Former Patriots coach Bill Belichick has plenty of time on his hands. He has been using it by, for example, visiting the University of Washington’s spring practice (his son coaches there now) and speaking at a Nebraska coaching clinic. And he clearly has much to offer.
With the NFL currently processing an unprecedented alteration to the kickoff, he surely has much to offer there, too.
NFL teams should be clamoring to get his views on how to handle both ends of the new play, both when kicking and returning the kicks. And they should offer him a significant amount of cold, hard cash for his views.
Plenty of unattached coaches and personnel executives do plenty of consulting for teams. As best we can tell, the rules are there ain’t no rules. He could, in theory, make plenty of money by going from team to team to share his thoughts on what can or should be done when kicking the ball or receiving the kick.
Even if the current coaching staff would bristle at the idea of bringing him in for a day of brainstorming, ownership should solicit his ideas, pay for them if need be, and then pass them along to the head coach without saying where the ideas came from.
Of all people currently on the planet, Belichick is the one who would surely have the most ideas and opinions and possibilities for how to handle the new kickoff. It would be malpractice, frankly, to not try to get his input on how to best handle what fundamentally is an experiment for 2024.