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Bill Belichick, by name of William Stephen Belichick, (born April 16, 1952, Nashville, Tennessee, U.S.), American professional gridiron football coach who led the New England Patriots of the National Football League (NFL) to six Super Bowl titles (2002, 2004, 2005, 2015, 2017, and 2019), the most for an NFL head coach.

Belichick’s father was an assistant collegiate football coach, primarily at the United States Naval Academy, who taught his son the finer points of the sport from an early age. The young Belichick attended team meetings and film sessions and knew how to diagram complex plays before he became a teenager. Although possessed of a precocious football intelligence, he was a limited football player who received no interest from top-division colleges and instead played centre and tight end at the smaller Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Upon his graduation in 1975, Belichick was hired as a special assistant for the Baltimore Colts.

He moved on to assistant-coaching positions with the Detroit Lions and the Denver Broncos before joining the coaching staff of the New York Giants in 1979. He served as special-teams coach and then linebackers coach before being promoted to defensive coordinator by head coach Bill Parcells in 1985. Capitalizing on the presence of future Hall of Fame linebacker Lawrence Taylor, Belichick developed one of the NFL’s most dominant defenses of the 1980s. In four of his six seasons as coordinator, his Giants defenses ranked in the top five of the NFL in yards and points allowed and were integral to the team’s two Super Bowl victories (1987, 1991) during that span. As a result of his success with the Giants, Belichick was named the head coach of the Cleveland Browns in 1991.

After leading the Browns to just one winning season in five years as head coach, Belichick was fired shortly before the franchise relocated to Baltimore and became the Ravens. He then served as a defensive assistant and assistant head coach for Parcells with the Patriots (1996) and the New York Jets (1997–99). Upon Parcells’s retirement from coaching at the end of the 1999 season, Belichick was promoted to the Jets’ head coach, but he resigned after just one day at the job—rather notoriously doing so by writing “I resign as HC of the NYJ” on a piece of paper shortly before taking the podium at a press conference and announcing his departure—citing discomfort with coaching a team that was up for sale. He instead became the Patriots’ head coach less than a month later.