When it became clear that there wouldn’t be an NFL land rush for Bill Belichick’s services, Belichick changed the narrative.

He doesn’t want to work for an NFL owner anyway.

The attitude came through on Monday, during the latest episode of the Let’s Go! podcast. Asked a simple question — When should teams make coaching changes? — Belichick turned the answer into a mini-rant against NFL owners generally.

“It’s such a personal question for ownership to decide,” Belichick said. “And historically, you look back at great coaches like Tom Landry, who probably never would’ve had a chance to do what he did in today’s environment. . . . There’s a lot of cooks in the kitchen, you know, between the General Manager, personnel directors, head coaches, owners, owners’ families and so forth. Sometimes, from the outside, it’s a little blurry as to who’s really making the decision, whether the owner has deferred it to somebody, whether he is making it him or herself, or whether it’s a committee or how all that works.”

And when it comes to looking for football coaches, the conversation usually focuses on something else.

“I would say in my experience of interviewing with different owners for head coaching positions, the subject very seldom relates to football,” Belichick said. “It’s about a lot of other things besides football. The only interview I’ve ever had with an owner that was a football conversation really was Al Davis interviewed me in depth about everything football, from personnel to coaching scheme, staff, practice, techniques, fundamentals, scouting, you name it. Now, some of that was probably a little bit of information gathering on his part, too, but he was genuinely concerned about the specific operation of the football team and how it would be conducted and how what he believed in and how that would integrate with somebody different than him who had never been in the Raider system. And it was a great day that I spent there in Oakland with Mr. Davis.”

So it sounds like Belichick is done with the NFL, even if the NFL is also done with him.

That said, his North Carolina $10 million buyout drops to $1 million on June 1, 2025. That term didn’t pop up spontaneously. He wanted it. He got it.

Which leaves the door open for more interviews about things other than football with too many cooks in a cramped kitchen.