As Bill Belichick comes to town, some CT coaching legends weigh in on a complicated legacy

Bill Belichick is known to look for the stone unturned, the untried approach, the different angle. In 2011, when the Patriots were nearly in the stretch run toward another Super Bowl, Belichick drew one of the most unlikely parallels one could fathom.

“I’m at practice, and the phone rings, and he says, ‘Hey, uh, coach, this is Bill Belichick,'” said Paul Assaiante, the long-time squash coach at Trinity College. “I go, ‘Yeah, sure it is.'”

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Eventually, the familiar monotone at the other end of the call convinced Assaiante, who had met the legendary NFL coach when Belichick’s Brian was applying to Trinity. The call was legit.

“How would you like to come and talk to the Patriots?” Belichick asked.

That year, Assaiante was leading Trinity to its 13th consecutive national championship and the longest winning streak in college sports history, which ended at 252 straight matches in 2012. So dynasties were to cross paths, but what did college squash have to do with pro football?

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“I’m thinking, ‘What the heck am I going to tell the Patriots?'” Assaiante said. “And he said, ‘Look, every time Trinity squash plays, you’re usually favored. And we’ve got three games left where we’re going to be favored. I want to make sure we avoid the trap games.’ … which was brilliant. It speaks to Bill’s ability to think outside the box.”

Assaiante was then working on his book, “Run To The Roar: Coaching to Overcome Fear,” which came out in 2012, when he drove his Honda Accord to Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., met the team in the amphitheater and spoke for more than an hour before watching one of Belichick’s meticulously choreographed practices.

His message: “We human beings have a tendency to decide the amount of intensity and focus we’re going to put into something based on our perception of the opponent,” said Assaiante, who retired in 2023 but remains involved with the squash program at Trinity. “So it was really about how to prepare for a ‘trap game.'”

The Patriots won a close game at Washington the next week and ran the table all the way to Super Bowl XLVI, which they lost to the Giants.

Consequential coach

Belichick, 74, can be polarizing, an enigmatic figure or a quick-witted golf partner, but his success and single-mindedness have made him, beyond dispute, one of the most consequential coaches in American sports history, a subject of study for coaches of all sports, all generations. He won 333 regular- and postseason NFL games, second only to Don Shula (347), and six of the nine Super Bowl appearances before leaving New England on less than amicable terms in 2023.

He surprised the football world when he returned to coaching with the University of North Carolina last season, and though his time there has been rocky, the Tar Heels (4-4), who came within a field goal of beating top-ranked Miami last week, are showing flashes of Belichick’s old Midas touch as they come to Rentschler Field to play UConn (4-4) Saturday at noon, a game pivotal to both teams’ hopes for bowl eligibility.

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“When you’re a young assistant coach coming up, you’re studying coaches who have had high-level success,” UConn’s Jason Candle said. “Nobody’s had more than that man, right? You pull bits and pieces from people, this profession’s about stealing ideas, stealing philosophies, themes from other programs. The most common thing, that’s most well-respected, is just the consistency and longevity to be able to do it at such a high level with so many different players.

“Pro football is meant to be a parity, everybody’s-equal sport, it’s built that way. You win the Super Bowl, you get the hardest schedule the next year. It’s meant for people to be average, and that guy refused to be average for a very long time.”

While Candle’s admiration is obvious, he also knows there is an element of that was then and this is now.

“Ton of respect for him and his accomplishments and what he’s been able to do, but with all due respect, none of those in the past have any bearing on this football game. We’re not playing the New England Patriots from 15 years ago, we’re playing the North Carolina Tar Heels and thank God, Tom Brady is not walking out of that locker room Saturday.”

Surely, there are elements of Candle’s response — the all-about here-and-now theme — that Belichck, himself, would applaud. Of course, he would have found a much shorter way to say all that, something along the lines of, “We’re onto Connecticut.”

Belichick, who played football, lacrosse and, yes, squash at Trinity’s ancient arch rival Wesleyan, graduating in 1975, became well known as defensive coordinator with the Giants in the 1980s. In ’83, he went for the vacant UConn job, which instead went to Tom Jackson. In those days, especially with the Giants, where Bill Parcells was head coach, Belichick was known for his engaging personality and sense of humor, as well as his brilliant maneuvering of linebackers and confounding of quarterbacks. After he became head coach with the Browns in 1991, he took on the taciturn manner which has become the public’s predominant perception of him.

His short, curt answers, or nonanswers are comedy for some, arrogant or insulting to others, especially when fans want an explanation for one of his decisions. Belichick’s competitiveness has been known to drive him to steal more than ideas. During his time with the Patriots, there were several episodes of bending and breaking of rules, the surveilling of opponents became known as “Spygate,” and Brady’s involvement with letting air out of football became known as “Deflategate.” At the end of his long run in Foxborough, there was friction and debate over who deserved the credit for all of it, Belichick, Brady or owner Robert Kraft.

Ruffling feathers

“One way you can tell a lot about a coach,” Geno Auriemma said, “is a lot of players who have played for you, how successful they were when they played for you, and later on, how much they hated half the stuff you made them do to get to that point. At that level, you have tremendous relationships and tremendous admirers, and you’ve got fractured relationships and lot so detractors. Like anybody who has won as much as he’s won, you ruffle a lot of feathers along the way.”

Auriemma, 12-time national champ with UConn women’s basketball and a Hall of Famer, met Belichick at a Travelers Championship Pro-Am.

“He’s probably a lot of what you see, and a lot of what you don’t see,” Auriemma said. “I found him to be engaging, fun, a really light-hearted guy. But when I watch him coach, he’s nothing like that, but it’s not the time to be like that. The thing I noticed as an outsider, the whole Patriots organization is accountability. What’s his famous line? ‘Do your job. … If you do your job, and you do your job, and you do your job, then we’re going to be successful.'”

Though Belichick did not get into the Pro Football Hall of Fame first time around, it’s only a matter of time before he does get in, just as both Auriemma and Jim Calhoun, UConn’s three-time champion in men’s basketball coach, are both Hall of Famers in their sport.

Calhoun, too, has witnessed Belichick’s sense of humor when their paths have crossed. “He’s a unique human being,” said Calhoun, a long-time Patriots fan from Boston

“When he was winning, everything was great and he was king of New England,” Calhoun said. “Then people started to see that he, in their opinion, didn’t treat the press well. He wasn’t interested in the press. He was never interested in anything, it appears to me, except winning football games. He’s a football coach, it’s what he does, it’s what he wants to do. I watched the game where (North Carolina) should’ve beaten the No.1 team in the country, and what he’s done there in a little over a year, and the look on his face, it’s the same as it was 20 years ago.”

Author of success

Belichick’s complicated legacy and complex personality has been examined by various authors. His own memoirs, “The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football,” was released in 2025. One of the more controversial parts of it is he makes not so much as mention of Kraft across its 289 pages. Ian O’Connor wrote the best-seller “Belichick: The Making of the Greatest Football Coach of All Time,” an unauthorized biography, before co-writing Dan Hurley’s memoirs, “Never Stop: Life, Leadership And What It Takes To Be Great.”

Hurley, who has won two national championships with the UConn men, and reached the championship game three out of four years, has made a study of Belichick’s ways of team building and roster construction.

“I’ve read everything I can on all the great coaches,” Hurley said. “The attention to detail, the characteristics of the type of players he brings into an organization and how they looked at it. Forget the strategic and tactical genius of the defense and the culture that was just all about winning and preparation for the next opponent. It was how detailed they got with the personnel part of things, size, weight, speed, really having archetypes and templates for the type of players they want at each position. That affected a lot of what we’re able to do in 2023 and after, looking for players at certain positions to fit our style of play.”

Mike Lombardi, an NFL veteran who came with Belichick to Chapel Hill as GM, and Stephen Belichick, the defensive coordinator, both resigned earlier this season, but Bill Belichick has stayed the course. Now UConn, Candle and the Huskies’ young quarterback, Kalieb Osborne, are in for the full Belichick experience in East Hartford on Saturday.

“This was a really gutsy move by him, taking this college job and really wanting to do this,” Auriemma said. “Regardless of what happens, whether he wins a national championship or it doesn’t work out the way he wants it to, he’s still Bill Belichick.”

Said Assaiante, who has remained in touch with Belichick through the years, “He is the CEO of a football program and he’s a defensive genius. I mean, he’s the smartest guy in the room whenever I’ve been in a room with him.”

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