What Bill Belichick wants to do is not make it easy for his team the Patriots to break up.
Tom Curran of NBC Sports says that Belichick’s fate was set after the 10-6 loss to the Colts in Germany on November 12.
This year, the Patriots are out of the playoffs to the third time within four years, and owner Robert Kraft wants his team to get back to being a winner.
There have been a lot of rumors about coach Bill Belichick’s future, with many saying this will be his last year with the team.
Greg Bedard of the Boston Sports Journal says that people inside the organization don’t think the legendary head coach is willing to be traded and won’t want to work in Kraft on a “elegant solution.”
Bedard wrote, “Belichick might agree to nice announcement language about ending their relationship, but don’t be fooled: the odds are high that this will end up being a firing that the end of the day.”
He said, “When they came back to Germany, it was very clear from the conversations I enjoyed that week that a choice had been made.” “The string was going to be played out, and towards the end for the year, they would part ways for a number of reasons.”
There is a chance that Belichick, who is 71 years old, could be moved to a team that needs a coach. However, Bedard’s sources say that he wouldn’t agree to that “unless there was a few tweak to Belichick’s contract.”
People used to think that linebackers boss Jerod Mayo was the “heir apparent,” but Titans coach Mike Vrabel has also been mentioned as a possible replacement for Belichick.
ESPN’s Dan Graziano says that the team has had a “glum” and “depressing” vibe lately because of the rumors and the fact that they had a terrible 3-10 season.
It has been decades since teams hired and fired head coaches and general managers in a factory-like way.
Quarterbacks have gone up and down in popularity. Teams have prevailed and fallen in cases that set new rules for the law. Fights have broken out and calmed down with the league’s office or commissioner.
All of this has happened while profits and property values have gone through the roof, whether because of huge success or because of terrible failure.
Most of the time, the league’s billionaire club has access to a lot of plans that spell out every possible problem or obstacle.
But the planned firing of one among the league’s most famous players? The NFL’s past shows that this issue has only been dealt with by a few team owners, leaving few pages of advice and more confusion than clarity.
For New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, this is the thinnest part in the ownership books when it comes with head coach Bill Belichick.
And even the few scripts that are out there—Jerry Jones’s clumsy firing of Tom Landry in Dallas in 1989; Wayne Huizenga’s forced firing of Don Shula in Miami in 1996; and Dan Rooney’s gentle retirement dance in Chuck Noll in Pittsburgh in 1991—don’t even come close to the meeting between Kraft and Belichick.
It’s easy to see why. The above-mentioned head coaches set career records and won Super Bowls that will go down in the annals of the league and club.
Because of Kraft’s success, the league has a new set of championship towers that will always be used as a standard. That means Kraft is in a situation we’ve never seen before.
Yes, sitting at 299, he’s just a few plays away from a regular-season win that will make his career. In addition, he’s only 17 wins away from Shula’s all-time record of 347 wins (including playoffs).
But he’s also in charge of a team that hasn’t felt this far away from the playoffs since, well, the year before. In fact, the whole business hasn’t looked or felt this lost or off-track since Belichick’s first season as coach, when the New England Patriots went 5–11.
That same five-win mark could be hard to reach this season, especially if the Patriots (1-4) keep having terrible starts and QB play gets worse.
In Week 4, they lost 38–3 at Dallas, which was the worst defeat in Belichick’s career. In Week 5, they lost 34-0 at home against the New Orleans Saints.
Already, the defense is limping from injuries, the offense doesn’t seem to have any explosive players, and when asked about these facts, Belichick seems to go back to his most bitterly repetitive self.
And just so we don’t forget, all of this happened after two offseasons in which Kraft himself placed pressure on Belichick in order to get the team back on track.
Kraft’s words to Belichick about going after Shula’s record and eventually breaking it as Patriots’ coach made those times very clear.