Beginning of the end: Patriots fall to Chiefs as season — and maybe Bill Belichick's tenure — winds down

If Bill Belichick’s run as New England Patriots head coach was a Martin Scorsese movie, this week would have been the moment when the piano outro of “Layla” started up. The endgame is clear, the finale inevitable; all that’s left is to play out the string.

Whether this week’s report about Belichick’s impending departure is accurate or not is, in a sense, irrelevant. Belichick’s woes and struggles since Tom Brady left the franchise are a matter of established fact, and the warming glow of six Super Bowl rings has faded away. Were Belichick literally any other coach for any other franchise, he’d have been left on the tarmac weeks ago. But he’s earned the right to draft the last pages of the script, to meet the inescapable end of his days in New England somewhat on his own terms.

Belichick spent the week not just sidestepping questions about his future employment prospects, but dismissing them entirely. When asked repeatedly about the report of his imminent dismissal, Belichick played a refrain on “We’re on to Cincinnati,” repeating, “I’m getting ready for Kansas City.” Not ready enough, apparently.

The beginning of the end — a 27-17 loss to the Chiefs on Sunday — looked a whole lot like most of Belichick’s post-Brady era: a flash of early promise, followed by utter devastation.

Kansas City took a 7-0 first-quarter lead on a standard Patrick Mahomes drive: four plays, 69 yards, 2:05 off the clock. But then Bailey Zappe settled in and engineered a 10-play, 61-yard drive that culminated with a what-have-we-got-to-lose fourth-and-2 pass that ended up in Hunter Henry’s hands for a touchdown. If you squinted really, really hard — and maybe if you'd have had a few Gillette Stadium beers, too — you might have flashed back to another Patriots QB who could engineer a pretty come-from-behind drive, too.

On the Chiefs’ very next play from scrimmage, Marte Mapu stepped right in the way of a Mahomes pass to snare a rare Patriots interception. Again, if you squinted hard — and if those beers had really kicked in — you might have flashed back to, say, Malcolm Butler in Super Bowl XLIX, another moment when the opportunistic Patriots flipped the script on a marquee QB.

And then, well, you were reminded it’s 2023. Mapu returned the ball to the 8-yard line, New England worked its way down to the 3, Henry caught another touchdown … and the play was called back on a holding penalty. The Patriots settled for a field goal, and then Kansas City went out and dropped 20 unanswered points on New England’s head.

As the game wound down, the broadcast took on the feel of an elegy, as graphics documented Belichick’s longevity and woes without Brady while the cameras panned over the many Patriots championship banners. New England punted on four straight possessions before Kevin Harris pounded through a flimsy Chiefs defense for an 18-yard touchdown. That play was set up by another Mahomes interception, this one the result of a Kadarius Toney drop. (It hasn’t been a great week for Toney, but that’s another story.)

That was the last meager bit of good news on the day for New England. A Kansas City punt pinned New England at its own 1-inch line. In desperation, the Patriots tried to convert a fourth-and-4 from their own 7; it will not surprise anyone to learn that it failed. The game ended with Mahomes et. al. taking mercy kneel-downs at the New England 4, and that was as cruel a fate for a Belichick-led team as you can imagine.

There’s a bit of poetry to the last quarter of the Patriots’ schedule. Sunday brought Kansas City, the likeliest heir to New England’s dynastic ways. Next week is Denver, the closest thing New England had to a conference rival during the mid-2010s.

The Patriots’ season — and quite possibly Belichick’s tenure — ends with Buffalo, the divisional rival that New England victimized for so many years. And finally, naturally, come the Jets, the team Belichick spurned — via a resignation note scrawled on a napkin — in order to join the Patriots. If the NFL’s schedule-makers had just figured a way to slip the Giants in there, it would’ve been a perfect coda.

Three weeks, perhaps, in the Belichick era. Three weeks, definitely, in the most disappointing Patriots season of the millennium. No matter how it turns out, this will be a year Patriots fans will try to forget as soon as they can.