Bill Belichick: Humble Beginnings of His Coaching Career
Analysis 6/16/23
This is the third of a multi-piece series from Bill Belichick’s sit-down interview with The 33rd Team’s Mike Tannenbaum, who worked in the front office of the New York Jets while the iconic New England Patriots’ coach was a member of the Jets’ coaching staff.
Others in the series: How Football Has Evolved | His Best Players
For Bill Belichick, the beginning of arguably the most successful coaching career in NFL history was humble.
The title was special assistant for Ted Marchibroda’s 1975 Baltimore Colts. The starting salary? Zero.
“And I couldn’t have been happier,” Belichick told The 33rd Team’s Mike Tannenbaum. “It was the break of a lifetime to be employed by Coach Marchibroda and the Colts and actually be getting paid nothing. And then I got that big raise to $25 a week and training camp.
“But it was all really about the experience.”
The payoff was a series of assistant coaching jobs over the next 16 years that provided a ladder leading to the first of Belichick’s two stints as an NFL head coach.
Long Road to the Top
In 1976 the Detroit Lions hired him as assistant special teams coach. A year later, the Lions made him their receivers coach.
In 1978, Belichick became the assistant special teams coach and a defensive assistant for the Denver Broncos. In ’79, the New York Giants hired Belichick as special teams coach and a defensive assistant.
From 1980-1984, Belichick coached linebackers and special teams for the Giants. In 1985, he got another huge break when Bill Parcells made him the Giants’ defensive coordinator, a role Belichick would fill for six seasons. His masterstroke was devising a game plan that tamed the Buffalo Bills’ explosive no-huddle offense and keyed the Giants’ victory in Super Bowl XXV.
That game plan landed in the Pro Football Hall of Fame and, along with the rest of Belichick’s body of work as an assistant, helped land him his first job as a head coach, with the Cleveland Browns, in 1991.
Building a Foundation with Cleveland
Belichick followed a similar approach to the one the Colts had taken with him when it came to adding young people eager to break into the league. He sold “the experience.” He offered a pathway to bigger and better opportunities.
After internships with a minor league baseball team and with the New Orleans Saints, Tannenbaum jumped at the chance to become player personnel assistant with the Browns in 1995.
“Of course, I hired some experienced coaches there, but also some young people to train,” Belichick said. “All the people in Cleveland that basically worked for free put in a lot of hard hours, a lot of hard work for no pay, but for the experience and for the opportunity, all, I’d say, have done pretty well for themselves.”
Investing in Yourself
Belichick had plenty of help in pitching the old-school style of working for nothing with the goal of eventually gaining so much more.
“There was quite a few of those where somebody on the staff would kind of tell the person that was coming in to interview or whatever, ‘Look, if you get offered the job, don’t ask about the money. Just take the job and figure all that out later. But if you ask about the money, you’re probably going to end up working somewhere else,’” Belichick said. “I think that’s really a good quality when you invest in yourself like that, and then it has a way of paying off.
"I’ve always kind of liked to promote from within — a way for people to come in, establish themselves, establish their work ethic there, gained respect in the building for their coaches and players that see what they put into it as the people did before them. They earn that respect and then move up in the organization as they are able to acclimate more experience. And that’s always worked pretty well for me.
“We had very experienced coaches, like Coach (Nick) Saban and Coach (John) Mitchell and so forth. And young coaches like Scott O’Brien and Phil Savage and other guys that came up through the system that eventually came on and had great careers.”
A Fresh Start
After going 36-44 in five seasons with the Browns — including a 1-1 playoff record in 1994 — he spent the ’96 campaign as assistant head coach and defensive backs coach for the New England Patriots and three seasons as assistant head coach and defensive coordinator of the New York Jets.
Then, in 2000, Belichick became head coach of the Patriots. He led them to six Super Bowl titles, with a 262-108 record in 23 regular seasons and 17 AFC East championships. He also has a 30-11 postseason record, including a 6-3 mark in the Super Bowls.
But Belichick will always remember the humble beginnings and how that inspired the way he handled his entry into head coaching.
“I look back and think about the group of people we had working there in Cleveland,” he said. “I was very fortunate to have so many good people working for me.”
Vic Carucci has been a national editor for NFL.com and a contributor to NFL Network, a senior editor for the Cleveland Browns and an NFL writer and columnist for the Buffalo News. Follow him on Twitter at @viccarucci.