The Art of the Rehash
A Review of The Art of Winning: Lessons from My Life in Football by Bill Belichick (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
Oh, Bill. I wanted to enjoy The Art of Winning. I wanted to know some of the secret sauce behind how you led my team--for decades, the laughingstock of the NFL--to six Super Bowl wins. I wanted to know how you made it worth it to clear my schedule for eighteen years of autumn Sundays. I wanted to see how your expertise is applicable to business and life. In The Art of Winning, I got very little of these.
The Art of Winning (which so wants to be Belichick’s oft-cited inspiration, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War) outlines Belichick’s coaching philosophy in fifteen chapters. In each, the coach weaves anecdotes with their supposed applicability outside football. Besides the (unstated, or likely, built-in) legions of adulating New Englanders, the coach sees his audience as current or aspiring business leaders. “I hope this book will help you improve your performance, wherever you happen to be on the ladder,” he writes. And while Belichick, to his credit, describes how his years running errands for the Browns taught him the ins and outs of managing an organization, the book demonstrates an almost complete lack of awareness about reality outside football.
In “Firing and Hiring,” for example, Belichick discusses his lessons on cutting players with dignity. That’s great: treat people with respect when you fire them. But what it fails to recognize is that most organizations don’t have the luxury of--every single year--having ninety people competing for fifty-three spots. Most organizations can’t just fire (er, cut) a person on a whim because there happens to be someone better. Most organizations don’t have multi-billion-dollar TV contracts keeping them profitable, even when they are terrible. And most organizations don’t have exclusive draft rights that keep talent from competitors.
The book bills itself as “bursting with unforgettable inside stories.” For observers of the Patriots, very few of the stories are unforgettable. In fact, many have been rehashed so many times that they come off as tired and devoid of insight. When describing the famous goal line stand at the end of Super Bowl XLIX, for instance, Belichick writes “My goal was to beat the Seattle Seahawks and win the championship. That goal was unwavering, and, as a result, my focus was not on mathematics or on my reputation but on something closer: the sideline of the Seattle Seahawks. What I saw across the field gave me everything I needed to know to decide on my next play, which, in that moment, was not to make a time-out call but to challenge the Seahawks to execute the right play against our goal-line defense.”
This is almost verbatim from the “Do Your Job” documentary about that season. But it misses the detail that would have made this story great: what did you see across the field, Bill? What within the chaos on the Seattle sideline did you see that led you to put your goal-line defense on the field? Perhaps Belichick can’t articulate it--that decades of instinct had taught him “something” was wrong. Or perhaps he’s withholding punches, that he is still angling for an NFL job and thus won’t bad-mouth potential allies. (Pete Carroll, the then-Seattle coach, now leads the Las Vegas Raiders, owned in part by Belichick’s partner in the six Super Bowls, Tom Brady.) Or perhaps, with several years of coaching left, he doesn’t want to give away his secrets. Regardless, the lack of detail renders this story, and similar anecdotes, hollow.
I didn’t hate the book. Several of Belichick’s points resonated with me, and I found myself cheering him on when he expounds about how culture is only as good as the individuals who propagate it. “Culture didn’t make the game-saving stop on third and one late in the 2001 ‘Snow Bowl’ against the Raiders. Tedy Bruschi, Ty Law, and Richard Seymour made that stop.” This made me think of how many of the winning proposals I’ve been a part of are due, in large part, to superior effort by the proposal teams, rather than the “culture” they worked in. Belichick’s descriptions of those long nights away from family and friends recalled the times my teammates and I plugged away at a white board in sweltering Bangladesh or trekking around East Timor, trying to figure out that edge.
But ultimately, nothing in The Art of Winning will be unfamiliar to any businessperson. It’s Management 101 wrapped in superficial football anecdotes. Perhaps it was too much to expect more from a first-time author, particularly one who may still be eying a return to the NFL. Or perhaps much of management insight has already been preached. As one sage put it, it is what it is.
