Defending Bill Belichick, because somebody must

Very few people hate Bill Belichick as much as I do. I hate how he screwed over my Jets by resigning on a napkin before even completing one day as head coach. I hate his arrogance. I hate the way he treated Eric Mangini when he first took the Jets head coach job. But really, I just hate how good he is.

Despite all of this, my hate for Belichick has never been stronger than it is right now. Because now I hate Bill Belichick for making me defend him.

We all know the situation by now: Fourth and two for the Patriots on their own 29 yard line. Instead of punting the ball to Peyton Manning and the Colts, like every other NFL coach would do without hesitation, Belichick decided to go for the win and the first down. Patriots didn't convert. Colts went on to capture the victory.

Suddenly, Belichick is a coach too arrogant for his own good.

"I hated the call. It smacked of I'm-smarter-than-they-are hubris," Sports Illustrated's Peter King wrote in his Monday morning column. Former Patriot Rodney Harrison and ex-Colts coach Tony Dungy were killing Belichick after the game on NBC's post-game coverage. In a column on espn.boston.com, former Patriot Tedy Bruschi wrote, "[Belichick] is going to have to rebuild the feeling of confidence in his defensive unit."

As is usually the case, all these NFL "experts" are ignoring the statistical evidence supporting Belichick's decisions. Without getting into the math too deeply, by going for it on fourth down, Belichick gave the Patriots about a 70 percent chance of winning, whereas punting would have put a New England victory at around 60 percent. And even if you tinker with the exact percentages of the Colts scoring or the Pats converting, there is still almost no way that anyone can statistically argue that Belichick made the wrong call.

By deciding to go for it on fourth down, Belichick did what every NFL coach is supposed to do — put his team in the best position to win the game. The fact that the fourth down conversion failed is irrelevant in analyzing the decision. To call this a knee-jerk decision made because of ego is ridiculous. After all, is anything Belichick does knee-jerk? And Bruschi's argument that the defense's confidence is going to be shot for the rest of the year because Belichick put the game in the hands of Tom Brady is ridiculous. Does Lamar Odom cry that Phil Jackson has no confidence in him when Jackson designs last minute plays for Kobe Bryant?

Here's my problem: The people killing Belichick are the same "experts" that killed Dolphins head coach Tony Sparano for leaving the Colts too much time in a game earlier in the season. It's the same people that have been labeling Belichick a genius over the past decade. If you want to kill Belichick for his poor clock management and use of timeouts, that's one thing. But to criticize Belichick for going for it on fourth down is hindsight analysis that ignores the fact that Belichick's decision was a classic case of a coach using a good process, and just getting a bad result.

But that doesn't mean that I'm not loving every minute of it.

Yaron Weitzman is a staff writer.