The debate is over. Bill Belichick is the greatest NFL coach ever.
TONY DUNGY WON A SUPER BOWL as a player for the 1978 Steelers and as head coach of the 2006 Colts. He is an accomplished football man and, as a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame class of 2016, owns the sartorially dubious mustard-colored jacket to prove it. But when his Colts were facing Bill Belichick’s Patriots during the height of their rivalry a decade ago, Dungy’s last words of advice before his team took the field were not typically delivered via fire-and-brimstone speech, or accompanied by a final nugget of statistical wisdom. Instead, he often sounded like the police sergeant on Hill Street Blues warning his cops: “Hey, let’s be careful out there.”
“I would tell them, ‘We’ve got to survive the first quarter, because no matter what we prepare for we’re going to see something we don’t expect,’ ” recalls Dungy, who since retiring after the 2008 season has been an analyst on NBC’s Sunday Night Football. “What I meant was if we don’t dig ourselves too big of a hole in the first quarter, we’ll be able to adjust and get our rhythm of what’s going to be good down the stretch. Now, we don’t want to get down by 18 /p>
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