Tom Landry coached the Dallas Cowboys for twenty-nine seasons, winning two hundred and fifty games, including two Super Bowls. Rob Chudzinski coached the Cleveland Browns for one season, winning four games, none of them the Super Bowl. Yet both coaches can now be said to have shared the same fate, common to their profession: they were fired. For Landry, it was in 1989, by the team’s new owner, Jerry Jones, on a golf course. For Chudzinski, or Chud, as he is known, it came this past Sunday night, just hours after the team’s final game (and loss) of the season. A few lucky coaches, by combination of success and circumstance, have deftly managed their own exits over the years (Vince Lombardi or Don Shula or Bill Cowher). But, for the majority of their peers, the joy of getting hired by a team carries with it the knowledge that, one day, they will be fired by that very same team.

Chudzinski’s firing (along with the dismissal of the Houston Texans’ coach, Gary Kubiak, a few weeks ago) was an early start to what has become a grim annual tradition: Black Monday, the first day after the end of the regular season, when bad teams, left out of the playoffs, get rid of their coaches. By late afternoon on Monday, the Lions, the Vikings, the Buccaneers, and the Redskins had all announced firings, as well. For fans, Black Monday is partly a day of catharsis, indulging in the dark and sour feelings of release after a season filled with losses. It is also a day for anger, mostly directed at a team’s front-office leadership. The same men in suits who introduced the coaches with fanfare as the team’s saviors now blame them for the latest disappointments. And for fans of especially beleaguered franchises, such as the Browns, it can be one of hang-dog self-loathing. One Browns player, upon hearing of his coach’s firing, summed up the city-wide frustration when he told NFL.com, “This organization is a joke.”

In 1995, the Browns fired their head coach, Bill Belichick, after five mostly losing seasons. Then the team moved to Baltimore, where, as the Ravens, they have since had three coaches and won two Super Bowls. Since the reformed Browns entered the league, in 2000, the team has had seven different coaches, making the playoffs just once. Meanwhile, Belichick has been coaching the New England Patriots. His current fourteen-season tenure is the longest in the N.F.L., three more than Marvin Lewis, of the Cincinnati Bengals. In that time, as of Monday, there have been a hundred and thirteen other coaches in the league.

How has Belichick lasted so long? First, and most plainly, his teams have won seventy-two per cent of their games. They have won eleven division titles. They have reached five Super Bowls and won three. Coaches get fired when they lose, and Belichick hasn’t lost since his first season, in 2000, when the team went 5-11. Before Belichick, the Patriots had gone through eleven coaches since 1969 (a span during which the Steelers, to take the opposite example, had just two.) Good thing the Pats didn’t give Belichick the Chud treatment back then. The next season they won their first Super Bowl.

All this winning has, not incidentally, coincided with the career of the quarterback Tom Brady, a sure Hall of Famer who has never had a losing season and who will retire among the all-time leaders in passing yards and touchdowns. It might be tempting to write off some of Belichick’s success as the result of winning the quarterback lottery, but Brady was an overlooked sixth-round draft choice, not a sure thing like Peyton Manning. And, in 2008, when Brady missed the entire season because of an injury, the Patriots managed to go 11-5. Their quarterback that year, Matt Cassel, has since won just twenty-two games in the league, playing for the Chiefs and Vikings.

The Patriots have also had stability and clarity in the front office. There’s the owner, Robert Kraft, and his son Jonathan, who is the team president. In terms of final decision makers, that’s it. There’s no general manager on the flow chart. When Belichick was given the coaching job, he was also put in charge of personnel decisions. For fourteen years, he’s worked with the players he wanted, the coaches he wanted, and likely the ball boys he wanted. (Belichick shared some management duties with Scott Pioli, who left the team after 2009.) If it didn’t work, it would have been his fault, and he would have been fired. But it has worked, year after year, leaving him not only secure in his job but the deserving recipient of the “genius” label often put on him by admirers, or the slightly modified “evil genius” one given by detractors. In this way, Belichick’s reign has been akin to Michael Bloomberg’s three terms as the mayor of New York—polarizing, personality-based, largely autocratic, efficient, and effective. There have been setbacks—Spygate is his third-term election; signing Albert Haynesworth is his soda ban—but there has mostly been success.

If you listen to sports radio in Boston, you will hear fans gripe that recent Patriots draft picks have failed to produce on the field as expected, or that Belichick and his staff haven’t, during the past few seasons, surrounded Brady with offensive skill players up to his talent, in effect wasting his quarterback’s last good years on teams that have held him back. Some may note that the Patriots haven’t won a Super Bowl since 2004. But, season after season, in a league jiggered toward parity through scheduling and a salary cap, the Patriots just keep winning more games than nearly everyone else. The current season is surely among Belichick’s most impressive. The team’s top receiver from last season now plays for the Broncos. Their second-best receiver is out of the league. Their third-best played just five games this year and is hurt again. Their fourth is in jail. Their fifth is on the Chargers. On defense, they long ago lost their best lineman and linebacker to injuries. And yet, twelve wins. They shouldn’t have been this good. There are many examples this season of players exceeding expectations, but that formulation doesn’t quite work, because Belichick himself never seems particularly surprised when no-name players thrive on his teams. The vague word “expectations” gives the outside pundits too much credit and Belichick too little.

A few examples: Julian Edelman, formerly a punt-return specialist, caught a hundred and five passes this season as a featured slot receiver, stepping in nicely for Wes Welker, whom the team decided to let leave as a free agent. Belichick and Brady were able to get thirty-two catches and over four hundred yards receiving from Kenbrell Thompkins, an undrafted, twenty-five-year-old rookie, part of a corps of young receivers who appeared hopelessly outmatched at the start of the season but who have done enough to get the team back to a prime playoff spot. And, in a standout performance last Sunday, the running back LeGarrette Blount ran for three hundred and thirty-four all-purpose yards against the Bills; he has been a key part of the Patriots’ multi-back ground game all season. Belichick got him in April from Tampa Bay in exchange for Jeff Demps, who attempted just one run for the Buccaneers all season.

Belichick lags far behind Landry’s twenty-nine seasons with the Cowboys, or Shula’s twenty-six with the Miami Dolphins, or the twenty-three straight seasons that Chuck Noll spent coaching the Pittsburgh Steelers—nor is it likely that, at sixty-one, he will coach long enough to catch them. But, in the contemporary era of coach roulette, his run has been remarkable, and it seems likely to continue for as long as he wants it to.

Of course, people have said similar things about other mainstay coaches before, only to be reminded of the harsh truths of the profession. Coaches win until they don’t. And, some day, it may even happen in New England. Heading into the 2008 season, people were marvelling at Mike Shanahan’s fourteen-season tenure as coach of the Denver Broncos. He had brought the team their only two Super Bowls, and kept them in position as an annual contender. It was hard to picture the Broncos without him. And yet, by the end of that season, after missing the playoffs, he was fired. On Black Monday, 2013, Shanahan was fired again, this time by the Washington Redskins.

Photograph by Jim Rogash/Getty. Chart by Nick Traverse.