Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft approached the podium inside the New England Patriots’ team meeting room Thursday with the look of two men at peace. Maybe it was because each guy got what he wanted—Kraft the elegant conclusion to the Belichick era and Belichick the freedom to go write the last chapter to the NFL’s greatest coaching legacy somewhere else.
But the idea that the two reached this place—where the right decision clearly for everyone was to turn the page—just this week would defy any sort of logic you want to apply to the situation.
Two months ago the Patriots landed in Germany with their season circling the drain, and Kraft hoping he could salvage yet another championship iteration with the Belichick era hanging by a thread. New England was 2–7 with a struggling young quarterback, a roster devoid of much hope for the future, a divided coaching staff and an owner who’d looked forward for months to the opportunity to bring his brand to a country where he’d worked hard to gain a foothold.
Kraft told anyone who would listen what a big game it was for him personally. He said it at a fan rally and expressed it to his team at the Saturday walk-through, stepping in to address the players in a way he rarely would in the middle of the season. A day later the Patriots didn’t just look bad. They looked like a dysfunctional mess.
An undermanned offensive line, sans embattled left tackle Trent Brown, gave up five sacks. The tenuous situation around troubled corner Jack Jones boiled over. Mac Jones threw a hideous interception at the end of the game, giving the staff another sign that his confidence was completely shot, and was benched. And the game effectively ended with Bailey Zappe throwing another pick on a badly botched fake spike play.
The network cameras showed Kraft in an oversized coat in a suite looking like someone out of answers. But those around him believed that he did have one: The time had finally come to pull the plug—on a coach who will go down as the greatest in NFL history—and start anew.
The past two months have given everyone plenty of time to think about how the ending that arrived Thursday would play out. The Patriots showed life at the end of the season, and Belichick very clearly had not lost the team with wins over the Pittsburgh Steelers and Denver Broncos, and competitive losses to AFC contenders in the Buffalo Bills and Kansas City Chiefs.
Those wins, though, really showed what everyone in the building already knew—that Belichick could still coach.
The rest of it explains why Kraft had to say goodbye Thursday.
