Jan. 11, 2024 will forever be remembered by NFL fans, specifically New England Patriots fans. Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft came to a mutual agreement for Coach Belichick to part ways with the franchise.
For the last 24 years, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady headed the greatest football dynasty that the football world had ever seen. Belichick was hired to coach the Patriots in 2000, and he went 5-11 in his first year as the head coach. The 2001 season, however, was capped off by his first career Super Bowl victory.
From that point, he went on to appear in nine Super Bowls, and he won six of them. In the 2007 season, the Patriots went 16-0 and made it to the Super Bowl, but lost to the New York Giants. The 2007 New England Patriots stand as the only team to have a 16-0 season. Other teams have achieved undefeated seasons, but they didn’t play that many games.
As a diehard Patriots fan, I am thankful to have gotten to witness three of the six Super Bowl wins. I got to witness the greatest Super Bowl comeback of all time, and like any Patriots fan, the score 28-3 will forever resonate with me. After Tom Brady left for Tampa Bay, Patriots fans were skeptical about the future of the team. I believed that Bill Belichick had a plan.
He first went after Cam Newton, who showed a few flashes of his MVP winning self, but that didn’t work out. The Patriots then drafted Mac Jones out of Alabama, and Jones’s rookie season looked promising. He led the team to the playoffs just two years after Brady left. Patriots fan including myself had high hopes for Mac Jones’s future.
This past season went down as Bill Belichick’s worst season as a head coach. About halfway through the season, fans started to speculate about Belichick’s future with the franchise. Now that the season is over, those speculations about his job have finally been answered. One of the greatest dynasties in the history of all sports comes to an end. Now, for first time in 24 years, the New England Patriots will have a new head coach answering to the media.
