Bill Belichick and Tom Brady didn’t exactly part ways on good terms. If you watched the Robert Kraft-funded Apple documentary, The Dynasty, you could tell the relationship had significantly frayed. However, despite their apparent rift, Belichick still made waves by suggesting that “maybe” the NFL should consider renaming the Super Bowl trophy after Tom Brady. Of course, news outlets have predictably misconstrued his comments.
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ProFootballTalk’s Mike Florio wanted to ensure that Belichick’s Super Bowl trophy quote wasn’t taken out of context. Florio called the way the Belichick story is being reported as both “wrong” and “clickbait”.
The context of the quote is important — and the context in which Belichick made that comment about Brady and the trophy changes how his words are perceived.
“He was making a joke, and the idea that they should name the Lombardi Trophy, the Tom Brady Trophy, came after Jim Gray, the co-host of the Let’s Go podcast, said maybe they should call the Lombardi Trophy the Bart Starr trophy, which came after Belichick’s soliloquy on why players are more important than coaches. That’s all that was; this isn’t some petition that Bill Belichick is starting at Change.org to change the name of the Lombardi Trophy to the Tom Brady Trophy.”
Florio also called the reporting on this story “intellectually dishonest” and “a misrepresentation” of Belichick’s actual feelings. The whole conversation stemmed from a monologue Belichick had given that was pumping up the impact of players on team success while downplaying the impact of coaches.
Bill Belichick credits players with Patriots’ dynasty
Belichick is viewed by many as the greatest or perhaps 2nd or 3rd-greatest head coach in NFL history. He’s got more Lombardis than anyone (six), he’s 3rd with 302 regular season wins, and he’s 2nd with 333 wins, including playoffs. Now that he’s taken his talents to the college ranks in North Carolina (UNC), he’s become much more open about his time in Foxborough.
Most coaches, when discussing success in such an abstract context, would certainly lionize the importance of good coaching. But Belichick had no qualms about shifting all the credit to his players. For Belichick, coaching is certainly important, but in the end, it does come down to the 22 players on that field, their physical ability, and the six inches between their ears.
“Players win games. You can’t win games without good players. You gotta have good players and as a coach, you want to give your players a chance to win. You wanna put ’em in a position where if they go out there and play well, they’ll have a chance to win. That’s what coach (Bill) Parcells taught me, is there’s always a way to win. You just gotta figure out what it is, and you have to give the players a chance.”
Gray then challenged Belichick, saying “It’s not the [Bart] Starr trophy, it’s the Lombardi Trophy”. That is what resulted in Belichick’s quip that “maybe” they should name it after Brady.
Some may read that Belichick quote and think, “Hey, here’s a guy that really gets it”. But some others, like Mike Florio, will look for a story where there isn’t one. And that’s what he did here.
Rather than a rational opinion about the important factors influencing success, Florio believes this is a 72-year-old, six-time Super Bowl champion making pre-emptive excuses just in case it doesn’t work out for him in Chapel Hill. We wonder if the irony is lost on Florio that in a segment where he was chastising other outlets for “misrepresentation” of Belichick, he is promoting half-baked theories about the same coach that are not based in fact.
