Belichick in MAGAland

This is an increasingly hilarious story.

Bill Belicheck, the most successful coach in NFL history, suffered some serious status degradation when Tom Brady’s departure from New England coincided with the immediate collapse of the Patriots’ dynasty that had dominated the NFL for an unprecedented 19-season span. Since Brady had been the team’s starting quarterback for all those seasons, with the exception of one that he missed because of injury, lots of people began to question to what extent Belichick’s record in New England was simply a reflection of Brady’s undoubted greatness as a quarterback.

On the Michigan football board that is my other internet hangout, there’s an ongoing furious debate about this question, with several people taking in my opinion the wildly extreme view that Belichick was an affirmatively bad, meaning replacement level, head coach and general manager, whose six Super Bowl wins as a head coach (along with three other appearances in the game) were literally 100% due to Brady’s abilities, while Belichick added nothing to the equation. (Tom Brady is former Michigan player, so the natural suspicion is that this sort of extremism is a product of a massive interpretive bias).

The thing is, while this view strikes me as ridiculous, the fact that Belichick is a big Trump supporter makes me want it to be true — it’s just that it requires some truly radical assumptions about the roles of head coaches and general managers in the NFL to make it even slightly plausible.

Very much on the other hand, I thought the University of North Carolina’s decision a few months ago to hire Belichick as their head ball coach at a gargantuan salary (more than $10 million per season) was completely crazy. The 73-year-old Belichick had literally not coached a day of college football in his life: his 49 previous seasons of coaching experience were exclusively in the NFL. Coaching college football is very different than the pro game in all sorts of ways, and the list of coaches who have been markedly successful at both is short, while there are plenty of examples of great college coaches — Nick Saban and Urban Meyer for example — who faceplanted in the NFL, and, as far as I know, not a single example of a successful NFL coach who made an even moderately successful return to the college game. (Bill Walsh’s second tenure at Stanford after his time with the 49ers featured one good season and two bad ones, and, very much unlike Belichick, Walsh had impressive college coaching record prior to his time in the NFL.

In short, nobody had every done anything even remotely like what UNC’s AD did in hiring Belichick, and there really was no reason to think it would work, and many reasons to think it would be a disaster, which — surprise — it has been to this date.

Which brings us to this back story, passed on by a Michigan board denizen:

Very brief primer on all this. The AD, Bubba Cunningham, wanted former Atlanta Falcons’ head coach Arthur Smith, Matt Campbell, John Sumerall, or Jeff Monken. While that process was happening, Belichick reached out to his friends Marco Rubio and Tommy Tuberville to tell them he’d take a college job.

Rubio reached out to Thom Tillis & vile shithead Phil Berger (a NC Republican bigwig) to tell them to get UNC to hire Belichick. They called Republican UNC trustees who basically forced the issue by telling Cunningham they wouldn’t approve a contract with anyone else. They then gave Belichick & his staff a staggering amount of $$.

Before that happened, Cunningham was barely holding on to his job. Their AD lost $$ during the pandemic and Republicans on the Board were going to use that as pretext to fire Cunningham and replace him with one of Chris Rufo’s best friends.

Tillis’s involvement in the hiring process is a matter of public record, and I find the rest of this sordid tale all too plausible given the current political environment.

No account of this circus would be complete without nothing that Belichick’s girlfriend is a “social influencer” 49 years his junior, who has been coming to UNC’s practices and demanding that the games be broadcast in Doubley (I may have invented that last detail).