Culture
Why Bill Belichick, perhaps the greatest coach in NFL history, didn't land a job
Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick smiled as they stood in front of a packed auditorium Jan. 11 at Gillette Stadium and emotionally recalled some of their fondest memories from their historic 24-year union with the New England Patriots.
The team owner and coach’s run together had just come to an end, and it was an appropriate time for the split. But if there had been any reservation, it was when Kraft mentioned how difficult it would be to see Belichick “in a cutoff hoodie on the sideline” for another team.
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That idea felt inevitable in the moment, with the Patriots among eight teams with a job opening and the NFL’s most successful coach on the market. Belichick, with 333 career victories, is 15 wins shy of breaking Don Shula’s record, and that seemed like an obvious attraction to ownership — on top, of course, of his coaching acumen.
That perception fell flat, however. The remaining coaching vacancies were filled this week, and it appears Belichick won’t be on an NFL sideline for the first time in a half-century.
For all the positives Belichick could bring to a new organization, numerous sources around the league, granted anonymity to speak freely without reprisal, cited a handful of reasons the coaching legend is still out of a job, and it runs deeper than the mere fact he’s about to turn 72.
The Atlanta Falcons were the only known suitor with serious interest, but they hired Raheem Morris after interviewing Belichick a couple of times.
At one point, it seemed publicly as though Belichick and the Falcons were building momentum toward a partnership. However, sources close to both sides expressed caution throughout the courting process.
Been trying to tell people for a week Belichick to the Falcons was never a sure thing. Both sides were gathering information about each other, open to seeing where it’d go, and the Falcons intended to keep their options wide open. https://t.co/0Nu0PqOWGh
— Jeff Howe (@jeffphowe) January 25, 2024
They were each on a fact-finding mission to determine whether the organization’s power structure was the right fit to sustain success with Belichick, who had become accustomed to total control over football operations, as Falcons owner Arthur Blank was poised to keep his leadership structure intact.
Sources close to Belichick also cited a frosty relationship with Falcons president Rich McKay as a primary reason the parties might have decided they could or should not work together.
It’s fair to wonder why Belichick wouldn’t just put his head down, adapt to another team’s way of business and focus on coaching his way to another 15-plus wins before retiring with a monopoly of significant coaching records.
But if Belichick wouldn’t go all in to pitch Kraft on a way to turn around the Patriots’ recent misfortunes, he certainly wasn’t going to do it for a relative stranger. League sources believed Kraft might have been swayed to keep Belichick for another season if the coach committed to changing certain strategies with the personnel department, roster construction and his offensive vision, but Belichick had been accustomed to a specific approach and wouldn’t bend that far.
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That’s also pertinent as it related to the mutual fact-finding mission with the Falcons, and they were hardly alone among teams in the coaching market.
But more than anything, the Falcons were wholly sold on Morris, according to a league source. Belichick’s resume will trump any coach’s — in a hiring process, or historically — but his past accomplishments mattered less to the Falcons compared with what they thought Morris could bring to their future.
When the Falcons hired Morris, only the Seattle Seahawks and Washington Commanders had openings. At that time, league sources called it a long shot for either organization to consider Belichick, and even those odds seemed generous.
Three primary reasons were echoed by numerous league sources: Belichick’s mishandling of the Patriots’ quarterback situation in recent years, his desire to maintain total control of football operations and a growing concern over the coach’s ability to relate to this generation of players.
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At quarterback, people around the league still don’t understand how Belichick could let Tom Brady leave in free agency, but the lack of a succession plan was nearly as perplexing. Belichick went the budget route with Cam Newton in 2020 and drafted Mac Jones in the first round in 2021 but failed to develop him by virtually every measurable degree.
Jones had three offensive coordinators in three seasons, including Belichick’s decision in 2022 to employ longtime defensive coach Matt Patricia, which was almost universally criticized in league circles. The offense was poorly constructed with a patchwork line and mostly substandard skill players. Executives from opposing teams were also turned off by Belichick’s public alienation of Jones.
These issues led decision-makers to wonder whether Belichick could build an offense without Brady or have enough patience to develop a young quarterback.
The power structure was another red flag. Belichick has been fiercely loyal to his coaching confidants and like-minded personnel executives throughout his career, and those ties could be traced to the Patriots’ deteriorating records in recent seasons — again, notably with moving Patricia to offense.
Sources with multiple teams that just hired new head coaches expressed varying degrees of relief Belichick wasn’t joining their team. Some were concerned Belichick would overhaul the leadership structure and the order of command.
Others, particularly on the draft side, heard stories from Patriots scouts who didn’t feel their opinions had carried any weight with Belichick. His draft record has come under heavy scrutiny over the past decade, and word had spread across the league about occasions when he overruled his personnel department with key draft decisions. The fear, especially with scouts who spend so much time on the road away from their families, is they’d be wasting their time.
There’s also been a change in the way players want to be coached. So many current players want to relate to their coaches as people, often feeling that’s how they’ll show up at their best for seven days a week, and they prefer to feel empowered by the staff.
The latest wave of new-age coaches doesn’t have as much of an authoritarian complex, demanding players do everything they say simply because they’re their bosses. Players want to know why they’re doing things, whether it’s the weightlifting schedule or a schematic technique, and coaches who can deliver their message in such a way have become more appealing.
Though executives around the league agree Belichick can still lead a defense in the current era — and the way the Patriots played still showed revolutionary ideas, they’ve said — the concerns with the offensive approach have outweighed the defensive coaching.
History has shown us that the eight hires made in this cycle won’t have a high success rate. As the saying goes in the business, there are only two types of coaches: those who have been fired and those who will be fired. Time might determine whether these teams will regret bypassing Belichick, whether he gets another chance on the sideline to prove he can still do it or fades into retirement as those teams’ preferred hires are replaced in short order.
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However it plays out, there was a strong enough conviction Belichick wouldn’t be on most of their shortlists due to his performance over the past four years. They cited many of the same reasons Kraft and the Patriots opted to replace Belichick with Jerod Mayo.
And it’s why Belichick might have to wait at least a year before he gets another chance to lead a franchise.
(Photo: Bryan M. Bennett / Getty Images)
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
PERMANENCE, by Sophie Mackintosh
Sophie Mackintosh’s novels are always speculative in some way, with either the author or her characters forging a world governed by its own logic and rules. In their boldness and their ability to convey the violence of patriarchy, they recall the work of Jacqueline Harpman — not only the cherished “I Who Have Never Known Men,” but also “Orlanda,” her wild riff on Virginia Woolf’s “Orlando.”
Like Harpman, Mackintosh has a spare and confident hand. Her work is sometimes described as dreamlike; certainly, its contours are sketched with rapidity and confidence and relatively little detail. Her prose operates according to the same principle, at once lyrical and precise, like this from her second novel, “Blue Ticket”: “On the ground was a dead rabbit, disemboweled. Still fresh, the dark loops of its insides glistening like jam.”
When Mackintosh writes about masculine power, she does so in a way that articulates both its seductions and its terrors. Her newest novel, “Permanence,” is less explicitly concerned with the structure of patriarchy, but it has the same erotic charge as her earlier work, the same preoccupation with social prohibitions and the thrill that comes from breaking them.
Like “Blue Ticket,” “Permanence” turns on a highly pronounced binary. In “Blue Ticket,” adolescent girls are issued either a blue or white ticket on the day of their first period. A white ticket denotes a future of marriage and children, a blue ticket one of work — even, it seems, a career. The divide is stark and self-evidently faulty, its coarseness an expression of the brutalizing regime the characters are trapped in.
“Permanence” features a similar opposition, neatly delineated. Clara and Francis are conducting an illicit affair. One morning, they wake up in an alternate reality where they are openly living together. The novel shuttles between these two worlds, one ordinary and familiar, the other a curdled paradise for adulterers.
The thinness of this “city of impermanence” — “fluid, cohesive and yet disparate” — emerges at once. The sky is “uncannily blue,” the newspaper bears no date, the edge of the city is marked by “a slick ring of water, as far as the eye could see.”
Still, a boundary cannot keep the other world from seeping in. Initially, elegantly, this is a problem in the structure of desire. Having been provided the life they dreamed of, in which their longing for each other is fully met, Clara and Francis begin to experience, to their uneasy surprise, boredom and discontent.
Without absence, the intensity of their desire for each other wanes. They even begin, or at least Francis does, to long for the relief of their ordinary life: “Another day ahead of them of petting, giggling, lying around. It seemed insubstantial suddenly, though only the day before he had felt he could do it forever.”
Soon enough, it becomes clear that the problem between Francis and Clara doesn’t lie in the outside impediments of the world they live in, but in their relationship itself. Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
“Permanence” might seem like an outlier in the current array of articles and books about open marriages and polyamory, and at first glance the line of distinction between the two worlds, much like the division between blue and white tickets, seems almost old-fashioned. But as Mackintosh persuasively illustrates, the familiar emotions of jealousy, infatuation and eventually indifference — these persist and can flourish in any relationship, however free of prohibition.
“You want this,” Clara tells herself, and then, “You no longer want this,” as it occurs to her that “maybe it was in absence that they loved each other best, and most honestly.”
In her work, Mackintosh devises scenarios that are bold and almost aggressively simplified. But her terrain is complexity and contradiction, and in her hands these oppositions twist and turn in on themselves.
It’s hardly a surprise when the central character in “Blue Ticket” decides to eschew her designation and have a child, declaring, “True and false were no longer opposing binaries. My body was speaking to me in a language I had not heard before.” Nor is it especially startling when discontent chases Clara and Francis from one world to the other, unraveling their relationship.
What is more disquieting is the surreptitious ease with which Mackintosh’s speculative worlds start to align with our own, allowing the reader to see how so many of the old prohibitions and conventions — around choice, around marriage — remain, somehow, firmly in place.
That moment of recognition, in a landscape that is startlingly alien, is the source of Mackintosh’s power as a writer.
PERMANENCE | By Sophie Mackintosh | Avid Reader Press | 240 pp. | $28
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