Winter Is Coming

Earlier this week, I watched the ESPN documentary about the relationship between Bill Parcells and Bill Belichick, which is really good if you’re into that kind of thing. The contrast between Parcells’s effective emotional manipulation and Belichick’s quiet bluntness and ability to convince skeptical players — Lawrence Taylor says he urged Parcells not to make Belichick the DC — through the sheer force of his brilliance is fascinating. And as for how effective it would be to combine Parcells’s leadership with Belichick’s tactics, you can probably just mention the playoff year in which they beat peak Walsh/Montana 49ers and Gibbs Racial Slurs by a combined score of 66-3 before the annual 80s Elway Super Bowl beatdown and drop the mic.

Anyway, the high pressure sales pitch by Belichick and the Krafts that convinced McDaniels to screw the Colts returns us to the puzzle identified by our resident McDaniels watcher and traumatized Broncos fan CF in comments: why did the Pats change their stance on McDaniels? For 5 years, they and their most egregious media lackeys have been strongly supportive of McDaniels’s head coaching ambitions, so why is suddenly keeping him a top priority? Payback to the Colts is surely part of it — and justified, Ballghazi was pathetic on the part of Irsay and Grigson — but doesn’t explain why Kraft waited until there was a real chance even McDaniels would keep his word rather than preempting the offer before McDaniels had started hiring assistants, etc.

And yet I think it makes sense. The roots of this go back to the issue that caused tension between Belichick and Kraft earlier this year, trading a highly (and, as it turns out, justly) coveted QB prospect for a case of Anchor Steam. I have no reason to doubt the solid reporting that this was Kraft’s decision, a judgment reinforced by the fact that the non-rebuttal rebuttals by whiny entitled Pats fans make Stephen Cohen’s Russiagate rants look hinged by comparison. (It’s not just that, as Ley says, Simmons’s argument literally boils down to “Bill Simmons doesn’t think Bob Kraft would have done something that Wickersham reported him to have done, therefore he didn’t do it,” the unsubstantiated counterfactuals he outsources to his clueless entourage are hilarious. “Well-known mawkish sentimentalist Bill Belichick just couldn’t bear to look at Jimmy’s sad eyes in meetings and decided to do him a solid.” Yes, I see no holes whatsoever in that theory.) But it doesn’t matter at this point who made the decisions and why. They lost their viable replacement for Brady, and also didn’t get a premium draft pick in return. The upshot is that barring a draft miracle the window for the Pats is closed as soon as Brady loses it.

And then there was the Super Bowl, which surely concentrated Belichick’s mind given the narrow window he has left in New England. Before the game, and having the benefit of playing four quarters against Mike Mularkey and another quarter against a coaching staff that decided to go the full Mularkey to protect a 4th quarter lead, it might have been possible to convince yourself that what looked like a bad defense would come through when it counted (and to look beyond the fact that before Marrone decided to do two runs into the line and a predictable pass play on 3rd down every drive, you were getting carved up by by a guy who turned 23 throws into 87 yards against the Bills two weeks earlier.) Getting mercilessly shredded by the Eagles backup — and I’m not knocking Foles, he was great, but he was also available cheap to any team than wanted him in the offseason — makes it pretty clear that this defense is just bad. This is partly because Belichick is finally losing a little off his fastball, and benching Butler is the point where Belichick’s lack of sentimentalism becomes damaging self-parody — but I’ll leave that to another post. What matters is that if Brady is merely very good, this team isn’t winning any championships.

In this context, Belichick actually needed McDaniels. Brady is a year-to-year proposition it this point, which isn’t the time to be assembling an entirely new staff. Mike Reiss, a very plugged-in reporter, said on Barnwell’s podcast that McDaniels has been given an unusual level of autonomy and responsibility for a Belichick assistant, which is credible. And as little respect as I have for McDaniels as a human being and as skeptical as I am that this would be portable to another context, in his current role he is not just a clipboard-holder getting credit for an established QB doing what he always does in the Gase/O’Brien mode. Brady has been better with McDaniels than without him over a long enough sample that it’s unlikely to be a fluke, and McDaniels also got a very good year out of a replacement-level QB the year Brady was hurt without an offseason to prepare. And, again, I’m not saying this to be in any way critical of Brady — his case as the greatest ever is as good as anyone’s — but as a 40-year-old with little mobility and declining arm strength he’s more reliant on top-level gameplanning and playcalling than, say, Aaron Rodgers. If healthy Brady would be very good even with Mike McCarthy as his OC, but unless they get a Saints-like draft miracle, they don’t have any margin to spare.

I still don’t think this is going to work out well for McDaniels as a head coach. Barring the unlikely event that Belichick leaves while Brady is still in top form, this is going to be a miserable job to take over for the reasons I stated last time. But for the Pats, it makes sense that they would go to the mat to keep him. They need to maximize their chances for whatever window they have left, and that means keeping McDaniels. Belichick’s ego has gotten then better of him with some defensive personnel moves recently, but he is the greatest coach in modern NFL history, and he was smart enough to realize that.