by Ian O'Connor
More proof that, as much as anything, the Patriots were viewed by design as interchangeable parts. “A guy who comes in and wants his name on a scoreboard that says ‘Joe Blow, No. 28’ is probably not going to be a New England Patriot,” Belichick said. “A guy who wants to play for a team and not worry about being a star is likely to be one.”
Even though Belichick would become more of a delegator than he was in his Cleveland days, he could still walk into any position room and take it over on the spot. It was rare for head coaches with defensive backgrounds to run quarterback meetings, but Belichick could easily do it while still managing the frequent interruptions from secretaries and staffers (“What type of meal do you want for the team flight to Oakland?” . . . “This player just became available; you have any interest in him?”). Belichick would also meet with his quarterbacks every Saturday in his office, where they’d sit on his couch. “Sometimes we’d talk in depth about game plans,” said Jim Miller, “other times about politics, a movie, or what’s going on in life. He really cares about his players.”
He really cared about putting them in an optimum position to win.
“Most head coaches who are defensive guys couldn’t call one offensive play in the playbook,” Miller said. “Bill could call an entire game.”
So, yes, he expected his Patriots to have more than a working knowledge of positions they didn’t play, and of opponents who appeared buried on the depth chart. “I remember we were playing a preseason game and he’d come in and ask you a question about their roster, like ‘Who is the backup nickel?’—in a preseason game,” said Kliff Kingsbury, a quarterback drafted in 2003 before landing on injured reserve. “Some cat who is not going to make the team, and he’s asking you where he’s from, what university he played at, what technique is his favorite technique, and he expected you to know it. He wanted you to be on edge and know that type of stuff. And if you give the wrong answer, he gives you that look and shakes his head.”
Belichick didn’t wait to set this tone until after Thanksgiving, when teams started making an urgent postseason push. “Every day he says it’s a big day,” Brady would recall. “He says it in May. He says it in July. He says it in December. We joke about it a lot. He never comes in and says, ‘Eh, you know, this day doesn’t really mean that much.’”
The head coach thought it was vital that New England’s message to the players was consistent. He’d talked to players from other organizations who complained about the coordinator wanting one thing and the head coach wanting another. Or about a conflict between the front office and the coaching staff over how the player should approach the game. Belichick wanted incoming Patriots to know that they didn’t have to worry about any such conflict. “Whatever message I’m giving you,” he told them, “that’s the way it’s going to be.”
He sent the ultimate message by way of his own commitment to the job: Belichick logged more hours in the building than anyone. He usually started before 6 a.m. on Mondays, with the responsibilities that day of reviewing game film, meeting with staff, talking about the players’ game-day grades, meeting with the players, sending them onto the field for a light workout, and meeting with staff about the next opponent, before leaving around midnight. He would return before dawn on Tuesday to start all over again on the game plan, with no letup in sight until Friday. The Patriots were week-to-week chameleons with their schemes, which only made more work for Belichick. “His preparation is second to none,” Brady would say. “Sometimes we come in on Wednesday morning to get the game plan and it doesn’t even look like our playbook.” So the coach had credibility when demanding maximum effort. His 2001 team was 3-4 when he handed the players a sheet that, among other things, explained how a 99.9 percent effort by the United States Post Office and the airline industry would result in 400,000 lost letters and 18 plane crashes every day.
When Belichick saw 99.9 percent effort in practice, he’d shout, “Take off,” and nobody needed a translation. “You never wanted to hear those two words from him,” Colvin said. “That means you’d better start running laps.”
As a coach who never subscribed to the notion that on-field berating was a mandatory part of his job, Belichick made the vast majority of his player corrections with a penetrating look in team meetings, or with his biting critiques in the film room. No Patriot ever wanted to be the leading man in one of his Monday morning movies. New England could win by three touchdowns and Belichick would still hunt down the two or three plays that, under different circumstances, could’ve cost the Patriots the game, or their season.
If he saw a breakdown on third-and-short or fourth-and-short, Belichick would often say things like “You mean to tell me you can’t get us an inch here? This doesn’t mean enough to you to get an inch for us in this situation?” Or his classic response to mistakes exposed by the film: “That’s not what we’re looking for.”
Though Belichick did embrace feedback from Brady on game-plan adjustments, on plays the coach incorporated during the week that Brady didn’t think would work on Sunday, the quarterback never received favored-nation status in these film sessions. Dan Klecko, undersize noseguard and oversize fullback, said that Belichick wasn’t afraid to treat his franchise player “like he’s Dan Klecko.” Brady once assumed the starring role in a weekly showing of film lowlights after committing the not-so-venial sin of throwing a pass into triple coverage that was picked off.
“And the next day Belichick says, ‘There you go, Brady, throwing it into a fucking team meeting,’” Klecko said. “You’re sitting there, you just got your ass kicked, and you’re trying not to laugh . . . but you’re like Did he really just say that to Tom Brady?”
He’d say it to anyone, any week, any season. Belichick would try all sorts of things to inspire his players and to break up the grind and drudgery of camp and a long, painful season. He’d show them classic boxing matches or introduce them to Bill Russell or tell them stories about watching Jim Brown and coaching LT. He had rookies get up and sing in front of the whole team and do a three-man barrel roll over one another on the practice field while giddy veterans poured water on them to create a mud pit. Contrary to popular perception, Belichick even kept his schemes as simple as possible. “He let the players play,” said safety Shawn Mayer. “Everything was a very easy game plan to execute. If we had any issue with anything, we just checked to Cover 2 or Tampa 2 and just played football.”
But the details mattered to Belichick more than anything. Bethel Johnson had been a running back until his senior year of high school, and he said Belichick was the first coach to teach him how to run proper routes. He was having trouble mastering the comeback route—the Patriots thought it took him too long to get out of the route—before Belichick told his speedy receiver that he was running too fast into his break. “You don’t run a 4.2 on the route,” he told Johnson. “You come out of it running a 4.2.” Belichick persuaded him to slow down and control himself on the first half of the pattern, then explode once he planted his foot and broke to the sideline.
The good news? This kind of precise coaching showed up in the box score. The bad news? It also showed up in the film room.
Cherry recalled walking into a Monday morning showing of lowlights, after a New England loss, without any reason to believe he’d be singled out for the result. “The last person on earth I imagined it would be was me,” Cherry said. He was a special teams player, after all, and his minor error wouldn’t have made any other coach’s top ten reasons why this particular Sunday went south.
Then again, there was a reason Cherry called playing for Belichick “the hardest thing you’ll ever do, but the best thing you’ll ever do.” No coach had ever cared more about special teams than the former prep school center who stayed after practice to work on long snaps in the rain. “He shows a lowlight of me not properly downing the football at the one-yard line,” Cherry said, “and he says the following: ‘This play right here sums it all up. This play.’ Me screwing up. I say to myself, How
in the world is my one play the culmination of the entire game being lost? It was improper technique. My feet were on the goal line.”
Meetings revolving around that weekend’s opponent were only slightly more fun. Belichick would fire questions at the rows of Patriots before him to find out who had done their homework and who had not. Occasionally he’d slip in a question that was tantamount to a prank, like the time he asked a rookie what state Kansas City was in. (The kid responded, “Kansas,” of course, and Belichick shot him a you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me look.) Sometimes a smart-ass player who knew an answer might do some showboating by adding extra and unnecessary information to his answer, drawing a half smile out of the coach.
Belichick wanted players who were energized by the challenge of finding the puzzle pieces and putting them together. He’d give them written tests, and the players who aced them were valued Patriots. Belichick didn’t care if they’d fail with every other organization in the sport.
When studying college talent, the Patriots were forever hunting for players who looked and acted like Patriots. A dynasty in a different sport, the New York Yankees, had a similar philosophy. The scout who signed a teenage Derek Jeter, Dick Groch, used these words to open the summation in his official report: “A Yankee!” As much as Jeter looked like a Yankee before he signed with Michigan (he abandoned a full scholarship for George Steinbrenner’s money), Tom Brady looked like a Patriot while playing at Michigan. New England saw in the quarterback an accurate passer, a leader, a winner (with a 20-5 record as a starter), and someone who managed the Drew Henson circus with the poise and maturity of a pro.
New England was among a small handful of franchises that didn’t subscribe to the two major scouting services, Blesto and National, which pool information on thousands of college players. Belichick was not in the business of sharing information; he was in the business of gathering it. Over all other standards, he wanted college prospects measured against Patriots on the current roster. If a certain college safety was better than, or equal to, the safeties in New England’s secondary, Belichick was interested.
He had learned some hard lessons from his Cleveland days when it came to the draft. Belichick had taken too many gambles on athletic players who looked the part but who weren’t overly productive for their college teams, and he wasn’t prepared when the Jets took the player he wanted in 1995, Penn State’s Kyle Brady, one pick ahead of him, at No. 9. Thomas Dimitroff, the ambitious former grounds-crew worker in Cleveland, had been brought in as New England’s director of college scouting and was considered a rising star. But Pioli was the front-office voice Belichick listened to above all, and just about every NFL owner envious of the Patriots’ stunning success had an eye on him. Belichick didn’t want to lose him in the worst way. In New England, they almost never disagreed on a player they drafted or a free agent they signed.
“It’s not a matter of him caving in to me or me caving to him,” Pioli said. “It’s what we know. It’s not about me proving myself right and Bill wrong. It’s about coming to the right decision.”
And the results began to show; Belichick’s drafts in Foxborough were far better than they’d been in Cleveland. Richard Seymour and Matt Light, their top two picks in 2001, became invaluable members of the defensive and offensive lines. The three receivers taken in 2002—Daniel Graham (first-round tight end), Deion Branch (second-round wideout), and David Givens (seventh-round wideout)—all became starting postseason targets for Brady. The 2003 class included finds such as fourth-round corner Asante Samuel and fifth-round center Dan Koppen. The 2004 class was headlined by nose tackle Vince Wilfork, the 21st overall pick, who would develop into a five-time Pro Bowler.
Pioli and his scouts studied thousands of college players, eliminating the vast majority of them before things turned serious at the pre-draft combine in Indianapolis, an unseemly meat market where the job applicants are poked and prodded and tested and almost literally stripped to their core. New England put the prospects it deemed worthy on a front board in its draft room, with the rest relegated to a back board.
The Patriots found enough true Patriots at the combine, in the draft, and in free agency to win 21 consecutive games over the 2003 and 2004 seasons, steamrolling the record of 18, set by five teams. Seymour and Rodney Harrison dumped a bucket of water on their coach after they won their historic 19th straight, a 24–10 victory over Miami, and, having downplayed the milestone’s significance before the game, the Patriots finally conceded that they did care about the record.
“I did tell the team that I was proud of what they did,” Belichick said, “and that they could be proud of what they accomplished, and that no other team in pro football has done that.”
The Patriots extended their streak to 21 before finally losing at Pittsburgh in their seventh game. They won seven of their final eight, including a blowout in Cleveland just days after the firing of yet another Browns coach, Butch Davis. Belichick hadn’t coached a game in Cleveland since his first Patriots team lost there in 2000, when Browns fans taunted their former coach with “Belichick sucks” chants. He returned the favor with a vicious 27-point beatdown that included late blitzing of a rookie quarterback, Luke McCown; the sight of Tom Brady throwing a deep touchdown pass while holding a 35–7 lead; and the sight of Belichick reinserting running back Corey Dillon into the blowout so he could pick up the two yards he needed for a 100-yard game. Belichick swore that payback wasn’t at hand, but people close to the coach knew better.
The Patriots finished 14-2 on the strength of a brilliant defense, an opportunistic Brady, and a running game greatly enhanced by the newcomer Dillon, a three-time Pro Bowler in Cincinnati who rushed for 1,635 yards and a dozen touchdowns and elevated the Patriots from 27th in rushing yardage, in 2003, to seventh. Dillon actually represented the kind of character-issue players New England preferred to avoid—he’d been in trouble with the law throughout his youth, had been arrested on domestic assault and DUI charges, and had once thrown his helmet, shoulder pads, and cleats into the stands in Cincinnati in the hope of securing a trade. When Belichick would pepper his team with questions about where this player or that coordinator attended college, or what looks a certain rival might give near the goal line, Dillon was out of his league.
“When he was asked questions,” Rosevelt Colvin said, “he was just guessing at the answers. Everyone knew Corey didn’t know the answer.”
Game day was a different story. Belichick gambled that the Patriots’ culture could make a responsible person and player out of Dillon, at least in the short run, and the running back responded with the best season of his career.
The Patriots had everything they needed to win a third Super Bowl in four years. They had the coach, the quarterback, the front office, the defense, and the running game to make them a dynasty in a salary-cap era designed to dismantle dynasties before they were fully formed. They also had a secret weapon, a franchise player who was a mystery even to the vast majority of people inside the franchise.
Out of Andover, Ernie Adams wrote a letter to the football coach at Northwestern, Alex Agase, an All-American college and pro player who had seen action as a Marine on Iwo Jima and Okinawa and had earned a Purple Heart. Adams asked if there might be an opening on the Wildcats’ staff, and Agase did what most major-college coaches never would: He answered the letter.
Agase told Adams he could serve as team manager, with a shot at more prominent assignments if he proved worthy of the challenge. And once he was on campus, in the fall of 1971, the curly-haired kid with thick glasses and a thicker New England accent proved more than worthy. Adams had spent most of his practice time with the team chasing footballs and setting up tackling dummies and cones. A Northwestern assistant, Jay Robertson, who had served as an infantry officer in Vietnam and as Wildcats captain under Ara Parseghian, often noticed Adams moving unusually close to the live drills to carefully observe the coaching that was being done.
One day, Agase summoned Robertson to his office and
handed him a thesis in a cardboard binder that was titled “Treatise on the Dropback Pass.” Robertson read it without knowing the identity of the author and decided, “Goddammit, this is deep stuff.” Big Ten schools weren’t proficient in the dropback pass at the time, and Agase had little interest in turning his program into an aerial show. Yet he wanted Robertson to know that the new team manager was responsible for the advanced breakdown on the passing game he’d just absorbed.
“I was amazed,” Robertson said.
Agase asked Robertson to evaluate Adams over the winter and find out if he could help the Northwestern staff. Robertson took the kid into the downstairs meeting room known as “the Dungeon,” a onetime ticket office in the old stadium that had tables, chairs, film projectors, a fridge, a toilet, and not much else. Coaches went down there to study their team and the opposition in peace. “I gave Ernie the keys to the Dungeon,” Robertson said, “which was probably the happiest day of his life at Northwestern.”
Adams showed up at the football offices carrying a black briefcase nearly every day after classes and lunch, and then he’d disappear into the Dungeon. He immediately learned the coaches’ terminology and broke down films of Big Ten opponents. Robertson and a Northwestern colleague, Bill Dudley, took Adams to the Notre Dame spring game to see if he could scout Parseghian’s Fighting Irish live. They sat in two dusty photographers’ boxes above the press box, Ernie in one booth and the coaches in the other. When they compared notes at halftime, Robertson and Dudley had added to their diagrams a phantom play—one the Irish hadn’t run in their intrasquad spring game—just to see if Adams was paying attention. The coaches showed Ernie the bogus card and pressed him on why his diagram of that sequence didn’t match up with theirs.