It is not unheard of for a coach who has had success to have a falling out with an owner.
In 1987, then-San Francisco owner Eddie DeBartolo was furious when the 49ers lost a playoff game to Minnesota and failed to make the Super Bowl for the third year in a row. He stripped coach Bill Walsh of his president’s title. In 1988, Walsh won his third title and then quit. It was an ill-advised move that cost Walsh a chance at winning more titles, although he later patched things up and ran the front office. George Seifert won two more rings after he left.
Then in March of 1994, Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson was furious when owner Jerry Jones told reporters at a league meeting that 500 coaches could win with the Cowboys. Instead of brushing it off and saying that was just Jerry being Jerry, Johnson decided to leave and he agreed to a settlement and left. He took a job in Miami, but he lost a chance to threepeat with the Cowboys and went 38-31 in Miami before retiring as a coach. He then had a broadcasting career with Fox.
And now we have the Bob and Bill show which now looks like it is going to last for the forseeable future.
Patriots owner Bob Kraft fired Bill Belichick, who won six Super Bowls with Tom Brady at quarterback but saw the team collapse after Brady left. Meanwhile, Brady won his seventh ring in Tampa Bay to foster the narrative that he was more responsible for the Patriots success than Belichick.
At the press conference announcing his departure, Kraft and Belichick made nice and said it was a mutual decision.
But it didn’t take long for it to become obvious that there was a rift between the two men. The Patriots made a 10-part documentary about their success and did not paint Belichick in a positive light. And Belichick recently published a 304-page book in which he didn’t even mention Kraft’s name, much less give him any credit.
Meanwhile, Belichick wasn’t hired by any NFL team last year. He only had one interview with the Falcons and they passed with speculation that Kraft may have warned them about the perils of hiring him. So he has taken a college job at North Carolina and gone public that he has a girlfriend nearly 50 years younger than him — a relationship that has raised a lot of eyebrows. And Kraft is trying to get the team on track when he fired Jerod Mayo after one losing season and hired former Patriot Mike Vrabel.
But neither Kraft nor Belichick seem ready to move on. Kraft seemed to show that in a recent interview.
“I gave up a No. 1 draft pick for a coach that had only won a little over 40 percent of his games to get him out (of New York),” Kraft said in the “Dudes on Dudes” postcast co-hosted by Julian Edelman and Rob Gronkowski last month. “I don’t know if there are any Jets fans here. I think getting Bill Belichick to come to the Patriots in 1999 was a big risk, and I got hammered in the Boston area, but he was with us 24 years.”
Belichick could have let that pass. After all, it was a risk for Kraft since Belichick had a losing record in Cleveland and resigned as head coach of the Jets after Bill Parcells retired to the front office.
“As I told Robert multiple times through the years, I took a big risk by taking the New England Patriots head coaching job,” Belichick said. “I already had an opportunity to be the Head Coach of the New York Jets, but the ownership situation was unstable.
“I had been warned by multiple previous Patriots’ coaches, as well as other members of other NFL organizations and the media, that the New England job was going to come with many internal obstacles,” he said. “I made it clear that we would have to change the way the team was managed to regain the previous attained success.”
It wasn’t that risky for Belichick because he did not have a job and teams probably wouldn’t have been rushing to hire him after the way he refused to take the Jets job and had a losing record in Cleveland.
Anyway, it is obvious from most recent incident that the two men with big egos haven’t patched things up.
And the Bob and Bill show will continue. Will the Patriots win without Belichick? Will Belichick win on the college level at a school noted more for basketball than football? The Patriots are building a statue for Brady. Will they build one for Belichick?
We will see.
