Bill Belichick might actually love insider’s ridiculous suggestion for next job

Nobody knows more about football and its history than Bill Belichick. Every once in a while, you can catch a glimpse of it, when he’s giving reporters a history lesson on the evolution of long snappers, making a field trip to Jim Brown’s statue to educate his players on the greats of yesteryear, or recapping Green Bay’s storied history and the evolution of the forward pass under Curly Lambeau and Don Hutson.

After Belichick and the New England Patriots mutually agreed to part ways following the 2023 season, the 71-year-old head coach did not find a landing spot among the league's head coaching vacancies. As things currently stand, the 2024 NFL season will be the league's first campaign without Belichick since 1975. 

While Belichick is expected to seek out coaching opportunities in 2025, there has been a lot of speculation about how Belichick will spend 2024. He has been linked to potential media positions after his brilliant performance on NFL Films' Emmy-winning "NFL 100 All-Time Team" series, where the coach dissected film from players as far back as 1919.

Mike Florio says Belichick should help NFL teams with new kickoff

Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio believes Belichick should spend the year as a consultant for NFL teams after the NFL redesigned the kickoff.

"NFL teams should be clamoring to get his views on how to handle both ends of the new play, both when kicking and returning the kicks," Florio wrote. "And they should offer him a significant amount of cold, hard cash for his views. He could, in theory, make plenty of money by going from team to team to share his thoughts on what can or should be done when kicking the ball or receiving the kick."

Belichick's football acumen is unparalleled, and he has more experience than any coach in high-pressure situations. Belichick has prowled the league's sidelines for nearly 50 years, and he has appeared in over 20 percent of all Super Bowls ever played.

But some coaches may be too prideful to accept that they could learn something from Belichick, but Florio suggested that ownership could "solicit his ideas" and "pass them along to the head coach without saying where the ideas came from."

Florio believes it would be malpractice to not get Belichick's input, but frankly, it's an unrealistic proposition, especially if Belichick expects to return to coaching in 2025.

The Atlanta Falcons had a chance to hire Belichick as their head coach this offseason, but ultimately opted to sign Raheem Morris instead. It's hard to imagine Belichick give them coaching lessons, and the Falcons likely wouldn't get a very pleasant reaction from saying, "We didn't want you to be our coach, but can you teach us how to coach this play?"

Bill Belichick has long been an outspoken proponent of the kicking game and special teams, and he has often criticized the NFL's constant tinkering with the kickoff.

“Seems like, football, we’ve got a pretty good game here,” Belichick said in 2016, h/t MassLive. “Been that way for a long time. Seems like the kicking game has been a great part of our game. But, look, like I said, a lot of people feel like the game needs to be changed, so we’ll have to see how all that turns out.”

When the competition committee passed a rule in 2016 for touchbacks to bring the ball out to the 25-yard line, Belichick suggested that the league's attempts to reduce concussions on kickoffs were misguided.

“Some of the concussions and some of the injuries look to me like they come on touchbacks,” Belichick said. “So we want more touchbacks. Is that really solving the problem here, as it’s been presented by the competition committee? I think you know how I feel about that. We’ll see how smart some of that has really been to address the problems that we think are being addressed.”

Still, he learned to adapt to the new rules, and he could likely do it again. Belichick loves the strategy of the game, and he'd likely love figuring out new ways to exploit and attack his opponents, but if Belichick has any ideas or tricks up his sleeve for the new kickoff, he'll likely save them for his return to the NFL.