'He made a tremendous investment in himself': Bill Belichick Sees O'Brien's Coaching Journey as an Ideal
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CHARLOTTE, N.C. — In 2007, Bill O’Brien decided to take a shot at coaching in the National Football League, even though it meant losing a position with more prominence.
This transition required O’Brien to leave a college football offensive coordinator position at Duke for a low-end assistant coaching role with the New England Patriots. The change was risky, but O’Brien believed in himself.
Former New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, arguably the greatest coach in NFL history, was impressed with O’Brien’s mindset when he joined New England's staff. Belichick didn't know exactly how it would pay off for O’Brien, but he sensed the beginning of something real—the blossoming of a successful coaching career.
Fast forward almost 20 years later, the two are coaching in the same league once again, only for different teams in an entirely different sphere of football—as head coaches in the Atlantic Coast Conference, Belichick for North Carolina and O’Brien for Boston College.
As former tight-knit colleagues who have the utmost mutual respect for one another, Belichick really wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. He predicted it from the very beginning of O'Brien's emergence into the NFL coaching season.
“He made a tremendous investment in himself,” Belichick told Boston College Eagles On SI at 2025 ACC Football Kickoff. “He left a coordinator position to come in basically as a quality control coach with the New England Patriots, and that worked out for him.”
The minor career backtrack which O’Brien accepted when he left Duke for the Patriots made O'Brien change his opinions of the game, according to Belichick. He saw there were different levels to coaching and how the combined efforts of everyone made a team function more efficiently.
“So the investment that he made in himself, and the confidence he had in himself to go from a coordinator position to honestly, kind of low man on the totem pole at the Patriots, and then, you know, to rise back to that same position and then turn that into the head coaching job at Penn State, was, you know, that’s what a lot of great coaches do,” Belichick said.
Belichick cited Patriots OC Josh McDaniels, former Patriots DC and Detroit Lions HC Matt Patricia, as well as former Patriots assistant coach and current New York Giants HC Brian Daboll as additional examples of coaches who held themselves from jumping the gun by going for head coaching and coordinator positions to learn from the lower ranks initially.
This process—of not just climbing the ranks within an organization, but also climbing in the coaching ranks of the league as a whole—has morphed dozens of assistants and low-tier coordinators into some of the greatest head coaches in both the FBS and the NFL.
Even Belichick spent over a decade as an assistant for the Baltimore Colts, Detroit Lions, Denver Broncos and the New York Giants before he became a head coach in Cleveland in 1991.
“Now you see a lot of these kids, they just want to skip that,” Belichick said. “They want to be [like], ‘I want to start at a coordinator level, assistant general manager, assistant to the president.’ And then a couple of years, they’re ready to take over whatever it is. And honestly, when you start at the bottom, you learn a lot more about how things work, [how] the organization works.”
Moving up is only a result of learning the intricacies of an organization, Belichick mentioned, no matter if it’s in the college or the pro ranks.
The learning curve for coaches who accept this fact earlier than later, which O'Brien did, is always a better means to future success, Belichick said.
“As you move up, you understand what’s going on, you know, underneath you,” Belichick said. “So I have a ton of respect for Bill for what he did, and then what he did at Penn State, Houston, when he came back to Alabama and when he came back to us at New England. You love Bill’s toughness. You love his competitiveness. And his players respond to that.”
Graham Dietz is a 2025 graduate of Boston College and subsequently joined Boston College On SI. He previously served as an editor for The Heights, the independent student newspaper, from fall 2021, including as Sports Editor from 2022-23. Graham works for The Boston Globe as a sports correspondent, covering high school football, girls' basketball, and baseball. He was also a beat writer for the Chatham Anglers of the Cape Cod Baseball League in the summer of 2023.
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