Well in CLE he took over a bad team that he gradually improved to the point of a playoff team with year-over-year progression. Eventually he got them to the playoffs. Then the bottom fell out the last year with the team moving and all. Over his first 3 years in CLE he had a losing record each time, but the overall direction was positive culminating in that great year 4 with a playoff win. He took over a 3-13 team and not everything is a quick turnaround. It was a slow build for him there. I don't hold that losing record against him for the first 3 years. The last year I chalk up to being a pretty tough situation to coach through with the team moving. They finished 5-11 but they actually started 3-1 and were still .500 when the owner announced the sale. That goes on his record as a losing season just the same though.
In NE, his first year here, he gutted the roster. They played parts of the year with less than 53 guys to help get the cap in order. Similar to CLE, he had a multi year plan in place and year 1 involved taking a step back to go forward. I don't fault him too much for that. The next year he started 0-2 with Bledsoe which is a blemish and definitely makes you ask the question of how much Brady was responsible, even at that stage of his career where he probably wasn't as good an overall player. It was 0-2 with 2 one-score losses, so not exactly like they were incompetent until Brady solved everything, but yeah it's question.
In his later NE years, he did an absolutely terrible job. That's why his record sucked. He was an awful GM over those last few years and the years preceding that. He made it worse by refusing to acknowledge it and properly rebuild like they needed. He chased stop gap QBs in the older, washed up Newton and low ceiling but NFL ready Mac Jones. He refused to go for the multi year rebuilds he did in CLE and NE and it left the roster mired in mediocrity until the bottom fell out his last year. His coaching circle dried up because he's 70+ years old and he didn't have a circle of trust to pull from because at a certain point they stopped developing coaches.
Coaches are not gods. They can't do anything they want.
If you don't think Modell interfering with big decisions was a big factor, then I don't know what to tell you. He wouldn't let Belichick move on from Kosar. That's why they were bad in 1993. As soon as they went with Testaverde, suddenly the Browns became good.
Remember, Kraft in 2001 was ready to fire Belichick for his decision to move on from Bledsoe.
Then in 2014 when Brady was 37, we drafted a QB for the future. People think it was wrong to do so. Belichick made the argument to Kraft. A lot of people think it was very very very wrong to start nurturing the QB of the future when your QB is 37. Belichick planned to replace Brady after Jimmy G's 4th year when Brady would have been 41. HOW WRONG OF HIM TO DO THIS!!!
The fact is, there was a lot of interference and a lot of rancor in 2017 and 2018. Kraft was again ready to fire Belichick for losing to the Eagles! Apparently, Belichick only saved his job by winning the Super Bowl again with a defensive performance for the ages. But that didn't stop the complaining and whining and the insistence that they spend as many resources as they had on weapons for Brady (a 1st, a 2nd [traded], a 4th [traded], a slew of free agents pass catchers (Demaryious Thomas, Ben Watson, Josh Gordon, Antonio Brown, Austin Seferian-Jenkins, not to mention the famous Mo Sanu, etc.). Why were they spending picks like drunken sailors (a trend which started with trading a #1 for Brandin Cooks)? To maximize the window for Super Bowls on a team that was getting very old (not just the QB). To top it off, they also lost 3 premium draft picks to an NFL scandal.
And in the midst of all this, the owner told Belichick that he would have to reinstall Guerrero's presence in the locker room after banning him, and this is something that even the players who hated Belichick (like Amendola) understood as undermining the entire coaching staff.
They traded picks for vets, lost picks to a scandal, and maxed out the cap for the first time in the Dynasty. Why? BECAUSE they were OLD.
You're going to slam Belichick for Cam Newton because Newton was too old? It was a Covid year. They didn't sign any FAs because they took the hit on the cap. This was a year to take the hit for the second Dynasty.
The rebuild began the next year. 2021. From your post, I'm assuming you think they should have tanked the season instead of winning 10 games? Good luck telling those Super Bowl winning vets to throw games. It was never going to happen.
People tend to forget that our defense from those years had slowed down a lot, we had 6 starters on D who couldn't run anymore (CB1, SS, FS, OLB, MLB, OLB, and the DE left in FA). We needed 7 new starters on defense, and that was part of the rebuild that began in 2021 and went through 2023 (Barmore, Judon, Dugger, Godchaux, Anfernee, Bentley, Gonzalez, Marcus Jones, Peppers). This defense looked pretty much rebuilt to me in 2023, though of course it could have used one more pass rusher.
This is the REBUILD.
On the offensive side, they tried and failed to rebuild the offensive line by bringing in 5 or 6 free agents over that span, and drafting Onwenu, Strange, J Andrews, Hines, Stauber, Mafi, Sow, etc. They spent 10 picks on OL, 5 of those were 1st through 4th round.
It was obvious they were rebuilding; I'm not sure how people missed that.
