by Ian O'Connor
As it turned out, Belichick should have done a few things he didn’t do. He should have gambled that Brady—a freak of nature who had stated his desire to play until at least age 45—would play at a high level into his forties and traded Garoppolo in the off-season for at least one first-rounder. He should have kept his promising third-stringer, Jacoby Brissett, whom he traded to Indianapolis in September for receiver Phillip Dorsett. Hindsight being 20/20, he also should have selected Garoppolo in the first round in 2014 (instead of draft bust Dominique Easley), which would have given New England the right to pick up a fifth-year team option on Garoppolo’s contract and to buy another year of monitoring Brady’s battle with the aging process.
It was too late for any of that in the middle of the 2017 season. The ultimate salary-cap manager, Belichick wasn’t about to commit $45 million to one position, even the most important position, in the event that he couldn’t find a trade partner for Garoppolo that didn’t lowball him because of Jimmy G.’s upgraded wage. Belichick had met with Robert Kraft, Jonathan Kraft, and Nick Caserio in the early summer to discuss the quarterback situation, and the men left their meeting committed to an attempt to sign Garoppolo to a manageable new contract. Between that meeting and late October, Robert Kraft told associates that he’d occasionally ask Caserio if there was any update on Garoppolo and that the longtime director of player personnel would tell him there was no progress to report.
Garoppolo’s agent, Don Yee, needed to keep his signature client Brady happy, which meant keeping him in Foxborough, and he needed to grant Garoppolo his ultimate wish, a starting job in the NFL, which meant moving him to another franchise. Yee was never going to do a long-term deal with the Patriots that kept Garoppolo on the bench, no matter what Belichick offered, and that was why negotiations didn’t get serious.
So Belichick did what he had to do, much as he didn’t want to do it. He moved Garoppolo out of the AFC to ensure that the quarterback couldn’t cancel any future Patriots trips to the Super Bowl, though he didn’t hold an NFC-only auction and wait for the highest bidder. Belichick handed him to a coach (Kyle Shanahan) and executive (John Lynch) he respected. He also did right by Yee, who had signed off on a series of deals with Belichick that paid Brady tens of millions less than what other elite quarterbacks were making in order to provide the team with cap flexibility. (Brady could offer these discounts in part because his wife had been the world’s highest-paid supermodel every year since 2002.) Belichick wouldn’t exactly have thanked Yee for his help and understanding had he sent his client to Cleveland.
In explaining the Garoppolo trade to the news media, and by extension to a surprised and confused fan base, Belichick said the quarterback situation was “just not sustainable given the way that things are set up. It’s definitely not something that we wanted to walk away from and I felt like we rode it out as long as we could. We, over a period of time, explored every option possible to try to sustain it, but just at this point felt like we had to make a decision. It’s a very complex situation on multiple levels, and this is really the last window that we had, and we did what we felt was best for the team.”
Belichick made it clear that he had strong feelings for Garoppolo. “The 49ers are getting a good player, and they’re getting a good person,” the coach said, “and they’re getting a great teammate and they’re getting a good quarterback . . . He’s a talented individual, was a great person to coach. I met with him weekly and, again, have a tremendous amount of respect for him.” Somewhere Brady must’ve been asking himself, Would it have killed the guy to have said these things about me every now and then?
Not that it mattered anymore. Forget the record five Super Bowl rings; Brady had accomplished the unthinkable. He’d become the first Patriot to defeat the same Belichick machine that had ultimately traded, released, or forced into retirement every star player before him. The machine had identified Garoppolo as his future replacement in the spring of 2014, and Brady defied it by winning two more championships in three years and forcing the kid to go take his ball somewhere else.
It pained Belichick to deal Garoppolo. This was his Steve Young, after all. This was the quarterback who would forever silence the discussion about Belichick needing Brady as much as Parcells needed Belichick. This was the quarterback who would end the debate over which titan was more important to the dynasty, Belichick or Brady.
And now he was 2,700 miles away. Belichick was left with an ageless and freshly empowered Brady, and with a nonthreatening, Tommy-deferring journeyman, Brian Hoyer, as a backup. He was also left with the task of finding another Garoppolo to develop (good luck with that) and with the burden of confronting a procession of published stories that detailed the escalating tension among Belichick, Brady, and Kraft and the internal power struggle that was won by the quarterback.
It started with a bulletin from a Golf Channel host, of all people, though Ryan Burr had spent seven years at ESPN. “Brady camp 3 days ago felt privately TB could be traded by Bill after 17,” he wrote on Twitter after the Garoppolo trade. “This was a Kraft decision to make it clear Brady finishes as a Pat.” Burr then tweeted, “Told TB relationship with BB not great and all his loyalty is too [sic] Mr. Kraft.” These tweets were largely dismissed as long-distance spitballs from an outsider. They shouldn’t have been.
In December, Bob Hohler of the Globe wrote that Belichick weeks earlier had stripped Brady’s body-and-life coach, Alex Guerrero, of the privilege of flying on the team charter, standing on the sideline during games, and treating players not named Tom Brady in the Gillette Stadium office the coach allowed him to have. Over time, Guerrero had added many of New England’s players to his roster of clients—one Patriots source said that nearly two-thirds of the roster was “going up the hill” from the stadium to see Guerrero at the nearby facility he opened with Brady in 2013, the TB12 Sports Therapy Center.
“Say what you want about Alex Guerrero,” said one team source, “but he knows how to manipulate the body.”
One invaluable TB12 convert, Rob Gronkowski, believed he’d been able to make a big catch on a painfully low Brady throw against Pittsburgh, in a December game that would decide home-field advantage in the playoffs, that he wouldn’t have made without embracing Guerrero’s emphasis on flexibility over the team’s emphasis on strength. Gronk’s fellow tight end Aaron Hernandez had been among the earliest high-profile Patriots who had decided Guerrero did a better job of getting him ready to play than the team’s training staff did.
It was no secret that Guerrero traded in unorthodox methods of injury prevention and treatment and that his advice to players often conflicted with advice they were getting from New England’s medical staff. Belichick came to believe he had made a mistake in granting extensive access to Guerrero, and he had become uncomfortable with the depth of his influence. So he kneecapped him. In the process, of course, he kneecapped Brady, too.
There was a time when Belichick would approve of anything Brady wanted when it came to preparing for a game. Years earlier, when Belichick visited the New York Yankees in spring training, he’d had a conversation with Yankees officials in their weight room. GM Brian Cashman recalled that they discussed equipment and what worked and did not work when training athletes. “Belichick told a story that Tom Brady wanted specific equipment, and their strength coach didn’t want it,” Cashman said. “Belichick said, ‘If Tom Brady wants it, Tom Brady gets it.’ If you get a player at that level, you get him what he needs, even if the strength coach says otherwise.”
In this case, Belichick was tired of other Patriots choosing Brady’s guy over the team’s staff. The quarterback was wounded by Guerrero’s demotion. They had just collaborated on a book, The TB12 Method, and Brady continued to hold up Guerrero as the primary reason he hadn’t missed a game because of injury since the 2008 season. The self-styled fitness guru, who had a dubious past littered with financial disputes, lawsuit settlements, and bankruptcy filings, was godfather to Brady’s son Ben and could be seen
sitting at the quarterback’s locker after a game, waiting for him to shower and dress. As business partners with a grand vision of millions around the globe frequenting TB12 facilities and living on TB12 diets, it seemed Guerrero needed Brady a whole lot more than Brady needed him.
Only the quarterback didn’t treat his partner as if that were the case. So when Belichick demoted Guerrero, that development, Hohler wrote, “created some friction in Foxborough.” In the wake of the Globe report, Greg Bedard, of Boston Sports Journal, wrote that the Guerrero situation “has absolutely become a source of friction between Brady and Belichick” and that an attempt to arrange a peace summit involving the quarterback, the coach, and Kraft—before the December 11 loss at Miami—failed, at least for the time being. The following week, under the headline “Patriots Run Feels Like It’s Winding Down,” NBC Sports Boston’s Tom E. Curran observed that the 2017 season had felt like the end of a party. “Like people are gathering up their coats and saying their goodbyes,” he wrote.
The coordinators, Josh McDaniels and Matt Patricia, were expected to leave for head coaching jobs, and the special teams coach, Joe Judge, was among the aides expected to depart for promotions elsewhere. But Belichick’s likely staff reconstruction was hardly the only reason that the late stages of 2017 felt like goodbye; whispers that Belichick and/or Brady might walk away were growing a bit louder. And that possibility was taken to Defcon 1 by a story published by ESPN’s Seth Wickersham on January 5, 2018, headlined, “For Kraft, Brady and Belichick, Is This the Beginning of the End?” An artful writer and dogged reporter, Wickersham surveyed the trees already planted and explained why they represented a forest.
Wickersham added detail and context to the Belichick/Brady-Guerrero divide and wrote of how some Patriots felt that the decision to see or not see Guerrero for treatment was really a choice between aligning with the league’s most powerful quarterback or the league’s most powerful coach. The ESPN story stated that Brady had several October meetings with Kraft to reaffirm his desire to play into his forties, that a separate meeting between the quarterback and Belichick ended with a “little blowup,” and that during Brady’s Deflategate suspension, an injured Garoppolo arrived at a scheduled TB12 appointment to find the doors locked and his phone calls going unanswered. (The quarterback denied freezing out his heir apparent and reminded associates that Garoppolo had made dozens of trips to TB12 and that Brady had invited him along on his most recent trip to the Kentucky Derby.) Of greater consequence, Wickersham wrote that Kraft and Belichick had a meeting two weeks before the trade deadline that ran a half day long, and that “a furious and demoralized” Belichick left with a “clear mandate” to trade Jimmy G. and anoint none other than Tommy B. as the 40-year-old quarterback of the future.
The piece caught fire on the Internet, and the Patriots responded with what had to be an NFL first: a joint statement from an owner (Kraft), a coach (Belichick), and a quarterback (Brady):
For the past 18 years, the three of us have enjoyed a very good and productive working relationship. In recent days, there have been multiple media reports that have speculated theories that are unsubstantiated, highly exaggerated or flat out inaccurate. The three of us share a common goal. We look forward to the enormous challenge of competing in the postseason and the opportunity to work together in the future, just as we have for the past 18 years. It is unfortunate that there is even a need for us to respond to these fallacies. As our actions have shown, we stand united.
Kraft would deny much of the ESPN story to Peter King of The MMQB and call the reported claim that he’d met for half a day with Belichick and ordered the code red on Garoppolo “a total fabrication and fiction.” Kraft said that his first conversation with Belichick about Garoppolo’s status since their early-summer meeting had unfolded the day the deal was made with San Francisco. The owner said he was initially taken aback by the coach’s news that he had a trade in place with the 49ers and that he consulted with his son, team president Jonathan Kraft, before giving Belichick his blessing to proceed.
Did Kraft really direct Belichick to move Garoppolo and interfere with a personnel decision for the first time since 2007, when he insisted that an aging Troy Brown remain on the roster? This was the central question that lingered as New England prepared to transition from a 13-3 regular season and its ninth consecutive AFC East title to another postseason run at the Lombardi Trophy. No credible source was doubting that Guerrero had created a chasm in the organization or that Brady was a bit paranoid about his gifted backup. When asked by an ESPN.com reporter the previous spring if he was annoyed by Garoppolo’s presence on the roster the way Joe Montana was once annoyed by Steve Young’s presence, Brady answered, “That’s a great question,” before delivering a lengthy response that didn’t include the word no. Sources said Brady did tell Kraft that he was concerned Belichick might trade him after 2017 and that he felt he deserved a secure place on the 2018 roster after all the winning he had done on bargain-basement deals.
But competing narratives emerged about whether Kraft had protected Brady and, by pushing out Garoppolo, prevented Belichick from using a potential postseason loss and even the smallest sign of decline to trade Brady before the 2018 season. It was clear that the owner respected Belichick’s control of the roster. When someone asked Kraft if he thought a second-round pick was really enough of a return for Garoppolo, the owner responded, “Don’t you think Bill’s earned the right?”
Belichick had certainly earned the right to make these calls. He’d proven to be the best of the best in the fields of talent evaluation, acquisition, and development, and if he thought the deal with San Francisco was a good one—even if many saw it as better for Garoppolo than for New England—he likely had sound reasons. Kraft understood that.
But Brady was the one exception to all Patriot Way ordinances. He wasn’t Lawyer Milloy or Richard Seymour or Wes Welker or Logan Mankins. Brady was the greatest football player ever, still performing at an MVP level. He also had a relationship with Kraft that was warm and transformational; his relationship with Belichick was always cold and transactional.
Brady had been turning to Kraft for help and guidance for a long time. In the early years, if he was concerned about the presence of some people in the locker room he thought didn’t belong there, he asked Kraft to step in. The owner visited Brady at his locker right before every game, every season, for a little heart-to-heart. They spoke and texted often, exchanged birthday gifts, and even lived in neighboring mansions near Pine Manor College, in Chestnut Hill. Sometimes Kraft signed messages to his biggest star with the valediction “Much love.”
Kraft desperately wanted Brady to retire a Patriot. When someone mentioned that the quarterback had left open the possibility of playing even beyond age 45, Kraft said, “Then he’ll be a Patriot beyond age 45.” Belichick knew how his employer felt. He didn’t have to ask Kraft about Brady and the possibility of replacing him. Sources said that Kraft never specifically ordered Belichick to trade Garoppolo. But if the coach had asked the owner if he could trade Brady and go with the kid, sources said Kraft would have rejected the request.
Those who argued over whether there was an actual “mandate” were playing a game of semantics. Belichick watched from afar as Garoppolo turned the 1-10 49ers into the 6-10 49ers, winning all five of his starts with impressive command while devaluing New England’s acquired second-rounder. A popular working theory in the Patriots’ building was that Garoppolo’s play was making the trade look more confounding by the week, moving Belichick to defend it more vigorously to confidants and to assign more and more blame to Kraft’s man crush on Brady. Voilà: A mandate was born.
The Kraft-Belichick relationship was no less interesting to examine than the Brady-Belichick relationship. It had gotten off to a good start in the early years—Steve Belichick, military man, liked his son’s boss because he always kept his shoes shined. On the other hand, sometimes Steve Belichick’s only child would pass Kraft in the hallway and no
t say a single word to him. Over the years, many players and aides experienced the same silent drive-by, and most came to realize that the coach didn’t care to waste three seconds on a useless greeting that could otherwise be devoted to a thought about Sunday’s game. Only Kraft wasn’t a player or an aide. After all these seasons together, he was a billionaire paying Belichick more than $10 million a year.
Sometimes in meetings, Belichick would treat Kraft like a reporter when he asked for an injury update. Though the owner wished his coach showed him and his son Jonathan more respect at times, Kraft had long ago come to terms with Belichick’s flaws. He’d been roughed up by Parcells, who taught him that the NFL isn’t for the sensitive and weak. (Stacey James, Kraft’s PR man, told associates that he’d gone 16 years without being yelled at by Belichick, and that he hadn’t gone 16 days without being yelled at by Parcells.) One owner who wasn’t a fan of Belichick’s once asked Kraft, “When are you going to fire that asshole?” Kraft responded, “When he goes 8-8.”
Belichick ripped off 17 consecutive winning years, averaging 12.3 regular-season victories along the way. Kraft had learned to wall off Belichick’s weaknesses and focus on his immense strengths. He’d been angry at his coach here and there—over Spygate, over unnecessary confrontations, over his high-profile role in the Shenocca divorce case—but he understood that managing geniuses in sports, the arts, business, politics, whatever, meant putting up with their maddening idiosyncrasies. One league source said Roger Goodell told Kraft that he was the only owner who could have successfully dealt with Belichick for as long as he had.