Before he was stumbling over interview questions on national TV, before he was the guy who made North Carolina football worse, before you could bet on when he might be fired, Bill Belichick was one of the most respected men in football. It may feel like a lifetime ago, but six Super Bowl titles as head coach and 302 career wins in the NFL built that reputation. The expected trail of fawning headlines—Americans ranking him alongside the closest thing the modern NFL has to a founding father, Vince Lombardi; the Washington Post saying Belichick’s New England Patriots should be considered one of the best dynasties in the history of world sports; the New York Times calling him a genius—all made a certain sense. Accusations that his team spied on opponents, another cheating scandal, and his own boss thinking he was an asshole never truly tarnished his public persona.
The world changed a lot while Belichick reigned from his Foxborough throne for nearly a quarter of a century. When Belichick first joined the Patriots, Mark Zuckerberg was still a high schooler. The rise of social media, smartphones, the app store, podcasts, viral videos, streaming, and influencers—all that happened while Belichick was plugging away at football, until the Patriots cut him loose after a 4-13 record in the 2023 season.
