A Real Winner

So you begin to fantasize. Wouldn’t it be great if it could be—and here you fill in the blank. Someone, say, from history. (My first choice would be Calvin Coolidge.) Or someone from the à la carte menu of contemporary politicians. This would include all the usual suspects, according to one’s ideological tastes: Elizabeth Warren, Bobby Jindal, Mitt Romney, whoever.

But what if you cast a much wider net. Made a choice that was truly unorthodox. Off the wall, outside of the box. How about, say, Chuck Norris? He’d give Congress 30 days to get the deficit slimmed down or else he’d roundhouse kick them into shape. Or how about Tom Hanks, who would have a hard time getting his personal approval numbers below 90 percent? Or why not Bill Gates, since this seems to be the season for billionaire businessmen?

Or, as someone said to me while we were exchanging texts on a lazy football Sunday, “How about Bill Belichick for prez? You want a winner and someone who knows how to deal with the media .  .  . he’s your guy.” (For the uninitiated, Belichick is the most successful pro football coach of our generation.)

“Ur rite,” I texted back. “Brilliant. Guy has forgotten more about ‘winning’ than Trump ever knew.”

The person I was texting had spent time in Iraq and had both a professional and a personal interest in the war on terror. She hates the way things are going over there and texted back, “Belichick would never say he wouldn’t put boots on the ground. He wouldn’t give away anything about what he might—or might not—do. He’d keep em guessing .  .  . and very, very worried.”

“Absolutely,” I texted back. “Gives the enemy no help. He won’t even say who he is starting at quarterback until the rules say he has to. Always keeps them guessing.”

“Right,” my correspondent texted back, fast and furious. “But if he did put boots on the ground, they would stomp the bad guys into a puddle and then stomp the puddle dry. Belichick isn’t about sending signals. He is about stealing yours and using them to beat you.”

And so on.

Bill Belichick isn’t going to be president, of course. He has no discernible interest in anything beyond seeing his New England Patriots teams win. Still, you can’t help wishing that some of our silver-tongued pols would copy his style when it comes to dealing with the press. His monosyllabic answers to rote questions frustrate the journalists who think that he owes them more. And .  .  . so what? There is never any uncertainty about who is in control. His job is to win football games and their job is to write stories. Nowhere is it said that he has to help them write their stories. They certainly don’t help him win football games. He gives just as much as he has to and no more. This isn’t to say that the man cannot mobilize language when he wants to. Compare Hillary Clinton’s insipid and ubiquitous “Stronger together” with this from the coach: “There is an old saying about the strength of the wolf is the pack, and I think there is a lot of truth to that. On a football team, it’s not the strength of the individual players, but it is the strength of the unit and how they all function together.”

I texted that quote back to the other member of the “Draft Belichick” movement.

“Yeah,” she texted back. “Yeah .  .  . wolves. That’s what I’m talking about. You think Bill Belichick would spend five seconds talking about some babe in a beauty contest and how fat she is .  .  . or isn’t?”

It is hard to win games in the National Football League. Hard even when you have your best players on the field. Harder when you are missing one of them and that one is among the best quarterbacks of all time. And much harder still when his backup is hurt and you are reduced to starting a rookie against the Houston Texans, a team known for a punishing defense that has feasted on quarterbacks a lot more experienced than someone named Jacoby Brissett. But the New England Patriots made it look easy, in a recent Thursday night yawner, winning 27-0.

An upset, perhaps, but not a surprise when the coach is Bill Belichick, and coaching counts for more in football than in any other sport.

They used to say about the University of Alabama’s Bear Bryant that he was so good, “He could take his and beat yours. And then he could take yours and beat his.” The great coaches have that. They win with what they are given, whether it is Tom Brady, Jimmy Garoppolo, or Jacoby Brissett. They make the system fit the players and they get the players to believe.

Easy as that.

Except .  .  . very few have it, and it cannot be copied or learned. Many of Belichick’s assistant coaches have gone on to take head coaching jobs. Almost all of them have failed. Evidently, whatever it is that Belichick has, it cannot be imitated.

But it is undeniable. He has been the head coach of the New England Patriots for 15 seasons and in that time the team has appeared in six Super Bowls, winning four of them. Four and counting. And in one of those years when the Patriots lost the big game, they won all the others. No team had ever gone 18-0 before the Patriots did it. No team has done it since.

There are various statistical measures and proofs of Belichick’s greatness. So many that it would be tedious to list them. Sufficient to say that he is the greatest in the game today at doing what he does. And, arguably, the greatest ever.

And he has done it in utter opposition to the celebrity zeitgeist. Everything about the man seems intended to reduce his celebrity quotient, not least the clothes. He wears hoodies with cut-off sleeves, and you’ll see better-dressed men down at the carwash. The clothes, like the rest of the public face, seem designed to deflect attention rather than attract it. We have all become accustomed to the sloppy use of the word “charisma,” which has been reduced to meaning “star power.” (It actually means something quite a bit more than that, but this is not the place for a discussion of Max Weber’s seminal essay.)

But let’s concede that “charisma” has come to mean fame and star power. Well, then, Bill Belichick is the anti-charismatic leader incarnate and, Lord, we could use a little more of that in these trying times.

Just imagine a president for whom it is not always “about me.” Barack Obama lusts after the camera and is utterly in love with the sound of his own voice. In these final days of his regime, he and his team are obsessively cultivating his “legacy.” It’s all about him. Always.

And somewhere along the way, that’s what happened to our national politics. Norman Mailer saw it coming with John F. Kennedy and wrote it up in his prophetic Esquire essay “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”:

Since that time, we have become somehow psychically dependent on our presidents. And they have become more powerful and “charismatic.” Or not, in some cases, for which we cannot forgive them.

So we have arrived at a place where we have to choose between a couple of narcissists, both badly flawed and plainly unable to resist the approval of crowds and cameras which, for them, is the only measure of success.

We become less as they become more.

That is the trouble with charismatic leadership. You end up worshiping power and surrendering to it. Belichick, the anti-charismatic man, does not appear ubiquitously on magazine covers. You do not read “items” about him in the gossip columns. He is not a frequent guest on late-night television. He goes to work. Does his job. Gives his obligatory press conferences in which he answers questions with a kind of phrasing and demeanor that is guaranteed to take any stray electricity out of the room. Consider this from a recent post-game press conference:

He delivered these lines with all the animation and passion of a clerk at the Department of Motor Vehicles telling you that your name appears nowhere in their records.

But his team wins, and that really is statement enough. And besides, there is a game next week and he has to get back to work.

There is one other aspect of the Belichick record that has pertinence here. His tenure as head coach of the New England Patriots has not been without scandal. First, there was something that came to be called “Spygate.” This offense, for which Belichick was personally fined $500,000 by the National Football League, involved using cameras to steal the signals opposing teams used to call plays and formations. How bad was it?

Plenty bad, as the size of the fine would indicate. But not bad enough to keep the Patriots from winning football games. They did lose the Super Bowl in 2008, in the immediate aftermath of the scandal. They lost it on the famous “helmet catch” by David Tyree of the Giants, which ruined that perfect 18-0 season in an almost transcendent case of poetic justice. After Belichick apologized and paid up in 2008, the Patriots went to two more Super Bowls. They lost one of them—to the Giants, again. They won the other, against the Seattle Seahawks. In the long aftermath of “Spygate,” perhaps the most telling insight into the scandal comes from the man who dropped the dime on the Patriots and Belichick. That would be Eric Mangini, who was, at the time, head coach of the New York Jets. He had been one of Belichick’s assistants on three of the Patriots’ Super Bowl teams.

“I think when you look at the history of success that [the Patriots] had after that incident,” Mangini said, “it’s pretty obvious that it didn’t play any type of significant role in the victories [the Patriots] had or the success that [the Patriots] had.”

And then there was “Deflategate.” This one revolves around the pounds per square inch of air pressure in a properly inflated football. The Patriots were accused, two seasons ago, of using soft footballs so their quarterback, Tom Brady, could get a firmer grip and throw a tighter spiral. There were all the usual investigations. Brady denied knowledge or involvement. Still, he was suspended for four games by the league commissioner. Brady played a full season while the suspension was on appeal and went into the judicial system, where at one point it appeared it might even go all the way to the Supreme Court. That didn’t happen and, for the first four games this season, Brady was not allowed to take the field as quarterback of the New England Patriots. Was not, in fact, permitted any contact with the team. He couldn’t drop by the locker room or the practice field to make a few throws, get in a little workout, talk trash with some of his teammates. He was in exile.

Since Brady is still on the payroll, though, Belichick could not afford to go out and buy himself an expensive quarterback to fill in. So he had to make do with back-ups, and it was generally felt the Patriots would be doing well to win two of those first four games. In their opener, they beat the Arizona Cardinals, who had gone deep into the playoffs last season.

Then they beat the Miami Dolphins, assuring that they would do no worse than 2-2 in those first four games. But they lost Garoppolo, their second-stringer, to injury and would be starting Jacoby Brissett against the Texans.

They won that one easily, 27-0. So it appeared conceivable that Belichick might have them at 4-0 when Brady returned. The question was asked, here and there, who counts more for the success of the Patriots, Belichick or Brady?

This is one of those pointless hypotheticals that provide fuel for talk radio. Still, it’s interesting to consider that if the Patriots had started the season 4-0, Belichick’s record without Brady since he became the starting quarterback would have been 15-5. That works out to a .750 winning percentage. With Brady as the starter the number is .771.

The Patriots, as it happens, proved they are only human, and lost, 16-0, on October 2. And the beating was worse than the score suggests. Belichick gave a typically cryptic press conference. He didn’t sugarcoat it. Didn’t pass the buck. He said, essentially, that it was a team effort. He was refreshingly downbeat:

He wasn’t asked if he would consider a write-in campaign for president.

Pity.

Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.