Super bowl seals it: Belichick the all-time greatest NFL coach

Going Long with Geisler

By Andrew Geisler, For The Miami Student

This Super Bowl was an all-time great game. Despite the sports media's deep desire to get back at a coach who is utterly dismissive of them for their inanity and lack of actual knowledge about the game, by playing up an entirely small time "scandal," which may turn out to be one big nothing-burger, please don't let them make you remember this year's Super Bowl for anything other than what it really was: an historically great match-up between even teams - one where the beauty of professional football, mainly that schemes, while important, are clearly subordinate to individual match-ups, was on full display.

The game was a joy to watch, and has the added benefit of being of serious historical significance. This was the fourth Super Bowl championship of the Brady-Belichick era in New England, and the first in 10 years. It is safe to say, if you care about the longevity of excellence, that Bill Belichick is the greatest head coach in the history of the NFL. This is a controversial statement, especially given the controversy surrounding the coach, and it's easy to say in the wake of a dramatic and impressive win, but reality bears it out.

People tend to hate what is excellent and unabashedly aware of it. This is not a reference to the conceit of someone who is merely really good at what they do. This is the self-awareness of excellence. It is often off-putting unless you have it, but we should recognize it more often and respect it. That's the story of Belichick, who is simply better at coaching and making personnel decisions than anyone else ever has been.

In the salary cap era, the league intentionally makes sustained success and continuity near impossible. The only man who has cracked this code, while both running the team and being in charge of personnel, is Belichick. The element of the cap means he's done the impossible with rationed resources, though with one undoubtedly first rate piece in Tom Brady (probably tied with Joe Montana as the greatest quarterback of all time).

The only other coach in the history of the league with as many Super Bowl wins as Belichick is Steelers legend Chuck Noll. Noll led the team for 23 years, but all of his titles came between 1974 and 1979. For the last 12 years of his regime, their winning percentage was around .500 and he won two playoff games. Noll's overall winning percentage was .566.

Compare Belichick's stat-line to Noll's. In his New England years, his winning percentage is .729. He's missed the playoffs twice, won his division all but twice, and had a losing record only in his first year on the job.

He's 22-9 in playoff games and is now tied for the most Super Bowl wins of all-time. This is sustained excellence in era where the rules are designed to eliminate sustained success.

Other all-time great are coaches like Vince Lombardi, who won five championships (both Super Bowl and pre-Super Bowl) in nine seasons at the helm in Green Bay in the 1960s, or Bill Walsh, who won three Super Bowls in 10 years in the 1980s as the head coach for the 49ers, pale in comparison when you consider longevity. Both physically and emotionally pushed themselves to the point that they could no longer coach. Belichick has been relatively unflappable in his 15 years in New England (where he's really figured it out after some early career missteps in Cleveland, where the management situation was untenable).

People want to, can and will focus on Belichick's greatness as a schemer, but his greatness is in tinkering with simplistic concepts everyone in football knows just enough to make them complex. He's made his bones as defensive mastermind, but one who relies heavily on one of the more basic coverage concepts in the game whenever his personnel allows it. The Pats played some version man coverage somewhere between 80 and 85 percent of the passing plays they faced this season.

What does this mean about the coaching philosophy? It means, unlike some who seek to simply be a genius on the chalkboard, Belichick is not obsessed with being an innovator, although, he often ends up being one. Instead, he's an encyclopedia of current best practices and the history of the game.

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Everyone has heard the famous, "Belichick makes his opponent play left-handed in big games" story line. This has generally happened on defense, most famously when as defensive coordinator of the Giants for Super Bowl XXV, he told his defense they would allow Thurman Thomas to rush for 100 yards in the Super Bowl to keep Jim Kelly from throwing it all day in order to handle the prolific K-Gun offense of the Bills. It worked: the Giants won 20-19 and Thomas rushed for 135 yards.

In Super Bowl XLIX this happened on offense. To keep it in layman's terms, the Patriots used their formations on offense to put the Seahawks in man coverage as much as possible (they prefer to play a Cover 3 zone). And whether they came in hoping to play more man coverage than normal or not, they clearly played left-handed on defense.

But scheming and genius personnel decisions can only be part of the greatness of the greatest coach. The most important thing in coaching is the relationships and the ability to motivate. Under Belichick, the dictum is simple; players must do their job, and on the motivational front, it is constantly them against the world. Further players with troubled backgrounds like Randy Moss go to New England and come out changed men who love Bill Belichick.

Belichick is the strategist and innovator that Walsh was, the motivator Noll was and the pure winner that Lombardi was. And though he doesn't always put on the best public face - this certainly hurts his chances of getting his due from most - don't let the media filter fool you, Bill Belichick is the greatest coach the NFL has ever seen.