The New England Patriots and New York Jets play this weekend, with the Pats once again an elite team and the Jets a disaster. Since 2001, the Patriots have won four Super Bowls and reached another two, posting a winning record each season. The Jets haven’t gone beyond the AFC championship game and usually fall well short of that. Beyond this, Jets fan have to deal with the frustration of knowing that New England can always count on Tom Brady and Bill Belichick, while their team endlessly cycles through quarterbacks and head coaches.
Most horrible of all, Jets fans know Belichick was once theirs … for an entire day.
Even by New York Jet standards, it’s a bizarre story. When the 1999 season ended, Bill Parcells stepped down as head coach of the Jets, having “retired” from coaching. (He soon returned to the Dallas Cowboys.) His logical successor was Bill Belichick, who had proved to be a brilliant defensive coordinator for Parcells, as they won two Super Bowls together with the Giants.
That said, there turned out to be a lack of enthusiasm on both sides for the new arrangement. For starters, Belichick was technically only getting the job because, in a complicated bit of maneuvering when Parcells and Belichick left New England to come to the Jets in 1997, he was guaranteed to be the New York head coach one day. (Indeed, Belichick was very briefly named head coach in 1997, before Parcells was able to join the team officially and Belichick returned to being an assistant.)
Beyond this, the New York Jets were going through an ownership change (which Belichick acknowledged was a major concern) and was likely sick of being in Parcells’ shadow (Big Tuna was still serving as chief of football operations).
The result: Almost as soon as he was officially hired, Belichick resigned. Legend has it that he was so eager to step down, he scribbled “I resign as HC of the NYJ” on a napkin as his official notice.
And so Belichick walked, and the Jets didn’t fight too hard to keep him, making the Pats give them the 16th overall pick in the 2000 draft and fourth- and seventh-rounders in 2001. (The Jets also conceded a 2001 fifth-round and 2002 seventh-round selection.)
It should be noted that for the 2000 season, it didn’t seem like a terrible move. The Patriots went 5-11, bringing Belichick’s career head coaching record to 41-55. (He had previously spent four years in charge in Cleveland.) The Jets were 9-7. Then Belichick gave this Brady kid a shot while the Jets desperately struggled to find a QB of their own. It’s been Butt Fumbles ever since. —Sean Cunningham for RealClearLife
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