Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  Belichick voted for the proposal after voting against it in the pre-Spygate days. “It didn’t pass last year and it did pass this year,” Dungy said. “So you can draw your own conclusions.”

  This story wasn’t about to go poof in the night. Goodell had met with Arlen Specter and told him that Belichick had been taping signals since 2000 (the commissioner had earlier suggested that the taping started in 2006) and that the Steelers had been illegally filmed in four games. The Herald report was still out there, and Matt Walsh was still out there, too. A low-level Patriots staffer from 1997 to 2003, Walsh had reinvented himself as a golf pro in Hawaii. He said he was willing to tell Goodell everything he knew about Spygate, but first he wanted protection. The commissioner had little choice but to give it to him. Had Goodell declined a meeting with someone who claimed to have fresh information about Spygate, his destruction of the Patriots’ tapes and notes would become even harder to defend.

  So Goodell reached an agreement that provided Walsh with indemnification against potential lawsuits and covered his legal fees and expenses as long as he turned over all tapes and other items relevant to the case. Walsh sent the league eight tapes of filmed signals from six games between 2000 and 2002, then met with Goodell for about three and a half hours on May 13. Walsh told the commissioner that he realized he was likely breaking NFL rules by videotaping signals and that after games he delivered the tapes directly to Ernie Adams. Walsh said that New England did not tape the St. Louis walk-through in February 2002 but that he witnessed it and did give coaching assistant Brian Daboll information on the Rams’ use of tight ends, and did tell Daboll that Marshall Faulk was lining up as a kick returner. Daboll told league investigators he couldn’t recall that conversation.

  Walsh then met with Specter, who wanted the NFL to run the kind of independent investigation that Major League Baseball had asked George Mitchell, former senator from Maine, to oversee on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in the game. Goodell would do everything in his power to make sure that didn’t happen. Walsh had given him no information that New England had bugged locker rooms or interfered with opponents’ communication systems. (He did claim that the Patriots used a player on injured reserve in practice in 2001, their first championship season.) The commissioner said that, after conducting dozens of interviews, he didn’t know where else to take the case. He even played Walsh’s tapes for reporters, who seemed underwhelmed by the filmed images of coaches giving signals that were visible to any fan with good seats or a pair of binoculars. Some clips, not shot by Walsh, showed up-close views of San Diego Chargers cheerleaders performing during a game.

  The next day, Belichick nailed down his biggest victory since the AFC Championship Game when the Herald ran front-page and back-page apologies to the Patriots in admitting that its story on the Super Bowl walk-through was false. SORRY, PATS, read the headline on the front page. OUR MISTAKE, read the one on the back. The triumphant feeling was short-lived. Walsh gave several interviews and described how he’d been instructed by superiors, including video director Jimmy Dee, on what to wear and what cover story to offer if questioned about his filming in another team’s stadium. New England videographers were told to wear generic clothing, to cloak team logos, and to explain to security that they were shooting footage for the owner’s media company, Kraft Productions. Walsh told HBO that the Patriots “went to great lengths to keep from being caught.” He told the New York Times that his first illegal taping assignment occurred in 2000, in a preseason game against Tampa Bay, and that one of the New England quarterbacks observed that “probably 75 percent of the time, Tampa Bay ran the defense we thought they were going to run. If not more.”

  Belichick had to respond to those claims. For the first time, someone involved in the filming scheme had gone on the record to say what much of the NFL already believed—that Belichick lied when he said he was unaware that he was doing anything against the rules. Belichick agreed to a TV interview with a CBS reporter he respected, Armen Keteyian, who asked tough questions without losing the coach’s trust. In the sit-down, Keteyian pressed the coach on the plausibility of his misinterpretation defense after the league had clearly spelled out the videotaping rule in writing.

  Belichick countered that Walsh had never been instructed to wear what amounted to a disguise. “We weren’t trying to be discreet about it,” he said. Belichick claimed that he didn’t think he could recognize Walsh, that the former staffer was “embellishing” his account of what had happened, and that Walsh had been fired for poor job performance and for secretly audiotaping a conversation with his boss, Scott Pioli. (Walsh’s lawyer told the Globe that claim was a “complete fabrication.”) Belichick reminded viewers that the signals were available to be seen by anyone who wanted to see them, and that the tapes were merely part of a “mosaic” of countless things Adams reviewed and considered in preparing for a game.

  In the end, Goodell eagerly shut down the possibility of further investigation and additional sanctions. Even Specter lost his stomach for the fight, revealing in June that he was done trying to kick-start a congressional investigation into Spygate. Belichick and the Patriots had to pay their fines and surrender their first-round draft choice, No. 31 overall, but the coach would be eligible to do his job on opening day. He had won something by avoiding a suspension, and yet he had lost so much in the court of public opinion. In 44 states, Belichick was now branded a cheater, and in many precincts he was considered a liar for swearing he was guilty of an unintentional error, nothing more.

  Football is a game of inches, not yards, and some suspected that Spygate advantages had allowed the Patriots to win three rings by a combined nine points. Yes, they did dominate in 2007, after the operation was shut down. No, they didn’t win the whole thing. New England didn’t have illegal film on the Giants from their regular-season game, and the Giants won the Super Bowl rematch by inches, not yards. Was cheating the difference between second place and first? Would the Patriots have won ring No. 4 if they’d stolen a few signs in Giants Stadium, in December, by way of a sideline camera?

  The Patriots knew that the only way to silence those questions was to actually win ring No. 4. And as Bill Belichick rebounded from a near-lethal strike on his reputation, he didn’t realize how forbidding a task that would prove to be.

  Bill Belichick always met with his quarterbacks twice a week. And for nearly seven full years and four Super Bowl runs, his lead quarterback in the meeting room was Tom Brady, who had made 127 consecutive regular-season and postseason starts. That streak died at 128, in the first quarter of the 2008 opener against Kansas City, when Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard came in low and hit the quarterback’s left leg, blowing out the ACL and MCL in his knee.

  That Belichick went 11-5 that year with Matt Cassel at quarterback, only to become the first 11-win coach to miss the playoffs since the 1990 expansion to a 12-team postseason, amounted to a cruel injustice. But if nothing else, Brady’s absence allowed Belichick room to reaffirm his greatness in a different way. His 11-5 record with Cassel (though Brady, the starter, was credited with the Kansas City victory) represented a necessary counterargument to those who pointed to his 5-13 record with Drew Bledsoe and his 36-44 record in Cleveland with Bernie Kosar, Vinny Testaverde, and friends as proof that Brady had made the coach, not the other way around. It also verified Belichick’s system of finding and developing talent on the field, on the coaching staff, and in the front office.

  His primary executive charged with identifying that talent, Pioli, left after the 2008 season to become general manager of the Chiefs. Out of loyalty to the man who raised him in the business, Pioli had rejected lucrative offers over the years from franchises that would have no Belichick for him to answer to. Like Josh McDaniels, the offensive coordinator who left to become head coach of the Denver Broncos, Pioli thought it was time to go out on his own. The system remained in place in Foxborough, with its founding father, just as it had when Thomas Dimitroff left his position as director
of college scouting a year earlier to become the GM in Atlanta.

  Belichick had moved people around his organization, most notably Nick Caserio, a coach and scout who was elevated to director of pro personnel and then director of player personnel. Caserio was typical of the young men Belichick often hired and groomed. He played small-college football at John Carroll, in Ohio, as did McDaniels, turning the Jesuit school into what would become a Triple-A farm team for New England coaches and staffers. McDaniels was the loser of a quarterback competition with Caserio, who was eventually hired as a personnel assistant by the Patriots, on McDaniels’s recommendation. A Division III backup at Wesleyan, Belichick seemed to be looking for future Belichicks in the same kinds of places.

  Eric Mangini had played at Wesleyan, Pioli had played Division II ball at Central Connecticut, and Dimitroff had played college ball in Canada, at the University of Guelph. Brian Daboll had played Division III football at the University of Rochester, and Matt Patricia did the same at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in upstate New York. Josh Boyer, a defensive assistant elevated to defensive backs coach in 2009, had played his Division III football at Ohio’s Muskingum University, and Monti Ossenfort, a rising scout in the organization, had been a Division III quarterback at the University of Minnesota–Morris.

  Those who play small-college football normally do so because they adore the game. They are often hardworking, resourceful athletes forever finding ways to overcome their physical shortcomings, and they are often hungry to prove something and willing to work overtime to do it. The profile jibes perfectly with the Belichick ethos.

  By hiring young applicants, and by generally avoiding retreads, Belichick didn’t have to worry about deprogramming staffers who had been developed in less successful systems. He could teach the Patriot Way to a twentysomething assistant, teach him how to evaluate talent and identify players who could thrive in New England—even if they weren’t likely to thrive for other teams. Belichick cared only about what a prospect could do, or couldn’t do, in his program. He wasn’t in the business of collecting talent, but of picking players who could form a highly functioning team. He despised groupthink, and he knew that lazy-minded, insecure scouts often shared opinions and information with peers in competing organizations in order to validate their evaluations and cover their asses.

  Pioli’s departure after the 2008 season left a significant front-office void and forced Belichick to rearrange his cabinet, installing Caserio as the franchise’s lead personnel voice. Belichick promoted Jon Robinson from assistant director of college scouting to the director’s chair and hired an old friend and colleague from his 1970s days in Detroit, Floyd Reese, who had built a Super Bowl team as GM of the 1999 Tennessee Titans, to help out with contracts as a senior football adviser. Belichick also rehired Jason Licht, who had left New England for Philadelphia after the 2002 season and later moved over to Arizona. Licht was proof that Belichick was willing to bring back into the organization people who had left him for other opportunities—he’d also rehire Daboll and McDaniels years later—as long as those people weren’t named Eric Mangini.

  In his nine years in New England, Pioli had been the most valuable Patriot outside of Belichick in shaping a championship roster, in acquiring players with strong character, and in allowing the head coach to do more delegating and big-picture, off-the-field managing of issues than he’d done in Cleveland. Pioli’s eye for talent—or, more specifically, talent that would work in Foxborough—was unquestioned. But as a leader, he was more like his father-in-law, Bill Parcells, than Belichick. Some of his subordinates found him too demanding, too Parcellsian in his approach and tone. Many Patriots scouts and junior personnel types thought that Pioli had a big heart, a genuine concern for their family issues, and an engaging personality away from the office, but that his second-floor work environment was a full-pads experience. No matter how his management style was viewed, it was clear that his expertise would be sorely missed.

  As he transitioned to the more even-tempered Caserio, Belichick was still surrounded by staffers who had made significant behind-the-scenes contributions to the culture that had landed New England in the Super Bowl four times in seven years. Belichick had always guarded his organization as if it were the Kremlin (some competing coaches actually referred to him as the Kremlin), and Spygate hadn’t exactly inspired a new era of glasnost. So these front-office and support people remained more faceless than a Belichick long snapper. NFL sources with direct knowledge of the key people in those roles offered up the following composite scouting reports:

  Nick Caserio, director of player personnel: “He’s a great example of being born and bred in the Belichick system. Bill meets someone and he tries to identify the intangibles, your character and work ethic, and Nick epitomizes the Patriot Way . . . If you slice Nick’s wrist, I don’t think blood would come out. You’d see wires . . . Nick is a machine. His work ethic is off the charts. He’s there at the crack of dawn, and he’s not leaving until maybe an hour before the crack of dawn . . . When people see how dialed in he is, they don’t see the human side. But when he gets you one-on-one, you see a good-hearted person.”

  Jason Licht, director of pro personnel: “Jason is the guy who says, ‘Hey, let’s get a beer after work.’ In New England, if you have time for a beer after work, you have time to really watch more tape. Jason’s a guy, in my opinion, that fights to find balance, because he’s seen too many guys crash and burn. They put all their eggs in that basket and the family takes a back seat, and once that job is gone, they have nothing . . . Jason Licht, you can drop him in a cave in Afghanistan and he’s going to talk to somebody. Jason has a lot more personality than Nick, who is very black-and-white. I’ll say this delicately, but Nick is like a lot of those lifers with Bill, where they almost become institutionalized, where, when they leave, they can’t operate in the wild.”

  Berj Najarian, director of football/head coach administration: “You know, that’s Bill’s right-hand man times a million. He’s got personality, Berj, but you always wonder what he’s thinking. I remember [Drew Bledsoe] on Secretaries Day sent Berj flowers and he was all pissed off. It was a joke . . . But you know his hands are in everything. He works a lot closer with coaches than the scouts. That’s a guy people try to keep at arm’s distance, because you get the sense that whatever we’re talking about is being brought back and analyzed. So because of that, you’re going to weigh every word. Guys are not really themselves around Berj . . . Berj worked his butt off to soften Bill’s edges. He did a lot of sit-downs, a lot of people stuff that Bill would never do before, to help Bill. Berj is one of the unknowns, but he’s done an incredible job of helping Bill with the media.”

  Jon Robinson, director of college scouting: “Bright. That man has earned it every step of the way. Treats people right . . . He had a rule for scouts, that they weren’t allowed to be on the road any more than 12 days if you had a family, and if you had kids, you had to be home for their birthdays and for Halloween. And that was nonnegotiable. There are guys you work for because it’s the job, and other guys you want to work for. He’s one of those guys you want to work for.”

  Monti Ossenfort, national scout: “He’s very similar to Jon Robinson. He has personality, and he’s a guy people are loyal to. Monti was in New England, went to Houston, and then came back, so he’s another guy Bill was willing to bring back to the organization . . . He’s the next star coming. He’s going to be a GM . . . He’s a scout’s scout . . . Great credibility.”

  Bob Quinn, assistant director of pro personnel: “Has a plan. A philosophical conviction on how to build a team. Smart, and has an air of confidence about him that doesn’t manifest itself as arrogance . . . The one knock on him is you had to watch what you said around him. He’s the guy who’s going to run and tell the teacher.”

  Floyd Reese, senior football adviser: “Floyd’s the best storyteller . . . A lot of young scouts think the more intricacies they can give in a report, and the more buzzwords and
polish, made them come across as more intelligent and diligent. And Floyd is like ‘Can he catch the ball or not? Can he run or not? Can he tackle or not?’ . . . He was as old school and simplistic as you can imagine, but he had a tremendous way to take a whole lot of information, put it through a filter, and come up with one or two words and solve it.”

  Nancy Meier, director of scouting administration since 1975: “Love her. She’s been through it all. What she means to that personnel department, you can’t put a monetary value on it. She’s the one common denominator in that department . . . She handles expenses, takes care of flights. ‘I’m stuck in Omaha and I’ve got to get to San Francisco.’ Boom, there it is. She minimizes stress for scouts.”

  Frantzy Jourdain, area scout: “Never a guy to go out there tooting his own horn . . . Frantzy was another one a lot like Floyd Reese. He’s not going to come across great in his reports, but if you sit down and talk with him, you know he knows what he’s talking about . . . Exceptional at getting background information about these guys in the SEC. Who’s getting money from this one, who had this problem, who smoked weed and got pinched for it three times—he’s that guy.”

  Brian Smith, assistant director of college scouting: “He’s another guy who has a work ethic you can’t even put on the chart . . . A consummate foot soldier. He’s been institutionalized. He’s a guy who will make sure he’s the last one leaving the office, for fear of reprisal . . . He’s as good a person as you’ll ever be around. He’s seen it all. He was an operations assistant before he got into scouting. He’d run around and make sure the food was right, and he talked about having to take Bill’s car to get an oil change and you’d get in his car, open it up, and all kinds of wrappers and cups and water bottles came flying out.”