Quote:
Originally Posted by DYoungJelly
The short answer is I don't know if they accepted it.
But it happened! (At least with Belichick in Cleveland)
When Belichick was the Browns head coach, his team lost the week 17 game 4 out of 5 years (from 1991 to 1995). In 1994 they made the playoffs and won the last game of the regular season.
There were fans in Cleveland saying at the time would Lombardi or Landry have accepted this?!?
I got tired of looking and have already invested more time into this discussion than I want to. You can look up Gibbs and Belichick's other stuff if you want.
Again, I don't think this "proves" anything, I just don't think it matters that much one way or the other.
I do think Belichick and Gibbs are great communicators and great at relating to the human animal. I also believe they are brilliant and would recognize that they have to be real with men, not college kids, about what is at stake in a meaningless week 17 game.
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Saying that a bad team loses the final game 4 out of 5 times isn't proof the coach was sandbagging it. And one of those losing seasons was when the Browns relocation controversy was ongoing, not just a case of playing a normal "meaningless" game.
I liked Mike Shanahan's take on being in the middle of a losing season here in 2012: It was time for evaluations. He had to back off that statement publicly, but the original statement seemed like something he, Belichick, and Gibbs would say rather than let the team slide on a "meaningless" game.
Good teams don't sandbag games for draft picks, give up in games when playoffs are out of reach. They build a winning culture through the ups and downs.