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For a guy who’s supposedly all in with college football, Bill Belichick has spent plenty of time this week hanging around the NFL’s marquee event.

From an appearance at the NFL Honors show to hitting the party scene to just strolling around New Orleans, the HC of the UNC hasn’t been honoring his “No Days Off” mantra.

It went next level on Sunday. While out and about with his half-century-younger-than-him girlfriend (not a judgment, just a fact), the happy couple trolled the Falcons.

She was wearing a T-shirt that declared the Falcons to be the champions of Super Bowl LI.

The message sticks it to the Falcons on multiple levels. That was the game that saw Atlanta squander a 28-3 third-quarter lead to the Patriots. Also, the Falcons are the team that interviewed Belichick but passed on him a year ago, hiring Raheem Morris instead.

While it’s funny, it’s another reason why it won’t be easy for Belichick to get another head-coaching job at the pro level. Between Bill and his consigliere “Lombo,” enough has been said both publicly and privately to likely burn all bridges back to the 32 teams of the NFL.

Which will make it impossible for Belichick to catch Don Shula. And which will make it inevitable for Belichick to be leapfrogged by Andy Reid.


I started covering the Super Bowl and the week preceding it in early 2009. The experience has taken the PFT traveling roadshow to Tampa, Miami (twice), Dallas, Indianapolis, New Orleans (twice), New York, Phoenix (twice), San Francisco, Houston, Minneapolis, Atlanta, Los Angeles, and Las Vegas.

Miami and New Orleans lead all cities with 11 turns at hosting the game. But the 12-year gap between Super Bowls for New Orleans makes little sense.

A recent item from FrontOfficeSports.com, which might or might not carry enough fingerprints from the league to send a clear message, questions the ongoing viability of New Orleans as a Super Bowl city, from the standpoint of hotel rooms and the absence of a new, high-tech stadium. The experience, however, more than justifies the drawbacks.

Although no true rotation has ever emerged, here’s an idea that popped into my relaxed brain this week. The core rotation should be New Orleans, Las Vegas, and Miami. Then, every fourth year, another cut of cities would make up the sub-rotation: L.A., Phoenix, Houston, Atlanta, plus the periodic quid pro quo that comes from a city/state paying for most of a new stadium.

Nashville quite possibly will crash the party, soon. And maybe this proposal will then expand to four core cities (Nashville included) with every fifth year given to a city from the second tier.

It’s probably a bit naive, since the NFL implements a broader, revenue-driven play based on getting the best possible deal with each and every Super Bowl that is awarded. Previously, it was an annual competition. Now, the league approaches a city, states its terms, and gets a “yes” or a “no.” (Not many cities are saying “no.”)

In the end, the NFL should say “yes” to a system that prioritizes the overall experience, with the best cities popping up more often.

New Orleans, Las Vegas, Miami.


They faced off on multiple occasions during their time with the Vikings and Packers. During the 2020 Collective Bargaining Agreement talks, quarterback Kirk Cousins and quarterback Aaron Rodgers engaged in a different kind of interaction.

Former NFL Players Association executive director DeMaurice Smith tells the tale in his upcoming book, Turf Wars: The Fight for the Soul of America’s Game, of an “intense conversation” between Cousins and Rodgers regarding the voting process for the current CBA.

Rodgers (who wasn’t the Packers’ union representative at the time) wanted the team-elected representatives to vote against sending the proposed deal to the players. That would have killed the CBA. Cousins “passionately” argued, per Smith, that not allowing all players to vote on a nearly $200,000 annual increase in minimum salaries impacting nearly 70 percent of the NFL’s rosters was wrong.

As Smith puts it in the book, Cousins was the only one who stood up to Rodgers. The move was instrumental in the eventual vote to send the deal to the players. Which resulted in a vote by the players to accept the new CBA, on the brink of the start of the COVID pandemic.

Smith also explains that Panthers owner David Tepper later said the owners should have pulled the offer from the table, given the looming pandemic. Which means the players got a better deal by moving when they did than they would have gotten if the reps had listened to Rodgers and killed the proposed CBA.

Turf Wars can be preordered here. It will be released on June 10.


Tight end Kyle Pitts was advertised as a generational talent when he came out of Florida, with the size, speed and resume to make NFL scouts droll. The Falcons made him the fourth overall pick, a selection that was applauded.

Pitts, though, hasn’t lived up to the billing.

He’s had pedestrian numbers over four seasons, with only one 1,000-yard season and only one Pro Bowl. His best season was his rookie season.

Of course, it hasn’t helped that he has played with six different starting quarterbacks in his career.

The Falcons believe they have fixed the turnover at quarterback with Michael Penix, their first-round pick in April. Penix believes he can help turn Pitts into all that he was expected to be.

“For him, it’s believing in himself, and for me, I’m going to believe in him,” Penix said Wednesday on PFT Live with Mike Florio and Chris Simms. “He knows that. I just talked to him the other day, and we just talked about some of the things that we want to do and it’s like, ‘All right, I’m going to give you my all each and every day, and I want you to do the same.’ Once we do that, our connection is going to continue to build. Just getting those full-speed reps, getting those reps together in practice, feeling comfortable with the game plan. Obviously, it’s different when you can scheme somebody up to get open based on game plan and stuff like that. It could be some of that as well, too. At the end of the day, whenever he’s open, I’ve got to find him and get him the ball, and I know he’ll make big-time plays whenever it’s in his hands.”


Kirk Cousins’s football future is unclear at the moment, but he knows that any hopes of returning to life as a quality starting quarterback will require him to be in top physical form.

Cousins didn’t look like he was in that kind of shape after returning from a torn Achilles in 2024 and his diminishing returns over the course of the season led the Falcons to bench him as they tried to beat out the Buccaneers for the NFC South title in the final weeks. They couldn’t pull that off, but making the move to first-round pick Michael Penix Jr. means that the path back to the first team is blocked in Atlanta.

During an appearance on NFL Network Tuesday, Cousins said he’s prioritizing his health over any discussions of where he’ll play for the time being.

“I definitely feel like I have a lot of good football left in me,” Cousins said. “Time will tell. It’s still kind of uncertain. We’ll get to March and know a lot more. But I think the focus for me really is getting healthy. That’s really my focus is I gotta get healthy. I’m no good to the Falcons, I’m no good to a team if I’m not feeling really good. That’s really where my focus has been through January and February now that the season has wound down, really taking all the time I can to get my body feeling really good.”

Cousins said he feels his Achilles is OK, but that his right ankle had issues and that his right shoulder and elbow were injured in Week 10.

Cousins has a no-trade clause and is guaranteed $27.5 million for next season with another $10 million will be guaranteed early in the new league year, so moving on from him would make for a sizable cap hit. Falcons G.M. Terry Fontenot said he’s comfortable with Cousins backing Penix up, but it remains to be seen which way the Falcons will actually go once the offseason gets going.