Bill Belichick and Tom Brady Are a Winning Combination INDIANAPOLIS - During football season, Bill Belichick's better half is Tom Brady, and vice versa. Belichick is the grumpy old New England coach; Brady his famous quarterback heartthrob. Belichick wears rumpled hooded sweatshirts; Brady endorses unisex boots made from sheepskin. Brady is an offensive star; Belichick a defensive guru. Brady smiles. Belichick does not. But B&B are not an odd couple. Far from it, in fact. Instead, those close to them believe they reached 124 regular-season victories, more than any head coach-quarterback combination in N.F.L. history, and their fifth Super Bowl together, another N.F.L. record, because they have become more and more alike. "What's unique about Bill and Tom is how sometimes they seem like the same person," said Tedy Bruschi, a retired Patriot and now an ESPN analyst. What they say, how they say it, the way they conduct themselves - it's very similar. Both of them are so calculated in everything they do. Among history's great pairings, few, if any, seemed more unlikely at the outset than Belichick and Brady, the head coach who had once been fired and the sixth-round draft choice. Yet on Sunday, when the Patriots play the Giants here in Super Bowl XLVI, B&B will pass the formidable combinations of Chuck Noll-Terry Bradshaw, Tom Landry-Roger Staubach and Marv Levy-Jim Kelly for championship appearances. B&B will stand alone, again. Last week, Brady, 34, spoke lovingly of Belichick, 59, even acknowledging that the regular jokes Belichick tells the team, "I've probably heard them 20 times." To Dr. Bonnie Eaker Weil, such sentiment sounded familiar, not just because she is a New York City psychotherapist and author of "Make Up, Don't Break Up." She is also a football fan. "I have to tell you," she said in a recent telephone interview, "Belichick and Brady, that's a marriage. That's the best kind of marriage. They've grown together. They've learned together. They feed off each other in a positive way. Weil says marriages evolve through three stages. The first is the honeymoon, in which Belichick drafted Brady in 2000 (on Belichick's birthday, no less), then Brady replaced an injured Drew Bledsoe the next season and B&B won the first of their three Super Bowl championships together. The second is the power-struggle stage, in which, Weil said, B&B worked through their differences, becoming more like peers. Instead of fighting Belichick's rigid methods, Brady embraced them, made them his own, conformed. This led to the real-life love stage, as Brady and Belichick ascended to N.F.L. domination because they understood each other and worked together as one. Not even the so-called Spygate videotaping scandal could pull them apart. "Now, they finish each other's sentences," Weil said. They start to look alike, sound alike. Belichick sees Brady as an extension of himself. He lets Brady do his own thing within the structure. That's what you want in marriage. That theory has some flaws, of course, because the Patriots, like all N.F.L. teams, employ more than one quarterback, making Brady, when he replaced Bledsoe, the "other man" for Belichick and the Patriots. Still, in a game in which quarterback is the most important position on the field, and the offensive plan is dependent on his skills, the relationship between coach and quarterback can make or break the most promising season. "It's the most important relationship on a football team," Don Shula said. Shula should know. He won more games than any other N.F.L. coach. Belichick and Brady hold the record for victories with a coach-quarterback combination; Shula reached the top 10 in that category twice with Miami. He won 116 games with Dan Marino and 82 more with Bob Griese. Although Shula ultimately won many games with each quarterback, his relationships with Marino and Griese were as different as the offenses the Dolphins configured for them. Griese struck Shula as quiet yet confident, a quarterback who "studied hard and ran everything within the framework of his personality and physical abilities," which were more limited than Marino's. Marino, in comparison, was "electric," Shula said, "one of the greatest competitors ever at the quarterback position." Just as Marino was more outgoing, the Dolphins" offense was more open, more vertical. But in each case, Shula's relationship with his quarterback provided a framework for decisions that affected the entire team. Randy Cross saw the same phenomenon in San Francisco, where he played with quarterback Joe Montana under Coach Bill Walsh. Those 49ers teams mirrored their coach-quarterback combination, precise and smooth, and Cross believes the Patriots have come to resemble B&B, too.