As Bill Belichick contemplates his next few years of work, we can save some time and skip the question about whether he’d be a fit with one of the NFL’s partner networks as a broadcaster. That’s an easy yes. If Belichick wants to do TV, both a slot and a contract will open up immediately. He’s in.
A more interesting question is how Belichick would fit on TV. And I think the answer is complex in ways that the coach’s surly, almost pointlessly uninterested posture during media scrums would never suggest.
In short, Belichick could be a network’s dream — if (and only if) that network is ready to create a role that plays to his considerable strengths, and then be willing to coach the coach. I’d gladly watch the result, if only because it would so confound the folks who think they know Belichick from watching his pre- and post-game pressers.
Belichick can jump right back into coaching if he wants. He can put the New England era in the rear-view and go for a quick turnaround gig with the Falcons or Chargers, or maybe the Commanders, with their ambitious new owners. There are jobs; he’s a coach.
Choosing network television is more of an unknown, and the history of the NFL on TV is certainly littered with the failures of former players or coaches to translate to the broadcast world. But it’s underestimating Belichick to assume he’d be a tough watch.
It’s all about the fit. Belichick doesn’t belong in a two-man booth on game day, no argument there. But that’s the tip of the iceberg. There’s a great chance that Belichick could shine in a studio setting, especially if some smart execs figure out how to really deploy his encyclopedic knowledge — not merely of the mechanics of the game or this season’s personnel, but of the sport’s history and the league’s own evolution through the decades. Those are the things he loves, the things he studies.
We’ve seen that on display from Belichick, but only occasionally. It usually gets lost under layers of snark and snip. But he won an Emmy (no, an actual one) for his work as an analyst on NFL Network’s “NFL 100 All-Time Team” series just a couple of years ago, and that production really showed off the coach’s understanding of NFL history and what made individual players great in their respective eras.
Belichick said more than once how much he enjoyed working on the series, and that’s exactly the kind of stuff he should be doing for a network. It doesn’t need to be so elaborately staged, either; simply mining the coach’s knowledge of the NFL as it currently exists — including his appraisals of why certain teams right now are succeeding or failing — is a start.
Every NFL network partner has plenty of football programming, but some setups are more obviously enticing than others. Installing Belichick on a quick-hit, rapid-fire pre-game panel sounds like the kind of mistake some network might make. But consider an alternative like, say, Football Night in America, NBC’s Sunday Night Football pregame show.
That’s the kind of show that could position Belichick to succeed. Its more leisurely pace would provide room for the coach to be placed into one-on-one segments with a host, who’d set up Belichick to either break down specific players and plays from that day’s NFL action, explaining why something worked or didn’t, or talk about a trend in football and get into detail about how it evolved.
Belichick can do all that, especially when he’s teed up. We’re just so accustomed to his grumblin’ mumblin’ stumblin’ routine with the media, particularly the New England media, that many folks assume that’s the way the coach behaves normally.
Now, here’s what he would need:
—A gifted host who can find open lanes for Belichick to do his best work.
—A network willing to coach him out of his tendency to mutter (and drop his volume almost completely before he ends a sentence).
—An editor to help Belichick fine-tune topic ideas, so that he hasn’t explained everything he knows in the first few weeks of a season.
And none of this answers the great unknown, which is whether Belichick would find broadcasting enough of a challenge to actually take it on. We also can’t know whether he would want to ramp up to TV energy level every week — and ask anyone who’s been in a studio, that level is real, and it’s an energy unlike what many might imagine. It is a different sort of pressure.
I don’t think anyone is clamoring for Bill Belichick as a color analyst on game day, because it’s such an obviously terrible mismatch with his strengths. Belichick on a show where he’s allowed weekly to open that encyclopedia of a brain and zero in on specific players, play calls, coaching decisions, league strategy — that’s a different animal.
When Tony Romo retired from football, he immediately jumped into a broadcast booth, and for the first several years of his broadcasting career viewers benefitted from the fact that he still knew the league. He anticipated play calls. He knew rosters on a personal level. He still thought like a quarterback, not a TV analyst.
A network could similarly benefit from Belichick, both here and for the next few years. But they need to get started right now — and they’d need to be willing to coach the coach.
Mark Kreidler is a national award-winning writer whose work has appeared at ESPN, the New York Times, Washington Post, Time, Newsweek and dozens of other publications. He’s also a sports-talk veteran with stops in San Francisco and Sacramento, and the author of three books, including the bestselling “Four Days to Glory.” More of his writing can be found at https://markkreidler.substack.com. He is also reachable on Twitter @MarkKreidler.
