Belichick is NFL’s Ruth, and Jets’ curse
Twenty years ago, he changed course of league history
It is 20 years ago next month, the first week of January in 2000, since Bill Belichick resigned after one official day as coach of the New York Jets. It remains one of the worst days any team has ever had in the history of New York sports. It wasn’t the Jets’ fault. They didn’t send Belichick away. He left on his own. It is still the worst day the team ever had. Or any football team.
Belichick left the Jets and signed with the Patriots three weeks later and the rest, well, the rest is American sports history. The Patriots had to send the Jets a first-round pick in the 2000 draft, three more picks in the next draft (a fourth, fifth, seventh) and one more second-round pick in 2002. It was, 20 years later, the NFL equivalent of the Yankees buying Babe Ruth from the Red Sox after the 1918 baseball season.
This doesn’t mean that the Jets would have become what the Patriots have become if Belichick had stayed. Belichick was never going to get the kind of authority that Bob Kraft gave him when he got to Foxboro. But let’s say that Bill Parcells, still running the Jets football operation in January of 2000, had turned over the keys to the kingdom to Bill Belichick with the approval of new owner Woody Johnson (whatever happened to him?).
Play it out that way, if you’re a Jets fan watching your team start all over again — again — with Joe Douglas as general manager and Adam Gase as coach and the kid, Sam
Darnold, at quarterback. Because if Belichick stays, maybe the Jets are the ones drafting Tom Brady, even in the sixth round, three months later, and not the Patriots with the 199th pick in the draft. That was a draft, by the way, when the Jets took Chad Pennington out of Marshall with their first-round pick.
Babe Ruth had come here from Boston over a century before. Now Belichick went the other way. There is no comparable transaction in between. The only other trade this significant, in terms of championship and legacies and history, is the one Red Auerbach
made in 1956 for the draft rights to Bill Russell, trading Ed McAuley and Cliff Hagan to the St. Louis Hawks.
Russell, the greatest winner in the history of team sports in this country, ended up winning 11 championships in 13 seasons for Auerbach’s Celtics. Belichick’s Patriots have now won six Super Bowls since he left the Jets, played in three others. And as good as Lamar Jackson has looked, and as much as Brady and the Patriots’ offense has struggled this season, bet against them going to another Super Bowl at your own peril, especially if the AFC championship game ends up in Foxboro.
If the Patriots somehow do win another Super Bowl, if they get to seven, it will be as many World Series as Babe Ruth won with the Yankees.
We will never know if Bob Kraft somehow got word to Belichick that if he was willing to leave the Jets, and willing to look as bad as he did in the process, that there was a sweetheart deal waiting for him in New England. But it has always seemed impossible to me that Belichick would leave the Jets if he didn’t know there was a better offer waiting for him somewhere. Or already in his pocket. If Kraft did work some kind of backchannel magic, it was the beginning of him becoming as successful an owner as there has been in pro football history.
There have been other big deals and big trades in sports. There has never been one bigger than this in the National Football League, just because Belichick became the greatest coach in the history of the sport. The Patriots are now tied with the Steelers for the most Super Bowl titles, with six. The Steelers won their first in January of 1975. The Patriots won their first in February of 2004. The Steelers