by Ian O'Connor
Belichick waited until the following morning to release a statement on the controversy. “I have coached football for over four decades,” it read, “and one of the greatest things about being in this environment is the diversity of people, backgrounds, viewpoints and relationships we are fortunate to experience. As with any large group of people, there is a variety of perspectives and opinions on many topics.” Belichick said he’d keep private his conversations with players about any issues involving the team. One Patriots source said that some African American players had expressed concerns privately about the Kraft-Belichick-Brady friendship with Trump. “There was a little bit of ‘Are they with us or are they with him?’” the source said. But that feeling didn’t fester, the source added, as the protesting players felt that all three had earned the benefit of the doubt.
Winning is a great unifier, and Belichick’s methods had won with all colors and creeds, over and over again. He was coaching in his 11th Super Bowl, and his most interesting response to a question in the leadup to the game might’ve come when he was asked about possibly breaking his tie with Vince Lombardi and joining George Halas and Curly Lambeau as the only men to win six NFL titles. How did it feel to be linked with the sport’s enduring icons?
“It’s hard for me to really picture that,” Belichick said. “They’re such great, legendary coaches. I don’t really see myself . . . I don’t think of it that way. I just think of how great they were, what they meant to the game, what they accomplished, and how much respect I have for them.
“I’d certainly put Paul Brown in there,” Belichick continued, “for all that he has done for this game. When you’re talking about all the great coaches, I don’t see how you can leave him out of it.” Belichick once wore a fedora in Brown’s honor, too—on the 2010 day he tied the former Browns and Bengals coach on the all-time victories list with No. 170.
Done with his press conferences, Belichick was the Thursday night co-star of an ESPN 30 for 30 documentary titled “The Two Bills,” produced by NFL Films’ Ken Rodgers, who’d persuaded Belichick and Parcells to sit together in the New York Giants’ locker room in June to tape their first joint on-camera interview since 1991. Their relationship had evolved from the time when one of Belichick’s teammates at Wesleyan, Art Conklin, said he’d attended a birthday party for Belichick where there were charts on the walls showing “all statistics of Parcells’s record with Belichick, and Parcells’s record without Belichick, and how much Belichick did alone.” (Conklin said Parcells was not present at the party.) Big Bill and Little Bill had patched up things enough to live peacefully for part of the year in the same Jupiter, Florida, building. They could even laugh about the time a leak from Belichick’s unit ran into Parcells’s and caused some damage. “Not just my apartment,” Parcells would say in a 2016 interview, “but everybody down below me, too. Happened about five years ago. I knocked on his door to let him know. I think it came from his fridge. Part of my ceiling came down, but it wasn’t just me.”
Parcells, a Hall of Famer, had come to terms with the fact that his former assistant had surpassed him on the list of all-time greats. In the ten Super Bowls he’d coached in, seven of them victories, Belichick had done some unconventional things that helped his team win. He planned for Buffalo’s Thurman Thomas to gain more than 100 rushing yards, and his Giants defenders thought he’d lost his mind. He refused to call a timeout with Seattle on the goal line in the final seconds, and Patriots assistants, players, and fans thought he was positively mad.
So it was no surprise that Belichick planned to throw a curveball at the Eagles. The only surprise was that Doug Pederson was ready to hit it out of the park.
His head bowed on the sideline, Malcolm Butler was weeping during Leslie Odom Jr.’s moving rendition of “America the Beautiful.” He was rubbing his crying eyes with his gloved left hand while safety Jordan Richards rested a hand on his shoulder pads. The hero of Super Bowl XLIX had just been told he wasn’t in the game plan for Super Bowl LII.
Belichick had decided to start Eric Rowe, a third-year cornerback from Utah, instead of Butler, who had played 97.8 percent of New England’s defensive snaps in the regular season and all 141 defensive snaps in the playoff victories over Tennessee and Jacksonville. Butler’s benching promoted Rowe, who’d been in the rotation against the Titans and the Jaguars, and moved up Richards and cornerback Johnson Bademosi. Richards had played only six defensive snaps in the AFC title game. Bademosi was a healthy scratch against Tennessee and didn’t play any defensive snaps against Jacksonville.
Butler had been sick enough to miss New England’s team flight to Minnesota on Monday, but he arrived the following day and joined his team at practice. By all accounts, he was ready to play. As the first half of the Super Bowl unfolded and it became clear that Butler wasn’t in Belichick’s game plan, people assumed the star corner must’ve violated a team rule to force the coach’s hand. Did he break curfew? Did he do something worse? If he’d ever exhibited a poor attitude after New England gave Buffalo’s free-agent cornerback Stephon Gilmore a big contract in the off-season (five years, $65 million), it hadn’t compelled Belichick to bench him.
So why sit him on the biggest Sunday of the year? On a certain level, Butler was the reason Belichick and Brady were considered the greatest ever at what they did. If he hadn’t intercepted Russell Wilson’s pass at the goal line three years earlier, Belichick would’ve been crucified for failing to call a timeout. The Patriots would’ve suffered their third consecutive Super Bowl defeat, and their championship drought would’ve covered ten full seasons and counting. Brady gave Butler the Chevy truck he won as the game’s MVP for a reason. He knew how much better a 4-2 record in the big game looked on his résumé than 3-3.
But the way Belichick saw it, whatever Butler did against Seattle then wasn’t going to help him beat Philadelphia now. He would say this move was based on football reasons only. Belichick thought Rowe and the other defensive backs gave him the best chance to win, so those were the men he put on the U.S. Bank Stadium field.
And on the game’s first series, Rowe was in coverage on the Eagles’ first two third-down conversions, though he recovered to break up a potential third-down touchdown pass from Foles to Alshon Jeffery and hold Philly to a field goal. On the Eagles’ next series, after New England kicked a field goal of its own, Rowe wasn’t so fortunate. Foles threw a perfect pass toward the back of the end zone, and Jeffery rose high to beat Rowe’s otherwise tight coverage and gather in a 34-yard touchdown pass.
Early in the second quarter, New England’s chances were further compromised when Brandin Cooks made a 23-yard catch and then zigzagged his way into a brutal helmet-to-helmet shot from Malcolm Jenkins, which sidelined the receiver for the balance of the game. Belichick had acquired Cooks from New Orleans for his 2017 first-round pick; the deal marked the first time the Patriots had dealt their first-round pick for an established NFL asset since Kraft made the deal with the New York Jets for Belichick himself. Now Brady would have to beat the Eagles without Cooks or Julian Edelman, who’d been lost for the year in August, just as he beat the Falcons a year earlier without Gronkowski.
Brady had taken a helmet shot to the midsection on the Cooks play that left him doubled over in apparent pain, and yet two snaps later, on third-and-5 at the Philly 35, he was asked to sneak out of the backfield and run a pass route so Danny Amendola could throw him the ball. Brady was wide open near the right sideline, and Amendola threw a near-perfect pass, but the ball bounced off the quarterback’s fingers and fell to the turf. Brady couldn’t blame the drop on the injury to his right hand; he wasn’t wearing the tape he had worn against Jacksonville. Belichick decided to go for it on fourth down, and a rushed Brady lobbed up a wobbly ball to Gronkowski that never stood a chance.
The Eagles would face their own fourth-down decision at New England’s one-yard line with 38 seconds left in the half. Pederson immediately decided to answer Belichick’s gamble with one of his own, dismissing th
ree easy points for a chance at the kind of dagger Jacksonville had been afraid to fire. The coach called time out, and Foles asked him, “You want Philly Philly?” Pederson looked down at his oversize play chart, hesitated for a second, and said, “Yeah, let’s do it, let’s do it.”
Foles returned to his huddle and said, “Philly Special, Philly Special, ready . . .” The Eagles clapped and broke the huddle. Foles lined up in shotgun formation, and running back Corey Clement shifted to a position next to him. Foles faked as if he was calling for the snap, moved up behind right tackle Lane Johnson, and stood tall and relaxed his body for a second—as if he were out of the play—when Clement took the direct snap. As the running back ran left, Foles suddenly reengaged and sprinted toward the right side of the end zone. Clement flipped the ball to tight end Trey Burton, a former high school and college quarterback, and Burton made the easy throw to a wide-open Foles for six points.
Foles caught the ball that Brady had dropped. Pederson won the fourth-down gamble that Belichick had lost. Philly took a 22–12 lead into halftime, and NBC’s camera focused on the trailing coach trotting off the field. Belichick was wearing a hoodless Patriots sweatshirt with sleeves cut off below his shoulders, over a shirt with sleeves cut off at mid-forearm; he looked like a weekend warrior in a flag football league. “Belichick back to the locker room,” play-by-play man Al Michaels said, “beginning to make his adjustments, which he makes all game long.” Color man Cris Collinsworth responded, “And he’s pretty good at halftime, too.” Michaels: “I’ll say.” Collinsworth: “Twenty-eight to three last time around, they came back and won. Ten-point deficit, nothing.”
Belichick’s revamped secondary had been picked apart by Foles, who passed for 215 yards in the first half. If Belichick had planned to force Foles to beat him through the air, it seemed that Foles was prepared to do just that. Belichick sat the 5´11˝, 190-pound Butler in favor of a corner (Rowe) who was two inches taller and 15 pounds heavier, and in favor of a three-safety nickel package that included Richards (20 pounds heavier). Safety Patrick Chung was also ten pounds heavier than Rowe, whom he replaced in the slot. If the idea was to persuade the Eagles to keep the ball in Foles’s hands rather than in the hands of punishing running backs LeGarrette Blount and Jay Ajayi, who weighed in at a combined 473 pounds, the strategy wasn’t working.
With Justin Timberlake’s halftime show providing all the time he needed to review his options, Belichick decided his three-cornerback sets in the second half should include Bademosi instead of the shorter and lighter Butler, who also happened to be the better football player. Asked later why he made the call to go with Bademosi in that role, Belichick would say, “He practiced it the most.”
Rowe actually played fairly well; in addition to breaking up a touchdown pass, he also broke up a two-point conversion attempt. But on the Eagles’ first possession of the second half, Belichick’s decision to go with Bademosi, a six-year veteran out of Stanford, hurt his team. On a night when the Eagles would badly damage the Patriots on third down (10 out of 16 successful conversions) and fourth down (2 of 2), Foles threw short of the first-down marker to Nelson Agholor on a third-and-6, and Bademosi whiffed on a Pop Warner tackle that absolutely had to be made. Philly scored on that drive to take a 29–19 lead, compelling Brady to try to win his sixth ring on his own.
Brady found Chris Hogan for a 26-yard touchdown on his second third-quarter series, after hitting Gronkowski for a five-yard score on his first, and the league’s two teams tumbled into the fourth quarter and toward an indelible finish. Win or lose, this couldn’t be Brady’s farewell to pro football. Though he’d recently told a friend that “winning three out of four a second time would be a great way to go out,” Brady couldn’t possibly leave the Patriots after Belichick traded Garoppolo and Brissett, could he?
Why would he leave, anyway, when he’d just been named league MVP for the third time, and when the Eagles were having a harder time defending him than the Patriots were defending Foles? Brady remained on fire by punctuating his third consecutive possession with a touchdown pass, this one his second to Gronkowski, before Stephen Gostkowski gave New England its first lead, at 33–32 with 9:22 to go.
So many times over the years, it seemed the Patriots had been outplayed and/or outhit by their opponents, only to hang in there and steal a victory with fourth-quarter execution, conditioning, and poise. They never, ever panicked, a direct reflection of their ever-stoic coach.
Only these Eagles were on the kind of magical ride the Patriots had been on 16 seasons earlier. Foles led a 14-play, slow-death drive that included a conversion on fourth-and-1 and a touchdown pass to Zach Ertz, who beat Devin McCourty and then survived the ground and an official replay review after losing control of the ball upon landing. The Eagles failed on the two-point try, and Brady got the ball back with 2:21 to play, down five points, with fans on both sides of U.S. Bank Stadium expecting anything but precisely what happened next.
On second down, as Brady was about to make his throw, a fellow Michigan man named Brandon Graham rushed in, reached up with his left hand, and knocked the ball loose and into the arms of teammate Derek Barnett with 2:09 left. Brady sat on the field in a state of disbelief, knowing the Tuck Rule couldn’t bail him out of this one. The Eagles ran Blount three times, kicked the field goal, and dared New England to score eight points against a defense built by coordinator Jim Schwartz, who had been given his first NFL job in Cleveland, by the Patriots’ head coach.
Belichick tried his second trick play of the night, a kickoff-return reverse run by Dion Lewis and Rex Burkhead, and it didn’t exactly mirror Pederson’s Philly Special near the end of the first half. Burkhead was tackled at the New England nine-yard line, leaving Brady 58 seconds to cover 91 yards with no timeouts. The best the quarterback could do was move the Patriots to their own 49 with nine seconds left, giving them one crack at a Hail Mary. Brady took the shotgun snap, spun out of Graham’s attempted sack, and let the ball fly before absorbing one last shot to the rib cage from Fletcher Cox. In the front of the end zone, Gronkowski and half the city of Philadelphia fought for the ball and batted it about before it dropped harmlessly to the turf as time expired. At last, the Eagles had their first Super Bowl title and their first NFL championship since 1960.
Belichick winced as the final play met its demise, tossed his headset to the ground, and bent over to pick up his papers before weaving his way through a manic maze of photographers and congratulating a Gatorade-soaked Pederson through a warm embrace. Brady had thrown for a Super Bowl–record 505 yards, and it wasn’t enough to compensate for the 538 yards surrendered by the defense, the most ever allowed by a Patriots team coached by Belichick.
The losing coach left the field with Philly’s green and white confetti falling around him. In his postgame press conference, Belichick said he was proud of how his players and coaches had competed. “We weren’t able to perform at our best,” he said. “Obviously didn’t do a good enough job coaching. Missed a lot of opportunities offensively in the first half, didn’t play good enough defensively, didn’t play good enough in the kicking game . . . Tough way to end a lot of really good things that happened this season, but that’s what this game’s about.”
Belichick maintained that Malcolm Butler’s benching hadn’t been disciplinary in nature and that the cornerback had been healthy enough to go. “We put the players out there and the game plan out there that we thought would be the best tonight,” he said. “Like we always do.”
When he was done answering questions, Belichick stepped off his podium and walked down the hallway behind a wall of dark curtains. Before he reached his locker room, he stopped at his team’s postgame food spread, grabbed something small off one of the tables, and spoke for a few minutes with Robert Kraft.
In 48 hours, Belichick and Kraft would dine together at a Patriots Place restaurant, Davio’s, in an attempt to reach a détente on their most pressing issues. Social media photos of this summit at an open table invite
d speculation that they wanted to be seen peacefully breaking bread; the truth of it was, the private room they’d requested for the meal wasn’t available. Between their chat on the losing side of U.S. Bank Stadium and their Tuesday night dinner, so much had gone down. Belichick and Kraft had persuaded Josh McDaniels to rescind his verbal agreement to coach the Colts and remain as offensive coordinator. Belichick was criticized and questioned over his Butler decision not just by commentators and columnists but by former Patriots (Ty Law, Rob Ninkovich, and Brandon Browner). Butler released a statement denying that he’d missed curfew or committed any team violation during Super Bowl week, and he apologized for the language he’d used in the only interview he gave after the game.
“They gave up on me,” Butler had told ESPN’s Mike Reiss. “Fuck. It is what it is.”
Butler said he didn’t know why Belichick sat him, and that he felt he “could’ve changed that game.” In the days before Super Bowl LII, one of Belichick’s old favorites, Rodney Harrison, had complimented his 65-year-old coach for changing his style over the years to better relate to millennials. “Oh, he’s different,” Harrison said. “And you have to be different, because the mentality is different. These kids nowadays, they’re different. They’re not hard-nosed kids like we were back when we were winning Super Bowls, so he had to change his coaching style, become a little softer, have more personality, because these younger players can now relate to him. I think he’s done a great job relating to the players.”