Stephen A. Smith said the legacy of Bill Belichick won’t be affected whether he is successful or not at North Carolina. His NFL legacy is set in stone. College football won’t elevate or lessen his ability as a coach, especially at this stage of his life. When Smith was asked about that topic, Smith brushed […]
Stephen A. Smith said the legacy of Bill Belichick won’t be affected whether he is successful or not at North Carolina. His NFL legacy is set in stone. College football won’t elevate or lessen his ability as a coach, especially at this stage of his life.
When Smith was asked about that topic, Smith brushed it off. He took time to remind the folks at home that Belichick was an architect of eight Super Bowl titles throughout his career.
“Nothing to me personally,” Smith said on First Take. “His record in this industry speaks for itself … I’m tired of us acting like we get to impugn the greatness of Bill Belichick. He is an eight time champion. I’m going to say that again. Eight time champion, six as a head coach, two as a defensive coordinator for one of the elite defenses this game has ever seen, universally recognized as a brilliant football mind. Now, I know it fell off after Tom Brady left New England. He got older. He was a bit too stubborn in terms of assisting and sort of pushing Tom Brady out the door.
“We get that part, and we understand that the game has evolved where the quarterback position has become even more important, but as important as a quarterback position has always been … the reality is that in a sport like football, more so than most others, it takes so much more offense, defense, special teams and to be a head coach and essentially the GM and to be an overseer spanning 20-plus years and to go to 10 Super Bowls. Do you understand the level of leadership that that entails? What it takes to keep everybody on the same page, focused, as great as Tom Brady was?”
Belichick went 266-121 with the New England Patriots and is 302-165 in his career when adding in his Cleveland Browns tenure. It remains to be seen what his college program will look like, but everyone will be tuning in to the GOAT.
“Tom Brady would be the first to tell you, I needed that, because you can’t coach everybody else, you can’t discipline everybody else,” Smith said. “You can’t elevate the culture by yourself. That’s Bill Belichick. So again, he wouldn’t have won the six Super Bowls without Tom Brady. We get that part, but he did win six Super Bowls, and Tom Brady did do it with him as his head coach, and you can’t take that away from him.
“So no matter what happens to him in North Carolina, we know he’s qualified for that job. We know he should have had an NFL job based on his credentials, and we know that he’s going to go down as arguably the greatest who has ever lived.”
Category: Football
