Bill Belichick has long made it clear that he’s a big fan of the guy who preceded him by decades as head coach in Cleveland, Paul Brown.
And that makes sense in a variety of ways.
We said yesterday that we believe that Belichick, who will guide his New England Patriots against the Atlanta Falcons in Super Bowl LI on Sunday night, is the best pro football coach ever. No one in the history of the game has done what he’s done in the last decade and a half.
But there are two men who are at least in the conversation in Don Shula, the all-time winningest coach with 347 overall victories, and Brown, who guided his first 10 Browns teams to 10 league championship games, winning seven of them.
Shula, from Grand River, Ohio, near Painesville, played at Harvey High School there and John Carroll University in Cleveland and then for the Browns as a defensive back for Brown in 1951 and ’52.
Brown and Shula were both no-nonsense coaches, just like Belichick. It was their way or the highway, just like it is with Belichick.
And, just like Brown was, Belichick is an innovator who has eschewed the status-quo and done everything a different way – a better way. The way he handles the salary cap and his roster is way ahead of what everybody else is doing. He is establishing procedures that coaches will be trying to duplicate for years.
With all the things he introduced, Brown changed the game dramatically. He was so far ahead of the curve that he was catching up to the tail end of it, ready to lap it.
It’s not surprising, then, that both Belichick and Brown, in creating the landscape, were able to master it and win the games. The deck was stacked, and still is stacked in Belichick’s favor.
Perhaps someone will come along somewhere down the line and out-do Belichick, Brown and Shula. In fact, that likely will happen. It’s the way sports work, with records made to be broken.
But it won’t come easily.
