“Humility as a leader goes a long way toward carrying the rest of your teammates with you to higher ground.”
Tom Brady and Bill Belichick during the 2014 season. Matthew J. Lee/Globe staff
Though Bill Belichick’s full-time media career is drawing to a close now that he’s the head coach of the University of North Carolina football team, the former Patriots leader is still offering some insight as the NFL playoffs move toward conference championship weekend.
Belichick, 72, recently reflected on how he used to coach legendary quarterback Tom Brady, as well as his thoughts on the league’s hiring schedule for job vacancies.
Speaking during an episode of the “Let’s Go!” podcast, Belichick was joined by Brady and fellow co-host Jim Gray. The subject of Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes was brought up, and how valuable it can be for the team’s best player to also be one of its hardest working (and one who accepts criticism alongside everyone else).
Discussing Jerod Mayo’s decision to try a long field goal instead of a Hail MaryDiscussing Jerod Mayo’s decision to try a long field goal instead of a Hail Mary
“Mahomes and Brady are two great, great leaders and what a great leader does is he helps make everybody better,” Belichick explained when asked to compare the two quarterbacks. “I think Patrick and Tom both have done and do that. I think when it’s your best player, whether it’s a Michael Jordan or a Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes, when they expect more out of themselves and they’re already the best player and the highest performer, they expect more out of themselves, you know, nobody wants to let them down.
“And everybody realizes if they’re working harder, I need to work harder, too, because I know I haven’t performed as well as they have,” Belichick noted. “So it’s a great message. It’s great leadership. It’s great humility and I think that humility as a leader goes a long way toward carrying the rest of your teammates with you to higher ground.”
On the specific topic of Brady, the coach who famously popularized the phrase “no days off” acknowledged that his quarterback was somehow the inspiration for an even greater work ethic.
“Every meeting I went into, I felt like I had to be as well prepared as he was,” Belichick recalled. “I remember having some meetings where I would say, ‘Well, Tom, you know, I haven’t really seen them do that.’ And Tom was always good about it, he would let me down easy, but he might say, ‘Well, I think I might’ve seen that last year in the game against Seattle.’ And I go back and look at it, yeah, he did see it and I had missed it.
“He was hard to coach, but in a good way,” Belichick added. “He made me a better coach.”
Gray followed up, asking for Belichick to elaborate on why Brady was “hard to coach.”
One thing that Belichick thinks did not make him a better coach was the potential of doing job interviews while a team’s playoff run was still ongoing.
Asked about the league’s current hiring practices — which frequently involve teams speaking to coaches who are still involved with another team’s bid to win a Super Bowl — Belichick offered some unsparing commentary.
“I’ve never been a big fan of it,” he began. “I think it’s really unfortunate when you have a team, including the coaches and the coordinators, [that] worked so hard all year to get to the playoffs, to have an opportunity to play in conference championships and Super Bowls, and then they’re totally distracted by another team, who was a bad team, who has a coaching change, infringing on that team that’s trying to get to a championship by hiring one of their top coaches.
“Nobody would be happy if that was a player,” Belichick pointed out. “But for a coach, that’s also very disruptive, especially when you’re the play-caller. I mean, it’s just human nature to be distracted by a potential job opening, staff and change of lifestyle from a coordinator to a head coach when you’re trying to prepare and call plays in a critical game.”
Belichick’s Patriots frequently had to navigate such an issue during the team’s lengthy run of success. Hardly a season went by at the height of the Brady-Belichick dynasty in which at least one of the team’s coordinators wasn’t involved in job interviews around the NFL or college.
In his own case, Belichick cited his first NFL head coach appointment, which he achieved after helping the Giants win Super Bowl XXV in 1991. While many modern coaches have to exhaustively interview amid ongoing playoff runs, Belichick’s own start came via the Browns after New York had successfully concluded its postseason run.
“When I took the head job at Cleveland, I didn’t interview for the head coaching position — at Cleveland or Tampa — until we finished playing, until the Super Bowl was over after we had beaten Buffalo,” Belichick remembered. “You’re going to get started at the same time anyway as a coach. It’s not that, but the distraction that it leads into, I think I was very fortunate and glad that I didn’t have to deal with that.
“So I don’t like it, but it’s not my rule,” he concluded. “It’s not my choice. So I think it’s unfair to the teams that have performed and worked so hard to get to that position to have another team that’s obviously not a good team, that has created their own negative situation by having to hire a new coach because their performance, generally is able to disrupt the team that’s trying to win a championship.”
