Bill Belichick Enters the Football Twilight Zone

Bill Belichick, who won a Super Bowl in one of every four seasons he coached the New England Patriots, parted with the team on Thursday.

“He is the greatest coach of all time,” owner Robert Kraft said without hyperbole received or hinted in the press conference, “which makes this decision to part ways so hard.”

The changing of the guard occurs during the same week in which Nick Saban, the greatest college football coach in recent memory, resigned from leading the University of Alabama and the Seattle Seahawks fired Pete Carroll, a winner of both a Super Bowl and a college football national championship. The clock eventually ticks its last on every player and coach but never on the game itself.

Vince Lombardi coached the Redskins. Johnny Unitas played quarterback for the Chargers. Bill Belichick now enters that football Twilight Zone where Joe Namath wears blue-and-yellow instead of green. This gets surreal soon.

As remarkable, at least to locals, as his nine Super Bowl appearances in 24 seasons in the salary cap and free agency era, Belichick took a team — occasionally blacked-out on local TV that played in a glorified high school stadium long named for a beer at the ghetto end of the cooler — from a distant fourth among the region’s professional sports teams to a firm first ahead of the Red Sox, Celtics, and Bruins. However one measures Tom Brady’s considerable contributions, Belichick drafted him when everyone else passed, carried him as a fourth quarterback on the roster, and stuck with the unheralded player after one of the game’s best-paid and better quarterbacks returned from an injury.

The greatest dynasty of the Super Bowl era recalls the greatest — perhaps the only truly great — football book, Frederick Exley’s A Fan’s Notes. Therein, the author/protagonist worships another great player-coach combination in Frank Gifford — “No doubt he came to represent to me the realization of life’s promises” — and Steve Owen, who led the New York Giants, the franchise where Belichick made his name, for 24 seasons. Exley struggles to break out of his role as a passive spectator and not an active player in life. Fandom here and not football serves as the metaphor for life, at least a misspent one. Exley also struggles to accept Jim Lee Howell, Owen’s replacement on the sidelines. One imagines similar skepticism greets Belichick’s replacement.

In his last game as head coach after a 3–9 season, cameras captured Owen alone on the sideline in tears. Belichick, who noted his Patriots tenure “exceeded my wildest dreams,” did not cry at Thursday’s press conference. He did show more emotion through a shaking voice and flash smiles in that one press conference than he did in all previous media interactions — including ones that referenced Snapface, Mona Lisa Vito, and long snappers — combined. He’s not on to Cincinnati. He’s on to uncertainty, an unfamiliar opponent.

“Players win games,” he admitted. “I’ve been very, very fortunate to coach some of the greatest players.”

It’s perhaps not the demise of Steve Owen but the other object of Frederick Exley’s veneration — Frank Gifford — who Thursday’s sadness recalls. Exley wrote of the most brutal hit in NFL history:

I watched [Philadelphia Eagles linebacker Chuck] Bednarik all the way, thinking that at any second Gifford would turn back and see him, whispering, “Watch it, Frank. Watch it, Frank.” Then, quite suddenly, I knew it was going to happen; and accepting, with the fatalistic horror of a man anchored by fear to a curb and watching a tractor trailer bear down on a blind man, I stood breathlessly and waited. Gifford never saw him, and Bednarik did his job well. Dropping his shoulder ever so slightly, so that it would meet Gifford in the region of the neck and chest, he ran into him without breaking his furious stride, thwaaahhhp, taking Gifford’s legs out from under him, sending the ball careening wildly into the air, and bringing him to the soft green turf with a sickening thud. In a way it was beautiful to behold. For what seemed an eternity both Gifford and the ball had seemed to float, weightless, above the field, as if they were performing for the crowd on the trampoline. About five minutes later, after unsuccessfully trying to revive him, they lifted him onto a stretcher, looking, from where we sat high up in the mezzanine, like a small, broken, blue-and-silver mannikin, and carried him out of the stadium.

Similarly in slow-motion Patriots fans witnessed Bill Belichick’s downfall this season. Belichick the general manager left Belichick the coach open to a de-cleater of Bednarikian proportions. He seemed better suited for rebuilding the team than anyone else. But his way of doing that in the past involved coldly cutting loose veterans before their inevitable dropoff, so perhaps Kraft applied the lesson he learned from Belichick in severing the relationship if that is indeed how it went down. New England fans are all crestfallen Frederick Exley now.

“You know what I wish?” Chuck Bednarik, a two-way player every bit as old school as Belichick, reflected after his career. “That God made us so we could play until we were 65. That would’ve been just long enough.”

Patriots fans, at least the ones who watched Rod Rust and Dick MacPherson from those cold steel benches, wished on Thursday that the frumpy curmudgeon in the sweatshirt could coach until he was 85. Maybe he will — just not for the New England Patriots.

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