Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  “Those guys in Miami, they would have died playing for Parcells and Belichick,” Williams said. “Wannstedt had those boys on cruise control. I was like ‘What, you can actually be like this? You can actually jog through practice?’ It was crazy.”

  A number of Patriots had felt the same way about Carroll, a born-and-raised, sunglasses-and-sandals Californian who was laid-back enough to allow staffers to enter his office without invitation and initiate conversation about football, philosophy, pickup basketball, or life. The players initially took to this style, of course, because they felt liberated from Parcells’s despotic methods.

  But after winning ten games and a playoff game in year one, Carroll’s Patriots won nine games and lost their first-round playoff game in year two, and then went 8-8 and missed the postseason in year three. The lack of discipline was slowly eroding what the Parcells-Belichick Patriots had established in their run to the Super Bowl, and Belichick had returned to restore some law and order. Naturally, he met with some resistance.

  “A lot of guys maybe don’t want to say it, but they didn’t want to play for Belichick when he came in,” said Michael Bishop, a backup quarterback in 2000 who had been drafted by Carroll. “It was his way or the highway, and I think some guys preferred the highway.”

  Belichick had fired strength-and-conditioning coach Johnny Parker, a former colleague with the Giants and the Patriots, right after he accepted Kraft’s offer, and four months later he fired Bobby Grier. He tossed former first-round pick Andy Katzenmoyer from the first team meeting for showing up late. In another meeting, he called out another former first-round pick, Tebucky Jones, a safety who had an impressive 40-yard-dash time out of Syracuse. “Tebucky,” Belichick said, “you ran a 4.43 at the combine, but you really run a 5.0, because you don’t know where the fuck you’re going.”

  Nobody was safe. In one film session, an assistant coach criticized an opposing quarterback for looking at the exact spot where he wanted to throw the ball, prompting his boss to stop the tape. “You’re joking, right?” Belichick asked the assistant. “How the fuck do you think he gets the ball there? He has to look where he’s throwing.”

  Marc Megna, a noseguard from the University of Richmond who was drafted by the Jets in 1999 and was trying to make the Patriots as a linebacker in 2000, recalled being shocked over the quality of players Belichick was willing to cut. Though he didn’t need the reminder, Megna said Belichick constantly told him, “This isn’t fucking William & Mary we’re playing” whenever he committed an unforced error in camp.

  A long shot from Fall River, Massachusetts, Megna thought he had made his hometown team in the final preseason game against Carolina, when he ran free and blasted Panthers quarterback Dameyune Craig for the sack. He was thrilled with himself as he headed to the sideline. He was basking in the biggest moment of his football life, and fully expecting a hearty attaboy from his coach, before Belichick stopped him cold.

  “Come on, Marc,” he sniped, “you’ve got to get the fucking ball out.” Megna didn’t even get a “good job” out of him. He was waived three days later, though brought back late in the season.

  It would be a long season for all involved, which wouldn’t have been hard to predict at the start of training camp. Belichick installed a grueling conditioning test that, according to the team, required quarterbacks, linebackers, fullbacks, and tight ends to run twenty 50-yard sprints in seven seconds a rep, and for tailbacks, wide receivers, and defensive backs to run twenty 60-yard sprints in eight seconds a rep. Offensive linemen had to run sprints of 40 yards in six seconds, with a half-minute break between reps. The results were less than encouraging.

  “We have too many guys who are overweight,” Belichick said, “too many guys who are out of shape, too many guys who just haven’t paid the price they need to pay at this point of the season. I think it’s basically a situation where you can’t win in this league with 40 good players when the other team has 53. You need to match them, and I guess I haven’t done a very good job of getting through to the players on what they need to do to prepare for an NFL season.”

  Belichick immediately ripped off a series of fines for ill-conditioned players that ran into the tens of thousands. Tony George, a defensive back and diabetic, was among those who failed the test after completing 19 of the 20 sprints; he later explained that he was in danger of suffering a diabetic coma and yet hadn’t stopped running earlier because he didn’t want to use his diabetes as an excuse.

  Belichick had warned the Patriots that there would be no excuses for failure. Damien Woody, second-year starter on the offensive line, said the new coach delivered a grim speech to open the 2000 camp that was short and bitter and left “jaws dropping all over the room.” Belichick told his players that they shouldn’t ask for breaks, because they wouldn’t be given any. “There is no light at the end of the tunnel,” he told them. When Belichick walked out of the room, Woody thought to himself, Oh, my God, what are we in store for? The message was clear: The Patriots were no longer being coached by Pete Carroll.

  And then Belichick started running his players hard and ordering them to crash into one another at full speed, over and over again.

  “It was honestly a living hell,” Woody said. “It felt like we practiced in pads for three and a half weeks straight. It was crazy . . . Not many human beings could withstand that first Bill Belichick training camp.

  “He wouldn’t let anything go all year. Any little detail . . . Imagine being in pads and practicing two and a half hours and the coach blows his whistle and tells you to start it over right from stretching. When you’ve got something like that going on, and you’re getting tested at night in meetings, it’s physical and mental warfare. Who is going to be left standing?”

  Belichick tested everyone, from the few big names on the roster to the undrafted players fighting for the last couple of spots. Shockmain Davis, a receiver from Angelo State, recalled dropping a corner-route pass from the sixth-round pick, Tom Brady, in a preseason game and having Belichick rewind the tape over and over in front of the team. Davis said that he had to dive for the ball and that the defender interfered with him, but the coach didn’t care. “We’ve seen you make this play eight million times,” Belichick barked, “and you mean to tell me you couldn’t catch this ball?” Belichick wouldn’t stop rewinding the damn tape. “You just want him to move on to the next guy,” Davis said. “You don’t want to be that guy in the team meeting after the game. He’s going to expose you.”

  The Patriots were all exposed early in that regular season. They lost their first four games, and they didn’t score more than 19 points in any of them. New England finally broke through in Week 5, when Bledsoe passed for four touchdowns in a road victory over Denver and earned AFC Offensive Player of the Week honors. Only the good vibe didn’t last long: The quarterback made a couple of bad throws in his next practice. “And Bill looked at him,” recalled one veteran starter, “and said, ‘Stop thinking about your fucking awards.’ And Drew just said [sarcastically], ‘Yeah, that’s what I was thinking about.’ I’ve never seen a head coach talk to a franchise player like that.”

  Even in the worst of times, Carroll was hell-bent on keeping his players upbeat. His successor had no use for that glass-half-full dogma. One player said that some Patriots thought Belichick had too quick a hook, and that they played hesitantly and in fear of making a mistake. “There were a lot of people unhappy,” the player said. Another Patriot said Belichick once gathered the players and told them they needed to conform to his ways or they would “cease to exist here.”

  One veteran who had spent time elsewhere with what he described as a user-friendly franchise raged against New England’s small-time operation—players had to drive to an off-site practice field, and incoming players were often housed in the nearby Endzone Motor Inn—and called the team’s leaky, creaky stadium and relatively primitive facilities “pretty freaking brutal.” He said the culture inside the organization was no more agreeable.
“I just felt there wasn’t a lot of warmth in the building. If you asked for anything, it was a problem. If you asked the equipment manager, ‘Hey, can I get another pair of socks?’ he’d be like ‘What happened to your other socks?’”

  This veteran said that typical tough-guy coaches of losing NFL teams usually try a kinder, gentler approach in midstream to salvage something of the season. “But not with Belichick,” he said. “It just got worse and worse and worse.” The player said that the full-contact hitting during the team’s bye week was extreme, and that two weeks later the coach took out his frustrations on his 2-8 team after a trip to Cleveland, in its second year with the expansion Browns filling the void left by Art Modell’s move to Baltimore. Cleveland fans mocked their former coach with “Belichick sucks” chants and a large BELICHICK 2-7, YOU STILL STINK sign, in a 19–11 Browns victory lowlighted by Bledsoe’s three lost fumbles.

  “Worst performance we had all year,” the veteran said, “and that Monday I expected some pullback from this tyranny. And he comes in and he’s like ‘All right, you heard those fans on Sunday. OK, I do suck. But here’s what you motherfuckers did.’ And then he has the lights turned off, and then the film goes on and it’s ten straight minutes of nothing but screwups and bad plays. I thought, This is crazy. How much lower can you get? . . . The overall mentality was that he was creating unity among the players, except that they were all unified in their hatred toward him. It was almost a strategy—that the disdain for him would bring them together.”

  Truth is, Belichick had in place a wide circle of executives, coaches, and aides who would go on to do big, important things in the NFL. He had an assistant head coach, Dante Scarnecchia, who would become as great an offensive line coach as the game had seen. Belichick had at the very bottom of his staff a local kid who used to fetch morning newspapers for Parcells, Mark Jackson, who would ultimately run the Villanova athletic department during a time when the Wildcats were winning two NCAA basketball titles.

  But at the time, the quality of teaching wasn’t yielding classroom results. Belichick had twice lost to the hated Jets, and before this season mercifully ended he’d be thoroughly embarrassed by three of his best players—cornerback Ty Law, receiver Troy Brown, and the reinstated Terry Glenn. The Patriots had beaten the Bills in Buffalo in near blizzard conditions, and Glenn had cited his fear of flying in wintry weather in refusing to take the team charter home that night. Belichick allowed Brown and Law to stay with Glenn as long as they made it to Foxborough in time for an early-afternoon meeting. Only the three ended up in a strip club that night on the other side of the Canadian border, and on Law’s drive back, with a female companion, around 5:30 a.m., U.S. customs officials stopped his car and found the drug Ecstasy in his baggage. The cornerback maintained his innocence and ignorance—he said that the baggage belonged to a relative and that he had no idea illegal drugs were stashed inside. Law was fined $700 by authorities and suspended for the final game of the season by Belichick, who repeatedly told inquiring reporters that he saw the case and the penalty as an “internal matter.”

  The episode did nothing to support the notion the Patriots were more disciplined under their new coach than they had been under Carroll. Of course, the Patriots lost that final game—at home, to Wannstedt’s cruise-control Dolphins, who clinched the AFC East title. Belichick watched the playoffs at home for the fifth time in six seasons as a head coach, and after the New York Giants routed Minnesota in the NFC Championship Game, he called his former general manager in Cleveland, Ernie Accorsi, who in 1998 had succeeded George Young as the Giants’ GM. Accorsi said it was the very first call he got that Monday morning.

  “Congratulations,” Belichick told him. “And I want to apologize for fucking that thing up in Cleveland.”

  “You didn’t fuck it up,” Accorsi assured him.

  But it was an open question as to whether Belichick would fuck it up in Foxborough. His off-season was actually shaped by a personnel move that seemed to betray the idea that he had autonomy over his roster. Bledsoe had been sacked 100 times and thrown nearly the same number of interceptions (34) as touchdowns (36) over the 1999 and 2000 seasons, and yet the Patriots signed him to a ten-year, $103 million deal. Though it was likely Bledsoe wouldn’t earn anywhere close to that figure—contracts aren’t fully guaranteed in the NFL—the agreement represented a major investment in an immobile quarterback who had just been subjected to some fan and media calls for his benching in favor of the more elusive Bishop. Robert Kraft was heavily involved in the negotiations; he personally called Bledsoe to close out the deal. The owner loved the quarterback, and the quarterback loved him back. Bledsoe described Kraft as a mentor, and the owner hoped to make him a Patriots lifer and keep him as the face of the team as it prepared to move into the new stadium being built next door. Their relationship reminded veteran Belichick watchers of the one shared by Modell and Bernie Kosar in Cleveland.

  By the time the delayed second game of the 2001 season arrived, Belichick was about as ready to move on from Bledsoe as he was to move on from Kosar in 1993. In Cleveland and New York, Belichick never thought Bledsoe was a particularly difficult quarterback to game-plan against. But even he couldn’t possibly make the switch one game deep into a $103 million contract. So after a moving pregame tribute to 9/11 victims and emergency responders at the World Trade Center, including the three firefighting brothers of New England guard Joe Andruzzi, all survivors, Bledsoe took the field with an 0-1 Patriots team that looked quite different from its 5-11 predecessor.

  Just as Belichick had made more than two dozen roster changes from Carroll’s last team to his own first team, he made more than two dozen from 2000 to 2001, all with the help of his trusted aide, Scott Pioli, who had taken Grier’s seat in the cabinet. Pioli had met Belichick in his Little Bill days with the Giants, when Pioli was a football player at Central Connecticut State, and had followed him to Cleveland and later to the Jets. Though Pioli would marry Bill Parcells’s daughter, he chose to follow Belichick again, to New England, after Little Bill’s nasty divorce from Big Bill.

  Kraft never thought he’d hire a member of Big Bill’s family, not after the way he had left the Patriots for the Jets following the 1996 season. “Parcells fucked us,” Kraft told a fellow owner. “And I let Belichick talk me into hiring Parcells’s son-in-law. That’s how much I trusted Belichick’s opinion of people.”

  While he was coaching linemen at Murray State, Pioli had been offered a personnel job by Belichick in Cleveland. His boss at Murray State, Mike Mahoney, thought of Pioli as a terrific recruiter and evaluator and advised him to turn down the Browns and stay in coaching. Pioli didn’t listen; he’d harbored a dream of someday running an NFL team. Now he was Belichick’s personnel chief in New England, trying to build a big, physical, weatherproof contender.

  With help from Andy Wasynczuk, a Kraft executive from the Parcells and Carroll days, Pioli made bargain-basement deals with a truckload of veteran free agents. The GM and Belichick felt good about the players they’d landed in the off-season, including a defensive end they had with the Browns and the Jets, Anthony Pleasant; an 11th-year linebacker they had with the Jets, Bryan Cox; a running back from Buffalo, Antowain Smith; a special teams madman from Miami, Larry Izzo; and a linebacker who had disappointed in Pittsburgh, Mike Vrabel, whom Belichick had promised he’d sign ASAP when he saw him at the 1997 combine.

  Belichick and Pioli also felt good about their most recent top two draft choices, defensive end Richard Seymour and offensive tackle Matt Light, though the Patriots were criticized in some corners for ignoring their glaring offensive needs with the sixth overall pick by taking Seymour instead of Michigan receiver David Terrell. The team was still using a revamped version of the scouting system put in place decades earlier by former coach Chuck Fairbanks and Bucko Kilroy, a former All-Pro lineman turned scout and executive who was regarded as a founding father of player evaluation and who worked with Gil Brandt on the Dallas Cowboys’ computerized met
hod of grading prospects. That system had not produced much help in the 2000 draft; nine of the team’s ten picks in that draft would ultimately combine for zero Pro Bowl appearances and all of three seasons as primary NFL starters. The lone exception was Tom Brady, a 6´4˝ quarterback out of Michigan and San Mateo, California. He was the 199th overall pick of the draft, and when the announcement was made, Brady said he “had to look on a map to see where the New England Patriots played, because I had never been this far east.”

  He’d spent his rookie year as a fourth-string player in dire need of adding weight to his flagpole frame. In the preseason of that year, one teammate said, “I remember thinking to myself, It’s really a shame Tom’s not going to make this team. He’s a good player. I was shocked he made the team.” Inactive for 14 games in 2000, Brady had returned for his second year bigger and stronger, if not faster. (He was clocked at 5.28 in the 40 at the draft combine, where his running style evoked a panting insurance broker chasing after a cab.) Brady was so sharp in the preseason, he jumped ahead of Bishop, who was waived, and veteran Damon Huard, who had won five of six starts in Miami and been signed to a three-year, $3 million deal to back up Bledsoe. The receivers thought Brady threw a light, catchable ball. Belichick was struck by how he took control of his rookie class, including the defensive players, with a firm on-field presence and a commitment to film study and post-practice workouts that went unmatched.

  “Tom has a lot of natural leadership,” Belichick said the day he promoted Brady to second-string.

  Bledsoe was still the starter, and Belichick was still a coach unsure whether his team had the fortitude to avoid a repeat of 2000. He lost himself in his job, as always, and if he came up for air once in that summer of 2001, it was for a concert featuring Jon Bon Jovi at the Tweeter Center, in Mansfield, where Bill and Debby gathered with some staffers. Belichick was a card-carrying rock-and-roll fan—he’d taken his Cleveland staff to see Pink Floyd—but nobody touched Bon Jovi, whom Bill and Debby had followed around Europe when he was opening for the Rolling Stones. For this show at the Tweeter Center, Belichick invited ball boy Zak DeOssie, an Andover student and the son of former Giants linebacker Steve DeOssie. They sat about 16 rows back, dead center, and when Bon Jovi performed “Livin’ on a Prayer,” the ball boy saw Belichick singing along and getting into it with the crowd. “He wasn’t swinging from chandeliers,” DeOssie said, “but he was certainly enjoying it.”