Bill Belichick has won more games than almost any other coach in American professional football history. As head of the New England Patriots, he has fielded a leading team for nearly fifteen years straight. In a sport replete with mechanisms to level the playing field – from team salary caps to draft rules that favor bad teams – his sustained success is even more impressive. Coaching an NFL team is an endeavor enmeshed in trade-offs; you can sign a better running back, but you’ll have to release a defensive end, and so on. There is no free lunch. So what can we learn from how Belichick consistently beats the system?
