Bill Belichick and the mental strain of accepting complexity

Bill Belichick is being fired today as coach and general manager of the New England Patriots.

For the last couple of years my friend Michael and I wasted time arguing with other posters on a Michigan football board about Belichick, until we both gave up in the face of what I believe in Catholic theology is called invincible ignorance. The posters we were arguing with, who are normally intelligent analysts and critics of all things Michigan football, as well as myriad other subjects, became fanatically committed to the most nonsensical idea ever argued for on that board, which is that Belichick had always been a bad NFL coach, who won six Super Bowls and reached three others because Tom Brady was — apparently by orders of magnitude, because otherwise this theory doesn’t begin to work — the best quarterback in NFL history.

There may be been some sort of bias at work here although I can’t quite identify what it was.

This view is so totally insane that it actually disturbs me that evidently intelligent people could hold it. It’s a position that requires believing that ultimately someone who is both the head coach and the de facto and then the formal general manager of an NFL team has an ultimately trivial role in a team’s success — a role that is genuinely negligible in comparison to that played by the starting quarterback, who is apparently responsible by himself for something like 95% of the team’s performance (do the math).

Occam’s razor suggests that Bill Belichick used to be a great coach and GM, and is now a bad one, for reasons that are exactly mysterious as the following developments:

(1) A player who was once a superstar but is now replacement level

(2) A novelist who used to write great novels but now writes bad ones

(3) A once brilliant and idiosyncratic thinker who becomes a bigoted crank

(A related phenomenon is how we feel tempted to discount the greatness of a person in one area if we subsequently discover that person is awful in other ways.)

Anyway, outside of contexts in which changes in performance can be measured fairly objectively, there’s a strong tendency to deny that these completely normal and even somewhat predictable progressions happen. Thus, for example, the erstwhile brilliant thinker is now revealed to have “always” been worthless, because it’s too disturbing to contemplate how complicated we and the world are.

Galsworthy was a bad writer, and some inner trouble, sharpening his sensitiveness, nearly made him into a good one; his discontent healed itself, and he reverted to type. It is worth pausing to wonder in just what form the thing is happening to oneself.

Orwell, “John Galsworthy”