Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  Kyle Brady recalled a midweek practice at Arizona State’s Sun Devil Stadium that went awry. “We went out and laid an egg,” he said. “Balls were dropped. Guys were missing blocks. Balls were on the ground. That had not happened all season long. Bill brought us up at the end of practice and he said, ‘Guys, let me tell you something. [The Giants] got ahead of you today.’ He wasn’t saying it to scare us. He really believed it.”

  Belichick didn’t betray that truth in his mandatory sessions with the news media. He was actually cordial, semi-pleasant, and humorous enough for Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy to label him “Belichuckle.” It helped that the Spygate questions had been in short supply during the week, and when he was asked in a news conference about the latest developments, he did his usual deflecting, saying, “That’s a league matter. I don’t know anything about it.”

  Truth was, Belichick was in the habit of bringing his media A game to Super Bowl week. It was as if he knew he had to rise to the occasion and play along on the national stage. Catching Belichick’s act during Super Bowl week was like catching Belichick’s act on Fridays in Foxborough, when much of his preparation for the upcoming game was complete and the TV people and out-of-towners had already parachuted in and out. The coach knew his Friday audience consisted of the beat’s day-to-day grinders, and for them he was often thoughtful and expansive—especially when the questions were about NFL history or the evolution of the tight end position or the ball flight for left-footed punters or the grit of old Giants warriors like Harry Carson, Carl Banks, and Lawrence Taylor.

  Belichick was often Friday Bill times five at the Super Bowl, where he scoffed at the idea that he disdained his meetings with the press. “I think you have a job to do,” he told reporters, “and you are our connection between our football team, our fans, and the people who have an interest in the game. I respect the job that you do and hope that you respect the job I do. I understand that sometimes I can’t give you everything that you are looking for, but I do know that this is the conduit of information from the team to the fans, and the fans are what drive the game.”

  New England’s players regularly saw the Super Bowl Belichick that he rarely trotted out for reporters and fans to see. But at the end of an emotionally and physically draining season, that side of Belichick wasn’t motivating the Patriots during their most important practices of the year. Meanwhile, the Giants were looking and sounding like a refreshed and confident team with nothing to lose. Plaxico Burress didn’t let his injured ankle stop him from predicting a 23–17 victory in the New York Post, and Giants co-owner Steve Tisch told a New Jersey columnist that he was also predicting an upset over the Patriots. “We’ll have more points than they do,” said Tisch, who believed the Giants were getting stronger by the week. “This is not a team that peaked at midseason,” the owner said, in what seemed like a shot at New England.

  In the AFC Championship Game, San Diego had held Brady to 209 yards passing while intercepting him three times. (Brady injured his right ankle in the victory.) The Chargers’ defensive coordinator, Ted Cottrell, said that his players “were holding our looks right until the end and didn’t show our hand.” The Giants called Cottrell for advice before the Super Bowl. “I didn’t give them all my secrets,” he said. Cottrell did tell the Giants about certain tendencies Kevin Faulk showed when he entered the game. He’d also been a member of the Vikings’ staff when Moss was in Minnesota, and couldn’t believe the things he saw the receiver do in practice and games. Cottrell told the Giants that they needed to get their hands on Moss as much as possible and to prevent him from getting up in the air.

  The Giants arrived at the Super Bowl site dressed in black for New England’s supposed funeral. They had gone 0-3 against Dallas and Green Bay during the regular season, and yet, after opening the postseason with a road victory over Tampa Bay, the Giants beat the top-seeded Cowboys in their building before surviving Ice Bowl–ish conditions at Lambeau Field and outlasting Brett Favre and the Packers in overtime. The Giants had a good week of work in Arizona, outside of the fact that a backup receiver and special teams star, David Tyree, dropped everything thrown his way in the team’s final full practice. “Balls were ricocheting off his helmet,” Tom Coughlin said, “and Eli had to pat David on the butt and remind him he was a clutch player who could come through for us in the game.”

  Off their regular-season showing against New England, and off their charmed postseason run, the Giants were true believers in their ability to win this game. “We knew that if we played them again that we’d beat them,” one Giants official said. “Physically, we beat the shit out of them in that regular-season game . . . They weren’t looking forward to going through that again. Psychologically, even though it was a loss, that last regular-season game worked to the positive to an unbelievable degree, and also worked to the negative for them to an unbelievable degree. Literally walking off the field that night, our guys were saying to themselves and each other, ‘If we play those fuckers again, we’re going to beat the shit out of them, and they know it and we know it.’”

  Though New England never would’ve agreed with that assessment, Kyle Brady did reveal that “a lot of guys on that team, if they were quite honest, would say they’d prefer to play the Packers, because we knew we matched up very well against them.” Every NFL team knew that the only way to compete with the Patriots was to bring pressure—especially interior pressure—and move Brady off his preferred spot. The Giants of Michael Strahan, Justin Tuck, and Osi Umenyiora were more capable than anyone of executing that strategy, especially with Brady limited by the bum ankle that bothered him more than he let on.

  At the same time, the Giants knew who and what they were up against. John Mara, team president and co-owner, had once been in the George Young camp when it came to Bill Belichick, Giants assistant. Mara didn’t think Belichick had the personality to be a successful NFL head coach, and yet the Patriots’ coach now stood next to Vince Lombardi and Tom Landry as former assistants the Giants never should’ve allowed to leave the franchise.

  “George Young had spent his life in the National Football League,” Mara said, “and he used to say to me all the time, ‘I’ve been evaluating personnel all my life. That’s what I do.’ And he was wrong about Bill. I was wrong. A lot of us were wrong. Shame on us.”

  The Cleveland experience had made it appear that they were right, that Belichick didn’t have the charisma and the commanding presence to lead. “That’s exactly what I was thinking,” Mara said. Belichick turned to Tom Brady in 2001, and everything changed. He had a chance now, in his eighth season in Foxborough, to join Pittsburgh’s Chuck Noll as the only men to win four Super Bowls.

  A Giants franchise that hadn’t won it all since the 1990 season, or since Belichick left for Cleveland, was all that stood between the Patriots and an unimagined place. Yes, the Giants were riding a wave of momentum and, yes, they were talking a good game after that 38–35 shootout in the Meadowlands. But deep down, they knew they had lost six more games than New England. Six. They knew what they were facing at the quarterback and receiver positions. Of greater significance, they knew what they were facing at the position of head coach.

  “So how are we going to do this?” Mara asked himself. “How are we going to beat him? He’s got two weeks to prepare for us, so how can we possibly beat him?”

  Eli Manning’s ball was floating directly toward Asante Samuel, near the Giants’ sideline inside University of Phoenix Stadium, which meant the Patriots were actually going to do this. They were going to win their fourth Super Bowl title. They were going to finish with the NFL’s first-ever 19-0 record. They were going to finish as the greatest team of all time.

  New England was leading 14–10, and there were only 80 seconds left, when Manning felt pressured by a blitzing Rodney Harrison and threw up a pass in the vicinity of David Tyree, who had scored the Giants’ only touchdown. The receiver broke off the route earlier than Eli had anticipated, leaving Samuel all alone with the
ball. And this is why the game was over: Samuel had 19 interceptions over the 2006 and 2007 seasons, playoffs included, the most in the league by far. He had picked off passes in five of his previous seven postseason games and returned three of them for touchdowns, including one against Peyton Manning in the previous year’s AFC Championship Game.

  “It would be great if I could pick off Eli one time,” Samuel had said before the Super Bowl. “That would be real nice. Then maybe I could ask both guys for their jerseys so I could hang them in my trophy case.”

  He had every right to be confident, even cocky. Harrison called Samuel “the best corner in the league, hands down,” and he was about to make a killing in free agency. A fourth-round pick out of Central Florida in 2003, Samuel had modest measurables among corners at the pre-draft combine, posting a 4.52 40-yard-dash time and a 35.5-inch vertical leap. But Belichick thought he had very good instincts and ball skills. “So when he gets his hands on the ball,” the coach would say, “he intercepted most of them.”

  Belichick said he expected a good game out of Samuel, who expected the same from himself. “Big-time players step up in big-time games,” he’d said, “and I consider myself a big-time player.” He was right, too. Samuel would retire in six years with 58 regular-season and postseason interceptions, ten of them returned for touchdowns. “Hopefully Eli will play a bad game,” he said that week in Arizona. “Hopefully I can be the reason.”

  The ball was right there. Eli was about to finish a bad game, and Samuel was about to be the reason. The 5´10˝ corner rose to make the catch, and the ball made contact with his ultra-reliable hands with 78 seconds to go. Somehow those ultra-reliable hands didn’t hold on. Somehow the Giants had new life. With the team’s season and legacy on the line, Samuel was the one Patriot not named Moss or Welker whom Belichick would’ve wanted in position to make a catch. And he didn’t make it.

  It wasn’t an easy play. If Samuel were 5´11˝ instead of 5´10˝, he would’ve made the pick. If Samuel’s vertical leap were 36.5 instead of 35.5, he would’ve made the pick. After the ball bounced off his hands and went flying into the Giants’ sideline, Samuel leaned his head backwards, grabbed his helmet with both hands, and looked skyward, his mouth agape. “I don’t know if Eli was trying to throw it away or something,” he said later. “But it was a bad play on my part. I could have ended the game.”

  Instead, on the next play, Manning lined up in shotgun formation on third-and-five from the New York 44, with referee Mike Carey stationed 12 yards behind him and to his right. Manning took the snap and almost immediately found himself under duress. New England’s furious four-man rush obliterated the Giants’ front line, all but leaving the athletically challenged Eli to fend for himself. He stepped up in the pocket to avoid Adalius Thomas, swooping in from his left side, and stepped right into the vortex created by the stunt, or twist, that was run by New England’s Jarvis Green and Richard Seymour, who steamrolled past Rich Seubert and Shaun O’Hara. Defending a stunt in football is like defending a pick-and-roll in basketball, and Seubert and O’Hara later blamed each other for not making a clean switch.

  Green grabbed Manning’s jersey with his left hand and then came over the top and grabbed it with his right while Seymour and O’Hara were locked in a Greco-Roman wrestling match inches away. The Giants’ center said he saw Manning curl into his typical standing fetal position and thought to himself, OK, we’re probably going to lose this game. Manning was so desperate to stay alive in the mayhem, he briefly considered throwing the ball to his best offensive lineman, Chris Snee, who wasn’t blocking anyone. Somehow Eli spun out of Green’s grasp, which left him open for Seymour to take down. Feeling he had nothing to lose other than the game, O’Hara planted his right hand around Seymour’s throat.

  “I said, ‘Screw it,’” the center said. “I was squeezing his trachea as hard as I could and not letting go.” The illegal chokehold disabled Seymour for a brief moment and likely allowed Manning to escape. The Patriots had been caught cheating at the start of their season, and a Giants lineman had just gone undetected cheating them at the end of their season.

  As a manic Manning retreated to his 33-yard line, Carey ran up next to him, and then retreated himself when he realized the quarterback was alive and well and about to attempt a pass. The referee later admitted that he likely would have blown the whistle and ruled the play dead—with Manning in the Patriots’ clutches—had he remained in his spot or taken a different path to the action. But Eli was free to make a play, and he had been making more than his share since his demonstrative Pro Bowl tight end, Jeremy Shockey, went down in December with a fractured leg. Shockey was a rare talent, but he was also a high-maintenance act who demanded the ball and wasn’t afraid to show up Manning when he didn’t get it. “I don’t have a problem saying Jeremy Shockey was a pain in the ass,” said Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes. “Eli was technically a young player, and the guy was constantly yelling at him when he’d come off the field. That’s not conducive to a productive work environment. I could sense that Eli was a different player from that point on.”

  Manning sent up a prayer down the middle of the field, where the 6´0˝ Tyree and the 6´1˝ Harrison waited at the New England 24 to see who could jump higher. Tyree won the contest, made the initial catch as the safety swung his right arm at the ball, and then somehow secured it while being dragged to the ground by pinning it, with his right hand, against the top of his helmet. The same helmet that balls had been ricocheting off during the Giants’ final practice. Before Coughlin could scramble onto the field for a second time on the drive, motioning frantically for a timeout, it was clear to all witnesses this was the most amazing Super Bowl catch they’d ever seen.

  Some players on the field didn’t realize just how absurd this sequence had been. Donté Stallworth was waiting for his luggage at the Fort Lauderdale airport the next day when he finally watched the play on his computer. “What the fuck?” he screamed out, and everyone at baggage claim immediately turned his way. Stallworth couldn’t believe his eyes. “One of the best safeties in the league, not to be able to jar that ball loose from Tyree?” Stallworth said. “That probably happens maybe five out of 100 times.”

  This was one of the five. The singular Patriot the Giants wanted to defeat more than any other, Harrison, had been defeated. “We had hatred for Rodney Harrison going in,” O’Hara said. “Not just him, but vengeance was on our mind.” Every man, woman, and child inside the building had a feeling after the Tyree catch that this game had been decided right then and there. The Giants still had to cover 24 yards in 59 seconds to get into the end zone, but what team ever makes a play like that in the final minutes and then loses the game?

  The Patriots had taken their 14–10 lead with 2:45 left, when Brady finished a workmanlike 80-yard drive with a short scoring pass to Moss, who was lined up on the right side against Corey Webster, man to man, before embarrassing him with his money move and making him fall down. On the New England sideline, Bruschi, a three-time champ, wrapped his arms around Seau, a legend without a ring. The Patriots needed just one stop.

  They had so many chances on New York’s final, fateful drive, and couldn’t convert any of them. For the Patriots, it was a drive of nearlys. They nearly stopped Brandon Jacobs on a fourth-and-one. They nearly forced and recovered a Manning fumble. On the next play, they nearly intercepted Eli on the pass that headed right for Samuel. On the play after that, they nearly sacked Eli, and then nearly broke up his Hail Mary to Tyree. “Some unusual things happened that made you scratch your head and say, What’s going on here?” Kyle Brady said. “We usually caught those breaks.”

  New England’s Adalius Thomas actually ran down and sacked Manning on the snap following the Tyree catch, leaving an entire region of tormented fans to ask, Where was that on the last play? Coughlin had to burn his final timeout with 51 seconds left. Three plays and 12 seconds later, on third-and-11, Manning completed a 12-yard sideline pass to Steve Smith to give the Giants a fir
st down at the New England 13. Burress was split wide to the left on the next play, and it was a small act of God that he was even on the field.

  Burress had injured a knee ligament five days earlier by slipping in the shower, and the team didn’t inform anyone about it. The receiver was sitting at his locker before the game, head down, praying that the painkillers he took would allow him to play with a bad knee and a bad ankle. Most of his teammates didn’t think he’d be able to suit up, and the Giants had only minutes to play with before submitting their inactives. “Right up until the deadline,” Coughlin said, “I didn’t know if Plaxico would even dress. It was real.” The Giants’ coach was preparing to make Sinorice Moss active when he got word from trainer Ronnie Barnes that Burress was a go. Coughlin didn’t need to be told twice; he handed his list of inactives to the team’s PR man, Pat Hanlon, who brushed past Belichick on his way to making those names official.

  The Giants were merely hoping the hobbled Burress could make a couple of big plays, and after managing only one 14-yard catch on eight targets, Burress finally gave them one. Matched up with Ellis Hobbs, who had already intercepted Manning, Burress faked a slant and froze Hobbs as he turned up the field, flawlessly executing what’s called a sluggo route. Eli had a wide-open receiver to hit in the end zone, and hit him Eli did, with 35 seconds to go. His big brother Peyton, the previous year’s Super Bowl MVP, started pumping his fists and clapping like mad in his upstairs suite.

  As exhilarated wives and family members of the Giants started making their way downstairs for the on-field celebration, the stricken wives and family members of the Patriots passed them on their way back upstairs. (They had headed down after New England took the lead.) Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers had played at halftime; Tom Coughlin and the Heartbreakers were playing now. Coughlin and Belichick had engaged in some epic practice-field battles as Parcells assistants in the late 1980s, when Major Tom was coaching the Giants receivers and Captain Sominex, the Giants’ defensive coordinator, was lording over the defensive backs. Parcells recalled his two assistants being locked in mortal combat as their units went after each other in red-zone drills. “That’s where Tom and Bill got to know each other,” Parcells said.