Zappe wasn't the guy either. Sucks. If there was some magic wand to the next QB that would have been nice.
All the more reason to not to start ****ing around the GOAT QB you already have on your team. Again, he created his own mess and then compounded on it by screwing up all his attempts at fixing it.
1. Don't start a pissing match with Brady by trying to set up his exit.
2. Don't ignore him all offseason when he can walk and then give him some mediocre deal that shows you didn't want to retain him.
3. Don't go into the off season with a dud like Stidham as your replacement.
4. Don't show the whole world you ****ed up by scrambing to get Cam Newton who was washed at the time as a bandaid for your own mess.
5. The next year when you need a QB don't play passive and wait for the last QB projected in the 1st round to fall to you and let other people trade over you so you don't have any say in who you get.
6. Don't take that QB and create a QB controversy with another QB who was a total sack of **** anyways.
7. Don't saddle them with a guy like Matt Patricia who has never coached an offense at a high level a day in his life.
8. Don't constantly all your QB's over the last 5 years **** weapons and a **** line.
And that's just the QB position that he screwed over. We could talk about how he mismanaged the kicking role during that time, we can talk about how he extended all his old favorites on defense and turned it into Jurassic Park with a bunch of slow guys, we could talk about how the team looked less prepared every single year and were making stupid decisions that were comical and news worthy by the end, we could talk about how every single one of his drafts for years were absolute failures. We can talk about how he only surrounded himself with old favorites on his coaching staff and couldn't ever find new forward thinking coaches. We can talk about how whenever he had a decision to make between players in free agency he always went after some sort of value deal over the more talented guys and was consistently getting duds (Sanu, Smith etc). We can talk about how the offensive line had been a mess since at least 2019 and he never fixed it and it's still a problem to this day. We can talk about how all of a sudden for the first time in the whole Belichick era we had a head coach who was starting to make excuses for himself and was covering his own ass instead of taking a "the buck stops with me" approach like he had for many years.
There's no way a reasonable person can look at where the team was when Bill got fired and think he deserved to stay on for any reason besides blind nostalgia.