Quote:
Originally Posted by lakefront
I will never understand this viewpoint.....never been a fan of Belichick, not a Brady hater, but how can they be seen seperately? The single criteria for judging how great a player or coach is seems to be how many Super Bowls they've won. So Brady gets the GOAT label but Old Bill does not. Did Pats win all those games 96-95? Did they not have a championship defense? Agree that the league may have passed him by, but reality is that he really sucked as a GM these last years. NE nearly empty of talent....and look at Brady's replacements. Would any other team want those guys as starters? Brady bailed because he knew Pats were empty of offensive talent and went to a LOADED Tampa Bay team that needed a good QB. Meanwhile Bill stuck with the guy he drafted way too long.
Don't know if Bellichick will ever coach again, don't care if he does. But kind of a shame he's going out in a bad way.
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That's not why Brady left New England. Brady left for a number of reasons and it wasn't because the offense was devoid of talent. There were seasons where Brady won SBs with the equivalent of backups on offense. He was just that good, on and off the football field. Remember his first SB win in the early 2000s? David Patten and Troy Brown were the wideouts, Jermaine Wiggins the TE, and Antowain Smith the RB. Not exactly an offensive unit brimming with talent, but he still made it work. Brady was different. Seth Wickersham wrote a book a couple years ago titled, It's Better to Be Feared: The New England Patriots Dynasty and the Pursuit of Greatness. He lays out why it fell apart and you know who the sources of that book were? Brady, Belichick, and others who were there. It's a great sports book, you should check it out if you're into those.
Your success as a head coach is inextricably tied to QB play, period. You cannot sustain success without a good one. Look at all of the successful head coaches in NFL history, they had solid QBs. Walsh and Seifert had Young and Montana, Reid had McNabb and Mahomes, Parcells had Simms, Chuck Knoll had Bradshaw, Shanahan had Elway, Landry had Staubach, and the list goes on. Belichick had Brady, and while that is not the
only reason why he was successful, it was a large part of it. There's no coincidence that when Brady left the New England Patriots Belichick fell off. If he were so great, he would still be competitive and he's just not. They have been a bottom third team since Brady left and the long term prospects aren't looking good.
It's absolutely fair to start to have these questions about Bill's perceived greatness. If Brady never left and didn't win a SB, and Bill didn't suck the last 3 seasons, I don't think this would be much of a discussion. It would simply be supposition, conjecture, or water cooler talk at best. But he did leave, and he did win a SB, and looked good doing it, and Bill stunk so here we are.