"Imagine what might happen if Bill Belichick signs on to coach the Cowboys
By Dan Shaughnessy Boston Globe January 16, 2024
It’s always about revenge here in New England, and we’ve seen this play out in dramatic fashion over the last week in Foxborough.
Bob and Jonathan Kraft are rolling out their new head coach (Jerod Mayo) Wednesday, but perhaps the larger story concerns the destination of Bill Belichick, who (along with Tom Brady) led the Patriots to nine Super Bowls in his 24-season run as head coach and emperor of the franchise.
Belichick already has interviewed with the Falcons, but there is a more intriguing possibility out there that he could take over the ready-to-win Cowboys, which would only escalate the personal war between the Krafts and the Hoodie, a dispute over credit, blame, legacy, and pro football immortality.
Can you imagine Belichick coaching Dallas and humbly telling Football America, “It’s nice to be working for a Hall of Fame owner”?
Bob — still desperately seeking the Canton induction that has eluded him — and Jonathan Kraft fired Belichick last Thursday, while making everyone insist it was “a mutual agreement to part ways.”
Since then, we’ve been bombarded by an anger-fueled fusillade of stories with anonymous sources assigning credit or blame to Bill and/or Bob and Jon.
There hasn’t been a local sports PR war like this since 1997, when Bill Parcells told us he wanted to buy the groceries and bolted in the hours after the Patriots lost Super Bowl XXXI to the Packers. This led to a border-war throwdown, forcing fans to choose sides in a Tuna-Kraft dispute that has not ended. Pro Football Hall of Famer Parcells still isn’t in Bob Kraft’s folksy Patriots Hall of Fame and probably never will be.
This is because Kraft wants everybody to think he invented the Patriots, even though that was actually the late Billy Sullivan in 1960. I saw evidence that Bob has successfully rewritten history in Sunday’s New York Times, where the third paragraph of a Belichick analysis explained, “The fortunes of the franchise began to change in 1994 when Robert K. Kraft … bought the team.”
No.
The Patriots’ fortunes forever changed when custodian owner James Busch Orthwein hired Parcells in January of 1993. That’s when the Patriots became NFL legit. Bob Kraft has been a great owner, but he did not hire the man who changed the franchise. Instead, he meddled (going behind Parcells’s back on draft day), ran Parcells out of town, and has spent the ensuing three decades rewriting that history.
And now we are seeing Tuna II.
I keep reading about how the firing of Belichick has enabled the Krafts to “take back their team.”
Swell.
It took Bob Kraft less than three hours to toss Belichick under the bus Thursday when he took questions (take note, John Henry) two hours after the phony photo op with Coach Bill. Kraft immediately planted the seed that everything that went down was Bill’s fault — especially when he told us that Belichick “had control over every decision, every coach we hire, the organization reports to him on the draft, and how much money we spend.”
That was it. Right there. According to Kraft, Bill was the one who cheaped out on payroll. Bill was the one who blew the draft. Bill was the one who botched the coaching hires. Shots fired. There was no mention of Kraft’s affinity for and promotion of Mac Jones and Bill O’Brien.
In subsequent hours, a series of pro-Kraft stories landed, all of them separating ownership from accountability for five seasons without a playoff win and 4-13 in 2023.
On Friday, ESPN dropped an account from Seth Wickersham and Wright Thompson outlining the depth of division between Bill and the Krafts. It was loaded with juicy tidbits designed to demonstrate hard feelings festering at Gillette.
According to the authors, after Brady won his Super Bowl for Tampa Bay the same year he left New England, Kraft said, “Bill had told me he couldn’t play anymore. And then he goes out and wins the [expletive] Super Bowl.”
The story held that Belichick told confidants “that Robert Kraft and his son, team president Jonathan Kraft, had eroded the culture he had built over two decades.”
It explained how “the Krafts were sensitive to the word around the league that they meddled and liked to be involved in football matters … sources said Jonathan created an urgency for his dad to be more involved.”
ESPN sources said that during the final years of Bob and Bill, Bob Kraft “put down Belichick at every opportunity” and that Belichick “refused to acknowledge [Jonathan Kraft] in the hallways and dismissed him as obsessed with optics.
“Word leaked around the office that if Belichick were gone in 2024, football operations would be split between Glaser [Robyn Glaser, senior VP of business affairs for the Kraft Group] and Jonathan Kraft.”
In the story, it’s noted that a Patriots assistant coach told a confidant, “The Krafts should be ashamed of themselves.”
In my opinion, Wickersham has done the best work of all reporters who’ve done books or documentaries on the Patriots dynasty. Many of the rest have been willing promoters of Kraft hagiographies. If you’ll tell Bob’s truth, you are granted access.
So here we are in Week 3 of January 2024: Bill is out, and fast-tracked Mayo is the Patriots’ new coach, promoted without any effort to comb the NFL landscape. Bob and Jonathan clearly think they have things figured out now that Bill is gone. It looks as if the Krafts may go into the all-important 2024 draft without having a new general manager. Jonathan Kraft — the Prince Charles of New England sports — apparently is finally ascending to the throne.
Meanwhile, we wait and wonder whether Cowboys owner Jerry Jones fires Mike McCarthy and maybe turns to Belichick.
Imagine Bill winning a Super Bowl for Hall of Famer Jerry Jones and the Dallas Cowboys?
While Bob and Jonathan take back their team.
Dan Shaughnessy is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at
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