Bill Belichick Sounds Off on NFL’s Skewed Priorities during Closed Meeting

His team may be the reigning Super Bowl champions, but you don’t stay at the top of the mountain by being satisfied with everything going on around you. Such was the case with Bill Belichick during the recently concluded annual NFL Owners and Coaches Meeting, in which the New England Patriots head coach reportedly ripped into a profanity-riddled tirade criticising the NFL’s skewed priorities.

The central theme of his complaints was the quality of NFL officiating, but not in the way you might expect. A much calmer and TV-friendly Belichick spoke publicly to reporters this week about the stinginess of some NFL owners in their refusal to spend money on cameras on sidelines and goal lines to make life easier for the men in black and white stripes.

According to ESPN’s NFL insider Adam Schefter, Belichick launched into the NFL, proclaiming, “we spend money to send the Pro Bowl to Brazil, we spend money to go overseas to London, but we can’t spend money to have four cameras in the end zone, four cameras to help determine the correct call in the end zone on certain plays?”

The man has a point. When an organisation like the NFL grows into the untouchable juggernaut of North American sports that it is today, there will always be some dissent between grassroots coaches aiming to improve the game on a logistical level, and owners keen to reach new markets in every corner of the globe.

At any rate, the NFL chose not to take Belichick’s suggestions on board, with some implying that cost effectiveness isn’t quite as much of an issue as how exactly to implement it. That alone brings up its own set of questions, but for now, it isn’t hard to see why Schefter is reporting that Mr. Belichick “left these owners’ meetings not particularly happy.”