New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick recently spoke about the strategy behind spending responsibly and building a sustainable winner in the NFL, and he said that overspending will always come back to bite you, bringing up some examples from the past with the Los Angeles Rams, Tampa Bay Buccaneers and the Jacksonville Jaguars.

“Temporarily you can, but you can't sustain it, no,” Bill Belichick said, according to Michael David Smith. “You can't sustain the 20 years of success that we sustained by overspending every year without having to eventually pay those bills and play with a lesser team. So I think if you look at the teams that have done that, that's kinda where some of them ended up. Jacksonville back in '14, the Rams are going through it, Tampa is going through it now. So, I'm not saying there's anything right or wrong with it. It's just a different way of doing things and there's the results of doing that.”

Belichick does have a point. The Patriots have been a sustainable winner for the majority of his tenure. However, two of the three teams he mentioned did achieve what they were going for, which was winning the Super Bowl in their window of contention. The Buccaneers won with Tom Brady as their quarterback in 2020, and the Rams won in 2021. The Jaguars did not win with that team.

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The Patriots were ridiculed by their fans at points this offseason for not spending, especially when it came to DeAndre Hopkins, who eventually signed with the Tennessee Titans.

Time will tell if that was the right strategy for the Patriots in 2023.