June 29th, 2025

By Stephen Juza

For our final article in our coaching wins leader series, we pick up after part three looked at Don Shula in depth. While Shula ended his career as the wins leader, there was a brief stretch of time where another coach overtook him. More than 390 games into his career, and the wins leader to start a career for more than 170 games, Shula was surpassed by none other than Bill Belichick.

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Slow Beginnings

It took a pretty historic run for Bill Belichick to catch up and surpass Shula, however briefly. Belichick had a very slow start to his career. Before he was the HOF-bound coach for the New England Patriots, he was the sputtering coach for the Cleveland Browns.

After his five seasons in Cleveland, he only had one winning season, an 11-5 season leading to a Browns playoff victory. Following the 1995 season, Belichick was fired by the Browns and returned to the assistant coaching ranks. After four years of assistant coaching, he returned as a head coach for the Patriots, but the future was not promising. In his first season, Belichick and the Patriots only went 5-11, the same record that got him fired five seasons earlier.

The Patriots Dynasty

By the time Belichick started his second season in New England, he had 41 career wins, 29 behind Shula at the same point in his career. After that, however, he finally turned the corner towards winning, securing his first Super Bowl victory, and three of the next four titles. With a young quarterback, well rounded team, it was the beginning of one of the greatest dynasties in American sports history.

During the next 300 games until he caught Shula, the Patriots won 77% of their games - averaging more than 12 wins a season. Included in that historic run was the Patriots perfect regular season, a feat first set in the 1970s by Shula’s Dolphins. While the Patriots fell short of the Super Bowl victory that season, they would go on to win three more between 2014 and 2018, giving Belichick the most Super Bowl victories of any head coach in history.

Between 2001 and 2019, the Patriots failed to make the playoffs only twice: 2002 and 2008. Every other season, they won the AFC East division. In fact, they had more Super Bowl victories than seasons with no playoff victories during this time.

Downfall of a Dynasty

A slow end to the 2019 season allowed Shula to surpass Belichick for good, and the 2019 season marked the end of the Patriots dynasty. We’ve talked about the issues at length of what helped bring down the Patriots in a prior blog post. Quarterback Tom Brady left the Patriots in free agency to go to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers who promptly won the Super Bowl.

With the 2020 Covid season shaping up, the Patriots had the most number of voluntary opt-outs of any team, possibly a result of the team's success over the years. Additionally, his reluctance to hire outside coaching minds eventually caught up to the team. Experienced coaches retired or changed teams, and Belichick opted to replace them with inexperienced assistants rather than seek an outside coach.

Eventually, Belichick’s prior brilliance was not enough to keep the team afloat, and in his final four seasons in New England, the team had only one winning season.

An Unremarkable End to a Career

Like most coaches, Belichick was fired unceremoniously due to poor performance. The team was going nowhere, and his reluctance to change led to a poor performing, unexciting team. While he fell short of the career wins record in New England, there was some thought that he would be hired somewhere else after the 2023 season. Ultimately, had he been able to find a good situation to land in, he likely would have had the wins record in about three years.

However, after failing to get hired for the 2024 season, the likelihood greatly diminished, and is now all but gone. He jumped to college football, and he was hired as the head coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels this latest offseason. It is hard to imagine a scenario where he ends up on an NFL sideline again in his career, leaving him just a few seasons short of the wins record.

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The Return of Shula

In this cart above, each column represents the “Ones” digit, while each row represents the “Tens” digit into a coach's career.

With Belichick no longer in the race, Shula returned to the top of the coaching pile until his retirement. Ultimately ending his career with 328 wins, a record that is really only threatened by Andy Reid and the sustained dominance of the Kansas City Chiefs. While Shula’s record will remain for at least several more years, Reid is the only coach in the league that threatens the record in the next ten years or so.