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Why are teams hesitant about hiring Bill Belichick? An NFL insider weighs in.
"Would an ownership group pledge to hand the keys to the coach, and stay out of the way?"
Considering the resume Bill Belichick crafted over 24 years in New England, the writing seemed to be on the wall that the free-agent coach was going to be in high demand this offseason.
But after plenty of initial buzz between Belichick and the Atlanta Falcons, there’s been largely radio silence surrounding the future Hall-of-Famer.
Despite holding two interviews with Belichick in under a week, the Falcons have cast a wide net in their search for a new head coach, also interviewing other appealing candidates like Mike Vrabel, Jim Harbaugh, Aaron Glenn, Ben Johnson, and Bobby Slowik.
On Tuesday afternoon, The Athletic’s Josh Kendall reported that Belichick’s candidacy for the Falcons’ coaching gig has “lost momentum.”
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So what gives?
In a new column published on Wednesday, Sports Illustrated’s Albert Breer noted that teams might be hesitant to hire Belichick if he’s adamant about a featured role in personnel decisions — especially when it comes to a team’s roster.
“I remember asking around in the fall about what the market would be for Belichick, and the answer, pretty uniformly, was that there would be a market for the greatest coach of all-time, even at 71 years old (he’ll be 72 in April),” Breer wrote. “But a lot of those takes came with a caveat: Teams would love to have Belichick as a coach, but that the trouble could be if landing him required a lot more than that.
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“Would another team hand him control over the roster after how the Patriots have sputtered post–Tom Brady? Would an ownership group pledge to hand the keys to the coach, and stay out of the way? These are the sorts of questions that could shift market conditions.”
Even if Belichick hasn’t lost his fastball as a master strategist and defensive guru on the sideline, his control of personnel decisions in Foxborough ultimately led to his undoing.
Since Tom Brady left the Patriots in March 2020, the Patriots are nine games under .500, with just one playoff berth in four seasons. While injuries did plague the 2023 Patriots, years of poor drafting and unfavorable roster moves sapped New England of talent.
On the same day the Patriots announced that they parted ways with Belichick, team owner Robert Kraft was asked if the team considered retaining Belichick as head coach, but with a limit as far as team control.
“We thought about that, but, I’ve had experience running different businesses and trying to develop a team,” Kraft said. “Think about it, when you have someone like Bill, who’s had control over every decision, every coach we hire, the organization reports to him on the draft, and how much money we spend.
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“Every decision has been his, and we’ve always supported him. To then take some of that power away and give it to someone else – accountability is important to me in every one of our companies, and where he had the responsibility and then someone else takes it, it’s going to set up confusion. And, ‘It was his pick and that was a bad pick’, or ‘He didn’t play them right’. It just wouldn’t work, in my opinion.”
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