ONE OF THE most insightful statements about Bill Belichick was made in mid-September of last year. But it wasn’t made by Belichick himself, even though he spent the football season all over airwaves and podcasts. It wasn’t made by Michael Lombardi, his longtime friend, colleague and chief public defender. It wasn’t about the New England Patriots. In fact, it didn’t even mention Belichick by name. But it was still about him.
The comments were made by Tampa Bay quarterback Baker Mayfield. He told the “Casa de Klub” podcast that when Tom Brady quarterbacked the Bucs, it was a “high-strung environment.”
“I think everybody was pretty stressed out,” Mayfield said. “They wanted me to come in, be myself, bring the joy back to football, for guys who weren’t having as much fun.”
Fun.
To those who know, that was an ironic word choice. What Tom Brady had once privately said about Bill Belichick — and was part of the reason why he decided to leave New England — was now being said about him. And that said something about them both.
ON MAY 6, Bill Belichick’s first book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football,” will be released. He is the rare coaching legend who wrote a book neither after winning a championship nor after retirement, but after he was fired. (Sorry — when he and the Patriots “mutually agreed to part ways.”) He was in a strange space during most of 2024: 72 years old, without a job in football for the first time in 50 years and unsure of where he would land. Between Brady winning a Super Bowl in Tampa, a few subpar drafts, three losing seasons in his final four years in New England, and “The Dynasty” docuseries, a pervasive narrative on Belichick had taken hold — that he struggles to connect with people, especially players. That his methods, once revolutionary, are now antiquated.
Editor’s Picks
2 Related
Brady, of course, became an exemplar of that movement. In Tampa, he and Rob Gronkowski were proof that winning could be fun, so went the story. It was no surprise that Brady, Gronk and former Pats receiver Julian Edelman gave a resounding “no” when asked on air late last year whether they could picture Belichick — who turned “do your job” and “no days off” into rallying cries — coaching in college at North Carolina, where he ended up.
“I would be frightened,” Brady said.
“Could you imagine Bill on the couch recruiting an 18-year-old?” Edelman added.
Having listened to Belichick over the decades, interviewed him multiple times, written stories that flattered and irritated him, listened to other coaches discuss him, and authored a book mostly about him, I expected “The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football” to be one of a few things. Maybe a modern version of Bill Walsh’s coaching-cult classic “Finding the Winning Edge,” which literally provided granular rundowns of what the former 49ers great told the team on the third day of training camp. Or, unlikely but plausible, a splashy tell-all, settling old scores. Or, perhaps, a business book for the Wharton crowd.
Instead, it’s about something more interesting and revealing. It’s largely a book about emotion. About emotional intelligence. About connection. About how a leader should treat people.
About, though not explicitly stated, Belichick’s famously perceived blind spots.
WHY NOW?
That question frames the beginning of the book. Why would an economics major who is famous for making shrewd decisions give away secrets, in a ruthless sport in which he still traffics? The answer, in part, is due to his father.
In 1962, Steve Belichick wrote “Football Scouting Methods,” one of the most influential football books ever. Steve did it while he was still in the game. If father can, so can son. Bill feels in debt to the sport. “I hope that this book can give back some of what I have taken from football,” he writes.
This book lacks a lot of hardcore football, at least in terms of what we’ve come to expect from Belichick when he has shed light into his vast knowledge, legendary preparation and savvy creativity. He doesn’t dive deep into his theories about, say, long-snappers or nickel cornerbacks. He offers little fresh insight into some of his most epic moments, from “Butch the Back” in Super Bowl XXXVI to “Malcolm, go!” in Super Bowl XLIX.
A preseason game from 2004 receives a longer look than most of his championships. Some of his greatest hits from over the years, when it became clear that he was playing a fundamentally different game than his peers — the intentional safety against Denver in ’03, the 1-10 defensive alignment against Peyton Manning’s Colts, the record-setting offensive innovations from ’07, to name a few — are either not mentioned or barely noted.
That’s not to say, however, that there’s not football. It just lives beyond the chessboard.
It arrives in the form of passion: “There are players who put everything they have into the game because they can’t imagine doing anything else,” Belichick writes. “I’m like that. I don’t need coffee; I need more hours in the day.”
And in humor: “If somebody uses AI to summarize this book down to three essential words, I hope they are: Don’t. Commit. Penalties.”
And in admiration: Pages are filled with analysis and perspective and features on his favorite coaches, from Bill Parcells to Sean Payton to Andy Reid, and players, from Lawrence Taylor to Mark Bavaro to James White, to name a few.
There are chapters on how to motivate people. How to prepare, improve, how to move on, and how to handle success. How to balance long-term strategy against short-term necessities. But classic Belichick, he spends more time on his mistakes than his historic successes.
Certain mistakes, that is.
He doesn’t mention Spygate, but he does detail the decision-making process as to why he went for it on fourth-and-13 against the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII, a key moment in the game that ended an undefeated season. Why he opened the door for Brady to leave in 2020 is looped in with a slew of players unaffordable for salary cap reasons; why the Patriots loved but passed over Lamar Jackson in the 2018 draft is given some real estate. Insight into why Malcolm Butler was benched in Super Bowl LII is ignored; why Belichick erred in not activating a defensive lineman named Dan Klecko in Super Bowl XXXVIII is studied.
In explaining the wrong way to fire people, Belichick points to a pair of examples from himself: His releasing Bernie Kosar when he was the Cleveland Browns coach in 1993, and, years later, when he pink-slipped an unnamed Patriots player while he was in the pool at a team party. Indeed, Belichick dedicates most of a chapter to four words that he uttered often in staff meetings, exemplar of leadership, accountability, culture, and the power of admitting mistakes: “I f—ed that up.”
Non-football influences, from Jack Welch to Steve Jobs to hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, get shoutouts. So does Roger Goodell, for helping to make “the NFL a great league.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Robert Kraft receives nary a mention.
But what has made Belichick successful, and fascinating, is that underneath that severed-sleeved hoodie is someone with a deep and diabolically genius understanding of the human condition. As he grew as a coach, from Baltimore to Detroit to Denver to the Giants to Cleveland to New England to the Jets and to the Patriots again, he has developed mechanisms and strategies to put coaches, quarterbacks and offenses under pressure, knowing that they’d likely revert to their most essential and predictable selves.
He knows that football is a people business. But for the most part, it’s been described in terms of how he smartly exploited an opponent’s ego or habits, from Mike Martz in Super Bowl XXXVI to John Harbaugh with the “Baltimore” and “Raven” formations, or how he ripped players, even superstars like Brady — especially Brady — in squad meetings.
In the book, he admits that at times, he was engaging in performance art. But if he could motivate a player to improve by pissing them off, so be it. If it made for a dour environment, that was an acceptable trade. If it wasn’t fun, tough.
Belichick goes to great lengths to let us know that he views players as more than nameplates, even if some of his former players might respectfully disagree, such as Lawyer Milloy and Drew Blesdoe, to name a few. He wants us to know that with players sacrificing their bodies and staff sacrificing family time, he takes his responsibilities seriously — to his core.
He does this in two distinct ways.
One, Belichick goes long on what it’s like to be fired. “Traumatic,” he writes, citing his Browns experience. A tireless work ethic, and deep awareness of the fragility of tomorrow, was instilled in him at a young age, when he learned about his grandparents’ immigration from Croatia. They worked “as hard as they could to put food on the table.”
Steve Belichick couldn’t afford to go to college, despite being a motivated and talented enough football player that he played at Case Western Reserve University and in the NFL. In college, Steve lived in a vacant room in a gym, “delivering ice, and doing other assorted jobs to make ends meet.” Bill Belichick became a wealthy coach, but he never forgot that emotional place. He pushed his football staffs to the brink in the pursuit of winning, but doing so provided a measure of stability for his coaches, scouts and their families in a ruthlessly unstable profession.
“During normal times,” he writes, “it’s easy enough to imagine that your job and your life are two distinct domains — family is family and work is work. But when you get fired, that distinction gets bulldozed. … All the basics and necessities of providing for a family and contributing to the future are suddenly less secure.”
Two, Belichick wants us to know that he has personally helped players and staff clear their minds to focus on the task at hand. An example: the Belichick Travel Agency. Whenever the Patriots reached the Super Bowl, Belichick spent the first two days after the conference championship game on logistics. Sorting out 1,600 game tickets, 300 hotel rooms, two full planes and whatever else. It’s a short story in the book, but a profound one.
For one thing, it’s amazing to imagine Belichick handling itineraries. For another, when Belichick was hired in New England, he pledged to delegate more after his Cleveland experience. This would seem like an obvious job to hand off. But no. It was not only important; it was important enough that he needed to handle it. “If I expect to be able to ask my slot receiver to play in a pinch at cornerback in front of a hundred million viewers on TV,” he writes, “I don’t get to ignore his request for a hotel room with a nice view.”
A book authored by Belichick is a statement as much as a story. Throughout his career, he has always tried to take the long view. There’s a reason why one of the largest collections of football books outside of the Library of Congress is on the Naval Academy’s campus and bears his family name. But Belichick has always taken the immediate view, too. He works, and works, and works, refusing to let up.
“Getting used to winning,” he writes, “is the quickest way for it to stop.”
Is that mindset healthy? Is it balanced? Is it — whisper this around Belichick — fun?
“The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football” is intended for a mass audience. But at its core, Belichick is writing for a subset of a subset of a subset of football minds, the truly and spectacularly obsessed. They will find virtue in it, and in Belichick himself, even if they don’t like him — even if they have wondered, as many owners, GMs, and coaches have, if his system works when he’s not at the head of the table. Belichick writes that his program is “not for everyone. Neither am I. But to get to the top, and stay there, is close to impossibly hard.”
Towards the end of the book, Belichick ponders his view of himself and maybe self-worth. “Has every year that I’ve failed to win a Super Bowl been a failure? Big picture? Maybe not.
“But I live in my picture.”
TOM BRADY LIVES in his picture, too. And after Mayfield’s comments, he responded on air.
He chose not to give the context. In 2020, Brady left New England — left Belichick — because the winning was less artistic than intolerable. He recently wrote that a “natural tension” had developed between him and Belichick — “the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities.” Brady chose Tampa, with its warm weather and warmer team culture, led by a coach, Bruce Arians, who unapologetically championed a vision beyond wins and losses, with cigars and cocktails.
When the season started, it became clear that Brady’s new team wasn’t as buttoned up as his previous one, wasn’t as accountable as his previous one, and wasn’t winning as much as his previous one. Sunshine be damned, that didn’t fly with Brady.
He didn’t miss Belichick, but it was clear that he missed elements of the football world in which he had been raised. It was up to Brady to take what he had learned, adapt it for situation and self, and apply it in his own way. Imagine what forms that might have taken, beyond the mind games that Mayfield detailed on the podcast, of Brady intentionally ignoring or throwing inaccurate passes to send receivers a message. His standards, like his former coach’s, are impossible — until they’re not, of course, and teammates reach a level of play even they didn’t think they could achieve.
“I thought ‘stressful’ was not having Super Bowl rings,” Brady said on air during the Bucs-Eagles game last season. “So, there was a mindset of a champion that I took to work every day. This wasn’t daycare. If I wanted to have fun, I was going to go to Disneyland with my kids.”
It was pure Belichick, and could have been straight out of “The Art of Winning.”
And Mayfield? He played well in 2024, and had some fun — until his season ended, with a first-round playoff loss at home.
