Poll: The Greatest Coach in NFL History Not Named Shula

I held my nose and voted Belichick. There's probably some recency bias here since I'm not old enough to have a real opinion on some of those other coaches (e.g. Lombardi, Landry). But let's face it, what Belichick has accomplished is impressive.

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Same here. Most impressive is he's doing this in the salary cap era.

 

I feel like we default to wins because Shula is the leader in that category and it makes us feel good. Thankfully there are a lot of other things that make Shula great and so the argument is more reasonable but I don't think career wins is necessarily the measuring stick. For me, that's kind of like ascribing wins to QBs. It's lazy. In the long run, you'll get some great QBs listed but it's kind of like measuring a QB by career yards or TDs. Whoever has the most in the end is surely great for obvious reasons but not necessarily the best guy.

To me, I admire what Belichick has done with a team that has at times been led by great defense and at times been led by great offense. He's worked within the era of free agents and constant turnover. He's had many of his underlings hired away and yet the magic seems to remain with him. His ability to scout and build a draft board seems really solid. He influenced how Baltimore's Ozzy Newsome goes about his business so the reach of Belichick goes well beyond X's and O's which is where a lot of coaches have made their only mark (i.e. Bill Walsh).

I've never had a problem giving Belichick his due. To me, he's far and away the best HC of his generation and that might be as much as we can ever say given the times have changed so much since the early days of Brown and Halas.

As far as the cheating allegations go, I only felt bothered by the fact his staff apparently taped an opponent's practice (walk-through). I don't care about deflated balls and pretty much everything else is speculation.


To me, Belichick's always treated his players like men and therefore they've responded as a unit. His Patriot teams have always seemed the most prepared and the most ready across the board. You need the defense to step up? They do it. You need a big play on special teams? It's there. On offense we've seen tons of cast-offs go on to be starters and have good success. It's crazy how many times that has happened. He evidently understand how to get the best out of people or simply how to use a wider cross-section of skills than most coaches.

To me, that is the biggest sign of good leadership--the fact that the players by in so much and focus more on the team than on themselves.

 

Good post Greg!

Only quibble I have is the comment about wins. IF a HC stays in the game a long time, then wins and championships are a great measuring stick, far more so than for QBs. Otherwise I agree with your post.

 

Bruce Arians.

Only because I just watched All or Nothing on Amazon Prime and he seems like a badass coach.

 

I won't vote for a coach whose entire legacy is based on systematic cheating.

It's funny how most are viewing winning a game with a 3rd string QB as evidence of coaching greatness, when really it's just providing further proof that this team is intercepting plays and signals at every home game giving it an incredible advantage that allows them to win with pedestrian players.

 

I'm actually thinking more of the coaches who didn't stay in the game a long time as opposed to implying anyone's stats are overblown.

When I see Dan Reeves, Mike Shannahan, Tom Coughlin, Jeff Fisher all ranked ahead of Paul Brown, Bud Grant, Joe Gibbs, and Marv Levy I begin to distrust the metric.

Heck Madden famously has the highest winning percentage going 103 and 32 for 75% and he's ranked 38th in wins.

Lombardi is 40th.

So while I agree that the very top looks right (Shula, Halas, Landry, Belichick) it immediately gets REAL debatable after that.

 

I liked the hood slang when talking to the players. Much respect Bruce.

 

Lombardi

 

You don't think the win had anything to do with turnovers? It's all down to signal stealing?

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God I wish there was proof of that. Seriously.....the entire fandom of New England would in one sweet...blissful moment...shut the **** up about how great they are.

Belichick has been caught cheating...which takes him out of the running in my eyes. No way could I vote him over someone like Lombardi...

 

I also will never vote for a cheater. Even if 90% of his success is not based on cheating, the fact that he and they have continued to cheat, year after year, eliminates him from consideration. Cheating disgusts me. I voted for Bill Walsh.

 

Walsh, his schemes revolutionized football and it is still used today.

 

I voted for Landry.

Nobody rocked a fedora like him!

 

Curly lambeau
George halas
Paul brown
Vince Lombardi
Bill Walsh
Joe Gibbs
Bill belichik

All great coaches not named shula.almost impossible to rank them. What's more impressive. Winning the super bowl with three different average qbs or playing in the title game ten straight years in a row

 

Bruce rocks the Kangol like nobodies bidnass

 

Jimmy Johnson

 

Jimmy johnson's hair

 

Ernie Adams/Bill Belichick have to be in the conversation for best coach of all time.


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Chuck Noll

 

Paul Brown. Few, if any changed the game so much. Walsh's offense was based on Brown's.

Brown was probably also the NFL's maniacal coach as well.

 

Of all the coaches that have been in the NFL and of all those the select few that actually can be counted among the best of all time, why is Belichick the only one plagued with the cheater moniker?

 

Bill Walsh.

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I think a good part of it is we're mostly aware of things that happened in the last decade or so.

Just googling a bit you find Bill Parcells being adamant that Bill Walsh cheated in the playoffs:
http://profootballtalk.nbcsports.co...nks-bill-walsh-cheated-during-1980s-playoffs/

You also find accusations of Don Shula cheating:
http://articles.philly.com/1986-08-25/sports/26063683_1_huddle-tactic-receivers

I'm sure there are many other examples.

 

There's always the occasional accusation.

What there isn't, is multiple significant guilty findings by the league and numerous other accusations by multiple coaches and players...that follow Belichick.

Fact.

 

I'll agree with that. I think the degree to which Belichick tries to game the rules is greater than the others.

I just don't think what he's actually capable of getting away with is the primary reason for his tremendous success.

 

That isn't based on the evidence. That is based on wishes and pixie farts.

 

No that's based on lack of evidence the primary reason is cheating. Wishes and pixie farts is assuming he's somehow the only coach that knows how to cheat his way to multiple championships for 15+ years while no one else can figure out how to do it.

 

Horse****.

He was a failed HC. Brady was a no one QB. They start cheating and win no matter who is coaching, starting, playing, etc. These are all things that point towards cheating not away from it.


Oh and they keep getting caught. I guess you believe everyone cheats and Belichick is too stupid to not get caught.....

 

I believe no one has shown evidence the primary reason for Belichick's success is cheating.

Anyway, we know where we both stand on this. No reason to go through it again.

 

The evidence is there, it's just not easy to find.

Headsets
Spygate
Deflategate (Which to me is a much bigger issue because the deflated footballs affected the Patriots turnover rate immensely. To the point of being statistically impossible)
Stealing other teams game plans


Those investigators hadn't come up empty: Inside a room accessible only to Belichick and a few others, they found a library of scouting material containing videotapes of opponents' signals, with detailed notes matching signals to plays for many teams going back seven seasons. Among them were handwritten diagrams of the defensive signals of the Pittsburgh Steelers, including the notes used in the January 2002 AFC Championship Game won by the Patriots 24-17. Yet almost as quickly as the tapes and notes were found, they were destroyed, on Goodell's orders: League executives stomped the tapes into pieces and shredded the papers inside a Gillette Stadium conference room.

"Goodell didn't want anybody to know that his gold franchise had won Super Bowls by cheating," a senior executive whose team lost to the Patriots in a Super Bowl now says. "If that gets out, that hurts your business."

Belichick, almost five years after being fired by the Browns and fully aware that this was his last best shot as a head coach, placed an innovative system of cheating in the hands of his most trusted friend.

As much as the Patriots tried to keep the circle of those who knew about the taping small, sometimes the team would add recently cut players from upcoming opponents and pay them only to help decipher signals, former Patriots staffers say. In 2005, for instance, they signed a defensive player from a team they were going to play in the upcoming season. Before that game, the player was led to a room where Adams was waiting. They closed the door, and Adams played a compilation tape that matched the signals to the plays from the player's former team, and asked how many were accurate. "He had about 50 percent of them right," the player says now.


During games, Adams sat in the coaches' box, with binoculars and notes of decoded signals, wearing a headset with a direct audio line to Belichick. Whenever Adams saw an opposing coach's signal he recognized, he'd say something like, "Watch for the Two Deep Blitz," and either that information was relayed to Brady or a play designed specifically to exploit the defense was called. A former Patriots employee who was directly involved in the taping system says "it helped our offense a lot," especially in divisional games in which there was a short amount of time between the first and second matchups, making it harder for opposing coaches to change signals.


http://www.espn.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/13533995/split-nfl-new-england-patriots-apart

 

He wore a trilby. As for rocking a fedora that title belongs to Humphrey Bogart. [/hatnerdmode]

 

Yeah, I once did a statistical analysis of the effect the abnormally low number of turnovers since 2007 (and you're right it is abnormally low) has had on the Patriots' W/L record. I think I looked at correlations of turnovers to wins and found that had at most a 1 extra win per year difference, which is not insignificant, but not enough to account for the huge success Belichick has had.

So on that fumbling issue I've been one of the ones putting forward evidence it was truly statistically abnormal AND that it mattered. So I agree there, though I'm not quite sure what it's due to (doesn't really matter.. it started in 2007 suddenly).


But the others I either dismiss or don't yet see the evidence it's the primary reason for the Patriots' success.

Headset problems occur in all stadiums and encryption prevents stealing those signals without a lot of effort (way more than I'd ascribe to a football team). And it's not illegal to tape opposing signals per se. It's just illegal to do it from certain positions. So spygate was about something that was technically illegal, but in principle not.

And is Adams doing anything illegal with his binoculars?

The type of evidence I need is precisely that the illegal taping provides such an advantage over the legal taping that it accounts for most of the difference in W/L records between the Patriots and other teams. If someone can specifically show that, then I'll change my mind. But saying you're compiling as much data on opposing signals and trying to use it to your advantage is just being smart. I also doubt the Patriots are the ONLY organization doing their utmost to decode opposing signals to their advantage so you really have to also explain why it's ONLY the Patriots benefitting year after year.

Either way very good post!

 

The Tuna.

 

I would think that winning the TO battle in as many games as they have would lead to more than 1 extra win per year. I can't really prove that, but I do know that TO's are one of the biggest indicators of who wins or loses a football game.

As for the headsets, I don't think they listen to the other teams signals or break the encryption. I don't think they really have a need to. I think they are feeding their QB's extra info, like what Flutie said, past the allotted time. I think walking into another teams locker room and stealing game plans and then making copies of those plans to give to your players is cheating. And what Adams is doing is relaying illegally obtained signals to BB who then feeds that info to Brady (or any other QB playing) up to the point of snapping the ball.

The videotaping, IMO, was much more than just filming from the wrong area. That's what we were told, but the real evidence, like what was written in that article, was immediately destroyed. For me, that's enough to show that something much more was going on. Many people in the NFL, many highly respected people, have publicly stated that the Pats are cheating and have some form of cheating system in place that has allowed them to be so competitive for so long. Some have come right out and some have stayed anonymous, but where there's smoke there's a fire.

I think the biggest problem is BB knows that nothing will really come of it so he keeps doing it. And it's not because Goodell is in on it etc. It has everything to do with money. The NFL realizes that if the REAL story were to ever come out they would lose billions of dollars and the Feds would get involved. And once that happens, everyone's little dirty secrets, legal and illegal, would come out.

And for the record, I'm the furthest thing from a conspiracy nutter. I can't think of one major conspiracy that I buy into. I go by the evidence shown. However, this unprecedented ability to keep winning, during salary cap era, with just about any player, is proof enough for me that something else is going on. Add to this that they have been caught cheating twice now, with many other accusations etc, and this "something else" is cheating.

 

Well let me just make a statistical argument here. What the Patriots have done is statistically speaking unbelievably unlikely ONLY if you assume team strength is randomly chosen year by year or game by game.

For example, the probability a team would make the playoffs at least 13 out of 14 years (Brady starting all games in the season + Belichick = 14 years) in the NFL is 0.0027%, which is astronomically low. So you might suspect cheating. OK.. well the probability the Bills haven't made the playoffs in 16 consecutive years (longest streak in the NFL) is 0.00015%, even lower.

Do you think there's systematic foul play against the Bills? It's more likely there is systematic foul play against the Bills than there is foul play favoring the Patriots. If you're just going by how unlikely something seems like, there's stuff far less likely in the NFL than what the Patriots have done.

Point is, once you understand that team strength is highly correlated from year to year, none of this is that unlikely.

 

What do you mean by "team strength"?

I'm not really going by the probability, I'm going by past cheating that was proven and continued accusations/signs of cheating. I'm going by them being able to win with 3rd string QB's. Bassit (SP?) is out next week. How much do you want to bet that even if Edelman starts at QB they still win? lol

 

"team strength" just means expected win percentage in that example. So either you randomly choose it each year and then select the number of wins in that season based on it, or you make the more realistic assumption that expected win percentage from season to season is highly correlated, in which case streaks like those of the Patriots and Bills aren't that unlikely.

We're approaching this from different perspectives. I prefer to suspect foul play ONLY if I see the outcome is suspicious. In a different thread/post I showed the Patriots' home win%, while the highest in the NFL during the Belichick era, isn't suspicious at all and perfectly expected (44.3% probability there is at least one team in a 32 team league with their home record or better).

So for me, as long as the win% isn't suspicious, the threshold for claiming the primary reason for their success is due to foul play will be high. That's why I'm insisting on strong evidence their success is due to foul play.

 

History is written by the winners... Don Coryell revolutionized football with his offenses concepts. Coryell introduced motion, WR option routes, the route tree, creating the modern TE position, etc... While Walsh was a great coach and certainly innovative, he basically gets credit for Coryell's revolution.