But they weren’t playing like it. Maybe because perennial All-Pro linebacker Ray Lewis had announced his retirement. Possibly because they were out to avenge the AFC title loss the year before. Or perhaps because they were actually better than they had played in the regular season or what, they simply hit January and flipped a switch that had them playing inspired—and more importantly, error-free—football.
No excuses, but that playoff win over the Texans came at a price for the Patriots. Gronk was back in the lineup, with his surgically repaired forearm shielded by an enormous brace like the kind K-9 officers wear to train attack dogs. Still, trying to catch a pass up the sidelines, Gronkowski lunged for the ball, landed awkwardly, and reinjured the arm.
Again, the coach had to answer for what Gronkowski was doing on the field. Only this time it wasn’t about the game situation, it was whether he’d been rushed back too soon. Belichick went with his stock answer, that he’s not the doctor. The Patriots’ team doctor Thomas Gill had cleared him. And when the medical staff says a guy can play, the football coach plays him. But the blood was in the water, and the sharks were circling.
Absent Gronkowski, Brady picked the wrong time to have one of the worst playoff performances of his career. The offense put together one touchdown drive all game. He was just 29 for 54. The last two possessions ended with interceptions as he was trying to mount a comeback down 28–13.
Meanwhile the defense, and me, kept waiting for a Joe Flacco mistake that just never came. He was efficient. Brady-like. Completing 58 percent of his passes with three touchdowns. He was just a different animal than the one that had been Joe Average all season.
The ultimate indignity came courtesy, once again, of Bernard Pollard. As I describe this, please note this is the same Bernard Pollard I’ve mentioned before. There wasn’t like some clone army of football players all named Bernard Pollard bred to destroy Patriots. It just felt that way. With the Patriots trying to get something going, running back Stevan Ridley shot through the line of scrimmage, only to be met head-on by Pollard, who lowered his shoulder pads and knocked Ridley back right where he stood, over onto his back like he’d been hit by a charging rhino, unconscious. Ridley fumbled the ball before he hit the ground. It was recovered by the Ravens’ Arthur Jones, Chandler’s brother, and three plays later they were in the end zone with the game out of reach.
As postseason losses went, this one wasn’t in the same solar system as the three to the New York teams. But it was tough to take. The two teams had begun to build up enough history to make Baltimore the Patriots’ biggest rival now that the Colts had moved on from Peyton Manning. Plus, their games included the essential element all rivalries need to survive: bad blood, going back to the game in 2007 when the Ravens felt the Patriots had been handed the win by the officials. To times when Ray Lewis accused Tom Brady of baiting the officials and begging for calls. There was a moment when Brady was running with the ball and slid to “give himself up” before getting tackled by Baltimore’s Ed Reed, only to stick his cleat up into Reed’s chest. Not to mention coach John Harbaugh claiming the Patriots intentionally manipulated the scoreboard in the championship game the year before. Things had gotten ugly between these teams.
They were made uglier by what happened after the game. A WEEI producer sent me cellphone video he had taken outside the Patriots’ locker room. It was Ravens’ linebacker Terrell Suggs, walking past the open door and screaming into it, “Have fun at the Pro Bowl! Arrogant fuckers!”
For me personally, 2013 was going to be unlike any other season I’d experienced in a lifetime spent obsessing over this football team. That was obvious from where I was sitting for the first game—in front of a stationary TV camera in the offices of Comcast Sports New England (now NBC Sports Boston). I’d been hired to be part of the Patriots’ pre- and postgame coverage. The show consisted of Mike Felger of The Sports Hub in studio with a rotating cast of former NFL players that included Troy Brown, Ty Law, and Mike Flynn of Boston College and the Baltimore Ravens. My job was to sit in the “web zone” monitoring Twitter for the “fan’s perspective,” asking questions of reporter Tom E. Curran live at the stadium, and whenever possible, cracking wise.
It was a hell of a side job for a guy with no TV experience and a face for radio. It came about mostly because of the growing popularity of Barstool, but also from a regular weekly call-in segment I was doing on Felger and Mazz, the highest-rated radio show in the Boston market.
That segment was a great opportunity not just because of the ratings, but also because Felger and his partner Tony Massarotti were among the loudest and angriest critics of the Patriots. It gave me a chance to push back against them and, while I’d stop short of sounding like I was doing P.R. work for the team, I could be the voice of fans who respected what the Patriots had built and wanted to argue back against their jihadists in the media. And 2013 gave both sides in that culture war plenty to argue over—everything from the fantasyland that is pro sports to the real-life horrible stuff that all too often spills over into our little world of escapist entertainment.
The most contentious issue of the early part of the off-season was Wes Welker’s contract talks, which were going nowhere. I think most of us thought that a guy with his résumé, his toughness and intangibles, would be in line to cash in. That the market for him would be three years or so, for somewhere in the vicinity of $21 million. The Patriots were reportedly offering way less, two years, for somewhere around $11 million. The consensus was that they simply didn’t value him, were playing hardball with exactly the kind of player they ought not be dicking around with because they had built a dynasty off the work of players like him.
And yet that market just never seemed to develop. There was no three-year offer. Depending on whom you want to believe, either the Patriots had no intention of ever re-signing him or they made him a fair offer based on their reading of the market. Whichever theory you go by, we know that the Patriots signed Danny Amendola of the Rams for five years, with $10 million guaranteed. And Welker was not coming back. Instead, he signed with Denver for two years and about $12 million. The Broncos had just taken Tom Brady’s favorite target and probably best friend on the team to go catch passes from their new quarterback, a surgically rebuilt Peyton Manning.
Robert Kraft went public to explain the process. His contention was that the team made a fair market offer to Welker, with Amendola as their backup plan. And as Welker was weighing his options, the Patriots felt they had to act before Amendola signed elsewhere. They had no desirable Plan C.
That version didn’t placate too many people, mainly because Welker was such a fan and media favorite. But also because, fairly or unfairly, Amendola was considered “fragile.” In 2011, he missed 15 games after needing surgery to repair his triceps. In 2012, he suffered a dislocated clavicle that came within millimeters of puncturing his trachea and aorta, which could have killed him. Team doctors popped the bone into place, and this “fragile” player missed all of three games. Meanwhile, Welker was considered Mr. Durability because his noncontact knee injury happened in the last week of the season, so he only missed one game.
Arguing about all this on a weekly basis on the most popular media outlet in the city? That was the fun stuff. Unfortunately, real-life horrors inflicted by bloodthirsty sociopaths that followed took up much of that spring and summer. And they couldn’t be avoided.
Right by the finish line of the Boston Marathon, two brothers who immigrated to Massachusetts from Kyrgyzstan placed two pressure-cooker bombs they had hidden in backpacks at the feet of children on a crowded sidewalk and walked away. The bombs shattered the bodies of dozens of people and killed three. Within hours, the brothers murdered Sean Collier, an MIT campus police officer who was keeping the peace in his cruiser. Within days, after a manhunt on an unprecedented scale, one of the brothers was dead. The other was in custody. They’d tried to tear a city apart, but they drove it together. They tried to spread fear, but instead produced some of the
greatest acts of heroism the city had ever seen. The whole region galvanized to treat the wounded, mourn the dead, and raise money to help anywhere they could. The act of terror was hideous in its effect, but it united Boston into a single community. I’ve never been prouder to be from here.
Then in June, a story broke that might have been too surreal to believe were it not for the fact that we’d just gotten a lesson in what human beings are capable of. I found out about it with a simple, “So that’s messed up about Aaron Hernandez” from a friend of the family over at my brother Jim’s house. Pardon? What? Why? What happened to Aaron Hernandez? “They’re saying on the news he’s wanted for murder.”
He could have said, “It turns out Hernandez is a space alien” and I wouldn’t have been any less surprised. This had all been happening over the last hour or so, and none of the Thornton boys had heard a thing. We looked at each other, dumbfounded into silence for a moment until Jack said, not knowing any of the details, mind you, “He will never play another down for the Patriots.”
Of course, he was right. Hernandez was a “person of interest” in the murder of Odin Lloyd, a friend of his. Lloyd’s body was found in a vacant lot not far from Hernandez’s $1.3 million house, dead of multiple gunshot wounds. The next day, the Patriots turned Hernandez away from using the team gym and barred him from Gillette Stadium. Within days, he was seen being led out of his house in handcuffs, and the team immediately cut him, before police confirmed they were charging him in Lloyd’s death.
“A young man was murdered last week and we extend our sympathies to the family and friends who mourn his loss,” the team said in a press release. “Words cannot express the disappointment we feel knowing that one of our players was arrested as a result of this investigation. We realize that law enforcement investigations into this matter are ongoing. We support their efforts and respect the process. At this time, we believe this transaction is simply the right thing to do.”
This was all happening in late June. It’s a time when coaches and players aren’t around the team facilities much and are under no obligation to talk. And aside from carefully worded press releases, nobody from the Patriots did. The Boston press filled that void with their own allegations, mostly that the Patriots’ organization bore some responsibility for Hernandez being a cold-blooded killer. Dan Shaughnessy of the Boston Globe basically claimed they should have known all along what a murderous psycho he was. “The Patriots have trouble in their house. They looked trouble in the eye and rewarded it with a huge contract. It could happen to any team. But it is not supposed to happen in Foxboro. The leadership that pushed ‘Patriot Way’ looks like it has lost its way.”
Ron Borges of the Boston Herald blamed the lack of intel about Hernandez on the fact the team had recently replaced their head of security, a former state trooper, with the guy who had run the security at the London Summer Olympic Games. As if to suggest this trooper were the local beat cop who knew every shoeshine man and paperboy in the neighborhood, and who could always get the word on the street about what was going down, as opposed to the guy whose only claim to fame was pulling off a major world event with no acts of terror.
We’d find out months later that police believed Hernandez’s motive for killing his friend was that Lloyd had been talking about two other killings, of Daniel de Abreu and Safiro Furtado, committed by Hernandez a year earlier after they’d accidentally spilled a drink on him. He was convicted of killing Lloyd, but acquitted of murder in the other case after a separate trial because the case had gone too cold. But if you believe he did kill de Abreu and Furtado (as I do), you have to wrap your brain around the fact that a man played 12 NFL games in 2012 with the blood of complete strangers on his hands. I’ve tried. I’m just not capable.
Eventually, somebody from the Patriots would have to talk, and that task fell to Bill Belichick. He was the right guy for the job because for all his talents, his best by far was his ability to manage distractions. And if there were a bigger distraction possible than having an alleged murderer in your workplace, I shudder to think what that would be. This was his finest hour.
Belichick spoke from the heart. If he had never bared his soul before, he was doing it now. “As the coach of the team, I’m primarily responsible for the people that we bring into the football operation,” he said. “Overall, I’m proud of the hundreds of players that have come through this program, but I’m personally disappointed and hurt in a situation like this. . . . It certainly goes well beyond being a football issue,” he said. “This is real life. I don’t know how it could be any more substantial.”
“We’ll learn from this terrible experience,” he added. “We’ll become a better team from the lessons we learn.”
27
“We’ll Take the Wind”
The 2013 season was a wild one to be covering the Patriots semiprofessionally, with the glamour and excitement that can only come from suddenly being moderately-rated-regional-sports-network-football-pregame-show-famous.
The Patriots started out 4–0 before losing a defensive struggle to the Bengals in a severe rain and windstorm. They split two early season games to the Jets, both decided by three points, and dropped one to the Carolina Panthers. Both of those losses came on bizarre, controversial calls at the end, the kind that came with “-gate” suffixes attached.
In the loss to the Jets, New York kicker Nick Folk missed a 56-yard field goal try in overtime. But the officials ruled that there was a personal foul penalty on New England on the play that gave the Jets 15 yards and a first down, and the subsequent 42-yarder was good to win the game.
The penalty was on Chris Jones, for pushing teammate Will Svitek into the Jets’ line. After the game, Bill Belichick insisted that his interpretation of the rule was that it said no one “on the second level,” meaning off the line of scrimmage, could push a teammate. Jones had been on the line of scrimmage alongside Svitek, so it was not a violation. In fact, he said the Jets did the exact same thing.
What we found out later was that Rex Ryan’s staff had alerted the officials to be on the lookout for the Patriots trying the move. Then Tom E. Curran took a screencap of the rule as it was written on the NFL’s official website, which clearly included the phrase “from the second level.” Within minutes, it was edited to remove the qualifier. And “PushGate” was born.
If you’ve never heard of PushGate or don’t remember it, you are not alone. Those of us who were getting used to different standards being applied to the Patriots than to the other 31 teams made as much noise as we could, but ultimately we found ourselves shouting at the ocean and getting no reply. All we can say is that, unlike the Tuck Rule, the Push Rule has never been applied any other time, before or since.
The loss to the Panthers was more of your regular, terribly blown call than it was a vast NFL conspiracy. With the Patriots down by four, the ball on Carolina’s 18, and 3 seconds left, Tom Brady found Rob Gronkowski solo-covered by Panthers’ All-Pro linebacker Luke Kuechly and threw to him. The pass fell incomplete, mainly because Kuechly had Gronk in a bear hug—not with his hands on him, not making what is illegal contact 99.9 percent of the time. Kuechly had both of his arms physically wrapped around Gronkowski’s body. Flags flew. It was Pass Interference. By rule, it was the Patriots’ ball at the 1, with one untimed play to decide the game.
Until it wasn’t. After conferring, the officials overruled the original call. The explanation was that the ball was ruled “uncatchable,” a piece of total illogical bullshit refuted not just by common sense given that the intended target was the most talented receiving target in the game, but also by a later ESPN SportScience segment that proved the ball was very catchable. The counterargument was thrown at me by Felger and Mazz during my segment with them; they asked if I really wanted the NFL to let referees end games with calls like that instead of letting them be decided by players on the field. My answer was that not reversing the call would have let the players decide it. Still, the call stood. HugGate never got
much traction outside of New England, though the effect both PushGate and HugGate had on the season turned out to be monumental.
The best day of the regular season came on October 13, a late-afternoon game at home against the Saints. The Patriots were still missing Rob Gronkowski thanks to a series of complications with his arm surgery. For receiving targets, Brady was relying on fringe players like Kenbrell Thompkins and Austin Collie, who had been released by the Colts. New Orleans took a one-point lead late in the game, and then, following four straight Brady incompletions, led 27–23. Brady threw an interception that seemed to put the game away as tens of thousands filed out of Gillette.
But then the defense made a stop that took very little time off the clock. With 1:13 left and no time-outs, Brady took over at the Patriots’ 30. He then connected with Julian Edelman to put the ball at midfield. Brady then hit Collie and Aaron Dobson to get within striking distance of the end zone. He converted a fourth and 4, again to Collie, and spiked the ball to stop the clock with 10 seconds to go. Then he hit Thompkins in the end zone with a perfectly lofted pass for the game-winner.
What we later found out was that as the Patriots were orchestrating that final drive, thousands who had left the stadium were hearing the final drive on their phones and were trying to talk their way back in. That, and we soon heard the call in the Patriots’ radio booth. Scott Zolak’s insane, almost incomprehensible and pretty much nonsensical rant, “Brady’s back! That’s your quarterback! Who left the building?!? Unicorns! Show ponies! Where’s the beef?!!” became his instant legacy.
Five Rings Page 27