The split with the Patriots and the team’s owner, Bob Kraft, was characterized as mutual. No one believed that. According to ESPN, the Atlanta Falcons came close to hiring Belichick; then Kraft warned the Falcons’ owner that Belichick, whom he’d worked with for a quarter century, was arrogant, untrustworthy, domineering, cold. Belichick got no offers. For the first time in forty-nine years, he spent football season not on the field but as a TV commentator—a member of the media, which he’d always seemed to despise.