by Ian O'Connor
“Bill has done me a huge professional favor [by writing the book foreword], and I’m very grateful to him. But I’m going to tell the physics like it is. And when you factor in the timeline, the best evidence is that somebody cheated.”
The 2015 season started heading south in an overtime loss to the hated New York Jets at MetLife Stadium two days after Christmas, and six weeks after a giddy victory over the New York Giants in the same building, on Stephen Gostkowski’s 54-yard field goal with one second left. Belichick had made a bizarre decision to give the Jets the ball after winning the overtime coin toss, and the home team needed only five plays to score and, ultimately, cost New England home-field advantage in an AFC Championship Game it would lose to Peyton Manning and the Broncos.
On the verge of retirement, Manning hugged Belichick on the field afterward and told him, “Hey, listen, this might be my last rodeo, so it sure has been a pleasure.” Belichick responded by pulling Manning close and telling him, “You’re a great competitor. You’re a hell of a player.” Denver would beat the Carolina Panthers in the Super Bowl, and Manning would finish his career with two championship rings, a record five MVP awards, and three consecutive conference-title-game victories over Brady, who was 11-6 overall in the head-to-head.
Belichick called the loss in Denver a “crash landing” after Brady absorbed 20 hits (the most on any NFL quarterback all year) and four sacks, and after Gostkowski missed his first extra-point kick in nine years and 524 attempts. The Patriots were manhandled, and yet, in a testament to their resourcefulness, they somehow had a chance to tie Denver in the final seconds on a two-point conversion pass that failed. Belichick responded by firing his offensive line coach, Dave DeGuglielmo, just as he’d fired his punt returner, Chris Harper, after his November fumble in Denver prevented New England from improving its record to 11-0.
Failure was not an option in Foxborough. Belichick cleaned up another problem in March when he traded Pro Bowl defensive end Chandler Jones, a 2012 first-round pick, to Arizona for guard Jonathan Cooper and a second-round pick in the 2016 draft. Jones had effectively traded himself in the middle of the playoffs when he stumbled into the Foxborough police station’s parking lot, shirtless and disoriented, after suffering from an adverse reaction to synthetic marijuana; he dropped to his knees and put his hands behind his head, though not on police orders. Jones was hospitalized, released, and back at work the next morning, but he was shipped out as soon as his coach could get some value for him.
Belichick sent that second-round pick to New Orleans for third- and fourth-rounders used to take two potential starters in guard Joe Thuney and receiver Malcolm Mitchell, adding to his long history of trading down in the draft. He’d done a fair amount of trading up, too, and, like every other strong evaluator, he had his share of draft-day misses. But Belichick didn’t just repeat the cliché that the draft is a crapshoot; he devised a strategy around that truth. Trading down allowed Belichick to add picks, and the more picks a team had, the better its chances of finding a productive player in that class. And the later a rookie was selected in the draft, the less the Patriots had to pay that rookie at the expense of veterans who had earned their keep.
As he entered the 2016 season, his 17th in New England, the 64-year-old Belichick had everything about his program completely under control. He regularly took scrap-heap players from other franchises and made them significant contributors to the league’s best team. Belichick was proficient at acquiring bargain contracts, at working the restricted free-agent market, and at identifying moderately talented players whose intelligence made them more valuable than their more skilled contemporaries.
Patriots who wanted to stick around needed to subjugate their egos; Belichick was not about to suffer any fools. “At this point in my career,” he would later tell his old friend Urban Meyer at Ohio State, “I want to coach guys I like. I want to coach guys I want to be around, and that’s it, and I’m not going to coach anybody else.”
He’d earned the right. It said so on the side of his Nantucket fishing boat, which once carried the name V Rings (counting the two he won as a Giants coordinator) before the Super Bowl victory over Seattle mandated a fresh paint job and a new name: VI Rings. Belichick was living large in his Nantucket and Hingham, Massachusetts, homes, and in his Foxborough fiefdom. He often showed up for work in jeans and wrinkled sweatshirts, and he did it his way. Over the years, if he felt like calling up a friendly AFC coach one day and telling him to cut his kicker for missing a crucial field goal attempt, he called him. If he felt like ripping the Eagles one day for firing Chip Kelly after three seasons, he ripped away. If he felt like cutting Tim Tebow one day, shortly after asking him to decline a $1 million endorsement gig that required 24 hours of work (for the sake of fitting into the team, of course), he sure as hell cut Tebow.
Belichick had established his authority the hard way. His assistants couldn’t complain on Thursday night that they hadn’t seen their wives and kids for more than 20 minutes since the previous Sunday night, because he was working more hours than all of them. Sometimes when Belichick headed home a tad early, one staffer said, he would “bring a backpack so big you could fit six bowling balls in it, and it was stacked with offensive and defensive playbooks.”
He never stopped, even after winning a Super Bowl in heart-stopping fashion. In the weeks after beating the Seahawks on Malcolm Butler’s goal-line interception, Belichick visited University of Indiana basketball coach Tom Crean before the draft combine to exchange ideas and watch some Indiana football film with his Patriots coaching assistant and former Cleveland personnel director, Mike Lombardi. Belichick told Crean’s basketball players that the Butler play had initially been installed in a May minicamp, and that January and February games are sometimes won the previous spring. As if to prove his point, Belichick broke out his cell phone and started taking photos of the motivational signs and pictures Crean had on his facility walls—in case one or two would work in Foxborough. He’d just won his fourth Super Bowl title, and he was trying to get 1 or 2 percent better in a college basketball gym.
That was classic Belichick. So were his conversations with fellow Wesleyan alum Thomas Kail, the Broadway director of Hamilton, about the similarities between teamwork on the stage and on the field. Friends and enemies alike were blown away by Belichick’s willingness to learn and improve despite his absurd success rate. One of his old full-time rivals and part-time critics, Bill Polian, came to fully appreciate Belichick’s greatness after leaving the Indianapolis Colts and joining ESPN as an analyst. He had never had a true conversation with Belichick (“The rivalry dies hard,” Polian said), and past controversies had done nothing to soften the edges of Patriots–Colts (“Spygate put a lot of gasoline on the fire,” Polian said), but the former executive was amazed by what Belichick had willed into existence.
“The way he put it all together, managed the game, created a game plan, and the way they adjust and tie all facets together—they’re in a league of their own in that regard,” Polian said. “And that’s all him. The coaching staff does exactly what he wants, and it works so well in terms of both strategy and tactics that it’s really amazing. I hate the term ‘cutting edge,’ because it isn’t; it’s really sound football and taking it to an organizational and strategic and tactical level that we haven’t seen in the NFL.
“What’s interesting about it,” Polian went on, “is he’s adapted to the rules and the players. Bill Parcells, for whom I have great respect, is a power football guy. And Bill Belichick and the Patriots are anything but that, and that’s because of a combination of the rules and the ability to have Brady and all these other players around him . . . If I had a Hall of Fame vote—and I don’t, and Spygate is a part of his history you can’t write without it, but it wouldn’t change my vote one iota—I think Bill Belichick is a first-ballot Hall of Famer, and that’s how I would vote. I think his record speaks for itself.”
Belichick started running things on his own terms and on
his own time after winning his first title. In those early years, he had a job candidate in to interview for a position on staff. The man sat outside the coach’s office and waited and waited and waited, and Berj Najarian popped in on occasion to apologize for the delay and to explain that Belichick had gotten tied up with work. The candidate went to visit another employee he knew in the building, and on the way he passed Belichick, working out on an exercise machine. Finally the coach saw his guest at around 3:30 p.m., some seven hours after the scheduled interview time. The candidate realized he’d been tested by a potential employer who wanted to see just how badly he wanted the job. He left the team facility thinking he’d had a good two-hour showing; Belichick thanked him and assured him he’d be brought back in for a second interview. The candidate never heard another word from the Patriots. It wasn’t the last time someone booked for an appointment with the head coach was put through that kind of experience.
Belichick was successful enough and powerful enough to treat people as he saw fit. At the league meetings in the spring of 2016, Jeff Howe of the Herald tweeted out the scene of Roger Goodell giving a speech to owners and head coaches in a banquet room while Belichick was walking down the hallway in the opposite direction. The Patriots’ coach had no use for league executives, league functions, league logos, league anything, after the Spygate and Deflategate cases. Belichick was the only head coach whose name and likeness didn’t appear on EA Sports’ Madden NFL video game—according to Yahoo!’s Dan Wetzel, he’d declined to join the NFL Coaches Association, thereby declining to cash in on its deal with Madden. Belichick had also mocked the league’s policy on injury updates by listing Brady as “probable” for years, for a shoulder injury that didn’t actually exist.
Mike Pereira, the Fox analyst and former game official who had become the NFL’s vice president of officiating, used to have semi-regular and always professional phone conversations with Belichick about rules, until the coach stopped calling after Spygate. The confiscated tapes were played on Pereira’s machine at league headquarters, but he had no meaningful role in the case. His apparent offense, in Belichick’s eyes, was that he worked for the NFL.
The news media could feel the deep freeze, too. Belichick did have his charming moments in pressers, and he did show respect to most network announcers in pregame production meetings (though he often rolled his eyes over the heavily detailed questions asked by one particular network reporter). One radio reporter and columnist who covered Belichick in his Cleveland days, and again in New England, Mike Petraglia, said the coach was more helpful and showed much more personality in media settings with the Patriots than he had in those settings with the Browns.
“But if you said A and you did B,” said another reporter who knew Belichick, “you were excommunicated from the church of Bill Belichick.” Those production sessions with network partners in New England could be tense, as nobody knew which Belichick was coming through the door on a weekly basis.
“There’s a sense of trepidation as you’re waiting for him to walk in,” said one veteran of these meetings. “You don’t know what kind of mood he’s in. Dick Vermeil might give you a bottle of wine, Jim Fassel will bullshit with you, and Mike Shanahan was great in those meetings, but Bill was different. It was like trying to pick a lock. You’re not quite sure what the combination is. If you ask the wrong thing, you could get that sideways look from Bill that said, ‘What the fuck was that question?’”
In every way, Belichick had won the media war that many coaches fight and lose badly. His star tight end, Rob Gronkowski, was injured in a joint August practice with the Chicago Bears, and Belichick’s next media availability was the following morning. In that press conference, not one question was asked about the injury or the status of an irreplaceable player who could end up in the Hall of Fame. Reporters knew the coach would give them nothing on it, so they didn’t bother. Nor would there be much point in asking Gronkowski’s teammates for an update, as Belichick was forever schooling his players on the messages he wanted them to deliver—or, more important, not deliver—to the news media.
On the practice field, while twirling his whistle, Belichick had the same hold over his players. One Patriots veteran who had played for an NFC North team on which his teammates openly laughed at a head coach trying to assume a tough-guy stance shuddered when imagining what would happen to players who laughed at New England’s head coach.
“There’s not many more intimidating figures in sports than Coach Belichick,” Gostkowski said. The kicker had done a hell of a job for his boss, replacing perhaps the greatest kicker of all time, Adam Vinatieri. And yet Gostkowski had long felt every ounce of the pressure Belichick puts on his players in the leadup to Sundays. In his first couple of days on the team as a rookie, in 2006, Belichick set the tone for Vinatieri’s successor by pointing to a picture of a Patriots player on the wall and asking him to identify the man. Gostkowski had no idea who it was, and Belichick lit into him and told him the player’s name was Don Davis, and that he might want to get to know Davis, since he’d be covering his kickoffs.
“Personally,” Gostkowski said, “I get more nervous kicking in front of Coach Belichick in practice than I do in front of fans in the game.”
As intimidating as his glare and presence can be, Belichick never believed in governing with volume. “He’s going to make it tough,” said safety Devin McCourty, “but he’s not going to degrade you. He’s not going to disrespect you.” The players appreciate that approach as much as they appreciate Belichick’s consistency. He’s virtually the same person every practice, whether it’s an August training-camp session or a late January day in preparation for the AFC title game. That the Patriots know what they’re going to get from him, McCourty said, “helps players know exactly how they need to perform.”
Belichick would keep it fairly simple when breaking down opponents, giving his players a few things they needed to do to win and a few they needed to avoid so they wouldn’t lose. Even though players sometimes arrived at the team facility on Wednesday morning—after an off day on Tuesday—to find a game plan that didn’t resemble anything in their playbooks, Belichick didn’t believe in overwhelming his team with information. He normally quizzed his players on Wednesdays on the upcoming opponents’ tendencies and strengths and backstories, and followed the full-team meeting with unit and positional meetings before running an afternoon practice that focused on first- and second-down plays. (Third down is generally handled on Thursdays.) Players watched tape of practice afterward, and Belichick started dialing back his demands on Friday. But he never stopped coaching situational football, which the Patriots practice, preach, and master unlike any other team.
Through 2008, Belichick kept an aging three-time Pro Bowler, Larry Izzo, productive on kick returns by allowing him to chip-block early in coverage to hide his diminishing speed. In 2010, Belichick explained to the rookie McCourty how the Gillette Stadium wind dragged a fade-pattern pass back to the inside on a certain corner of the field. Sure enough, in New England’s next home game, McCourty found himself defending that very pattern Belichick had talked about. “I had an interception where the ball was sailing that way and it just kind of stopped,” McCourty said. Just as his head coach had predicted.
As much as he insisted that pro football was a players’ game, Belichick had established himself as the NFL’s MVP—most valuable person. On a certain level, it was funny that Belichick had ascended to such heights in a game dominated by big, powerful, and remarkably swift men. He had been a mediocre high school football player and a lousy Division III college player. In the words of one longtime NFL evaluator who had watched Belichick work out prospects, he was “maybe the worst fucking athlete I’ve ever seen. The players used to laugh at him . . . He would move along and show the players drills, shuffling laterally, and he was just a terrible athlete. I remember one big offensive lineman saying, ‘Did this guy play anywhere?’”
Belichick could joke about his own lack of athleticism
, in part because his historic career amounted to such a decisive victory of brains over brawn. He wasn’t going to have Tom Brady for the first four games of 2016, which was the kind of development that would ruin most teams’ seasons, and yet Belichick was so confident in his program and in his ability to coach up the young second-stringer, Jimmy Garoppolo, that he spent the morning of the September 11 season opener, in Phoenix, talking baseball with his friend Tony La Russa, the former Cardinals, Athletics, and White Sox manager and current Arizona Diamondbacks executive who had just been inducted into the Hall of Fame.
La Russa didn’t want to bother Belichick on the day of his big Sunday night opener in the desert. “But he said, ‘Get your ass down here,’” La Russa recalled. “So I walked in, the Patriots are about to play the Cardinals to open the season without Brady, and we had this talk and Bill was more concerned about our disappointing season and how to fix it and what’s ahead. I was in there for an hour and a half, and for an hour and 15 minutes of that, he was checking on me. Geez, what a friend.”
What a coach. That night at University of Phoenix Stadium, where he had won his most recent Super Bowl title, Belichick walked in as a 9.5-point underdog, the biggest spread against his team since it had upset the Rams 15 years earlier. He walked out as the proud owner of an apparently worthy successor to Tom Brady.
Garoppolo, 24, completed 24 of 33 passes for 264 yards and a touchdown in the 23–21 victory, showing mobility, touch, and toughness in finding a way to win without the injured Gronkowski. (By comparison, a 24-year-old Brady had been 13 for 23 for 168 yards and no touchdowns in his NFL debut as a starter.) Garoppolo took smelling salts before the game—just to get himself going, he said—and then did nothing to disabuse anyone of the notion that he was a star in the making.
“Good” was Belichick’s underwhelming assessment of his quarterback. Asked for a little bit more than that, Belichick said, “It’s been good. He made some plays. It’s not perfect, but he made a lot of good plays.” The Patriots’ coach wasn’t going to get carried away, because the Patriots’ coach never got carried away. He’d already guaranteed that Brady would take over as the starter when his suspension was complete, removing any possibility that Garoppolo could effectively unseat the incumbent the way Brady had unseated the injured Drew Bledsoe in 2001. As it turned out, Garoppolo couldn’t make it through two full games without getting injured; he threw three touchdown passes against Miami before exiting with a 2-0 record and handing the job to the third-stringer. Jacoby Brissett, a Bill Parcells favorite, beat Houston before getting shut out by the Buffalo Bills. Brady returned in Week 5 to pick apart the hapless Cleveland Browns, throwing for 406 yards and three touchdowns after former Browns tight end Aaron Shea, Brady’s friend and former Michigan teammate, said that a pissed-off Tommy was bad news for the rest of the NFL and that “Deflategate hurt Tommy a lot more than he’ll let anyone know.”