Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  Belichick used his second-round pick in the draft on University of Arizona tight end Rob Gronkowski, who had missed his junior season in 2009 because of back surgery. Though Gronkowski was 6´6˝ and ran like a much smaller man, his back injury made him a gamble. Just not the kind of gamble that Hernandez was two rounds later. Despite the Florida star’s considerable issues, the Patriots didn’t think he’d still be on the board in the fourth round.

  “I’m glad he was,” Belichick said.

  Meyer had delivered his friend perhaps his biggest draft bust in New England, Florida wide receiver Chad Jackson, the 36th overall pick in 2006, who caught only 13 passes as a rookie before a serious knee injury suffered in the AFC Championship Game derailed his career. And yet Meyer all but handpicked New England’s 2010 draft, as Belichick selected Florida linebackers Jermaine Cunningham and Brandon Spikes in the second round (with Gronkowski), providing a measure of familiarity for Hernandez.

  Floyd Reese was working contracts for Belichick, and he included some conduct clauses in Hernandez’s deal that protected the team. Reese said that the Patriots were well aware of all of Hernandez’s problems in Gainesville and that they had constructed a rookie deal in a way that would “make him understand he was going to get every cent that he was due at the draft slot . . . but that he was going to have to earn it. It was not going to come all at once just because you were picked in the fourth round . . . He had to stay on the straight and narrow. In the contract, he was going to be penalized for issues with drugs or being late or any of the things you look for.”

  Hernandez suited up as the youngest player in the NFL. In his first minicamp as a New England Patriot, winded after some reps, Hernandez jogged over to the sideline and approached the team’s head trainer, Jim Whalen, with his mouth open. “I want water,” the tight end said. Whalen grabbed the water bottle, threw it at Hernandez, and said, “This isn’t fucking Florida. Do it yourself.” Hernandez picked up the bottle, drank from it, then laughed as he threw it back down and walked away. The Patriot Way was about to be tested to the max.

  If Bill Belichick was a talent evaluator without peer, he still had a couple of holes in his game. He had a hard time drafting the right defensive backs and wide receivers. Belichick also made underwhelming first-round choices at tight end in Daniel Graham (2002) and Benjamin Watson (2004), though he did prove himself at that position in the selections of Rob Gronkowski and Aaron Hernandez.

  Off the alarming 10-6, one-and-done season in 2009, Belichick transformed his offense by shipping out the most lethal skill-position player he’d coached, Randy Moss, four games into the 2010 season. The receiver had reverted back to pre-Foxborough form by campaigning for a new contract and saying he felt unwanted. He also refused to engage fans in the team’s annual charity Kickoff Gala, an event close to Robert Kraft’s heart. Moss reportedly had a halftime confrontation with Bill O’Brien in the middle of a game at Miami and reportedly had a locker room argument with Brady over, of all things, the receiver’s beard and the quarterback’s long hair. The Herald said Moss had asked for a trade.

  Belichick might have tried to work things out with a 27-year-old Moss, but not with a 33-year-old Moss, and especially not with a 33-year-old Moss who had put up marginal numbers in the postseason. Belichick dealt him back to his original team, Minnesota, and then went to work on reacquiring Deion Branch from Seattle to give Brady a fighting chance. But the coach’s vision for this team clearly revolved around his explosive playmakers at tight end, Gronkowski and Hernandez, who returned the Patriots to legitimate championship contention.

  Over the 2010 and 2011 regular seasons, Gronkowski and Hernandez combined for 256 receptions and 40 touchdown catches (27 by Gronkowski) as New England went 27-5. The Patriots suffered a crushing home playoff loss to Rex Ryan’s Jets in between; the Jets sacked Brady five times and intercepted him once. Yet, according to a Patriots source, Belichick thought that over time the use of a “12 personnel” offense, or a two-tight-end set, would compromise some of the Ryan pressure packages that were giving New England problems.

  “The transition from three wide receivers to a double tight end . . . came in response to Rex’s overload pressure on one side,” the source said. “With two tight ends, it makes it very difficult to do that. Or you could play 21 personnel and put Hernandez in the backfield; that versatility would get the Jets trapped in their base defense, and some of their exotic packages were then minimized to some degree. If you put 12 personnel on the field, you’re leaving your base defense on . . . It’s not like Bill sat down and said, ‘We’ve got to get back at the Jets,’ but he realized the Jets had schematic things that gave us problems, and that other people were going to duplicate it. Until we got hold of it, it wasn’t going away. Once we got to more of a 12 personnel team with Gronk and Hernandez, those issues with the Jets went away.”

  The Jets had split with the Patriots in 2008 and 2009 and had taken two of three in 2010, including the divisional-round victory over the top seeds at Gillette Stadium that left Belichick and Brady feeling almost as gutted as they were after the Super Bowl loss to the Giants. But New England swept the Jets in 2011, outscoring them 67–37 in the process, and then swept them again the following year. It appeared that Belichick’s roll of the dice with Hernandez had paid off. The combined numbers of Hernandez and Gronkowski in the 2011 season (169 catches, 2,237 yards) obliterated the previous NFL highs for a tight-end tandem. A personnel man who had worked with Belichick in a different organization said that Hernandez had “revolutionized” the Patriots’ offense. “They had the no-huddle concept that destroyed everybody,” he said. “You could never line up in the right defense.”

  With tattoos snaking up and down his exposed arms, Hernandez was quite a sight as he zigged and zagged across the field. One AFC general manager who had removed the Florida tight end from his draft board over character concerns was suddenly kicking himself for not picking him. “We were like ‘Wow, I guess we blew that one,’” the GM said. “All those concerns were for naught.” Hernandez scored a touchdown and gained 61 rushing yards, including a 43-yard run that set up the opening touchdown, in a 45–10 playoff rout of Denver, then had seven catches in the 23–20 AFC Championship Game victory over Baltimore.

  “Every time we had him do something,” Reese recalled of Hernandez, “it was shocking how well he did it. Near the end of his career, we were playing him as a running back, and we would turn around and give him the ball and it was shocking how well he ran it. He could do anything you wanted him to do.”

  Without Moss’s length and acrobatics at his disposal, Belichick had found a different way to torment opposing defensive coordinators. The Patriots gained 6,848 yards in 2011, second most in the league, and they scored 513 points, third most in the league. They were returning to the Super Bowl for the first time in four years with a remodeled offense, and Belichick was ready to deploy it against the one football coach on the planet who seemed to have his number.

  Tom Coughlin was never intimidated by Bill Belichick, and that was half the battle. The aura of Belichick and the power of his hundred-yard stare seemed to compel stressed-out opponents to do things they didn’t ordinarily do. Coughlin knew better. He had known Belichick as an equal when the two went head to head in Giants practices under Bill Parcells’s watch.

  Side by side, they watched as Belichick’s defensive backs tried to cover Coughlin’s receivers. Belichick would ask his staffmate what he thought was the most challenging part of the secondary’s coverage, and in turn Coughlin would ask his staffmate what he thought was the hardest part of defending the wideouts. Belichick said he worked more with Coughlin than he did with any other offensive assistant. They were forever trying to make each other better for the good of the team, and they were forever succeeding in that pursuit.

  Belichick called Coughlin a good friend and a disciplined, hard-nosed coach whose teams reflected his approach. “I would say that, as an assistant coach,” Belichick said, “it was the b
est relationship that I have ever had with another counterpart in that way.” Coughlin returned the compliment in public settings when the two were about to face off. “I’ve got nothing but respect for Bill Belichick as a coach,” he said. Coughlin added that he liked working with Belichick “because he was always about football, what he could do to make his players better,” and spoke highly of Belichick’s emphasis on toughness and preparation.

  “We became good friends,” Coughlin said. “We shared a lot of thoughts together.”

  So as these two fiercely determined men prepared to meet in Super Bowl XLVI, in Indianapolis, four years after their epic confrontation in Arizona, the storyline was set. Belichick and Coughlin, good friends and colleagues dating back to their Parcells days, were ready to compete for another championship before returning to their respective corners inside their mutual admiration society. Except that multiple people who had worked every day with Coughlin for years made some behind-the-scenes edits to that script. They maintained that, as much as Coughlin respected Belichick’s football IQ and work ethic and had enjoyed matching wits with him in bygone Giants practices, he didn’t have much use for Belichick the person. Tom didn’t hate Bill; that was too strong a word. He just didn’t particularly like him.

  Coughlin had beaten Belichick in four of their five meetings as head coaches, including two when Tom was in Jacksonville and Bill was in Cleveland. In their most recent meeting, in November, Coughlin’s Giants had ended Belichick’s 20-game home winning streak and Brady’s league-record 31-game home winning streak on Eli Manning’s one-yard scoring pass to Jake Ballard with 15 seconds to go. Coughlin was hoisted in the air by Brandon Jacobs in the jubilant visitors’ locker room. After surviving a four-game losing streak and more calls for his head, the Giants’ coach had gotten hot at the right time. He’d turned a 7-7 record into a Super Bowl rematch with Belichick by beating the 15-1 defending-champion Packers in Green Bay and the 13-3 49ers in overtime in San Francisco. The Patriots had won ten consecutive games after their regular-season loss to the Giants, and they were about as tired of losing to this franchise as the old-guard Pats were of Belichick talking up Harry Carson, Carl Banks, and LT.

  Even though Rob Gronkowski was severely limited by a high ankle sprain suffered in the AFC title game, Belichick had appeared relaxed during the week, advancing his trend of trotting out a kinder, gentler version of himself for the Super Bowl. He joked that he’d received a warm welcome from Indianapolis residents who appreciated his fourth-and-two gamble gone wrong against the Colts in the 2009 regular season, and was loose enough around the players that Wes Welker wondered if the change had been brought on by “a lady in his life.” In fact, for about five years, Belichick had been dating the stunning Linda Holliday, a correspondent for the StyleBoston TV show and a thrice-divorced mother of twin girls. Holliday seemed to be doing a fairly good job on the human relations front. “Linda’s fantastic for him,” said Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers, a Belichick friend who had spent some time in the couple’s company. “Just a good person and fiery and funny and light, and I love watching games with her.”

  Rivers and Belichick had addressed each other’s teams on occasion, and Rivers was impressed when he found Brady sitting in the front row with a notebook, as if he were a fifth grader eager to please the substitute teacher. Known as one of the more user-friendly coaches in professional sports, Rivers told anyone who would listen that Belichick was at heart a fun and agreeable personality. “I think Bill has that with the people he wants to have it with,” Rivers said. “I think Bill’s as engaging as anybody I know. I tell people all the time that he has a great personality and he’s extremely funny. But Bill knows he’s comfortable using it with people he trusts, his friends. The Bill Belichick you see in front of the media is the Bill Belichick doing his job. The Bill you see in other places is the Bill being a loving guy with friends and family.”

  The media tested Belichick at least once in Indianapolis. He fielded a Spygate question at the Super Bowl for the first time in a while, and it was a perfectly legitimate one. The Patriots hadn’t won it all since they were caught breaking the rules, and that was becoming a thing. “We moved on from everything in the past,” Belichick said in batting away the question. “We are focused on this game. That’s it.”

  Coughlin was also busy validating the notion that he was no longer the oppressive ruler from the bad old days of 2004–2006, before he established a leadership council of veterans to connect with the locker room and before he actually interviewed local football writers on how he could improve his own tense relationship with the press. Given his head-to-head record against Belichick, and his team’s belief that it could always find a way to beat New England, Coughlin had reason to feel good.

  “I just think Tom and our coaching staff had their staff’s number,” said Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes, who had won the NFC Championship Game (against San Francisco) on an overtime field goal for the second time. “I think, as a player, and I’m not an X-and-O guy, but I think those guys believed because Tom had beaten Belichick and had a proven track record. So when Tom was presenting his plan for the Patriots, you’ve got 53 guys believing, and now it’s going to be hard to beat them.”

  Then again, Bill Belichick had two weeks to prepare for the Giants. He was the best coach in football, and people up and down the Giants organization still couldn’t believe what he had pulled off in 2007, going 18-0 with an offensive line they thought was mediocre at best. That line couldn’t protect Brady against Coughlin’s pass rush in Super Bowl XLII, inspiring one Giants executive to say, “It’s the only time I’ve ever seen Brady get rattled. This fucking guy is fearless; he never flinches. That was the first time I’ve ever seen him imagine pressure that wasn’t there.”

  Four years later, the Giants thought they had made Brady flinch again in their Week 9 victory at Gillette Stadium. “He was reacting to pressure that didn’t exist,” said second-year pass rusher Jason Pierre-Paul, who had 16.5 sacks in 2011, “and he was just throwing the ball places that there wasn’t a receiver there. So imagine us just getting there even faster and we’re actually doing our jobs and getting there and getting hits on him.”

  The Patriots’ challenge was clear. They had to solve a defense that knew how to rattle the quarterback, and a leader, Coughlin, who had no love for, or fear of, the highly decorated coach on the other side of the field.

  Tom Brady had the lead, the ball, and an open Wes Welker in Giants territory with a little more than four minutes to play and the trailing team in possession of only one timeout. Brady let go of a pass down the left side of the field, and suddenly New England’s fourth title seemed as certain as it had when that Eli Manning pass was heading Asante Samuel’s way in Super Bowl XLII.

  Welker had even better hands than Samuel, and, while Belichick had staged his two-tight-end clinic all year, the receiver reminded everyone that his coach had revolutionized the slot position, too. Fully recovered from the knee injury he’d suffered two years earlier, Welker had career highs of 1,569 yards (on 122 catches) and nine touchdowns during the regular season. He’d also caught all seven passes Brady threw his way inside Lucas Oil Stadium and had run the ball twice for 21 yards. Welker was positioned near the Giants’ 22 as the lofted pass came in for a landing with about 111 million Americans watching.

  The Patriots were going to win No. 4 with Gronkowski making two catches on one leg, and with unwanted players all over the field. Welker was undrafted. New England’s two featured running backs, BenJarvus Green-Ellis and Danny Woodhead, were undrafted, and the all-time great quarterback sharing their backfield was picked 199th. The starting center, Dan Connolly, was undrafted. On the starting defensive line, Kyle Love was undrafted, and Brandon Deaderick was a seventh-round pick. Among the starting linebacker group, Tracy White was undrafted and Rob Ninkovich was a fifth-round pick who had been cut by two other teams. In the starting secondary, Kyle Arrington was undrafted out of Hofstra and cut by two other teams, and Jam
es Ihedigbo was undrafted out of UMass and let go by the Jets.

  Belichick always believed that his players determined the depth chart, not the coaches or the scouts. “One thing we tell all of the players at the beginning of the year . . . is if you look at our track record and history, it’s true that I tell the team that I don’t care how you got here,” he said. “It’s what you do when you get here. It doesn’t matter if you were drafted in the second round, the fifth round, or not drafted at all. Ten years in the league, one year in the league, we are going to play the best players. Whoever that is is decided by you.”

  Mangini, Crennel, McDaniels, and Weis had all left New England for head coaching jobs in the NFL and major-college ranks (Weis), and they’d all failed. Some of them might’ve tried to act like Belichick, but in the end, they weren’t Belichick. They couldn’t bring Tom Brady with them, and they couldn’t replicate the Patriots’ equal-opportunity system.

  That system was a split second away from being rewarded on the biggest stage one more time. But something very unfunny happened on the way to the championship ceremony stage. Brady had actually put his pass a little behind the 5´9˝ Welker, and a tad high, and when the receiver rotated his body and extended his arms, his expert hand-eye coordination suddenly failed him. The ball bounced off his fingers as he started to fall down. Welker ended up on his knees at the 19-yard line, his helmet planted in the turf and both gloved hands planted on his helmet, with four minutes left on the clock.

  On New England’s bench, the defensive linemen reacted like fans, grabbing their own heads in disbelief. The referee, John Parry, told one of his fellow officials, “Well, that was the game.” One incomplete pass later, the Patriots were punting the ball to the quarterback who had broken their 18-0 hearts in Arizona.