Cris Collinsworth doesn’t know if Bill Belichick will return to coaching, so he feels free to give an opinion on his future, whether on TV or as the next head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars, Philadelphia Eagles, or Dallas Cowboys.
Appearing on The Rich Eisen Show last week, Collinsworth threw a dart while lauding Belichick’s work on TV. With an impressive Rolodex of media gigs, from ESPN to Underdog Fantasy to The 33rd Team and more, Belichick has weathered his year away from coaching quite nicely with a bit of a career renaissance.
“I wonder how he feels about this,” said Collinsworth. “If you would asked me this at the beginning of football season, I would have said 1000% percent yes. I do think he wants to coach, and I still do. It probably depends on the job — and I still would lean 60/40 that way. But he’s been so good on television. I mean, I don’t know how much of this stuff you’ve watched, but when he gets on to explain something about some intricacy of the game, I watched him the other night describing the outside zone play. And they went on and on and on about the history…
“Luckily for me, Mike Shanahan and that whole tree I grew up with. Mike was my offensive coordinator at the University of Florida my senior year, so I knew a little bit of that history, but the depth of what these players are doing is unbelievable. I remember I asked him; I said to him one time, like I was talking to him one time about the ‘Hand Jam’ of the defensive tackles on his team, and he went on for 20 minutes. If you don’t ask about his team or the other and try to get any strategic advantage out of him, he’ll talk to you all day.
“I said to him at the end of the thing, I go, ‘Coach, you could write a book about this.’ He goes, ‘Cris, I could write a book about every position.’ I was like, ‘Yeah, you probably could; that’s just about right.’ I think he’s probably, he hid away all those talents inside the coaching room, but I really do feel like as somebody that never played for him, I’m starting to understand the depth of understanding that he had about all those positions and why they won so many championships.”
What will be funny to Collinsworth in the world is that Belichick goes back to coaching, watching him go to the podium again and seeing if he changes faces. Collinsworth did his best impression of arguably the greatest head coach of all time and suggested that the 72-year-old Belichick would go from giving brilliant, elaborate answers to being the minimalist he was for 24 seasons in New England.
“And everybody’s gonna go, ‘No, we know better. We know you actually know how to do this. Stop it!'”
