by Ian O'Connor
“And he said, ‘No, I remember this play. The referee fell down,’” Robertson recalled. “We’d just drawn a fake play, and Ernie had such vivid recall and documented the extra tidbit that the referee fell down, which he did, we knew we didn’t have a chance. Dudley and I looked at each other and folded our cards and said, ‘Ernie, the rest of the game is yours. And we’re going to get hot dogs.’”
Parseghian was known for throwing all kinds of formations and plays at scouts working his spring game, in an attempt to overwhelm them, but Adams didn’t blink. The kid was so good, in fact, that Agase reassigned Robertson and made Dudley and Adams his scouts. Ernie wasn’t old enough to rent a car, and Robertson had to teach him how to make hotel reservations and fill out expense reports. Some Northwestern coaches resisted the presence of this bookish wonderboy, who did most of his work on defense. Pat Naughton, a defensive coordinator who could give out an ass-chewing with the best of them, blitzed Adams when he suggested he had some intel on Illinois coach Bob Blackman from his days at Dartmouth. Over time, Naughton came to realize that young Ernie could answer questions that older staffers couldn’t. “And Ernie’s play that he talked about Blackman running at Dartmouth?” Robertson said. “Illinois ran it, and that exonerated Ernie.”
Adams was in charge of the scout team, and when Naughton asked him to run an upcoming opponent’s third-and-five play, Ernie consulted the cards he’d written up and ran the precise play. Ernie was also responsible for the scout team’s motivation and huddle discipline, never an easy task for a college underclassman in charge of older schoolmates who were bitter over their lack of playing time. “Ernie somehow mastered that job and never had a rebellion,” Robertson said. “I think those kids knew they had something special.”
Those kids took to the student dressed in his gray T-shirt and purple shorts, the student who busied himself sniffling and wrinkling his nose and pushing up his glasses while excitedly reading from his play cards. Adams could coach talent and scout talent, but the Northwestern coaches wanted to see if he could recruit talent. Robertson took him on a trip to a Chicago-area high school, where the coach ushered his college visitors into a back room, lit a cigarette, and summoned into the room a young player who seemed too small for the rigors of Big Ten football. The coach had his player take off his shirt and flex his muscles, and Robertson, a bit embarrassed, wrapped up the visit with an empty pledge that they’d keep an eye on the player.
On the drive back to the Northwestern campus, after a couple more recruiting stops, Robertson looked over at his passenger. Adams was lost in thought behind a bleak expression. Robertson could tell that the episode of the high school player removing his shirt had disgusted Adams, whose initial goal was to either coach under Steve Sorota at his alma mater, Andover, or to become a college assistant. Adams had just realized he didn’t have the personality or the desire to recruit.
“Ernie,” Robertson said to him in the car, “it looks like the NFL or nothing, doesn’t it?
“You’re so right,” Adams responded.
Agase was replaced at Northwestern by former Indiana coach John Pont, and Ernie then won over Pont and his Indiana staff faster than he’d won over Agase and his. Upon graduation, in 1975, Adams persuaded New England Patriots coach Chuck Fairbanks to give him an unpaid job after he learned two Patriots playbooks in four days. Ernie had a photographic memory and an ability to write up scouting reports more thoroughly than any Fairbanks had seen in his 20 years of coaching. He was ahead of the curve in splicing together film clips for more efficient study of, say, an opponent’s goal-line defense. “We were the only ones doing it,” Ernie said. A former Fairbanks assistant, Ray Perkins, hired him as an offensive assistant and quarterbacks coach immediately after getting the Giants job in 1979, and Ernie, in turn, recommended that Perkins bring on his old Andover friend Bill Belichick.
Adams didn’t exactly impress NFL quarterbacks with his own throwing arm in practice. “But there wasn’t anything that got by Ernie,” said Randy Dean, one of his quarterbacks with the Giants and at Northwestern. “He was a great resource coverage-wise or on technique or on certain things he’d seen on film.”
Though Belichick successfully navigated the transition from Perkins to Bill Parcells and remained with the Giants until he was hired by Cleveland after the 1990 season, Adams somehow lost his way. He was named the Giants’ director of pro personnel, at age 29, in May 1982—when the New York Times made it a point to report that he’d “never played college or professional football”—and then let go in favor of Tim Rooney three years later. “He was forced to find another career,” Robertson said. Adams was working as a municipal bond trader on Wall Street when Belichick hired him in Cleveland, and as an investment analyst when his Andover classmate hired him in Foxborough. Belichick kept bringing Ernie back from the NFL dead.
Adams’s media guide bio said his responsibilities included “researching special assignments for both the coaching staff and the personnel department,” but Ernie was involved in far more than that. Adams attended every Patriots practice and game, and from the coaches’ box he communicated directly to Belichick, headset to headset. He could tell Belichick what he was seeing on the field, or whether to challenge a questionable call on replay. He was active in draft preparation and had a draft-day seat in a decision-makers’ room that had fewer bodies in it (in order to maintain a streamlined focus) than most around the league.
Adams had nearly instant recall on teams, players, and game situations from the past. He studied film and statistics and assumed a prominent role in personnel decisions, game planning, and halftime adjustments. He was a big contributor to the successful plan of attack against Marshall Faulk in the Super Bowl XXXVI victory over St. Louis. In the Super Bowl XXXVIII victory over Carolina, Adams advised Belichick to accept a defensive penalty on second-and-goal at the Panthers’ 4 rather than risk a challenge on a potential Brady touchdown pass to Christian Fauria that was ruled out of bounds. The Patriots scored on an Antowain Smith carry on the next play.
“I stick my finger in as many pies as possible,” Adams told the New York Times in a rare interview. “It’s important that I don’t have everyone in the organization thinking I’m in their way. If I come to a conclusion on something, I go to Bill and give it to him . . . My responsibility is to do whatever I can think of to help us win. Part of it I make up as I go along. Bill and I work together. If I think I can help us win, my job is to do it.
“The reason we’re successful here is everyone is on the same page. We sing from the same hymn, the same notes. No one deviates.”
Above everything else, Adams was a devoted son. He lived with his mother, Helen, until her death, in September 2004. “And when his mom was dying of cancer,” Robertson said, “he stopped by her hospital room every morning at some ungodly hour to pay his respects, and then did so on the way home. He was unbelievable. He’s really a remarkable guy.”
Adams sometimes worked more than 100 hours a week. He was everywhere, and yet his goal was to be seen and heard by as few people as possible. Tom Brady said that very few Patriots knew anything about him. Scott Farley, training-camp safety, said that Adams was the only person at the team facility he was never introduced to.
“He was a man of mystery, certainly,” Farley said. “He was always within earshot of Coach Belichick, but you wouldn’t know the difference between him and one of the first-year trainers. If you haven’t been a part of the organization, you would think he’s a guy just kind of walking around and taking everything in. I’m sure there’s a lot that goes on behind those glasses of his that is a part of the success . . . It was like Where’s Waldo? He’s there, but he’s not there.”
It was becoming more and more clear that Belichick and Adams were pro football’s answer to Noam Chomsky and Stephen Hawking. In what might be the best two-word description of a living human on record, author David Halberstam called Adams “Belichick’s Belichick.” Though he projected the vibe of a nutty professor d
ressed in khakis and a windbreaker, Adams was known to friends as being every bit as competitive as his former Andover classmate. “Ernie’s a guy that I have the confidence to bounce pretty much anything off of,” Belichick said. “I think he’s got a great football mind and he’s been a very valuable resource for our organization and for me personally.”
Back in the bad old days in Cleveland, Adams wasn’t met with such universal praise. One of the Browns tight ends he worked with, Scott Galbraith, called him, among other things, “a joke.” But, like Belichick, Adams was fielding the kinds of endorsements in New England that were making any Cleveland criticisms moot.
“He knows more about professional football than anyone I have ever met,” Brady said.
Yet Adams was never made available to the general news media, even during pre–Super Bowl sessions that included mandatory access to all participating assistant coaches. Adams wasn’t an official coach, and his vague title allowed Belichick to keep him off-limits. Occasionally a New England coach or player would offer up a useful nugget about Adams—on the subject of opponents, Brady said that Ernie once advised him to “make them defend every blade of grass”—but that was about it. In a league that shared among its members everything from revenues to pre-draft scouting reports, Belichick thought the less shared about his Andover classmate, the better.
Adams was never much of a talker anyway. His first boss at Northwestern, Agase, asked Jay Robertson to probe the depths of Ernie’s football knowledge, and decades later Robertson felt he hadn’t come close to hitting rock bottom. In hindsight, Robertson realized it was odd how things had unfolded at Northwestern. During all his time spent at the Wildcats’ football offices, Adams never brought up the fact that he was close to Bill Belichick, son of the longtime Navy assistant Steve. Robertson was among the coaches who had read Steve Belichick’s scouting book.
“But Ernie said he had one friend involved in football as much as himself, and that was Evan Bonds,” Robertson recalled. Bonds was a fellow Phillips lineman and football nerd who attended Duke and later earned a Ph.D. in musicology from Harvard and a faculty position at the University of North Carolina. “Ernie talked a lot about Bonds,” Robertson said. “But he never discussed Bill Belichick with me.”
The Patriots were preparing to play the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl XXXIX, and Bill Belichick was reaching again for a motivational tool that was, in many ways, beneath him. Twisting printed headlines and quotes into something sharper than a butcher’s knife was a tactic used by every meathead high school coach in America trying to whip his athletes into a frenzy, and yet Belichick did it as much as anyone in the NFL. He understood that football was the ultimate game of emotion, and that an enraged, disrespected team was more likely to sacrifice body parts in the pursuit of victory.
“Let me just read you a little something here; I thought this was kind of interesting,” Belichick said to a hotel ballroom’s worth of players sitting in rows of armless conference chairs, most of them dressed in casual shirts and jeans. He’d gotten his hands on information printed in a Philadelphia Inquirer story headlined “In Case of a Win, a Major . . . Event; Just Don’t Call It a Parade,” and reportedly referenced in an email from an Eagles official to the Boston Red Sox delegation that had just celebrated an historic, ghost-busting title. The Inquirer article explained that superstitious city officials weren’t calling the event planned for Tuesday at 11 a.m. a victory parade. “We’re being deferential to the Eagles,” managing director Philip R. Goldsmith said. “They’ve asked us to be cooperative and not talk about it.” City officials wouldn’t go on the record with details of the planned celebration, but Inquirer sources anonymously filled in some blanks. The Eagles were expected to ride the parade route in double-decker buses, and military jets were scheduled to perform a flyover.
Of course, when Belichick shared these details at the team’s hotel, he left out some important context. “At first,” the coach told his players about the city’s plans, “I couldn’t believe it. But it’s actually true. Talking about the Philadelphia parade after the game. All right, it’s 11 o’clock in case any of you want to attend that. It’s going to go from Broad Street up to Washington Avenue, past City Hall, then down the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, and it will end up at the art museum.”
Never mind that every city—Boston included—plans a potential championship celebration days in advance of a championship game. Belichick knew the sport he was playing, and he knew the room he was working.
“That level of disrespect,” receiver Bethel Johnson said of the scheduled parade, “added fuel to our fire.”
“It was absolutely a great motivating factor,” said offensive lineman Russ Hochstein. “Bill had a great way of painting us as the underdog whether we were or not, and in that Super Bowl I sure felt like it after that, and I think my teammates did as well. It was ‘Hey, we’ve won two Super Bowls in three years, and here they are planning their parade route.’ Bill threw that out there, a lot of guys grabbed on to that, and it was like ‘Whoa, maybe people do think we’re going to lose.’ Bill had an uncanny way of doing that. He’d find a quote or a small snippet in the newspaper and use that to motivate us.”
Belichick had dealt from the same motivational deck earlier in the postseason, starting with New England’s 20–3 divisional round victory over the quarterback (Peyton Manning) and the AFC rival (Indianapolis Colts) they positively owned. In the leadup to that game, Belichick told his players that the Colts—in anticipation of a victory over New England—had called the Steelers looking for an extra 1,500 tickets to the AFC Championship Game in Pittsburgh. That real or imagined claim likely wasn’t necessary after mouthy Colts kicker Mike Vanderjagt, who had criticized Manning and Tony Dungy two years earlier for not showing enough emotion, said he thought the Patriots were “ripe for the picking.” The kicker who missed the 48-yard field goal that would’ve tied the Patriots in the final seconds of the season opener also told WISH-TV, in Indianapolis, that New England was “not as good as the beginning of the year and not as good as last year.”
The Patriots were angered by the remarks, and didn’t need Belichick to pile on as kickoff approached. But pile on he did, just in case his players weren’t angry enough. According to one of the backup quarterbacks, Jim Miller, Belichick played video of Vanderjagt’s remarks in a team meeting on the eve of the game. “He held up the Super Bowl ring from the year before,” Miller said, “the last world championship . . . He said, ‘Guys, you know how hard it is to win.’ This is Saturday night in the hotel, and normally you show film reminders and go over things. And Bill got everyone together and showed that video, the Vanderjagt thing, and that was it. We broke and got our snack. That’s really all he said.”
New England didn’t allow a single touchdown to the No. 1 offense in the league, whose two-time MVP quarterback had just set an NFL record with 49 scoring passes. Belichick called Manning “the best quarterback I’ve coached against.” Yet Manning was now 0-7 in Foxborough, while Brady was 7-0 in the postseason. The Patriots rushed for 210 yards (Corey Dillon delivered 144 of them) to Indy’s 46, and even though they were missing three defensive starters, in Seymour and cornerbacks Ty Law and Tyrone Poole, and using receiver Troy Brown in the secondary, the Patriots baffled Manning with looks he hadn’t previously seen.
The Patriots–Colts narratives were firmly in place. Indianapolis was a finesse team built around small, quick players, while New England countered with power and physicality the Colts couldn’t handle. Manning was a stat machine and a dome player missing some intangible needed to win the big one, especially the big one in Foxborough, while Brady was the more industrious leader and winner. Dungy was a nice guy you’d want as a next-door neighbor, while Belichick would sell his firstborn for a first down in a close game.
The Colts had complained about all of New England’s grabbing in the secondary in the AFC title game the previous winter, compelling the league, in the off-season, to reestablish its commitment to kee
ping receivers clean and scores up. So the Patriots mocked them after this latest playoff defeat and dared them to push for some other rule reinforcement. “What are they going to do next?” Brown asked.
The Colts watched New England go into Heinz Field and tear apart the team that had ended its record 21-game winning streak on Halloween night. Brady was run-down with the flu, and the wind chill off the river on this night was minus 1, but his two touchdown passes (including a 60-yarder to Deion Branch) and Rodney Harrison’s interception of rookie Ben Roethlisberger and 87-yard interception return for a score shaped a 41–27 victory that snapped Pittsburgh’s own 15-game winning streak. Belichick had actually been surprised to see the Steelers advance past the New York Jets in the previous round. On a call to his friend Herm Edwards, the Jets’ coach, to solicit inside information on Pittsburgh, Belichick revealed that he’d predicted to his players all week that the Jets would upset the Steelers, who prevailed in overtime. Imagine what Belichick would’ve done with that information during the week if he were Pittsburgh’s coach and a future opponent had said that about his team.
Either way, the New England coach pushed the right buttons before that game. He felt that his players weren’t sure they could win in Heinz Field, where the Steelers had them down three touchdowns late on Halloween. So he was more emotional than usual when he gathered them before the game to tell them how confident he was that they would beat Pittsburgh.
“I’m speechless,” linebacker Ted Johnson said. “He just has it, whatever it is. He just finds a way. The way he motivates us, the way he can get a team ready mentally and physically. He’s so tuned into his players . . . He just says and does the right thing at the right time.”