At 2024 NFL Combine, Patriots Begin Necessary Departure From Bill Belichick

New England’s director of scouting took a big step toward the organization’s new era, toeing a delicate line of public perception following an all-time great.

New England Patriots director of scouting Eliot Wolf spoke at the combine Tuesday and told all of us assembled there that the team was changing its draft grading rubric from the traditional Bill Belichickian scale, which is weighted heavily on a player’s prospective role, to a more Green Bay Packers–centric scale. Wolf said the Packers scale is more “value-based,” which allows scouts to more easily stack prospects.

Before we get on with our point, let’s consider how stunning that last sentence was for several reasons. 

1. A member of the Patriots’ scouting staff spoke publicly at the scouting combine.
2. A member of the Patriots admitted that the team had a grading scale.
3. A member of the Patriots admitted what the original purpose of said grading scale was.
4. A member of the Patriots admitted that the team was changing its grading scale.
5. A member of the Patriots was not immediately thrown into the trunk of an unmarked Camry and driven to a dark site where his identity was erased.

Wolf, who's in his third year as the Patriots' director of scouting, signaled a new era on Tuesday :: Kirby Lee/USA TODAY Sports

Welcome to one of the first significant steps taken by the organization in the post-Belichick era. The Patriots arrived in Indianapolis tasked with the challenge of artfully stepping out into a new day, while maintaining a deference to one of the most important figures in the organization’s history; one who was notorious for his desire to maintain control over every facet of the team and whose approach eventually became unsuccessful enough to warrant a parting of ways.

Let’s take a moment to recognize how absolutely impossible it is to find the right notes to pluck in this scenario.

If Wolf had come out and spoken in a monotone, hard-breathing through every question as if each reporter was keeping him from an emergency heart transplant, we would have seen it as an insultingly poor imitation, which would necessitate questions about why the team would move on in the first place.

If Wolf had come out and stomped on an effigy of Belichick whilst twirling his quarter zip over his head, yelling No ,more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks, the battle lines would have been drawn amid the sands of public perception. The Patriots on one side, and a coach who, I imagine, will soon have a massive platform on some television network each Sunday—and a vested interest in both defending his reputation and heightening it to the point where he’s a desirable head coaching candidate again in 2025—on the other. It’s not a fight the Patriots would want.

Certainly there were more sensible options at Wolf’s disposal, but you know what I mean.

There was a fine line to walk, and Wolf, who did admit that the eventual culture the team was constructing would be less “hard ass” (a statement I found more obvious than controversial because, compared to Belichick, any program is going to be mathematically less hard ass) seemed to tread it perfectly. Wolf also talked about the weaponization of the offense, which, if we were truly looking to extrapolate some kind of defiance based on loosely contextualized press conference utterances, could also be seen as a hard pivot. The Patriots admitted that life would be different, both in their words and in their actions Tuesday. But there was also a tacit understanding that the person who did it before them defined what it meant to be a football coach in America for a majority of some adult lives.

I often bring up the Patriots’ usage of Cam Newton as a kind of punch-absorbing apparatus between the Tom Brady era and the Mac Jones era, because it’s proof that even Belichick cared about the emotional weight of someone replacing the greatest. And if Belichick, the most narrative-averse human being in professional football, believes there needs to be separation between perceived greatness and an heir apparent, it should eliminate that doubt for the rest of us.

Now, Belichick is the one being replaced, but the parameters are much different. He was the Patriots organization. It was one man’s ethos Saran Wrapped around an entire building. The Patriots organization is now a small army of different thoughts, ideas, backgrounds and sensibilities.

Their early attempts at standing together have rendered the lot of us optimistically curious about what is ahead—and not longing for what was left behind. As we mentioned, the enormity of that task and its immediate success should not be overlooked. Now, with new grading systems, new cultures and new freedoms, the challenge becomes keeping it that way.