaskeys, Khans and Bensons and wait to get told no because they’re scared? What do they have, two Super Bowl wins between the three of them?
"I’m all set. And I hope everyone pays close attention to what I’m doing and takes note because the NFL was in my marrow. But not this NFL. Not your NFL. You can have it. I’m leaving. Pricks.”
Lombardi’s explanation dripped of everything he and Belichick likely have been discussing behind closed doors for months.
“When you look over the landscape of the NFL, the question becomes, ‘Where are the great jobs?’" Lombardi asked. “When I started in the league in 1984, we did not have huge front offices. Coaches came in, they were the power broker. They ran the teams. The GMs ran the teams. Today there’s layers upon layers. There’s sons of owners who run the analytical department. (Note that as a whack at the son of Jaguars owner Shad Khan.)
"It’s a long, long steep curve with some of these franchises that may be looking for coaches in the offseason have had a history of losing. And there’s a reason why they’ve lost.”
Lombardi then veered to the Patriots.
“I think the last two years in New England were really hard for him with the changes that were going on internally within their organization,” he said. “They were kind of deviating from what they had done when they won six Super Bowls.”
Why’d they deviate? For the hell of it? Nahhh. Just one more revisit.
They deviated because Belichick made it untenable for a quarterback he perceived to be in decline to stay. Tom Brady left and won a Super Bowl, which made Robert Kraft apoplectic. So, after years of crap drafting and drama, drama, drama, Kraft asked for Belichick to be less of a czar, more of a collaborator.
Belichick spent $172 million in straight cash in the spring of 2021. The Patriots got 10 wins and a playoff assassination at the hands of the Bills.
Then Belichick, unwilling to bring in anyone who didn’t share the Belichick hivemind after Josh McDaniels left, basically left the offense uncoached in 2022. Kraft held his breath, because any moron could see that this was a bad idea. But Belichick, having spent 21 years as a genius, was getting the latitude a legend and visionary deserved.
It went worse than bad. And the jug-eared first-round quarterback who actually seemed pretty capable -- Bill even said so of Mac Jones -- had the balls to say, “This seems odd.” Bill got mad.
Then he got madder when he was shamed in a season-ticket holder letter from Kraft after 2022 saying “We WILL hire an OC and we’re negotiating to make sure Jerod Mayo doesn’t leave.” And all the while, the team kept getting worse until Belichick apparently wasn’t talking to either of his coordinators for large swaths of last year. The team finished 4-13 and the prospect of having Belichick run the reboot at 72 when he was already driving the Krafts bananas was a bridge too far.
Did the Patriots “deviate?” Yeah. Quite a bit.
Did Belichick have a right to believe that -- after all he did for this franchise -- he at least deserved a second shot to get it right post-Brady? Sure.
Did he have a right to believe that other teams would look past the Patriots' listless performance in his final seasons? That they'd still understand his legend and hire him? Sure.
He even has a right to feel blackballed.
But ownership's popular vision of Belichick is likely that he’ll walk into the office, clear the owner’s desk with one swipe of his forearm, lace his fingers behind his head, lean back and put his feet up. And, in effect, Belichick is kind of copping to the desire to do exactly that by making control the driving force behind his college move.
“To me, when you go to college or you’re going to a pro team, you run your program,” Lombardi said. “Some colleges are better than pro jobs. The coach runs the program. …Now in pro football there’s so much interference. There’s so much from the outside. ‘We have to have a committee meeting to do this,’ or ‘We need to do that.’ This is not about control. I don’t want anybody to misinterpret this. But it’s about how many layers are put in.”
C'mon. What’s the difference? Six of one, half-dozen of the other.
This isn’t exactly what Belichick wanted, of course. But given the choice between having Ryan Poles and Kevin Warren looking over his shoulder in Chicago or being in the warmth of Carolina with Lombardi, his son Stephen and whoever else he brings along? This is a layup.
We’ll see how minimally invasive the Carolina community is. How much Belichick will enjoy the cocktail parties that his AD Bubba Cunningham implores him to attend after a last-second loss to Virginia. How he likes wandering around the Bayou slapping mosquitoes the size of sparrows to visit some five-star recruit. How giddy he is to be gladhanding and backslapping and har-har-har-ing on command because, “Hell, coach, we’re paying you and your posse a lotta money to get this thing right down here!”
Maybe he plays along and loves it. Maybe Carolina becomes a power and there’s a (sort of) football happy ending. Maybe Belichick cruises along for a couple years in a football half-retirement, doing it his way, with his inner-circle, gets some wins, doesn’t light the world on fire, and then fades away. Helluva lot less stressful and humiliating than having some dips--- emailing him analytic suggestions while living in frigging Jacksonville and going 8-9 with overpaid Trevor Lawrence.
I don’t know how it’s going to go. I do know that it boils down to this:
Bill Belichick’s at UNC because the NFL doesn’t think he has it anymore. And -- at his age, with what he’s accomplished -- the NFL that doesn't think he has it isn’t the NFL he loved.
