Bill Belichick’s new book underscores the importance of personal connections
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Seth Wickersham
ONE OF THE most insightful statements about Bill Belichick was made in mid-September of last year. But it wasn’t made by Belichick himself, even though he spent the football season all over airwaves and podcasts. It wasn’t made by Michael Lombardi, his longtime friend, colleague and chief public defender. It wasn’t about the New England Patriots. In fact, it didn’t even mention Belichick by name. But it was still about him.
The comments were made by Tampa Bay quarterback Baker Mayfield. He told the “Casa de Klub” podcast that when Tom Brady quarterbacked the Bucs, it was a “high-strung environment.”
“I think everybody was pretty stressed out,” Mayfield said. “They wanted me to come in, be myself, bring the joy back to football, for guys who weren’t having as much fun.”
Fun.
To those who know, that was an ironic word choice. What Tom Brady had once privately said about Bill Belichick — and was part of the reason why he decided to leave New England — was now being said about him. And that said something about them both.
ON MAY 6, Bill Belichick’s first book, “The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football,” will be released. He is the rare coaching legend who wrote a book neither after winning a championship nor after retirement, but after he was fired. (Sorry — when he and the Patriots “mutually agreed to part ways.”) He was in a strange space during most of 2024: 72 years old, without a job in football for the first time in 50 years and unsure of where he would land. Between Brady winning a Super Bowl in Tampa, a few subpar drafts, three losing seasons in his final four years in New England, and “The Dynasty” docuseries, a pervasive narrative on Belichick had taken hold — that he struggles to connect with people, especially players. That his methods, once revolutionary, are now antiquated.
Brady, of course, became an exemplar of that movement. In Tampa, he and Rob Gronkowski were proof that winning could be fun, so went the story. It was no surprise that Brady, Gronk and former Pats receiver Julian Edelman gave a resounding “no” when asked on air late last year whether they could picture Belichick — who turned “do your job” and “no days off” into rallying cries — coaching in college at North Carolina, where he ended up.
“I would be frightened,” Brady said.
“Could you imagine Bill on the couch recruiting an 18-year-old?” Edelman added.
Having listened to Belichick over the decades, interviewed him multiple times, written stories that flattered and irritated him, listened to other coaches discuss him, and authored a book mostly about him, I expected “The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football” to be one of a few things. Maybe a modern version of Bill Walsh’s coaching-cult classic “Finding the Winning Edge,” which literally provided granular rundowns of what the former 49ers great told the team on the third day of training camp. Or, unlikely but plausible, a splashy tell-all, settling old scores. Or, perhaps, a business book for the Wharton crowd.
Instead, it’s about something more interesting and revealing. It’s largely a book about emotion. About emotional intelligence. About connection. About how a leader should treat people.
About, though not explicitly stated, Belichick’s famously perceived blind spots.
WHY NOW?
That question frames the beginning of the book. Why would an economics major who is famous for making shrewd decisions give away secrets, in a ruthless sport in which he still traffics? The answer, in part, is due to his father.
In 1962, Steve Belichick wrote “Football Scouting Methods,” one of the most influential football books ever. Steve did it while he was still in the game. If father can, so can son. Bill feels in debt to the sport. “I hope that this book can give back some of what I have taken from football,” he writes.
This book lacks a lot of hardcore football, at least in terms of what we’ve come to expect from Belichick when he has shed light into his vast knowledge, legendary preparation and savvy creativity. He doesn’t dive deep into his theories about, say, long-snappers or nickel cornerbacks. He offers little fresh insight into some of his most epic moments, from “Butch the Back” in Super Bowl XXXVI to “Malcolm, go!” in Super Bowl XLIX.
A preseason game from 2004 receives a longer look than most of his championships. Some of his greatest hits from over the years, when it became clear that he was playing a fundamentally different game than his peers — the intentional safety against Denver in ’03, the 1-10 defensive alignment against Peyton Manning’s Colts, the record-setting offensive innovations from ’07, to name a few — are either not mentioned or barely noted.
That’s not to say, however, that there’s not football. It just lives beyond the chessboard.
It arrives in the form of passion: “There are players who put everything they have into the game because they can’t imagine doing anything else,” Belichick writes. “I’m like that. I don’t need coffee; I need more hours in the day.”
And in humor: “If somebody uses AI to summarize this book down to three essential words, I hope they are: Don’t. Commit. Penalties.”
And in admiration: Pages are filled with analysis and perspective and features on his favorite coaches, from Bill Parcells to Sean Payton to Andy Reid, and players, from Lawrence Taylor to Mark Bavaro to James White, to name a few.
There are chapters on how to motivate people. How to prepare, improve, how to move on, and how to handle success. How to balance long-term strategy against short-term necessities. But classic Belichick, he spends more time on his mistakes than his historic successes.
Certain mistakes, that is.
He doesn’t mention Spygate, but he does detail the decision-making process as to why he went for it on fourth-and-13 against the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLII, a key moment in the game that ended an undefeated season. Why he opened the door for Brady to leave in 2020 is looped in with a slew of players unaffordable for salary cap reasons; why the Patriots loved but passed over Lamar Jackson in the 2018 draft is given some real estate. Insight into why Malcolm Butler was benched in Super Bowl LII is ignored; why Belichick erred in not activating a defensive lineman named Dan Klecko in Super Bowl XXXVIII is studied.
In explaining the wrong way to fire people, Belichick points to a pair of examples from himself: His releasing Bernie Kosar when he was the Cleveland Browns coach in 1993, and, years later, when he pink-slipped an unnamed Patriots player while he was in the pool at a team party. Indeed, Belichick dedicates most of a chapter to four words that he uttered often in staff meetings, exemplar of leadership, accountability, culture, and the power of admitting mistakes: “I f—ed that up.”
Non-football influences, from Jack Welch to Steve Jobs to hedge fund manager Ray Dalio, get shoutouts. So does Roger Goodell, for helping to make “the NFL a great league.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Robert Kraft receives nary a mention.
But what has made Belichick successful, and fascinating, is that underneath that severed-sleeved hoodie is someone with a deep and diabolically genius understanding of the human condition. As he grew as a coach, from Baltimore to Detroit to Denver to the Giants to Cleveland to New England to the Jets and to the Patriots again, he has developed mechanisms and strategies to put coaches, quarterbacks and offenses under pressure, knowing that they’d likely revert to their most essential and predictable selves.
He knows that football is a people business. But for the most part, it’s been described in terms of how he smartly exploited an opponent’s ego or habits, from Mike Martz in Super Bowl XXXVI to John Harbaugh with the “Baltimore” and “Raven” formations, or how he ripped players, even superstars like Brady — especially Brady — in squad meetings.
In the book, he admits that at times, he was engaging in performance art. But if he could motivate a player to improve by pissing them off, so be it. If it made for a dour environment, that was an acceptable trade. If it wasn’t fun, tough.
Belichick goes to great lengths to let us know that he views players as more than nameplates, even if some of his former players might respectfully disagree, such as Lawyer Milloy and Drew Blesdoe, to name a few. He wants us to know that with players sacrificing their bodies and staff sacrificing family time, he takes his responsibilities seriously — to his core.
He does this in two distinct ways.
One, Belichick goes long on what it’s like to be fired. “Traumatic,” he writes, citing his Browns experience. A tireless work ethic, and deep awareness of the fragility of tomorrow, was instilled in him at a young age, when he learned about his grandparents’ immigration from Croatia. They worked “as hard as they could to put food on the table.”
Steve Belichick couldn’t afford to go to college, despite being a motivated and talented enough football player that he played at Case Western Reserve University and in the NFL. In college, Steve lived in a vacant room in a gym, “delivering ice, and doing other assorted jobs to make ends meet.” Bill Belichick became a wealthy coach, but he never forgot that emotional place. He pushed his football staffs to the brink in the pursuit of winning, but doing so provided a measure of stability for his coaches, scouts and their families in a ruthlessly unstable profession.
“During normal times,” he writes, “it’s easy enough to imagine that your job and your life are two distinct domains — family is family and work is work. But when you get fired, that distinction gets bulldozed. … All the basics and necessities of providing for a family and contributing to the future are suddenly less secure.”
Two, Belichick wants us to know that he has personally helped players and staff clear their minds to focus on the task at hand. An example: the Belichick Travel Agency. Whenever the Patriots reached the Super Bowl, Belichick spent the first two days after the conference championship game on logistics. Sorting out 1,600 game tickets, 300 hotel rooms, two full planes and whatever else. It’s a short story in the book, but a profound one.
For one thing, it’s amazing to imagine Belichick handling itineraries. For another, when Belichick was hired in New England, he pledged to delegate more after his Cleveland experience. This would seem like an obvious job to hand off. But no. It was not only important; it was important enough that he needed to handle it. “If I expect to be able to ask my slot receiver to play in a pinch at cornerback in front of a hundred million viewers on TV,” he writes, “I don’t get to ignore his request for a hotel room with a nice view.”
A book authored by Belichick is a statement as much as a story. Throughout his career, he has always tried to take the long view. There’s a reason why one of the largest collections of football books outside of the Library of Congress is on the Naval Academy’s campus and bears his family name. But Belichick has always taken the immediate view, too. He works, and works, and works, refusing to let up.
“Getting used to winning,” he writes, “is the quickest way for it to stop.”
Is that mindset healthy? Is it balanced? Is it — whisper this around Belichick — fun?
“The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football” is intended for a mass audience. But at its core, Belichick is writing for a subset of a subset of a subset of football minds, the truly and spectacularly obsessed. They will find virtue in it, and in Belichick himself, even if they don’t like him — even if they have wondered, as many owners, GMs, and coaches have, if his system works when he’s not at the head of the table. Belichick writes that his program is “not for everyone. Neither am I. But to get to the top, and stay there, is close to impossibly hard.”
Towards the end of the book, Belichick ponders his view of himself and maybe self-worth. “Has every year that I’ve failed to win a Super Bowl been a failure? Big picture? Maybe not.
“But I live in my picture.”
TOM BRADY LIVES in his picture, too. And after Mayfield’s comments, he responded on air.
He chose not to give the context. In 2020, Brady left New England — left Belichick — because the winning was less artistic than intolerable. He recently wrote that a “natural tension” had developed between him and Belichick — “the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities.” Brady chose Tampa, with its warm weather and warmer team culture, led by a coach, Bruce Arians, who unapologetically championed a vision beyond wins and losses, with cigars and cocktails.
When the season started, it became clear that Brady’s new team wasn’t as buttoned up as his previous one, wasn’t as accountable as his previous one, and wasn’t winning as much as his previous one. Sunshine be damned, that didn’t fly with Brady.
He didn’t miss Belichick, but it was clear that he missed elements of the football world in which he had been raised. It was up to Brady to take what he had learned, adapt it for situation and self, and apply it in his own way. Imagine what forms that might have taken, beyond the mind games that Mayfield detailed on the podcast, of Brady intentionally ignoring or throwing inaccurate passes to send receivers a message. His standards, like his former coach’s, are impossible — until they’re not, of course, and teammates reach a level of play even they didn’t think they could achieve.
“I thought ‘stressful’ was not having Super Bowl rings,” Brady said on air during the Bucs-Eagles game last season. “So, there was a mindset of a champion that I took to work every day. This wasn’t daycare. If I wanted to have fun, I was going to go to Disneyland with my kids.”
It was pure Belichick, and could have been straight out of “The Art of Winning.”
And Mayfield? He played well in 2024, and had some fun — until his season ended, with a first-round playoff loss at home.
On the day Alex Bregman met Roman Anthony and Marcelo Mayer this spring, the two Boston Red Sox uber-prospects greeted him with a proposition: Let us play student to your teacher. Bregman, who joined the Red Sox days earlier on a three-year, $120 million contract, has cultivated a reputation as perhaps the smartest baseball mind in the game, a combination of film hound, analytics dork, eagle-eyed scout and pure knower of ball gleaned from a wildly successful big league career. As Mayer put it in his unique verbiage: “Hey, bro, do you just want to marinate in the clubhouse and talk shop?'”
“It made me laugh,” Bregman said, “because, like, ‘marinate in the clubhouse and talk shop’ — it sounds like me when I was 21. All I wanted to do is just sit in the clubhouse for four hours after a game and talk about baseball.”
All these years later — having played more than 1,000 games, whacked 200 home runs and worn the countless slings and arrows of those who can’t bring themselves to look past his role on the Houston Astros team that cheated amid its championship run in 2017 — Bregman is still in love with the game. When his wife, Reagan, was about to give birth to their second child in mid-April, Bregman told teammates he didn’t plan to take full advantage of Major League Baseball’s three-game paternity leave. That day in Tampa, Florida, he went 5-for-5 with two home runs, flew to Boston, saw the birth of Bennett Matthew Bregman, and returned to the team. He missed one game.
At 31, Bregman is scarcely different from the baseball obsessive who brute-forced his way to the big leagues within a year of being drafted and has logged the second most postseason plate appearances since. Even as others seek his wisdom, he still fancies himself an apprentice, an explorer with an endless font of curiosity– someone who watches closely and studies ceaselessly, capable of making adjustments from pitch to pitch, at-bat to at-bat, game to game. Bregman converses in English and Spanish, with hitters and pitchers, finding himself at the intersection of the Venn diagrams that illustrate divisions in plenty of clubhouses.
“It’s consistent ball talk,” said Garrett Crochet, the Red Sox ace also acquired over the winter. “When I’m not starting, in between innings, he’ll come over on the bench and pull out the iPad and be like, ‘I was looking for this right here. He’s going to give it to me the next at-bat,’ and then [the pitcher] does, and it’s a single or double.”
Bregman’s instincts come from a place of necessity. His biographical details don’t scream big leaguer. In a game increasingly inhabited by physically imposing athletes, he stands a couple of inches shy of 6 feet. He grew up in New Mexico, nobody’s idea of a baseball hotbed. Bregman’s love of the game has fueled him every step of the way, from starring at SEC powerhouse LSU as a freshman to being selected No. 2 in the 2015 MLB draft and becoming a mainstay in a loaded Astros lineup since his debut as a 22-year-old.
“His energy is very contagious,” said Red Sox first baseman Abraham Toro, who also spent parts of three seasons as Bregman’s teammate in Houston. “He’s always talking about baseball. Even when the game’s over, he’s talking about baseball. And it makes you want to get better.”
Bregman started his career picking the brains of veteran teammates such as Justin Verlander, Martin Maldonado, Brian McCann and Carlos Correa in his quest for improvement. Now, a decade later, he is relishing the opportunity to foster those discussions with the next generation of players in his new home.
“Baseball talk is the key,” Bregman said. “Just talking the game with your teammates, coaches, talking about the pitcher you’re facing or the hitters that our pitchers are facing, how you see it and how they see it. And then if you see anything in their game or they see anything in your game, you go back and forth on how guys can improve.
“It’s energizing, to be honest with you. Especially it being a bunch of younger guys who are trying to improve the same way I am. I feel like I’m young and want to get a lot better. And I feel like my best baseball’s ahead of me.”
As the offseason languished on, it became increasingly clear that Bregman would have to find a different home than the only clubhouse he’d ever known. When Bregman’s primary suitors finally came into focus, the favorites were the Detroit Tigers — managed by A.J. Hinch, with whom he spent four seasons in Houston — and the Red Sox.
In the final hours, Bregman asked Boston for its best offer — one the Red Sox had loaded up with annual salary and opt-outs after each of the first two seasons in hopes of proving sufficiently alluring.
It was a staggering deal for someone who over the previous five seasons was plenty good (.261/.350/.445 with 92 home runs) but objectively not a $40 million-a-year player. But Bregman and the Red Sox both believed he could get himself back to the version of himself from 2018 and 2019 — the one who posted more than 16 wins above replacement and ranked among the game’s elite.
Bregman accepted. And that’s when Boston’s hitting machine went to work. Red Sox coaches already had put together a presentation to explain how and why he needed to fix his swing. Over time, Bregman had developed almost imperceptible bad habits. The timing of Bregman loading his hands was too late and too fast. Moving his hands as the ball left the pitcher’s hand left him vulnerable, and never did Bregman possess the sort of bat velocity to make up for it.
“After those [successful] years, it was like, I wanna be better, I wanna be better, I wanna be better, I wanna be better,” Bregman said. “So I started trying to change things and improve, improve, improve instead of doing what made me who I am and just refining what I was already doing at the time.”
Red Sox hitting coach Peter Fatse and assistants Dillon Lawson and Ben Rosenthal loved the simplicity of Bregman’s move in the batter’s box, but they saw more potential and knew swing adjustments would be necessary. Change doesn’t exactly suit Bregman. He is the guy who eats the same meal every day and never deviates from his hitting schedule. But he is also the son of two lawyers and at least open to practical solutions, so he was willing to hear out his new coaching staff.
The Red Sox worked with Bregman to address the flaw in the swing: It all started, they agreed, with a poor setup and load. Rather than exclusively focus on bat-speed training, Bregman committed to loading earlier and rebuilt his swing in a place that’s heaven to baseball rats like him: the batting cage.
“Get back to doing what I did in my best years, which was to focus on being the best in the cage that day,” Bregman said. “Not worrying about if I’m hitting well on the field; more like, can I master the f—ing cage today? Can I square the ball up? Can I execute the drill in the cage and then go play in the game? As opposed to, I need to go 4-for-4 tonight with two doubles and a homer. I’m gonna be the best hitter before the game in the cage, and then I’m gonna go out and just try and repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat.”
Bregman had found his greatest success when he followed a few cues: load slowly, take the bat’s knob past the ball in front of the plate and strike the inside part of the ball. Finding that simplicity in his purpose and swing would be the goals. He did not need to set specific production expectations, instead trusting process over outcome. He would fix the swing in time for the numbers to reflect it. When the ball started jumping off Bregman’s bat again, he knew he had hacked himself successfully. His average exit velocity over the first seven regular-season weeks with the Red Sox jumped by 3 mph. His hard-hit rate spiked to 48.5% — up eight percentage points over his previous career high. He is hitting .304./381/.567 with 10 home runs and 32 RBIs in 43 games.
“Honestly,” Bregman said, “I feel like this has been the best I’ve hit in my career.”
Bregman’s desire for improvement does not begin and end with himself. When he recently overheard Fatse and Ceddanne Rafaela, the Red Sox’s talented 24-year-old super-utility man, talking about ways to improve Rafaela’s poor swing decisions, he couldn’t help but chime in.
“We were talking about simplicity of the load, and [Bregman] just goes, ‘One, two,'” Fatse said. “One, be ready to hit. Two, be in a position to get your swing off. And it was amazing. It just clicked. In the dugout, we’ll scream: ‘one, two.’ Rafa’s walking up plate: ‘one, two, one, two.’ [Bregman] will be screaming it from the dugout, and it’s simple, but it’s his ability to connect with everybody that makes him a unicorn in that regard. He cares so much about his teammates. He wants to win.
“It’s just the urgency behind it,” Fatse continued. “If he has something, he’s going to go right to you and give it to you. And whether it’s something with his swing or if we’re talking about somebody else’s approach or swing or matchup-related stuff, he’s ready to engage in the conversation immediately. There’s no waiting around. When you have that level of urgency, everybody responds to it.”
In much the same way that his advice has rejuvenated Rafaela — who has four two-hit games in his past eight and has struck out only twice — Bregman’s arrival has changed the Boston clubhouse by bringing to it an edge that left with the 2019 retirement of Dustin Pedroia, the second baseman who was every bit the heart of the Red Sox’s three most recent championships as David Ortiz. Bregman grew up idolizing Pedroia for his outsized production from an undersized body. He was unaware of the other qualities they share: the encyclopedic knowledge of the game, the capacity to evoke fits of uproarious laughter at team dinners, the desire to help others find the best version of themselves the same way he did.
“Everyone understands [Bregman’s] process is just to win that game and he’ll do whatever it takes that day or night to win,” Red Sox outfielder Rob Refsnyder said. “He’ll adjust his swing, his setup, his thoughts, his scouting, everything. It’s all about just winning that game. I think guys are a lot more receptive to him, and obviously he’s a winner and he works so hard. It’s easy to take advice from somebody like that because you know it’s from a genuine, we’re-just-trying-to-win-this-game [perspective].”
Winning comes in plenty of forms, be it a 5-for-5, two-homer day or an 0-for-4 bummer in which Bregman does the work with his glove or legs. By now, his teammates know that no matter how early they show up to the ballpark, Bregman will be there first, his white pants already on, ready to attack the day. He’s always happy to pore over information and develop a detailed scouting report, Crochet said, “based off of analytics, video, prior at-bats. For him, it’s really a happy medium of all three. I feel like he’s able to get on TruMedia — that’s our site with all the pitch-usage breakdown by count and pitch-frequency maps — and window a guy or sit on a specific pitch, specific spot. It’s incredibly impressive.”
The Red Sox aren’t taking for granted the time they get with Bregman. As much as they’ve loved the knowledge and production, they recognize that a seasonlong jag almost certainly will precipitate him opting out of his contract. Bregman now knows he can replicate for other teams what he developed in Houston, where he was lionized by local fans amid the festering fallout of the cheating scandal in 29 other stadiums.
If this does wind up as a Boston gap year, a la Adrian Beltre, Bregman’s influence will continue to reverberate. He did spend time marinating with Anthony and Mayer — and also bought them, and a host of other top Red Sox prospects, tailored suits to help them feel comfortable in a major league setting. By Bregman’s second week with the Red Sox, the kids were already giving him grief, wondering aloud if he had gray pants in his spring training locker — an implication that he’s too big-time to travel for a Grapefruit League road game. Never one to be told what he is or isn’t, Bregman went for a 90-minute bus ride with Anthony and Mayer from Fort Myers to Sarasota.
Bregman’s connection to the Red Sox is generational. His grandfather was the general counsel for the Washington Senators and helped hire Ted Williams, who spent the entirety of his 19-year Hall of Fame playing career with Boston, as their manager. His father, Sam — currently running for governor in New Mexico — grew up around the Senators and Williams. And it sparked a fondness for baseball he passed on to his son.
The allure of Boston that helped guide Bregman to the Red Sox — familial and modern — has been substantiated in every way but their record, which, at 22-22, is good enough for second place in the American League East but would leave Bregman on the outside looking in at the postseason for the first time in a full season spent in the big leagues. Boston has plenty of time to right itself, which would be the final validation for Bregman on his stay in Boston, however long it lasts.
“I felt like it was a place I could win,” Bregman said. “I felt like it was a place where I could prove the caliber a player that I believe I am. And I wasn’t scared to go prove it.”
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The Boston Red Sox placed right-hander Tanner Houck on the 15-day injured list Wednesday because of a flexor pronator strain in his right forearm.
The move is retroactive to Tuesday. In a corresponding move, the Red Sox recalled right-hander Cooper Criswell from Triple-A Worcester.
Houck yielded 11 runs, nine hits (including two home runs) and three walks in 2 1/3 innings Monday night in a 14-2 loss at Detroit.
“This is definitely probably the most lost I’ve ever been,” Houck, 28, said after the game. “And just not getting the job done, which weighs on me heavily.”
Asked about his health, Houck said, “Physically, I feel good,” and added, “I just need to be better.”
Houck is 0-3 with an 8.04 ERA, 17 walks, 32 strikeouts, an America League-high 57 hits allowed and a major league-worst 39 earned runs in 43 2/3 innings over nine starts this season.
An All-Star in 2024, Houck owns a career 24-32 record with nine saves, a 3.97 ERA, 158 walks and 449 strikeouts in 474 1/3 innings over 113 regular-season games (80 starts) since 2020.
The Red Sox selected Houck 24th overall in the 2017 MLB draft out of the University of Missouri.
Criswell, 28, is 0-0 with one save, a 10.38 ERA, one walk and no strikeouts in 4 1/3 innings over three relief appearances this season. For his career, he is 7-7 with one save, a 4.78 ERA, 44 walks and 104 strikeouts in 141 1/3 innings over 41 games (20 starts) for the Los Angeles Angels (2021), Tampa Bay Rays (2022-23) and Red Sox (2024-present).
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