It’s impossible to have a conversation about Bill Belichick that doesn’t involve a lot of bloodshed, girlfriends, and the latest news about the University of North Carolina football program.
But let’s try. Let’s talk about the pro football franchise that somehow had an induction ceremony this summer that didn’t include Belichick. Yes, Belichick was on the ballot last summer, and one would think his election would be a simple matter of filling out the necessary paperwork and booking hotel rooms. As the proud owner of the second-most coaching wins in NFL history and the only head coach to win six Super Bowls, you shouldn’t be sitting on the phone waiting for Canton’s call.
And yet Belichick was denied the honor of being a first-year teacher. with one voice. One reason is that Belichick’s impressive coaching resume has a rap sheet attached to it, and the New England Patriots’ 2007 “Spygate” shenanigans are right up there. And here’s the thing: We’d say Belichick has a reputation for not being nice to people. That includes sportswriters. It is not unreasonable to think that there will be some sort of game-fixing on the day of the vote.
But the biggest problem, it turns out, is a flawed voting system. And as The athletics‘s Mike Sando pointed out in his breaking story Friday morning, the long list of Pro Football Hall of Famers, according to Sando, has been on the job for two and a half years.
Reading Sandon’s piece brings to mind a line from “The Godfather: Part Three”; In it, the twisted Archbishop Gilday says, “We have rules. We have very old rules. It’s like a Pro Football Hall of Fame with pages from decades past stuck in a playbook.”
However, it was a new rule in 2024 that hurt Belichick’s chances the most. “Those changes include forcing three top candidates, one coach and one contributor to compete between one year and three positions,” Sandow wrote. What this did was to plant a seed among voters considering veteran candidates who had been waiting years and years for inspiration, or who might have been permanently blown out the door to Canton. Calling candidates 2026. And so the great San Francisco 49ers running back Roger Craig, who closed his career with the Minnesota Vikings in 1993, was chosen. Belichick, who coached his last NFL game with the Patriots in 2023, was not selected.
My favorite of these recent changes was a news release from Pro Football Hall of Fame President and CEO Jim Porter, who stated, “The old election process rules left open the possibility of ‘unintended bias’ in three major areas: the exceptional ability of individuals who make initial presentations at each annual meeting, the category of 2 players and the corresponding NFL voters who have reached their final years of eligibility in the modern era.”
When a media person who joined debate class in high school is now tasked with making the case for this or that Hall of Famer, rising up like Winston Churchill, I jumped at the vision of “the diverse talents of individuals who make nominees’ debuts.”
In Belichick’s case, no speech should have been necessary. And Belichick’s absence doesn’t matter how much the process was and how much the anime was. The truth was that it was a bad look for the hall, although, although, it created a happy day for Belchik’s enemies, an international organization with more members than AARP. The group includes Jets fans, Colts fans, Chargers fans, Browns fans… and more. It includes sportswriters who may have felt slighted over the years by Belichick’s barely veiled disdain.
Is the Belichick snub a good thing?
And then there are talk show hosts, who fall into the love-to-hate category. When Belichick was waiting last January, “Yet: The Follow” was on the radio.
Mike Felger, host of the afternoon drive on “98.5 The Sports Hub” in Boston, put it this way: “Bill Belichick was denied the Hall of Fame for what? Personal biases… petty jealousies… vendettas… lies… to grind. I think that’s mostly true. Bill would never act like this, would he?”
As talk-radio goes, that one was solid gold. The station liked it so much that Felger has been using it in show promos since the day he said it. The unsaid works well because of the obvious part: Of course, Bill Belichick should have been a first-ballot Hall of Fame inductee. Felger’s point, shared by many, was that it was hard to sympathize with Belichick.
But for those who still believe in the absurd notion that justice is blind, Belichick should have poured lobster butter on his gold Pro Football Hall of Fame jacket.
No one ever seriously believed that Belichick would step into a soap opera megastar named Suzanne Lucci, who wears earplugs and sidesteps. He was about to get in. He just had to graduate in the class of 2026.
If it were not righteousness, it would be right.
Try to imagine the look on Belichick’s face if Patriots owner Robert Kraft sat on the Canton stage next summer while his former boss and current rival was still on the outside. Talk about a soap opera…