Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  In the wake of this regular-season classic, both teams showed immense respect for each other; the Patriots–Giants relationship was the opposite of the Patriots–Jets relationship. Mike Pope, the Giants’ tight ends coach and a former colleague, hugged Belichick on the field and told him, “I’ll tell you what, that’s an incredible thing. Nobody does that. Nobody does that.” Belichick passed Giants owner John Mara in the stadium corridor and told him they were certain to meet again in the Super Bowl. Mara thought Belichick was just assuming the role of gracious winner.

  Kevin Gilbride, the Giants’ offensive coordinator, was waiting in the tunnel to congratulate New England linebackers coach Matt Patricia, who was a friend and former Syracuse colleague of his son’s, when Roger Goodell grabbed his hand and told him what a great game it had been for the league. “He was the happiest guy in America,” Gilbride said. After the commissioner walked off, Tom Brady approached Gilbride to express his respect for the Giants. “He has his entourage of bodyguards protecting him,” the offensive coordinator recalled, “and he says, ‘Coach, what a great game. And what about some of those things you did in the red zone?’ I said, ‘Tom, you think I’m going to tell you this stuff?’ I didn’t know him at all. He just came over. So I was thrilled he came over, but I wasn’t going to discuss that. He just said, ‘Tell Eli I said he had a great game,’ and that was it.”

  If Brady was attempting to do some early reconnaissance in the event of a possible rematch in the Super Bowl, Belichick would have been proud. The Giants walked off the field that night believing they had outhit the Patriots and that they could beat them if given a second chance. New England seemed to be aware of that.

  One of the casualties of Coughlin’s decision to play the Patriots for real, O’Hara was standing in the Giants Stadium tunnel after the game with New England guard Dan Koppen, with whom he shared an agent. Koppen asked O’Hara about his injured knee before saying, “You guys are the best team we played all year.”

  “I hope we get another shot at you guys,” O’Hara said.

  “I hope not,” Koppen responded.

  Bill Belichick’s work with the 2007 Patriots was staggering. In his previous three NFL seasons, Wes Welker had a total of 98 receptions and one touchdown; he had 112 receptions and eight touchdowns in his first year in New England. Tom Brady threw for 22 more touchdowns than his previous career high. And Randy Moss, who arrived as a neon advertisement for trouble, accepted every tenet of the Patriots’ culture and gave Belichick more receiving yardage (1,493) than he’d given any other coach.

  “I think why I have so much love for him, admiration and appreciation for him,” Moss said, “is because he brought me back down to the reality of: Everything that I’ve accomplished up to that point means nothing. And it was kind of like I had to refocus myself. He helped me refocus, the team helped me refocus, and then magical things happened. So I think it was just more of he knows how to get more out of his players no matter what type of level—Pro Bowl, All-Pro, free agent, whatever. He knows how to get the best out of any guy.”

  Belichick hit Moss with so many questions in team meetings about the defenses he was about to face, the receiver said, “it was like you couldn’t study enough . . . When he starts talking, 80 to 90 percent of the team has a pen in their hands, ready to write.” Truth was, Belichick grabbed Moss’s attention in New England’s very first team meeting of 2007. The Patriots were sitting by position, with the offense on one side of the room and the defense on the other, leaving Stallworth and Moss next to each other. Belichick started in by saying that nobody in his audience was a winner, because nobody in his audience was a member of the 2006 Indianapolis Colts, the defending champs.

  Belichick would show the Patriots plays from their AFC Championship Game loss to the Colts, who had rallied from a 21–6 halftime deficit. He’d also prove to them that franchise players weren’t entitled to any free lunches. Belichick played film of Brady passes that hadn’t exactly hit their targets. “Very simple passes that a high schooler could make,” Stallworth said. “Horrible throws. Bill looked back at us, played the film, looked back at us, and said, ‘What the fuck is this? I could get Johnny Foxborough from down the street to make a better fucking throw than this, Brady.’”

  Brady didn’t flinch because, well, Brady never flinched when blitzed—by opposing pass rushers or his own coach. “But Moss and I looked at each other and said, ‘Oh, shit,’” Stallworth said. “We sat up in our seats. We were like ‘Holy shit.’ Like a movie. We looked at each other at the same time. If Tom Brady gets this, everyone can. It set the tone for the season, and guys on that team were used to that . . . Nobody was safe from being coached up by Bill Belichick.”

  Including grinders the likes of Heath Evans, a 6´0˝, 245-pound fullback from Auburn who had been picked by Seattle in the third round of the 2001 draft. Evans was barely used in his four seasons under Seahawks coach Mike Holmgren, and then in 2005 he was discarded by the Dolphins’ Nick Saban after six games and a grand total of one rushing attempt for no yardage. When Belichick picked him up, Evans was, in his words, “a beaten-down dog.” Holmgren and Saban always wanted to use him as a big-bodied fullback, a banger and nothing more. Belichick saw an athlete, not just a battering ram. “He knew my strengths more than I knew,” Evans said, “and he knew my weaknesses more than I knew, from almost the jump.”

  Three weeks after Miami cut him, Evans suited up for the Patriots against the Dolphins. If only to stick it to Saban, Belichick made Evans the featured part of his offense, and the ex-Dolphin responded with 84 rushing yards on 17 carries plus 18 yards on three catches in a New England victory. The son of a Marine, Evans felt whole again as a football player. “I saw what a championship mentality is,” he said. “I saw how to study film. I saw what real leadership was from players. I saw what real football discipline was. I also saw the pressure from day one to be overly prepared because of what Bill puts you through every day.”

  Evans recalled Junior Seau’s first team meeting in New England in 2006. The legend was sitting in the back of the room, and Evans figured he hadn’t been corrected or yelled at by a coach since junior high. And yet on this day, Belichick jumped him good, compelling Seau to get out of his chair and say, “Buddy?” in an incredulous voice. (Seau called just about everyone “Buddy” because he had a hard time recalling names.) “Junior didn’t even know how to respond to Bill coaching him the way he was being coached, and being held to a different standard,” Evans said. “He was a first-ballot Hall of Famer, and Bill was coaching him like he’d coach anybody.” On the practice field, Seau sometimes aggressively approached the A-gap, bounced around, and then jumped offsides. Belichick didn’t tolerate undisciplined mistakes, even from the sport’s signature stars. “We don’t guess here,” he told Seau. In another practice, when Seau jumped offsides again, Belichick “ripped Junior apart in front of the whole team,” one Patriot said.

  It was a humbling experience for Seau, who nonetheless had the résumé to counterpunch in a team meeting before a bye-week break. Belichick asked him a question, and the linebacker responded, “Buddy, I have no idea.” When Belichick followed up by pressing Seau on why he couldn’t handle the question, the player said, “Seat 2A.”

  “What’s Seat 2A?” Belichick asked.

  “That’s the first-class seat I have on a flight out of here,” Seau responded. “I’ll have the answer when I get back.”

  Belichick never stopped challenging his most accomplished stars. Forever sitting in the front row in meetings with his notebook open, Brady was under constant pressure from his coach, who sometimes made him prove his worth relative to his backup. “I saw Bill pit Matt Cassel against Tom Brady in a Q and A one time in front of the team,” Evans said, “where Matt would answer a question and Bill would be like ‘Brady, what do you think?’ And he’s like ‘I don’t agree.’ And then Brady would have to give the right answer.”

  Every day, every classroom session, was an education in how to s
ucceed in the NFL. Evans said that when he first got to Foxborough, he had no clue how to look at defenses, and how to value every precious inch of space separating a player from his adversary. Belichick taught Evans to ask himself, “What’s the shade of the outside linebacker? What’s the positioning of the 3-technique? What’s the alignment of the safeties? How wide are they? Where are Randy Moss and Wes lined up, and according to Randy and Wes what’s their coverage?” Evans would line up in the backfield with Kevin Faulk, and the two of them would talk about everything they were seeing. In five to ten seconds, they could diagnose everything coming their way. Belichick had given them the answers to every test by teaching them how to study.

  And the lessons didn’t stop at the classroom door. “Bill flat out asked you walking down the hallway, ‘Hey, Heath, on first and ten in the tight red zone, what’s Baltimore’s favorite blitz?’” Evans said. “And you’d better know. Hallway, team meeting, at practice, wherever. And then he’d be like ‘All right, smart-ass, what’s their second-favorite blitz?’ So it wasn’t having one answer for him. It was having stockpiles of answers for him.”

  Belichick lit into players only if they committed unforced mental errors. He never asked players to do things they were physically unable to do, something Evans greatly appreciated after his miserable experiences in Seattle and Miami. Holmgren had won a Super Bowl in Green Bay, and Saban would later become arguably the greatest college football coach of all time. But after he was done with those coaches, Evans had no confidence. It took Belichick, he said, “to literally build a new version of me.” That building of a new human being was done with a human touch.

  “From what I knew of Nick . . . Bill is much more of a people person,” Evans said. “People see the media persona, but Bill has an ability to coach in different ways. Mike Holmgren would just yell and scream at me and never really give me any way to get better, and it freakin’ killed me on the inside, because I’m a pleaser. If you ask Bill, he’d know that I wanted to do well for the people I care about. I wanted to do well for my family. I wanted to do well for my coaches, and the people that took a chance on me or invested in me. Bill knew how to get to me and coach me so I could please him and make him happy. I couldn’t make Mike happy for four years. And Bill is one of the funniest guys I ever met in my life. Everyone knows how smart he is, but he’s also quick-witted.”

  In 2007, as he spread out defenses and emphasized the slot position, Belichick de-emphasized the fullback position. He told Evans that New England wouldn’t be using two-back sets, told him he was needed on all special teams, and asked him to lose a little weight. But Evans did score touchdowns in the back-to-back games against Philadelphia and Baltimore that the Patriots nearly lost, and he did prove to be the kind of reliable role player Belichick cherishes. When Evans first showed up in Foxborough in 2005, he was fed up enough with Saban and the circumstances of his departure that he handed Belichick his Dolphins playbook as a form of payback. In return, Belichick developed him into a viable NFL player and offered up another small reason why he was going places no football coach had ever been.

  By the time they made it to Super Bowl XLII, in Glendale, Arizona, for a rematch with the Giants, the 18-0 Patriots resembled a golfer who had squandered six shots of his seven-shot Masters lead as he trudged to the 72nd tee just hoping for a two-putt par. New England hadn’t been the same unstoppable freight train across the final six regular-season games, nearly losing three of them. The Patriots were tied with Jacksonville at halftime of their divisional playoff game before winning by 11 on Brady’s remarkable accuracy (26 of 28 passing for 262 yards and three touchdowns). They were leading San Diego by only two points entering the fourth quarter of the AFC Championship Game before winning by nine, having leaned on Laurence Maroney’s second straight 122-yard rushing game to overcome Brady’s three interceptions. Moss had only one catch in each playoff victory, and suddenly he was facing an allegation of domestic battery made by a woman who had obtained a temporary restraining order against him. (Moss vehemently denied the allegation.)

  The Patriots expended a great deal of energy in the drive for a perfect season as opponents hoping to break up the streak attacked them with playoff intensity. “I think in the long run, that wore our team down,” Kyle Brady said.

  As much as seemingly everyone had rooted for the Patriots six years earlier, everyone was rooting against them now. Even Jon Bon Jovi was pulling for the Giants, his hometown team, over his buddy Belichick. “Everybody pulls for David, nobody roots for Goliath,” Wilt Chamberlain once lamented. The Patriots had become Goliath, and Spygate made them less likable.

  “When I went up there, that team had almost a persecution complex and used that to their advantage,” Kyle Brady said. “Already before the controversy, you had a feeling that everyone outside New England and Patriots Nation hates them. So many people were so tired of their success and hearing about Brady and Belichick, and the haters gravitated toward an additional reason to hate them. It gave that team an energy and created a greater sense of resolve and determination to prove none of that stuff was necessary to win. ‘This is the Patriot Way. We outwork you. We’re better prepared, tougher, more disciplined.’ They took pride in that.”

  As the Patriots closed in on the 1972 Miami Dolphins, reporters turned to some of those old Dolphins for comment. Mercury Morris, running back and return man, was known to throw a little party every time a previously unbeaten team lost late in the season. One day, Morris was on the TV in the New England locker room, essentially rooting for the Patriots to lose, and Kyle Brady recalled one player saying, “Man, let’s shut this dude up. Let’s go ahead and do this. This dude is too much. Everyone is tired of hearing him.”

  The more the Patriots pressed forward, the more resistance they met. Realizing that Tom Brady was having a season for the ages, teams had started blitzing him more to speed him up. New England was feeling the pressure between the lines, and also in the court of public opinion, where Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania senator and the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was demanding to know why Roger Goodell had ordered the destruction of the Patriots’ tapes and notes relevant to their illegal videotaping operation. A devoted fan of the Philadelphia Eagles, the team that had lost Super Bowl XXXIX to New England, Specter told the New York Times that Goodell would be called before the committee, that the public had a right to know if the integrity of the game had been compromised and a right to know what was on those tapes. Later that morning, in his annual state-of-the-league news conference held on the Friday before the Super Bowl, Goodell fielded half a dozen questions on Spygate and maintained that he didn’t believe New England’s filming had had a significant impact on the outcome of any game. Of course, with Specter grousing about the NFL’s antitrust exemption, it was in the commissioner’s interests to downplay the entire episode.

  Goodell said six tapes from 2006 and 2007 had been recovered from the Patriots, and that destroying them had been “the appropriate thing to do and I think it sent a message.” Only very few people accepted the commissioner’s explanation. A former Patriots video assistant named Matt Walsh suggested in an interview with ESPN.com that he was in possession of relevant and undisclosed Spygate information, and then the very next day, on the eve of the Super Bowl, the Boston Herald dropped a bombshell in the middle of Belichick’s locker room. John Tomase of the Herald reported that the Patriots had taped the St. Louis Rams’ final walk-through before New England’s indelible upset in Super Bowl XXXVI, six years earlier. Though the team and the league denied having any knowledge of this, Tomase reported that after filming the Patriots’ walk-through in the Superdome, a staffer remained behind and filmed the Rams. That staffer was later identified as Walsh, who acknowledged being present at the St. Louis session (he told Brian Daboll, then a coaching assistant, that Marshall Faulk was lining up as a kick returner) but denied videotaping it.

  The Herald story only hardened the notion that nobody outside of New England want
ed Belichick’s team to win its fourth ring. As much as America had wanted the underdog Patriots to take down St. Louis in New Orleans, America wanted to see them fall to the underdog Giants in the Arizona desert. Belichick could tell his players every hour, on the hour, that they shouldn’t worry about public perception and that Spygate was his personal burden to bear, but they were only human. And it was only human for athletes to feel stressed when their authenticity was being questioned.

  As it was, the Patriots were buckling under the pressure to finish 19-0 even before those news stories broke near the end of the week. Troy Brown, a decorated Patriot and pro’s pro who had been reduced to a practice squad player in his final season, would tell his biographer, Mike Reiss, that in his 15 years of professional football he “had never been part of a team that practiced as poorly as the Patriots did leading up to the most important game of their careers, which led them to being kicked off the field by Bill Belichick.” Brown said that New England’s first two practices after arriving in Arizona were “as bad as he’s been a part of at any level” and that by week’s end “things had picked up slightly but it was still an uneasy feeling.”