Yes, on paper, Bill Belichick deserved to be inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame at the first available opportunity. He’s won six Super Bowls as a head coach and two as defensive coordinator. He ranks third all-time in regular season wins and has more playoff victories than any other NFL head coach.
And yet, in voting last month, Belichick fell short of the 40 out of 50 votes needed for induction to the Hall of Fame, a move that shocked the football world. Belichick’s rejection reminds all of us of some oft-ignored lessons about life.
Start with “Spygate,” where the league learned the Patriots videotaped opposing coaches’ signals from prohibited locations. On Sept. 9, 2007, a Patriots video assistant was caught filming New York Jets’ signals. Belichick issued a statement “to apologize to everyone who has been affected.” The NFL imposed a $500,000 fine for Belichick, a $250,000 fine for the team and loss of a 2008 first-round draft pick.
This hardly invalidated the team’s accomplishments in the preceding years, but it established a perception of Belichick as a cheater.
Armando Salguero, who has covered the NFL since 1990 and writes for OutKick, presented the case for Belichick to the Hall of Fame selection committee.
“I presented him (to the committee) … I did not mention Spygate in the presentation,” Salguero said last week on NBC Sports Boston’s Arbella Early Edition. “Then debate happened. There were a lot of Spygate mentions in the debate, and then I get the final say, in which I presented a Spygate rebuttal. I’ll tell you right now: The reason that Bill Belichick is not in the Hall of Fame as a first-ballot Hall of Famer is Spygate. Period.”
“Spygate” was followed by “Deflategate,” the contention that then-Patriots quarterback Tom Brady ordered the deflation of footballs used in his team’s victory against the Indianapolis Colts during the 2015 AFC championship game. Less-inflated footballs are apparently easier to throw and catch in cold weather. The league suspended Brady for the first four games of the 2016 NFL season, while the Patriots were fined $1 million and forfeited two draft picks.
Patriots fans will argue for the rest of time that any breaking of league rules was disputable and ultimately inconsequential; in the end, those touchdowns still needed to be scored, and those tackles needed to be made by players on the field.
But if you get caught breaking the rules, the perception that you’re not honest or honorable will haunt you for a long time.
One reason Belichick may not have been granted the benefit of the doubt was because during his long coaching career he could often be a jerk — terse, prickly, unwilling to offer the slightest glimpse into his preparation for a game. After a championship, he could warm up and smile and laugh during appearances with David Letterman. But there’s a reason the football world laughed at comedian Frank Caliendo’s impression of Belichick, repeating in a soft monotone, “we’re on to Cincinnati,” to every question, even in the face of a tornado. Belichick often acted like interacting with the press — the people who would eventually vote for who gets inducted into Canton! — was the most insufferable burden of his job.
Then there’s the inconvenient fact that once the legendary coach and quarterback parted ways, Brady won a Super Bowl with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers without Belichick, but without Brady, Belichick struggled, recording zero playoff wins. If you throw in Belichick’s largely forgotten tenure as head coach of the Cleveland Browns and his time before Brady became quarterback, his record as a head coach without Brady is a very meh 83 wins and 104 losses.
If Brady, the Patriots’ sixth-round pick in the 2000 NFL draft, had not developed into one of the most improbable all-time greats in sports, Belichick would probably be remembered as a good coach, but not among the greatest of all time.
Belichick’s record as a college football coach shouldn’t affect the perception of his NFL achievements, but his first year leading the University of North Carolina Tar Heels this past autumn was a disappointment with four wins and eight losses.
Similarly, if you’ve heard the 73-year-old Belichick’s name in the news in the past year, there’s a good chance you heard it alongside the name of his 24-year-old girlfriend, Jordon Hudson. From where I sit, there is something almost romantic about the world’s biggest sourpuss suddenly being the kind of guy who’s willing to pose for goofy pictures pretending he caught Hudson as a mermaid. And our private lives shouldn’t influence how our professional accomplishments are perceived. But … perhaps they do.
Add it all up, and you have just enough reasons for at least 10 Hall of Fame selection voters to conclude, “someday soon, coach, but not this year.” They’ve concluded that with all the controversies, Belichick just isn’t of the moral character to be elected in his first year of eligibility, to join the ranks of, er … O.J. Simpson.
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