Brady or Belichick? Geno Auriemma has an opinion
Geno Auriemma was riding higher than any coach in America when Breanna Stewart played for him at UConn. Four years. Four national championships. Eleven in all for Auriemma, one more than even John Wooden amassed with the UCLA men.
The sports dynasty king. The coaching genius.
“And then after we lost in the Final Four, one of those years after Stewie graduated in 2016 someone wrote something like, ‘Just goes to show that the only time Auriemma won is when he had the best players,’ ” Auriemma
said. “I just laughed out loud and asked, ‘Who the hell ever won with the worst players?’ ”
And therein lies the great question this Super Bowl week, the unsolvable puzzle for some, a hot-take absolute for others.
Who was more responsible for the Patriots’ six Super Bowl titles and nine Super Bowl appearances over a remarkable two-decade period that comes as close to a dynasty as any in modern professional sports?
Quarterback Tom Brady, who’ll be playing in his 10th Super Bowl in his first
season with the Tampa Bay Bucs?
Or coach Bill Belichick? “If half the country is split on it, I’ll bet it’ll come down to whether they love Tom Brady or not,” Auriemma said. “If they don’t, they’ll tell you Belichick is the reason. The people in Brady’s corner are saying this proves Brady is the reason.
“Really, you can’t separate the two. They accomplished what they accomplished together. Who is to say that either of them could have done it for that many years with someone else? You can’t answer the question. It’s too difficult a question.”
That doesn’t mean some don’t try. Former Patriots receiver Danny Amendola said if you look up Patriot Way in the dictionary, Tom Brady’s name will be next to it.
“None of those coaches threw any passes, caught any passes, made any tackles,” Amendola said. “They got guys in the right position because they watched a lot of film and spent all their time at the facility. Tom Brady is the Patriot Way. That’s the reason why Tom Brady’s in the Super Bowl right now and the Patriots aren’t.”
Matt Light, Patriots offensive lineman for 11 years, said Amendola had his points, but he sounded like an angry elf. In other words, it sounded personal. Which speaks to Auriemma’s point: The less subjective you are, the harder it is to separate Brady from Belichick.
So he argued on behalf of both and he made some fascinating points along the way about athletic and coaching greatness and their symbiotic relationship.
“To win as much as the Patriots have won, to win as much as Brady has won, you obviously are dealing with the best player and you also have the best players in a lot of positions around that guy,” Auriemma said. “And you have the best scheme that fits perfectly with that guy and the defense that complements what they’re doing.
“You can say if you took the player away the coach isn’t the same coach. Bruce Arians would probably be the first one to tell you he’s a much better coach now that
Brady is on his team. Everyone understands that. Obviously, one player can have a huge impact on a basketball team. But you could argue one quarterback makes all the difference in football as well. That’s been proven to be true, provided there are other pieces around him.”
He turned to Brady, 43, and the measuring stick of “talent.”
“What does that mean?” Auriemma said. “He has the best arm in the NFL? The quickest feet? The best athlete? That’s what makes him a champion? When you look deeper to where someone gets to be where he is and to stay there for that long and be consistently great that many years, it’s a special kind of talent.
“It’s a transcendent kind of talent that’s not defined in the dictionary. It’s indescribable. The ability to throw any kind of pass anytime, anywhere. To know when to throw it, and how to throw that particular pass. To have the mind he has, to be able to see what he sees. To be tough enough to be able to withstand the punishment that it takes to be a great professional football player. To keep his body at his age, to perform the way he performs.”
You say Tom Brady has a lot of talent?
“The word is he has a lot of ‘talents.’ ” Auriemma said. “More importantly, he knows how to use every single one he has been blessed with. I’d venture to say no one in the history of professional football has been able to do it better. That’s undeniable. All you can do is shake your head and marvel at what he does.”
Auriemma was asked a few years ago how he felt about his Eagles’ chances in the Super Bowl against the Patriots.
“If we’re up two touchdowns with under a minute left, I think we have a chance to win the game,” he answered. “That’s the respect I think people have for Tom Brady.”
Auriemma doesn’t know Brady personally. And he asks, “Who really knows Bill Belichick?” He said he knows this much.
“Putting together a Super Bowl-winning football team may be the single hardest thing to do in sports,” Auriemma said. “That many guys with that many injuries and week in and week out the spread is almost always under a touchdown? And to have that organized on the field, ready to go every week? That, to me, has to be the most difficult thing there is. I can’t even imagine what that’s like.”
On top of that, he said, is the one-and-done nature of the NFL football playoffs.
“You could play 28 games to win the NBA playoffs, four seven-game series, it’s an entire college season, crazy,” Auriemma said. “That is one kind of pressure. But one bad day at any point in the playoffs with arguably the best team in the league who still is less than a touchdown favorite … and it’s all on the line? It has to be the hardest job in America. You could say coaching in the English Premier League or World Cup soccer, but we’re talking here. And then Vinny from Brooklyn is calling Monday morning going crazy that you didn’t go for it on fourth-and-2? Yo, dude!”
Auriemma argues the most underrated metric in sports is those athletes,
those coaches, those teams that repeatedly put themselves into position to win the Big One. Jack Nicklaus won a record 18 golf majors. He also has a record 19 second-place finishes.
“It may be as great an achievement as actually to have won that game,” Auriemma said. “To put yourself in position to win year after year after year after year after year, that to me is really legendary.
“To be at the 18th tee with a chance to win a seventh Masters or to be in the U.S. Open tennis finals for like the 10th time in 11 years. I don’t know if people give enough credit to people who did that. It’s always who won, who won. Man, what Jim Kelly did taking the Bills to four consecutive Super Bowls was amazing.”
Auriemma is 11-0 in championship games. Yet in putting together an equally remarkable 12 consecutive Final Fours, he has lost six times. He says he can look back on all the years the Huskies didn’t win and see: A). they lacked overall talent; B). the coach didn’t have a great year; or C). they didn’t have that one player to pull it off. He says it usually is C.
Like Stewie. Like Brady. “I’ve been on both sides of it,” Auriemma said. “And you always know what kind of job you did as a coach. There are times when we’ve won the whole thing, I’ve just said I was riding Secretariat. I just wanted to make sure we came out of the gate in one piece and got out of anything that would cause a problem. People go, ‘That was a great ride.’ Hey, I didn’t have to navigate anything.
“And there are years you know you worked your ass off and navigated a whole bunch of things. Still, you came up short. Somebody will give you coach of the year for that easy ride and won’t even think twice about giving it to you when you didn’t win it and you know you busted your butt and did a much better job.”
It is left to others to judge greatness.
Others to argue greatness vs. greatness.
That is why we love sports. We can be wrong, but we’re sure we’re right.