by Ian O'Connor
Of course, Belichick was blitzed about who would make the Super Bowl start in New Orleans: Brady or Bledsoe, both of whom told reporters they should ask the coach. On cue, Belichick said that Brady could’ve conceivably played in the second half against Pittsburgh, and that a healthy Bledsoe was the better bet. He saw no need to offer up information that didn’t need to be disclosed. He’d have only one week to prepare for the Super Bowl—the 9/11 postponements and makeups had forced the NFL to wipe out the second week between the conference championship games and the biggest spectacle in American sports—and New England would spend that week working as discreetly as possible.
The Patriots pulled away from Heinz Field and headed for the airport. When they arrived in town to play the Steelers, Damien Woody had said, “It seemed the whole city of Pittsburgh was in our hotel. People with Terrible Towels, Steelers jerseys, like the whole city was trying to intimidate us. And when we won that game, it was like a ghost town. We didn’t see cars on the road, nothing. It was like Pittsburgh was wiped off the map. Like the whole city was gone.”
Long after they left Heinz Field behind, the Patriots discovered that they’d be facing the St. Louis Rams, who’d defeated the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFC Championship Game. Rams coach Mike Martz had predicted after his November victory over Belichick that his team might see the Patriots again, and those turned out to be the words of a prophet.
In only two seasons, Belichick had proven he was worth the first-round pick and all the headaches attached to his stormy departure from the Jets. Now came the hard part. Now he had to figure out Kurt Warner’s St. Louis offense over seven days, just as he’d figured out Jim Kelly’s Buffalo offense over seven days in a different life. Only Little Bill wasn’t working for Big Bill anymore.
This time Little Bill was Big Bill.
Bill Belichick picked Tom Brady over Drew Bledsoe all over again. In New Orleans, after watching Brady work out on his healing left ankle, the coach made it official. “Tom Brady demonstrated in practice that he is fit to play,” Belichick said. “He will be our starting quarterback on Sunday.”
What a remarkable journey for Brady, who entered the league so unentitled he eagerly took a job making $500 at a teammate’s football camp. Asked years later what he knew about a young Brady, the Rams’ superstar back Marshall Faulk said: “I knew about him what everybody else knew about him: He sucked and he couldn’t beat out Drew Henson.”
Belichick knew different. Though his was the popular move among Patriots fans (by Monday afternoon, 81 percent of 60,000 voters in a Boston.com poll had stated their preference for Brady, if healthy, over Bledsoe), Belichick never much cared for public sentiment. One of his assistants said that Bledsoe was never seriously considered as the Super Bowl starter, that Belichick merely wanted to show him some respect and, of course, to take a quick look at Brady on that ankle.
That assistant also said Bledsoe’s performance in Pittsburgh hadn’t necessarily helped his cause. He completed only 10 of 21 passes for 102 yards and almost lost the game on Porter’s near pick-six. The New England staff thought Bledsoe showed heart and poise in overcoming his inactivity and managing the magnitude of a conference championship game, but the assistant said he’d actually made a bit of a mistake on his touchdown pass to Patten. Bledsoe made the more difficult first-down throw, the assistant argued, while Brady would’ve settled for hitting an open Charles Johnson in the flat. Though the assistant’s assessment that Johnson would’ve easily scored was questionable—a Pittsburgh defender was in the vicinity—it underscored Belichick’s feelings about Bledsoe.
“That was Bill’s problem with Drew in a nutshell,” the assistant said. “That’s one reason Tom had so much success with Bill, and vice versa. The right reads are made, and there’s no complaints.”
Only this week, New England’s biggest quarterback dilemma involved the quarterback suiting up for the other team. Kurt Warner was the best in the league (4,830 passing yards and 36 touchdowns), and he ran an offense that had scored more than 500 points in three consecutive seasons. St. Louis also had the best all-around running back in football, Faulk; a great left tackle in Orlando Pace; devastating weapons at receiver in Torry Holt and Isaac Bruce; and speed up and down both sides of the ball. The Rams were coached by Martz, who drove a Porsche and wanted his team to play faster than his car. Martz had been Dick Vermeil’s offensive coordinator on the 1999 team that was led by the former Arena Football League quarterback who used to stock shelves at a Hy-Vee in Cedar Falls, Iowa, for $5.50 an hour. “Kurt Warner came off the street,” Vermeil said, “and [Martz] made him NFL player of the year.”
The 2001 Rams led the league in 18 offensive categories. “How do we stop a team that has two MVPs in the same backfield?” Belichick said of Warner and Faulk, who had combined to win the past three league MVP awards. New England’s defense had surrendered the sixth-fewest points in the NFL but ranked 24th in yards allowed. The Patriots as a whole, said guard Joe Andruzzi, were “a bunch of nobodies put together,” and proud of it.
So the Patriots were heavily favored to lose another Super Bowl in New Orleans, where their 1985 team was crushed by the Chicago Bears of Mike Ditka and Buddy Ryan and where their 1996 team was done in by Brett Favre and the in-house soap opera starring Bill Parcells and Robert Kraft. Following a quick stop home, Belichick and the players arrived the day after their upset victory in Pittsburgh, while the coordinators remained in Foxborough an extra day to work on the game plan. Belichick spent the flight to New Orleans talking to Ernie Adams about their plan to contain Faulk. After they landed, the head coach didn’t specifically warn his team about Bourbon Street and the French Quarter; rather, he established a midnight curfew for most of the week and merely reminded his players to exercise good judgment and always remember they were representing something bigger than themselves.
“There was a lot of chatter during the week that the Rams were staying out late,” Damien Woody said, “no curfew, late partying . . . We were zeroed in, zoned in, and from the things I heard, the Rams were really enjoying themselves.”
Though his Patriots were generally a monument to low-maintenance living, Belichick had one high-maintenance issue to deal with. Lawyer Milloy was complaining about the size of his hotel room, and his coach solved the problem by giving the safety his suite—complete with a Jacuzzi and a treadmill that had been installed specifically for Belichick. Once that crisis was averted, the Patriots were in a favorable place spiritually and emotionally.
Five years after his absurd joint Super Bowl presser with Parcells, Kraft appeared content to bask in his coach’s shadow. Belichick appeared content, period, after spending his previous two Super Bowls in attack-dog mode when writers asked about his interest in the Cleveland job (January 1991) and about Parcells’s reported interest in leaving the Patriots (January 1997). Belichick came across as relaxed; he occasionally even cracked a smile while tending to the nonstop media obligations during the week. And why not? His 2000 Patriots had finished dead last in the AFC East, and here he was a year later, the toast of the entire sport.
“Have I lightened up a bit? I probably have,” Belichick told reporters. “In Cleveland, I might’ve been a little too rough on [the players] at times. In the end, my intent isn’t to try to have conflict, or try to be iron-fisted, or tyrannical, or anything like that—but to just try to get it done, get through a message. However that’s interpreted, I’ll leave that up to you guys.”
Before he even reached the postseason tournament, Belichick had made a bit of a stunning admission about his grim approach to media relations during his time with the Browns. “I watched what Bill [Parcells] did with the New York media when I was there, and maybe I tried to do some of those things,” he said. “And he was in a position where, honestly, he could get away with some things that other people can’t get away with. And I don’t think I really realized that . . . I tried to do some of the things he did. And they came out a lot differently when I did them than when he
did them. It was a miscalculation.”
Nobody much cared anymore. Parcells was out of the league, and Little Bill was one of two coaches left with a shot at winning it all. Belichick and Martz spent the week complimenting each other for making brilliant in-game adjustments. The two men weren’t close and had never worked together, but Belichick was the only head coach to call Martz with congratulations after the Rams clinched their division title. As the big underdog with the more impressive pedigree, Belichick represented the more interesting story. Of the 53 players on his roster, only 15 were there the day Belichick was hired in 2000, when the Patriots were some $10 million over the salary cap.
He had 21 veteran free agents, six rookies and first-year free agents, and three waiver pickups on his Super Bowl team. His front-office guy, Scott Pioli, knew the Patriots needed an overhaul of attitude, character, intelligence, and toughness. He told Belichick he could find Belichick players, pro’s pros, and he brought in the experienced likes of Cox, Phifer, Pleasant, Patten, Mike Compton, Bobby Hamilton, Otis Smith, and Larry Izzo.
“Not a turd in the bunch,” said one Patriots official.
Pleasant was an intriguing acquisition. He had seen the worst of Belichick firsthand in Cleveland, and he initially had reservations about joining the Jets, in part because Little Bill was a part of Big Bill’s staff. Before signing with the Patriots, Pleasant spoke with some of his old Cleveland colleagues—Pioli, Pepper Johnson, and Eric Mangini—and they all assured him that Belichick had changed for the better. Pleasant took a trip to Foxborough to see for himself.
“He wasn’t the same guy he was in Cleveland,” Pleasant said. “He wasn’t practicing like it was boot camp, the way he was in Cleveland. He tried to take care of players. He listened to the players. I think he got a better understanding as far as the body can’t continue to take a pounding, pounding, pounding, that the body needs to recover. His mannerisms were different. He seemed more seasoned as a head coach, more mature. He just had a different mind-set than he had in Cleveland.”
Pleasant thought the Cleveland Belichick “didn’t listen to anybody” and acted as “a know-it-all with a chip on his shoulder.” He told Belichick’s old friend with the Browns, Michael Dean Perry, that the coach was especially careful with the older players during the week to preserve them for Sundays. “Mike,” Pleasant told Perry, “you wouldn’t believe what Bill is doing.”
Cox was another veteran who saw personal growth in Belichick, his defensive coordinator with the Jets. “Bill had an issue not just with communication,” the linebacker said, “but with presentation. He was all football and nothing else, from what I saw . . . The man evolved. He was more personable. He’d find you, ask you how your family was doing. I really believe he got better as his children grew older and he had to communicate more with them . . . You knew the man could coach; he also became a total person.”
Turns out he had a soft touch after all. Belichick didn’t just dial back the kind of relentless full-pads hitting that can wear a team down to the nub by Thanksgiving. He also became a much better delegator, more like his former boss. Parcells would focus on big-picture tasks such as motivating players and controlling the daily media message, and allow Little Bill to run the defense. Much as he was criticized for trying to act like Parcells in Cleveland, Belichick had to act more like him in New England.
“When he first came here,” Charlie Weis said, “I ran the offense, he ran the defense, and the one thing he wasn’t allowed to do was really manage the team. Then, when he brought in Romeo this year and turned over the defense to Romeo and other guys, that allowed him to become a head coach, and I think he’s really flourished. His personality has come out as he’s gotten more familiar with guys on both sides of the ball. When you’re a coordinator, you’re not supposed to have a personality. You’re only supposed to teach them what to do.”
Weis later told reporters, “You don’t know Bill. He’s not going to ever let you see him . . . You’re missing the guy who went on tour with Bon Jovi over to Europe. This guy’s got more personality than anyone knows.”
If the press didn’t often see it in his news conferences throughout the season, the players saw it in meeting rooms and on the practice field. Pleasant, the 12-year veteran, knew better than any Patriot that a transformation was taking place. In the middle of the season, he stopped in Belichick’s office to deliver a message the coach had never heard in Cleveland.
“I just saw something in him, saw it in his eyes,” Pleasant said. “I just felt compassion for him, and I just saw in his heart he really wanted to win very, very badly. And I felt after all the negative things said about him as a head coach, after what happened in Cleveland, that I really wanted it for him . . . I told him, ‘Coach, my goal is seeing you win a championship.’”
Belichick had climbed a mountain every great coach has to climb. For the first time, his players wanted to win for him as much as they wanted to win for themselves. Now all he needed was a winning strategy against a more talented opponent. For starters, to acclimate the defense to the blazing speed of the St. Louis wideouts, Belichick had the scout-team receivers line up three yards in front of the line of scrimmage. He also ordered his outside linebackers and everyone else within reach of Marshall Faulk to prepare to hit him, jam him, and maul him whenever he tried to release outside into a pass pattern. (Faulk had caught more than 80 passes for four consecutive seasons, for a total of 26 touchdowns.)
A coaching assistant, Ned Burke, ran the New England scout team charged with giving the starters another preview of Faulk’s talent. “Our poor backup running backs,” he said. “Mainly Kevin Faulk. He was the guy who could most duplicate what Marshall could do.” For good reason: Kevin was Marshall Faulk’s cousin.
As a game-plan team forever making adjustments to its schemes, New England felt it had an advantage over the Rams with one week instead of two to prepare for the Super Bowl. “We put in a whole new playbook for whoever we were playing every week,” Burke said, “and we’re used to doing it quickly. We knew the Rams were a system team.”
Belichick hammered home to his players that they were entirely capable of beating the Rams; they only had to execute the plan. Just as he had been certain the Giants would upset Buffalo 11 years earlier by punishing its receivers and letting Thurman Thomas have his way on the ground, Belichick was sure his Patriots would prevail if they met the Rams’ finesse with physicality.
The November loss to St. Louis actually had been the turning point in the season—many players later said they believed they could beat anyone after nearly beating the league’s elite team. The Patriots had won eight straight since that night. So in a team meeting on the eve of the Super Bowl, Pleasant said, Belichick told the players, “I’ve got a plan on how we’re going to beat them. Don’t let them throw the ball deep on us. Just play the deep ball, and let them catch everything underneath us. But no big plays on us.” Belichick spoke of beating up the Rams’ receivers, making it hard for them to get into their routes, and disrupting the timing that was so critical to Warner’s success.
But Belichick talked more about the great running back than the great quarterback. In their regular-season matchup in November, Faulk had rushed for 83 yards and caught seven passes for 70 yards and a touchdown. Up seven, the Rams ran out the final 7:37 on the clock because New England couldn’t stop Faulk. It was another reminder of why Belichick had called the trade in 1999 (when he was with the Jets) of Faulk from Indianapolis to St. Louis “one of the happiest days of my life.” He just wanted that matchup nightmare out of the AFC East. (The Colts moved to the AFC South through the league’s expansion and realignment in 2002.)
In the days before the rematch in New Orleans, Belichick did a sit-down interview with ESPN’s Chris Berman, one of the national media members he liked and respected. When the interview was done, Berman asked his producer and camera operator to leave the room. The broadcaster and coach chatted about strategy for a few minutes before Belichick looked Berman
in the eye and said, “Marshall Faulk will not beat us in this game.”
The Patriots embraced his confidence. Intense preparation breeds extreme faith, and Belichick’s players were telling people they had never had a coach so detailed in his approach.
“In my whole time in New England,” Redmond said, “there’s never been a time when I stepped on the field and every single player on our side of the ball did not know exactly what the defense was going to do.” Redmond, a third-down back, spoke of writing 12-page reports on what the defense did in all passing situations, on the strengths and weaknesses of certain defenders (Is he athletic? Is he a bull-rush guy? Does he like to jump around?), and on the college backgrounds of opposing linebackers and safeties, from first string to third string. “Real-ass reports,” Redmond said. “I did less in college than I did with Bill Belichick, every single week, and that’s why the only mistakes I ever made were physical, not mental.”
On February 3, 2002, Super Bowl Sunday, the Patriots were reveling in their standing as long shots. The Rams were favored by 14 points, and New England’s one skill player who could run with them, Terry Glenn, had been suspended again by Belichick for missing meetings and practices and had long been reduced to what George Orwell would call an unperson. Belichick wasn’t sweating it. The afternoon before the game, he sat in his office with a couple of old Wesleyan friends, Jim Farrell and Mark Fredland, and spent what he called “probably the most relaxing hour of that entire week for me . . . We just sat and talked about what for us were the good old days.”
The next day, Belichick was so calm when meeting with Kraft before the game that the owner walked out of the locker room believing his team would win. Two hours before kickoff, Belichick was so confident that he had prepared his team to pull off one of the biggest upsets in NFL history, he sat down on the Patriots’ bench next to ball boy Zak DeOssie and talked about everything except the Rams.