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Henry McKenna
AFC East Reporter
Bill Belichick is on to …
Well, we don’t actually know where. Belichick is — in a surreal yet unsurprising twist — the former coach of the New England Patriots. He is without a job. It’s the end of an era in New England.
No more Tom Brady.
No more Rob Gronkowski.
No more Julian Edelman.
And now, no more Belichick.
His mark on the franchise is incalculable. But starting now, it begins to fade. That’s the nature of a league that resets every season. And — boy — do the Patriots need a reset.
“I’ll always be a Patriot,” Belichick told reporters on Thursday. “I’ll look forward to coming back here. But at this time, we’re going to move on and I look forward, excited for the future.
By about midseason, this outcome seemed inevitable. The writing was on the wall going back to previous offseasons, when owner Robert Kraft began to exert pressure with passive-aggressive remarks about overspending in free agency (“I do remember we always made fun of the teams that spent a lot in the offseason,” Kraft said. “So we know nothing is guaranteed.”) and poor draft classes (“If you want to have a good, consistent, winning football team, you can’t do it in free agency,” Kraft said. “You have to do it through the draft.”).
Surely, Kraft didn’t appreciate Belichick moving on from Brady, whom the owner has long said is like a son to him. When Brady won the Super Bowl for Tampa Bay in 2021 — with the Bills blowing out the Patriots in the wild-card round a few weeks earlier — it was the first strike against Belichick. And it has all been downhill since then.
Leading up to this, Belichick did not show any vulnerability — nor did he crack in recent weeks when asked about the possibility of this exit. Kraft, though, seemed to be carefully spinning the story, because exits like this are almost always ugly. One side often ends up looking bad. Just look at how Belichick handled the exit of Brady. That…
Source link : https://www.foxsports.com/stories/nfl/what-bill-belichick-can-learn-from-tom-brady-in-launching-next-phase-of-career
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Publish date : 2024-01-12 14:04:34
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