Every day, up and down the culture, unjust things are happening. Terrible things happen to good people, while some of the most vile people this country has ever produced blithely escape any accountability for their actions and go on cutting the line. It is all wrong, and if the wrongness of it is not necessarily new, it can feel crushing all the same.
Now turn that frown upside down: Bill Belichick was not elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame in his first year on the ballot. As Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham reported at ESPN, Belichick failed to receive the necessary 40 of 50 votes from the Selection Committee during their recent conclave. "Several sources who spoke with the coach over the weekend described Belichick as 'puzzled' and 'disappointed,'" the reporters wrote, adding that Belichick groused, "Six Super Bowls isn't enough?" to an associate, and believes that "politics kept him out." Delightful!
What we have here is a perfect fit between villain and consequences. Belichick has won more Super Bowls than any head coach in NFL history, and would have a fine case for admission just for his game-changing work as a defensive coordinator under Bill Parcells, where he won an additional two Super Bowls with the New York Giants. There is no real case for keeping him out of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. But the argument that Van Natta and Wickersham attribute to Bill Polian—and which Polian disclaims while saying he can't remember to a certainty whether he voted for Belichick or not—which amounts to making Belichick wait a year as a sort of ad hoc penalty for the two cheating-related offenses he oversaw in New England, is funny if not remotely valid. It is the nature of Hall of Fame voting that stupid stuff happens for stupid reasons, and this can comfortably be filed under that heading. In that sense, while the Spygate and Deflategate offenses are real enough, it would also be perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the thing for a member of the committee to withhold a vote from Belichick just because of how he acted.
More than that, though, it is so perfectly insignificant. Belichick will get in, but he will have to wait for the honor. The NFL media gets to work off their case of the zoomies during the quiet week before the Super Bowl, by stomping around and demanding that the cowards who didn't vote for Bill Belichick simply because of his awful personality or past incidents of breaking league rules show themselves and explain their values. An anonymous NFL front-office type texted ESPN's Adam Schefter to request that those who didn't vote for Belichick be exposed. Online squeakers have compiled a Google Doc tracking which voters have and haven't gotten on the record, for accountability purposes. Blowhards who communicate in the register of a congressman heatedly snarling "Let me get this straight," in a speech made to an empty chamber, are doing just that.
"I presented Bill Belichick in the coach sub-committee meeting that moved him forward to the full committee, and I presented him to the full committee," Outkick NFL writer Armando Salguero posted Tuesday. "I am stunned, disappointed, and disagree deeply with the at least 11 selectors who didn’t vote for him for the HOF Class of 2026." Peter King, when Van Natta and Wickersham reached him with some version of "God, did you hear about Bill Belichick?" replied, "Holy fuck!"
There will be repercussions from this, but they will not matter very much. Belichick will gnaw through the hood drawstrings on whatever fucked-up sweatshirt he's wearing with slightly more vigor than usual; Tom Coughlin's and Mike Shanahan's election to the Hall of Fame by the Coaches Committee will be delayed by a year to maintain proper spacing. Salguero will presumably write a column or two about it. In its stupid, secretive, lavishly and needlessly petty smallness, it is every bit the perfect a tribute to Belichick's career and persona, and much more so than his bust in Canton will be. He'll deserve that bust when he gets it, and he deserves to get it next year. But that will just be a metallic rendering of his signature rictus, and so necessarily incomplete. This goofy affair, in its combination of scattershot vengefulness and vinegary personal sloppiness, actually feels like Bill Belichick.
