Getty Former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick in January 2024.
The legendary Bill Belichick came on the NFL head coach market for the first time in over two decades in 2024, and despite six openings (in addition to the New England Patriots job), it looks as though the six-time Super Bowl champion will stay unemployed next season. If he returns in 2025, Pro Football Talk insider Mike Florio predicts the Tampa Bay Buccaneers could be one of his landing spots for the currently out-of-work head coach.
If the 71-year-old coach sits out a year and comes back to the NFL at 72, Florio predicts there will only be a small handful of teams interested in Belichick’s services.
“Teams to watch include (in my own assessment) the Bills, Browns, Jaguars, Giants, Eagles, Vikings, and Buccaneers,” Florio writes. “That’s still not a long list of potential options. It’s seven.”
Mike Florio Has Long Pushed Bill Belichick to the Buccaneers
This isn’t the first time Florio has floated the idea that a marriage between Bill Belichick and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers makes a lot of sense.
As early as Nov. 14, 2023 — between Weeks 10 and 11 of the NFL season when the Patriots were 2-8 and the Buccaneers were 4-5 — the Pro Football Talk guru talked about the Pats trading Belichick at the end of the season, and the Bucs being the best partner.
“You put Bill Belichick on the Buccaneers — that stadium was half-empty the other day between the Buccaneers and the Titans. They’ve lost all their sizzle with Brady gone. The sizzle could return to a certain extent with Belichick,” Florio said on his “PFT Live” podcast.
During his musing, Florio mentioned that Belichick wouldn’t be interested in “dysfunctional teams,” “bad ownership groups,” or “ownership groups out there that don’t care about winning.” In the NBC insider’s estimation, the Buccaneers’ ownership and organization isn’t any of those things, so Belichick could make sense.
It certainly made sense when Tom Brady came over from the Patriots. But that may be the exact reason Belichick to the Buccaneers doesn’t happen.
Tom Brady Could Be the Reason Belichick Doesn’t Come to Tampa Bay
For 20 years, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady were the perfect NFL duo. Belichick created and called a crafty defense while Brady led an unrelenting offensive attack. The pair went 219-64 in the regular season with Brady at quarterback, 21-8 in the playoffs, and 6-3 in the Super Bowl.
Toward the end, though, there were reports that the two both thought they deserved more credit than the other, and Belichick went so far as to tell Patriots owner Robert Kraft that Brady “couldn’t play anymore,” according to an ESPN expose by Seth Wickersham & Wright Thompson.
Well, Brady could still play, and he won the Buccaneers a Super Bowl in 2021 to prove that.
At 72 (when he likely next coaches) and just 26 wins behind Don Shula for the winningest coach in NFL history, it seems like Belichick will want one more bite of the apple to prove, once and for all, that he is the greatest head coach the league has ever seen.
Will he really want to follow Tom Brady to Florida in order to do that? If he does and fails, will that put him even further in TB12’s shadow?
While the organization and situation might be right for Belichick, the Brady factor complicates things immensely and makes it incredibly hard to see the coach finishing his career in the same spot Brady did. Despite what Mike Florio likes to say.