by Ian O'Connor
When play resumed, Wilson handed the ball to Lynch, who rumbled over left tackle before getting tackled at the one-yard line. It was a huge four-yard gain, and yet the Patriot Way was in full force on the stop. Patrick Chung, safety, aggressively filled the hole and sacrificed his body while getting pancaked by 272-pound fullback Will Tukuafu. Dont’a Hightower, a linebacker playing with a torn right labrum in his right shoulder, did a remarkable job by shedding 307-pound tackle Russell Okung and diving his injured body into Lynch’s legs. Akeem Ayers, linebacker, got rid of his blocker (Luke Wilson) in just enough time to finish the tackle on Lynch with a minute to go.
Dressed in his PATRIOTS ESTABLISHED IN 1960 hoodie, Belichick stood there and thought about taking a timeout. Carroll, still looking as youthful as ever despite his snow-white hair, froze in anticipation of his opponent’s next move. It was a Wild West showdown between supposed good and supposed evil. Belichick was cast in the role of diabolical overlord of a secretive empire that operated outside league rules, while Carroll was everyone’s friendly next-door neighbor. Never mind that Carroll had left USC’s storied football program to confront severe NCAA sanctions, or that his Seahawks were twice punished by the NFL for practice violations, in 2012 and 2014. Pete was fun and bouncy and goofy, and it pained Kraft to have to fire him after the 1999 season.
But fire him Kraft did, in favor of the coach who was letting the clock run and run and run with Seattle 36 inches from another Super Bowl title. Belichick studied Carroll’s body language, studied the indecision of Seattle’s players and assistants. “I don’t know,” he said, “something just didn’t look right. They started on, and they started off, and now however many seconds had gone by, and I’m thinking, All right, I’m not going to take them off the hook here by taking a timeout. If they want to use it, let them use it.”
Meanwhile, Belichick’s defensive coordinator, Matt Patricia, asked his boss more than once if he wanted to take a timeout, and the head coach didn’t even look at him or answer him. “Yeah, I got it,” Belichick finally said into his headset. He was effectively applying a full-court press to Carroll, and he decided to win or lose with his goal-line defense.
On New England’s sideline, Matthew Slater, four-time special teams Pro Bowler, represented the conflicted mood of the players as Belichick let the clock run. “Tense. Tense,” Slater said. “I may have been voicing my protest. I didn’t know what was going on. I was just hoping we would do what we could to try to preserve time.”
A couple of Patriots coaches lifted their arms, put their clenched fists near their ears, and flexed their biceps before putting three fingers in the air to signal a heavy goal-line package with three cornerbacks, or Goal Line 3—the first time all year New England was using this personnel group. Butler had to get out there in Arrington’s place, and the Patriots’ safeties coach, Brian Flores, shouted, “Malcolm, go.” Butler had been distraught over Kearse’s acrobatic catch at his expense, and now he had a chance to do something about it.
During New England’s final practice, Butler had struggled with the pass play Seattle was expected to run. Armed with blue and red team binders at his desk, buried behind his hayfield of a mustache and his Coke-bottle glasses, Ernie Adams had worked on the play in an office with handwritten memos and yellow Post-it notes to himself thumbtacked to a nearby bulletin board. After considerable study of the Seahawks, Adams labeled his diagram “14 Raffle Utah” and decided that New England might have to defend it in a big situation. Seattle would stack two receivers to a side of the field—one on the line, to essentially set a pick on his defender, the other off the line and outside the up-front receiver’s shoulder and preparing to run a hard slant off the pick. Butler was having a rough time in practice covering the receiver running the slant, as the corner was chasing around the pick and compromising his ability to break up the pass.
The Patriots wanted Butler to jump the route and beat his man to the spot, in case Seattle lined up in that formation. And, sure enough, a rushed Carroll and offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell had Kearse and Lockette stacked on the right side, with Kearse on the line and Lockette off his right shoulder. Browner planted himself directly opposite Kearse, up close and personal, while Butler stood in the end zone, about a yard in front of the K in SEAHAWKS. Out of the shotgun, after receiver Doug Baldwin went in motion toward the left side, Wilson called for the snap with 26 seconds left. That meant Belichick had killed 34 seconds that could’ve been used by Brady on the following series.
That meant Belichick was going to get shredded by talk-show hosts and columnists if Seattle took a three-point lead and left too little time for New England to work its way into field-goal position. That meant Belichick was going to walk into his locker room inside University of Phoenix Stadium and blame himself as he had seven years earlier.
Carroll had been boxed in a bit by the wasted timeouts. Had two timeouts been available to him instead of one, he could have run Lynch twice, stopped the clock in the event both attempts failed, and then figured out whether to run or pass on fourth down. But even with one timeout, Carroll should have made the commonsense call. Football coaches can try to explain away almost anything with logic they think escapes the average fan or sportswriter, and, as it happened, Belichick would defend his opponent’s decision to throw the ball on second down. Coaches tend to rush to each other’s aid when under intense fire.
Lynch had made four consecutive Pro Bowl teams and had accounted for 1,306 rushing yards and 13 touchdowns in the regular season and for a combined 259 rushing yards and two touchdowns in the NFC Championship Game and the Super Bowl struggle he was one carry away from likely winning. Ricardo Lockette, the intended receiver on the play Carroll did choose? He’d managed 25 catches in his four-year career, postseason included.
Carroll called his number anyway. Across the field, with noise shaking the stadium at its core, Belichick was so calm and composed, it appeared he was gazing at a springtime sunset from his yard in Nantucket.
On the snap, Browner won the battle with Kearse by jamming him hard and rendering his pick useless. Lockette cut behind his teammate but didn’t exactly move with the urgency of a man about to be involved in Super Bowl history. On cue, Butler charged from the rear as Wilson took his quick drop, swung open his shoulders to the right, locked in on Lockette, and fired a pass designed to lead the receiver into the end zone. Butler exploded toward the ball, blew up Lockette on contact just before the goal line, and made a remarkable catch before falling forward to the two-yard line. An undrafted Division II player who had worked the window at a Popeyes after being kicked off his junior college team had just won the Super Bowl.
The Patriots broke into a dizzying celebration. Belichick raised his right hand to the sky in triumph. Near his bench, a helmetless Brady did a 360 as he hopped up and down and squealed like a teenager at a boy-band concert. Across the field, Richard Sherman looked as if he’d just seen a family friend run over by a car. Wilson lowered his head, clapped his hands as he walked toward the sideline, and asked his head coach what had just happened. “They undercut the route,” Carroll said. The Patriots had just undercut their former coach’s shot at a two-Pete.
Before the final 20 seconds expired, fists and flags were thrown, Seattle’s Michael Bennett jumped offside, and teammate Bruce Irvin was ejected. Collinsworth couldn’t stop ripping Carroll for his incomprehensible call. Finally, Brady took the knee that ended the madness. Belichick had already embraced his coordinators and absorbed two Gatorade baths by the time he found his quarterback for a hug.
Belichick had feelings of empathy for the gutted Carroll, who he thought did a terrific job getting his teams to play hard for a full 60 minutes. Bill had been where Pete was at this very moment, in this very building. He knew it was a dark and lonely place.
Yet this was a moment of extreme relief for the winning coach. Belichick’s championship drought had felt biblical to him, and now it was over. He’d seized his fourth Super Bowl championship, joining
Pittsburgh’s Chuck Noll as the only men to do it. He’d won without the sport’s best offensive line coach, Dante Scarnecchia, who had retired a year earlier, and for the first time he’d won with his older son, Stephen, a 27-year-old defensive assistant, as part of his staff.
One of Belichick’s childhood heroes, Joe Bellino, Navy’s Heisman-winning halfback in 1960, was touched by the scene of Bill with his son Stephen as he watched from his Massachusetts home; it reminded Bellino of little Bill and his father, Steve, side by side at Navy practices back in the day. The Patriots’ coach was thinking about his old man, too, and his 93-year-old mother, Jeannette, who was residing in an assisted living facility in Annapolis. Belichick’s previous Super Bowl victory had come nine months before Steve died, and as Bill started to address the media in his postgame news conference, he was wondering what his father thought of him now.
“I guess the last thing I’ll say before I open it up is, the last time I won and I got Gatoraded, my dad was here,” Belichick said as his voice cracked with emotion. “I was certainly thinking about him tonight, and I’m sure he was watching. I hope my mom is watching, too, so—Hi, Mom.”
On this memorable night in the Arizona desert, the head coach of the New England Patriots wasn’t identifying himself as a four-time Super Bowl champ. He was, above all else, the proud son of Steve and Jeannette Belichick, and that was plenty good enough.
18
The Comeback
The unbearable Deflategate saga lasted 544 days before Tom Brady announced on Facebook that he would not appeal his four-game suspension to the Supreme Court of the United States. Brady surrendered to the NFL on July 15, 2016, a Friday, the best day of the week for powerful corporations and rich and famous people to deliver bad news.
Only no summer getaway day could reduce the magnitude of this story. The most accomplished player in the league had just accepted Roger Goodell’s penalty for being “at least generally aware” that low-level Patriots staffers John Jastremski and Jim McNally deflated footballs used in the AFC Championship Game victory over the Colts, according to the findings of attorney and lead investigator Ted Wells.
The Wells Report was released on May 6, 2015, and was followed five days later by the NFL’s announcement that the Patriots would be fined $1 million, docked a first-round pick in 2016 and a fourth-rounder in 2017, and forced to play someone other than Tom Brady at quarterback for four games because the franchise player had engaged in “conduct detrimental to the integrity of, and public confidence in, the game of professional football.” The battle that followed, in and out of courtrooms, left no winners on either side and did significant harm to long-standing relationships throughout the league.
Brady originally had his suspension overturned in New York by U.S. District Court Judge Richard Berman, who rebuked Goodell for enforcing “his own brand of industrial justice” and won himself a lifetime offer of free coffee from a Dunkin’ Donuts in Maine in the process. After playing out the 2015 season, Brady saw his suspension reinstated by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, which reinforced Goodell’s broad disciplinary authority under the collective bargaining agreement. Brady’s appeal of that ruling was denied before the quarterback decided against dragging his four-ring circus into the Supreme Court.
In the end, the people who believed Brady was involved in Deflategate seized upon the circumstantial evidence in the case. McNally, the officials’ locker room attendant, popular among the refs for bringing them clam chowder (according to the league’s former VP of officiating, Mike Pereira), had identified himself as “the deflator” in a text to Jastremski, an equipment assistant, before the Patriots countered with an absurd explanation for that nickname. (The team said McNally was referring to his own attempt to lose weight.) McNally had said in another text to Jastremski that he was “not going to espn . . . yet.” He had taken the AFC Championship Game balls out of the officials’ locker room (without permission) and into a Gillette Stadium bathroom for 100 seconds before carrying them to the field. Brady, who had said in a 2011 radio interview that he preferred deflated footballs, disposed of a cell phone that was used during a period Wells deemed relevant to his investigation.
The people who believed Brady was innocent of any wrongdoing in Deflategate seized upon the scientific evidence in the case—namely, that experiments using the applied principles of the Ideal Gas Law proved that Mother Nature, not the Patriot Way, represented the force responsible for New England’s low PSI numbers. Those people also seized upon the Wells Report finding that the Patriots’ footballs had not been as underinflated as first reported by ESPN’s Chris Mortensen. Long regarded as one of sportswriting’s most reliable news breakers, Mortensen had spent more of his time focused on the number of balls cited by his league source (the correct number, 11) before tweeting the news, rather than on the level of inflation. (The source’s information of 2 PSI per ball was incorrect, though all 11 balls were under the minimum 12.5 PSI when measured on both of the referee’s pressure gauges.) And yet the erroneous part of that report—left uncorrected by the league—shaped a narrative that the Patriots were as guilty as they were in Spygate.
New England assailed the NFL’s claim that it had run an independent investigation, given that Jeff Pash, the league’s executive vice president, played a significant role in Wells’s inquiry and report. Robert Kraft was as angry at Pash as he was at anyone, and it seemed his days as “the assistant commissioner” and chief benefactor to Goodell were over. But eight days after the Deflategate penalties were disclosed, in May 2015, Kraft announced that he was reluctantly accepting the team’s sanctions, for the best interests of the league. It was a painful concession for the owner to make, as he loved to be loved and he knew this move would be a most unpopular one with the fans.
The Patriots cared deeply about their feelings; network partners would hear more complaints from Patriots officials that included the words “our fans are not happy about this” than they’d hear from any other franchise. New Englanders are protective of their own, and Tom Brady, son of San Mateo, California, had very much become one of their own. So the fans were not happy with Kraft when he seemingly abandoned Brady and his planned appeal, and the quarterback’s family and friends weren’t happy with the owner, either.
One person close to Brady said the entire family was “miffed” at Bill Belichick for dumping Deflategate on the quarterback’s shoulder pads three days after the story broke. “And we were very miffed with Kraft [in May],” the person said. “He hung Tom out there by saying he wasn’t going to fight it with the league. And then later he realized that was a mistake. It was about money, and he’s a billionaire. But over time we forgave him for that.”
Some NFL owners weren’t so quick to forgive Kraft for eventually pivoting away from his concession and resuming the fight, to the locals’ delight. The owners’ anger intensified over time as Kraft ignored the counsel of some associates to stand down for the good of the league and to remember that many believed that Goodell had gone easy on the Patriots in Spygate.
Kraft blistered Goodell’s decision, in July 2015, to keep Brady’s ban at four games—the owner had counted on a reduction after playing nice in May—and said that he was “wrong to put my faith in the league.” Kraft directly apologized to the team’s fans and declared that it was “completely incomprehensible to me that the league continues to take steps to disparage one of its all-time great players and a man for whom I have the utmost respect.” The New England owner ripped the NFL again—after Brady called off the legal fight—when he said his quarterback had been denied a fair and impartial process.
“I was really unhappy with Robert’s statement after the Deflategate case was settled,” said one high-ranking executive with a rival team. “He went too far questioning the integrity of people in the league office . . . Of course they deflated the footballs. They’re drinking the Kool-Aid [in New England], but there’s nobody outside of New England who believes they didn
’t do it. I think some people have been sent to the electric chair on less circumstantial evidence than there was in this case. You’re telling me that two equipment guys did this to the balls, with a Super Bowl trip on the line, without one of the greatest quarterbacks of all time being aware of it? . . . People say Roger wanted to go after the Patriots after Spygate. Do you really believe he wanted to do this? Why in the world would he want this?”
A September 2015 story by ESPN’s Don Van Natta Jr. and Seth Wickersham answered that question definitively, citing sources saying that Goodell’s relentless pursuit of Brady and the Patriots in Deflategate was effectively a “makeup call” for going soft on Kraft’s franchise in Spygate. The investigative piece included the shocking and comical scene of three league officials, including Pash, literally stomping to pieces New England’s Spygate videotapes in a stadium conference room and feeding Ernie Adams’s Spygate notes into a shredder. This was done under the watchful eye of the team’s counsel, Robyn Glaser, who picked shards of the smashed tapes off the floor and threw them in the trash. Van Natta and Wickersham also reported that Goodell had asked former St. Louis Rams coach Mike Martz, loser of the epic Super Bowl encounter with Belichick after the 2001 season, to state publicly that he’d accepted the league’s handling of Spygate in order to quiet Senator Arlen Specter’s calls for a reopened case. Martz said he’d always believed “something happened” in his career-altering loss to the Patriots. Years later, when shown a copy of his statement suggesting that nothing untoward happened, Martz said he was certain someone had taken it and “embellished quite a bit.”