There’s no questioning Bill Belichick’s legacy in the NFL.
The New England Patriots head coach has won seven Lombardi Trophies over the course of his career, the most recent coming with the Patriots’ amazing Super Bowl LI victory over the Atlanta Falcons.
Following the Pats’ thrilling victory on Feb. 5, many were ready to hail Belichick as the greatest coach of all time. Fox Sports 1’s Skip Bayless certainly is not in that camp. In fact, he doesn’t even consider Belichick a great coach.
Speaking on FS1’s “Undisputed” on Thursday, Bayless cited Belichick’s struggles as the Cleveland Browns head coach as a knock on his legacy, and that the Patriots head coach owes a lot of his success to Tom Brady.
“I don’t think he’s a great coach,” Bayless said, as transcribed by WEEI. “I think he’s a very good one. All I know is that in his first six years of head coaching, he had five losing seasons before Tom Brady fell out of the sky and into his lap. And by the way, in that year of 2001, with Bill Belichick as the head coach, he had fallen to 0-2 and I know various assistants on his staff were ready to put their house on the market because they all thought they were going to get fired after they went 5-11 the previous year … if he’s an all-time great coach, he would have been better than he was in Cleveland. Tom Brady saved his job and turned around his career.”
While Brady and Belichick both are integral parts of the Patriots’ long run of success, saying that Brady “saved” Belichick’s job might be a bit of a stretch.
We have a feeling Bayless is in the minority with this opinion, at least in the New England region.
Thumbnail photo via Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports Images
