It is plausible, in some parallel dimension, that Bill Belichick deserved a first-ballot snub for the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But not in this one. Belichick, 73, coached the New England Patriots to nine Super Bowl appearances in his 24 seasons there. But according to multiple reports, Belichick was not voted in. The winners will be officially announced on Feb. 5.
Winning a league’s championship game more than anyone ever has is enough for any sport to enshrine that coach in its forever museum.
Belichick won the Super Bowl six times. That is two times more than Pittsburgh Steelers coach Chuck Knoll, who’s in the Hall of Fame; three times more than San Francisco 49ers coach Bill Walsh and Washington coach Joe Gibbs, who are both in the Hall of Fame; and four times more than Hall of Famers Tom Landry, Vince Lombardi and Tom Shula. (Knoll, Landry and Shula were all first-ballot Hall of Famers.)
Winning a league’s championship game more often than anyone else, ever, is enough for any coach to be enshrined in their sport’s forever museum.
That’s true even if Belichick is, as Patriots owner Robert Kraft once called him, “the biggest f–––ing a–hole” he had ever met in his life, in a scene described in ESPN reporter Seth Wickersham’s 2021 book about the relationship between the pair. For all the time he spent winning, and making Kraft money (the franchise’s value reportedly ballooned from $464 million to more than $6 billion when he was head coach), Belichick seemed to spend just as much making enemies in the media and among coaches and players outside of New England. Most of his players and former assistant coaches speak fondly of him, but Belichick didn’t leave much of a cheering section in the NFL when he left New England after the 2023 season.
It’s probably because he was so unliked that no NFL team hired him after he left the Patriots and he ended up coaching an undecorated college program.
The Hall of Fame voters, made up of football writers, former coaches and executives, may intend Belichick’s first-ballot snub as comeuppance for a litany of sins that include “Spygate” and, more ridiculously, “Deflategate,” two of the NFL’s most notorious scandals. In the former, the Patriots were caught in 2007 violating NFL rules by recording opposing teams’ secret play-calling signals; in Deflategate, the Patriots, specifically star quarterback Tom Brady, were accused in 2015 of orchestrating a scheme to make footballs easier to catch by deflating them beyond league regulations.
After the first scandal, Belichick was personally fined $500,000, and the Patriots paid another $250,000 and forfeited their first-round draft pick the following season. Deflategate kicked off a circuslike sequence of events that included Brady battling the NFL in federal court before accepting a four-game suspension. In that scandal, the Pats were fined $1 million and gave up two more draft picks.
Deflategate kicked off a circuslike sequence of events that included Brady battling the NFL in federal court.
If an acidic personality and cheating allegations were enough to keep anyone out of the Hall of Fame, then Belichick would be permanently on the outs. But the museum’s 50-person selection committee won’t keep Belichick out forever, so excluding him on the first ballot is just petty and absurd.
It’s as absurd as the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum’s long freeze-out of Barry Bonds and, even worse, its posthumous acceptance of Pete Rose, whom baseball banned for gambling, then made him watch as it went into business with bookies.
This freeze-out of Belichick, however temporary, is just as disgraceful.
It’s time for the Belichick detractors to admit that the main reason they hate him is because he beat their teams so often. He beat their teams no matter how hard they tried, and no matter how badly those teams or their fans wanted to see Belichick humbled. Instead, he humbled them, and he especially humbled my team. During his New England run, “The Hoodie” went 12-4, including 3-0 in the playoffs, against my hometown Steelers. He did it to everyone, and then he’d proceed to deliver detestable nonanswers in postgame press conferences with the smugness of a coaching god who acted as if everyone else in the room was beneath him.
The winning, the alleged cheating, the sneering, the exaltations of his gridiron genius and questions about whether all the magic in New England was really Brady’s doing — all of that is Belichick’s legacy. And isn’t preserving legacy, for better, for worse and for all time, why sports halls of fame exist?
The football hall’s criteria for coaches amounts to retiring for at least one year and being nominated, which technically can be done by fans who care enough to write a letter but realistically is handled by football insiders. After that, it’s up to a presenter to make the case for candidates, and a coaches committee to debate and whittle down the list to one name to recommend for enshrinement.
It’s unclear why the selection committee is reportedly keeping him out this year, and a report in The Athletic suggests some reasons Belichick may have been snubbed that have nothing to do with his scandals or likability. Some of the voters may not have liked how soon after retirement coaches are now eligible for the hall; others, confident Belichick would eventually be admitted, might have felt the need to vote for more on-the-bubble nominees whose names may not appear on future ballots.
Whatever their motivations, Belichick missed the cut, and that’s a crime. The conventional wisdom on halls of fame is that if a sport’s history can’t be told without mentioning a specific person, then that person should be in.
Even — especially — if you loathe him, try talking about the NFL’s last quarter century without saying Belichick’s name. You know it’s impossible, and so does he.
