With accomplishments came controversies
Bill Belichick has unequivocally earned his fame, but he has earned infamy, too.
Belichick’s Patriots coaching résumé features 13 AFC Championship game appearances, nine AFC titles, six Lombardi Trophies, and 24 years of building a dynasty unrivaled in NFL history.
Many of those years, however, were mired in controversy.
It began with a curt resignation written on a scrap of paper and ended with Spygate 2.0 — yes, there were two — earning him a reputation as not only one of the greatest coaches of all time, but also one of the most polarizing.
Here’s a breakdown of the biggest off-the-field controversies of Belichick’s legendary career.
Belichick resigns from the Jets
Moments before he was to be formally introduced as the Jets’ coach in January 2000, Belichick handed team officials a piece of scrap paper on which he had written his plans to resign as “HC of the NYJ.”
Instead of delivering an introductory news conference, Belichick endured something that more closely resembled a cross-examination. The event lasted 50 minutes and left the public with more questions than answers, Belichick citing the ongoing sale of the Jets among “uncertainties” that didn’t allow him to keep the job.
To quote Taylor Swift, nothing good starts in a getaway car. Before he had even set foot in Foxborough as the Patriots’ coach, Belichick was already battling rumors.
Shortly thereafter, Robert Kraft named Belichick the replacement to Pete Carroll.
No one knows exactly what happened Jan. 4, 2000, or the day that led up to the infamous resignation. He had been announced as Jets’ coach just one day before, the handpicked choice of Bill Parcells, his resigning mentor. Was he working with the Patriots when he accepted the Jets job? How could he do that to Parcells?
The sides, with Parcells settling his longstanding feud with Kraft and playing peacemaker, settled on compensation. The Patriots sent the Jets their first-round pick in 2000, allowing Belichick’s career as HC of the NEP to begin.
Spygate, 2007 season
The second major controversy under Belichick fittingly also began with the Jets. The Patriots were discovered to have been videotaping opposing teams’ signals from unauthorized locations, and the chief piece of evidence came during a September 2007 game against none other than Belichick’s former team.
Videotaping opposing teams’ signals is not explicitly illegal in the NFL, but it must be done from designated areas. Belichick and his staff, however, were found to be taping the Jets’ defensive coaches’ signals from their own sideline, which NFL commissioner Roger Goodell ruled was prohibited.
After an investigation, the NFL fined Belichick $500,000, the maximum allowed by the league and the largest fine ever imposed on a coach. The league also fined the Patriots $250,000 and revoked their first-round pick in the 2008 NFL Draft.
Deflategate, 2015 season
Only one scandal during Belichick’s tenure made it to a federal court.
After Tom Brady was found to have ordered the deliberate deflation of footballs used in the 2014 AFC Championship game, which the Patriots won over the Colts, he was suspended four games. The team was fined $1 million and forfeited two draft selections in 2016.
Belichick indicated that he had no knowledge of the deflation and was fully cooperative with the investigation.
For his part in the controversy, Brady was supposed to serve his suspension during the 2015 regular season. He successfully appealed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York and played the entire year. But following the conclusion of the season, the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit reinstated Brady’s fourgame suspension, which became effective for the 2016 regular season.
After his suspension concluded, Brady led the Patriots to win Super Bowl LI and was named Super Bowl MVP.
The investigation resulted in Belichick bizarrely referencing Mona Lisa Vito from the movie “My Cousin Vinny” during a news conference, and it gave the public one of the greatest court room sketches of all time.
The Alex Guerrero feud
For nearly four years, Belichick permitted Alex Guerrero, Brady’s close friend and business partner in the TB12 fitness brand, his own office near the Patriots’ locker room, to fly on the team charter to road games, and to receive credentials to work the sidelines of every game.
But in 2017, for reasons he did not explain, Belichick stripped Guerrero of those privileges. Belichick’s decision created friction in Foxborough, but neither Belichick nor Brady addressed it publicly.
“Every day it felt like there was some type of dark cloud over what we were trying to accomplish for one reason or another,” Brady said in 2022.
The Globe reported in 2015 that the Patriots’ medical and training staff had lodged complaints with Belichick about Guerrero’s alternative treatment practices often clashing with their own methods as well, as his questionable background.
Before Brady made him his business partner, Guerrero was sanctioned by federal regulators for falsely presenting himself as a medical doctor and deceptively promoting nutritional supplements, according to government records.
Spygate 2.0, 2019 season
Well, it happened again.
According to the NFL, the team illegally videotaped the Bengals’ sideline during Week 14 of 2019.
The Bengals reported the Patriots’ activities to the NFL after a Cincinnati scout observed a Patriots videographer taking film of the sideline from the press box during the Bengals’ game against the Browns in Cleveland.
Belichick distanced himself from the incident, saying that he had no involvement in or knowledge of the video. He also noted that the man accused of taking the video said he worked for Patriots.com, not the Patriots organization itself.
Regardless, the Patriots were ordered to pay $1.1 million as punishment. The NFL also stripped them of a 2021 third-round pick, and the Patriots’ TV crews were barred from shooting games during the 2020 season.