Much has been made of Bill Belichick’s failures in the NFL draft — particularly in recent years. In fact, it is really the only main criticism on Belichick, widely considered the greatest head coach of all time. However, upon close examination, Belichick has about as good a record at drafting players as any other general manager in the league. With the 2022 NFL draft coming up in only two weeks, let’s take a look back at Belichick’s five best draft classes while he’s been at the helm of the New England Patriots.
For this list, I will not be including the last two drafts (2020 and 2021) as the players who were taken in them have not had much time to develop yet, so it would be hard to accurately quantify how good the classes are at this point. While I could spend 200 words raving about the first-year returns from quarterback Mac Jones, the reality is that the sample size is just too small from the last two drafts to make any sort of reasonable assessment of them right now.