Boomer Esiason Says Belichick Turned Down the Falcons Job, Which Makes the World Make Sense Again

Adam Glanzman. Getty Images.

Let me tell you why you're here. You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it for weeks, that there's something wrong with the world. You don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. 

It is Bill Belichick being unemployed while Mike McCarthy still has a job and Dan Quinn just got hired. It's the Falcons giving Belichick two interviews, only to give the job to a retread like Raheem "21-38" Morris. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work… when you go to church… when you pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.

Fortunately, we have a football Hall of Famer here to give us the red pill that lets us see that truth:

Boomer Esiason:

“Legitimately an NFL executive basically told me that they believe that [Falcons owner] Arthur Blank offered Bill the job. Now there may have been some caveats to that offer, you never know, it’s never ‘OK Bill, I want you, here’s a five-year contract, you do whatever you want.’ I don’t think it was one of those. 

“The way it was made and sounded to me was like ‘OK, I understand your concerns, but you’re gonna have to deal with some of this and we want you to come in, we want you to be the coach,’ and then maybe he just thought better of it.

“And just maybe he said ‘You know what? I don’t want to go right back in. I want a year away. I want to see what happens,’ because as we know there will be about five or six job openings next year, and there may be a better situation where an owner says ‘you know what? I wanna go down this path with you and I want you to take my building over and I want you to run it the way that you ran it with the New England Patriots.'”

First of all, thanks are in order to Boomer for making the world make sense again. I feel so indebted to him for this I owe him an apology for enjoying that disastrous Friar's Club Roast they did of him at the Waldorf Astoria when the Super Bowl was in New York and I was one of the people who wrote jokes for it. And we all sat up in the balcony crying laughing as all the NFL guys like Bill Cowher and Dan Marino were painfully unfunny. And then Jeff Ross just eviscerated Esiason. And then Gilbert Gottfried (RIP) got up and told a 20 minute joke about an old guy having filthy sex with a young woman while millionaires quietly exited the hall in disgust, as literally tears of laughter rolled down into my shirt collar. But for the giving us the gift of this report, Esiason deserves better than to be subjected to my love of social awkwardness and vulgar comedy.

But to the substance of what he said, this the only logical explanations. And confirms what I wrote at the time:

Arthur Blank continues to be an imbecile who doesn't know how to run a football operation. Probably because he's listening to the very people who would lose all their power if Belichick was brought in. Especially CEO Rich McKay. 

McKay is Blank's Littlefinger. The one who has the ear of the king. And he's not about to cede that power. … The people making the decisions are interested in keeping their jobs, even at the expense of continued irrelevance. So they made that choice. 

As for Belichick, good for him. Why should he compromise? He doesn't give up control to you. You give control over to him. He's not going to accept some role where he has to answer to some bureaucrat with zero championships on his resume. If you want to hire him, you do it on his terms. He's a package deal. A pretty fucking successful package deal, as the ring he was probably wearing at those meetings, the Super Bowl LI one with exactly 283 diamonds on it, would indicate. 

He's better off waiting for the perfect job to come along. Somewhere where he'll get the power he deserves and the respect he's earned.

Belichick doesn't need to work at the moment. He's not in some dire straits where he can't afford to take a year off because the bank will foreclose on the family farm. He's got one more job ahead of him, and he's going to pick the perfect one. Not compromise and have to go take his orders from some CEO who's never accomplished anything. Next year there will be options. Some better than this one, to be sure. A team with a better roster and more cap space, and an owner anxious to give him his chance to build it in his image. He'll be a year older, sure. But Don Shula's record will still be there. The Falcons will be a year shittier, and no closer to becoming a winning organization. 

Just as I suspected. Belichick shot down the Atlanta job, not the other way around. And next January, when he's tanned, rested and ready to return, may God have mercy on everyone else who didn't hire him. Because he won't.