Is Bill Belichick really the best coach ever?
I'll make the case that he has not done anything without Tom Brady, even in mid career, when Tom went down in the first game for the season, that was the one year when they did not win the division (in Bill's defense they did go 11-5 with Matt Cassell, but finished in 2nd place).
Plus there is another thing to consider. The cheating. We know he's been caught a few times, but to me, I think he was a serious cheater. I believe this because he got caught taping Bengals practices...........the Bengals were the worst team in football at the time. If he's cheating against the worst team, wouldn't it stand to reason he's cheating against the good ones?
Plus there has been an issue with communications devices (QB headsets) failing to work at Foxboro. If the visitors devices go down, they have to cut off the home team's as well. But don't you think that the Patriots would have some sort of plan for that, a contingency because they KNOW this will happen in certain close games. Teams have talked about their headsets malfunctioning at that stadium and it always seems to happen in close games, too.
You could say Bill & Brady needed each other, but Brady kind of showed that wasn't really true as he won a Super Bowl with a second-level head coach and offensive coordinator that might have been overrated due to Brady. Plus you look at the Bill Belichick coaching tree. Not very successful, in fact, wrought with failure, as we know all-too-well !
Bill is being watched now, he can't get away with the crap he used to and wouldn't you know, the Patriots haven't been very successful. Was Bill's genius his coaching or his scheming? (and I don't mean game-plan scheming). I am shocked he hasn't walked away yet. He's like an SNL skit, running on long after the joke was over. He's looking like Miggy last few years. The AFC East is licking their chops right now, ready to bury them in last place. It would take an epic failure by one of those teams to not have that happen.
I think he's a good coach, but I think he's a bit of a fraud too. I think Chuck Noll was probably the best coach of all time. Tom Landry's up there too. Vince Lombardi's name is on the trophy, but his brief stint in Washington wasn't very successful. Noll took over the Steelers at a time when the Steelers were a very Lionesque joke and turned them around in 3 years and put them on a permanent path of relevance, long after his departure.