Patriots' split with Bill Belichick likely ends the NFL era of autocratic 'everything' coaches

Robert Kraft said Bill Belichick earned it. Until he didn’t.

Therein lies the elastic and inevitable quandary of NFL team owners who allow their head coaches to consolidate power and organizational autocracy on a level rarely seen in professional sports. It's the kind of blood oath contract that maximizes potential but inevitably burns out. An accord that delivers victories, captures championships, generates riches, demands fame — all while winding down a path that rarely shrinks into a picturesque, softened sunset.

This was the hand-in-hand journey of Belichick and Kraft as coach and owner of the New England Patriots, which ended Thursday in a split that could represent the end of the league’s “everything” coaches. Even Rome had a last Caesar. For the NFL, Belichick could be it.

Yes, the NFL is a living, breathing, circular war of ideologies — promising to take every old idea and make it new again. But even on that landscape, Belichick was a true rarity. Not just a coach and general manager rolled into one, but also someone who held and exercised total control of how every aspect of the organization was shaped. Hirings and firings. Salary cap and all avenues of personnel management. Draft picks. Free agents. Undrafted free agents. The full roster and practice squad. Gameday actives. The coaching staff and schemes. Everything.

He may not have invented the Patriots, but Belichick ran the football operation like Henry Ford ran his motor company. An envelope containing a key decision might pass through a litany of hands, but it never arrived at a conclusion without crossing the boss' desk. Hell, there’s a solid chance the practice field grass couldn’t grow to a certain height unless it asked Belichick first.

This isn’t the stuff of being a coach who has 51 percent of decision-making power written into his contract — that kind of setup is still somewhat common in today’s NFL. Nor is it as simple as being titled as both head coach and general manager. That’s a smallish fraternity over the years, but still sizable enough to forget some who had dual-role power.

Belichick transcends both those groups, existing on a list of names that can be counted on one hand. Specifically, head coaches who wielded power over a franchise as if they owned it. Which in some cases, they did. Their names?

Paul Brown, George Halas, Vince Lombardi, Bill Walsh and Belichick.

These were the true “everything” coaches. Not just because they had the power to do anything and everything, but because they actually embraced it and acted on it regularly. There is no coach in the NFL who exists on that kind of plateau today — largely because there are no club owners who will allow it. And as of Thursday, you can add Kraft to that collective.

The changing role of NFL coaches

Look across the league this week. What did you see? More and more franchise owners pushing the power centers of their teams into the middle of a table. Tennessee Titans owner Amy Adams Strunk fired Mike Vrabel in an effort to forcefully shift her team into a more collaborative decision-making process that includes general manager Ran Carthon. The Seattle Seahawks nudged Pete Carroll out of his head coaching position, shifting power into the hands of general manager John Schneider. And then you had Kraft, who ended the reign of the most powerful coach in the NFL since Walsh was walking the sideline in San Francisco.

But not only did Kraft make the decision, he explained why he first gave Belichick “everything” power, then ultimately had to split with him because of it.

“Just to be clear, [Bill] didn’t have all that power and rights [when he was first hired],” Kraft continued. “I don’t think it happened until after the third Super Bowl. But it slowly happened, and in my opinion, he earned it. And it worked pretty well for most of the time. But all of us need checks and balances in our life. We need what I say — I call it, we need Dr. No’s around us — people to protect ourselves from ourselves, protect us from ourselves. And, as things evolve and you get more power, sometimes people are afraid to speak up. I’m speaking about all companies. I think it’s good to have checks and balances, but once you have it, it’s kind of hard to pull it away and expect to have the accountability you want.”

Belichick's successor will be Jerod Mayo, a defensive assistant on the staff who was a former Patriots linebacker.

One longtime NFL executive who has spent time with Kraft and Belichick in league meetings and other events — and who has also spent years studying the Walsh era of the San Francisco 49ers — pointed to the league’s movement toward “task specialization” as the revolution that has likely signaled an end to “everything” coaches.

“We have more people doing more specialized jobs than ever,” the executive said. “In some ways, it makes it easier to identify problems and then attack them. But you also get bigger and there can be more communication issues and getting more people on the same page.”

He pointed to the continued specialization and expanding size of coaching staffs through the decades. The growth of salary-cap staffers, strength and conditioning teams, analytics experts, multi-faceted layers of personnel departments, mental health experts, nutritionists, in-house media and even special hires who are added for a finite period to perform a specific task — like Vic Fangio being retained as a defensive adviser down the stretch of the 2022 season to help the Philadelphia Eagles fine-tune scheme and game planning. As staffs have gotten bigger and more specialized, it allowed one person to sharpen their focus and perform at a high level inside a niche.

“Most of us are trying to find the 50 best people to do 50 specific jobs,” the executive said. “The good part, when something is wrong, you can point to a specific person’s job. Twenty years ago, a handful of people were doing a bunch of different jobs. One person might be doing two of their jobs well and completely fail at their third [job]. Now you have a problem. So you take away the job they’re failing at and give it to someone else [in team headquarters]. But everyone has an ego, and believe me, that creates issues. Now with specialization — one person hyper-focused on their [niche] — if they fail you can just fire them and fix the mistake.”

Now lay that blueprint over an organization with an “everything” coach.

“If someone has all that power and is making the final call on everything, they also have to be consistently successful at almost everything they’re doing,” he said. “If they aren’t, and now it’s really hurting the team, now you have to say to a coach like Belichick, ‘We need to take some things away from you.’ It’s like telling Vince Lombardi or Bill Walsh, ‘You need to do less.’ That’s a tough bind for any owner.”

Belichick put Patriots in a tough spot

It’s the dilemma Kraft found himself in with Belichick. As a defensive strategist and head coach, he continued to live up to a standard that made him a historic architect. As a manger of his coaching staff and talent evaluator, he had significant failings. All of this translated into this week, with Kraft facing three decisions: Keep Belichick and hope for a miraculous turnaround; part company with Belichick entirely; or thread a needle and fire Belichick the GM while retaining Belichick the coach. Kraft wanted no part in that.

“We thought about [taking away some of Belichick’s power], but I’ve had experience running different businesses and trying to develop a team,” Kraft said. “Think about it: when you have someone like Bill, who’s had control over every decision, every coach we hire — the organization reports to him on the draft, and how much money we spend. Every decision has been his, and we’ve always supported him. To then take some of that power away and give it to someone else — accountability is important to me in every one of our companies, and where [Bill] had the responsibility and then someone else takes it, it’s going to set up confusion. And [then it becomes], ‘It was his pick and that was a bad pick’ or ‘He didn’t play them right.’ It just wouldn’t work, in my opinion.”

We’ll never know, but Kraft’s words framed the dilemma perfectly. He gave something that was extremely hard to take away, even when it was the most obvious decision available to him. If there’s one lesson we can take away from all of this, it’s that the NFL is a universe of decisions and ideas in motion, all constantly changing, ruthlessly teaching, relentlessly expanding, and then on some occasions, pockets of unparalleled momentum suddenly collapse backward.

This was the timeline of Belichick in New England. A coach hired to lead and build a franchise, evolving into an all-encompassing architect of historic success, only to have his obsessive design suffocate and devour his final years as a Patriot. It was a glorious trajectory, despite also being inescapably flawed over a long enough timeline. His reign in New England epitomized the dynamic that makes the “everything” coach so rare and also so doomed. Perhaps because it leans into the warping nature of all-encompassing power.

Coaches harness it, collect it, earn it, steal it — then wield it until it eventually destroys their ability to win with it.