Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  Things didn’t draw Kraft and Parcells together. People did. On January 12, 1997—the morning of the AFC Championship game—Will McDonough, the legendary Boston Globe columnist, approached the owner. McDonough was close to both Parcells and Kraft, and while McDonough believed that Kraft intentionally misled him prior to the NFL draft in April 1996, he knew he could still talk to him. They needed to talk. The Boston Herald had broken a story that explained why the Patriots would indeed be due compensation if another team wanted to hire Parcells. McDonough, also a reporter for NBC, had interviewed Parcells early on the morning of the 12th. Of course, Parcells had already read and reacted to the Herald article. He suspected that Kraft had given the story to reporter Kevin Mannix, and he was furious about it.

  In recounting his version of the Kraft-Parcells relationship just over a month later in the Globe, McDonough wrote that he had wanted to talk with both men in January so that they could—temporarily at least—work together peacefully. “I told [Parcells], ‘Listen, I’ll grab Kraft when he gets here, bring him into your office, and straighten this thing out. He told me all along he wants to take the high road. Let’s see what the deal is.’ ” Kraft remembers being surprised when McDonough approached him that day in ’97. “Will said to me, ‘I need to mediate something with you and Bill.’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said something about Parcells wanting to get out of his contract. It felt like they were trying to browbeat me.”

  It was a lot of action, and the AFC Championship game still was four hours away. Once it started, the Patriots were in control against the Jacksonville Jaguars. They were 20–6 winners. Kraft, close to his three-year anniversary of ownership, was going to have a shot at a Super Bowl ring. He spoke on the field after the game, and no one could have guessed that there had been a problem with Parcells earlier in the day. He called the coach one of the NFL’s greatest and said, “This is one of the great moments of my life. This is why our family got into the sports business. We have built something special here, and we owe it to the efforts of our players and our coaching staff. I can’t even describe the feeling. I’m ecstatic. I’m happy. I’m content.”

  That feeling would last for a week. On January 20, a depressing Monday for Patriots fans, McDonough filed a stunning story from New Orleans. The message in the news story was as blunt as its headline: “Parcells to Leave.” The major reason given for the decision, McDonough wrote, was a deteriorating relationship between Kraft and Parcells. Leaving was not going to be that simple for the coach, but it was probably best for him to leave anyway. He wasn’t happy with the organization, and it wasn’t happy with him. The season had been filled with bizarre messages, both overt and subtle, and this topped all of them. Each member of Parcells’s coaching staff probably had his own threshold moment, a moment when he realized that the season was actually a nonfootball weekly drama.

  “I don’t know if I could really put my finger on it,” Belichick says now of the ’96 season. “I mean, there were times when things would look okay, and there were times when it would look hopeless. And yet, there could be some fluctuation in there. I think two events really stick out.”

  One was Terry Glenn. The rookie receiver didn’t like to fly, especially when the weather was bad. He was uncomfortable flying with the team to New York and was looking for Parcells to talk to him about it. “So Charlie [Weis] brought him to me because he couldn’t find Bill,” Belichick says. “We couldn’t find Bill because Bill had left. He didn’t want to fly. And he wound up disciplining Terry for the same thing the head coach was doing. So it’s hard to show consistency there.”

  The second event was Super Bowl XXXI. The Patriots were going to be facing the Green Bay Packers and league MVP Brett Favre. They were double-digit underdogs. But the intriguing stories were not about stopping Favre and blocking defensive lineman Reggie White. The Parcells story was the story.

  “Yeah, I’d say it was a little bit of a distraction all the way around,” Belichick says. “I can tell you firsthand, there was a lot of stuff going on prior to the game. I mean, him talking to other teams. He was trying to make up his mind about what he wanted to do. Which, honestly, I felt totally inappropriate. How many chances do you get to play for the Super Bowl? Tell them to get back to you in a couple of days. I’m not saying it was disrespectful to me, but it was in terms of the overall commitment to the team.”

  The Patriots were staying at the New Orleans Marriott. According to Parcells’s telephone records, there wasn’t a lot of long-distance restraint in the Big Easy. His bill showed dozens of itemized phone calls to Hempstead, New York, the administrative home of the New York Jets. Kraft had his suspicions about the Jets and was convinced that Parcells already had a deal in place with them. The phone calls to New York—which were either brazen or thoughtless, given that the Patriots could view all their employees’ records—were proof that something unusual was happening.

  “It was a very, very strange time,” Jonathan says. “And when you’re not an expert at this business—you know we were still very new to the business—it can be educational. Big Bill had kept us in the dark on a lot of things. He probably misled us on some things. And we didn’t know how to go about questioning it.”

  Nothing could be done to save the relationship—if it could be called that—between Parcells and the Krafts. It was over. Even without the stories and distractions, it was going to be hard for the Patriots to defeat the Packers. With everything that happened leading up to the game, it didn’t seem wise to anticipate a New England win. This was nothing like the conference championship, when Kraft and Parcells could argue before the game and compliment one another afterward. That game was in the wintry comfort of Foxboro, against a team, Jacksonville, that was coming off an upset of Denver at home.

  In Louisiana the Patriots were facing a Green Bay team that had scored the most points in the league and had given up the fewest. The Packers were better. They won the game, 35–21. It was competitive the entire evening, but the championship was secured on a dynamic sequence in the third quarter. Kickoff returner Desmond Howard ran 99 yards through the New England special teams and wound up with the game’s final touchdown. It was both punctuation and puncture.

  Robert Kraft left New Orleans knowing that he wouldn’t be picking up a ring. Jonathan left wondering about the step his family would take next. Belichick, the coaches, and the players left with the understanding that Parcells would be officially off the clock. “Not flying back after the Super Bowl kind of—it sent a message to the team that probably wasn’t a good one,” Belichick says. “It was clear there were big issues brewing.” Given his relationship with Kraft, Belichick was an early candidate. The Patriots wanted to hire him, and everything they saw told them that they should have hired him. Belichick would have been the perfect choice for the Patriots in February 1997. How many examples did Robert and Jonathan need to convince them?

  The team’s defensive backs would come up to Robert, unsolicited, telling him how talented their position coach was. Kraft would press them for specifics, and they would shake their heads and answer, simply, that he had a knack for telling them what would happen before it happened. He was a good teacher, someone who could teach you the proper way to jam at the line without being overwhelmed yourself. He was a craftsman, deft with small touches that you didn’t notice until you had seen someone else try the same thing with less care.

  Robert remembered the conversations. He remembered Belichick talking about the new NFL that the 1994 collective bargaining agreement had created. Under the system, Belichick theorized, a smartly managed team would be able to compete for playoff positions and, ultimately, championships each season. Jonathan remembered their conversations outside of fitness centers on the road and the weight room at home. It would be five or six in the morning. “And we’d sit and we’d talk for an hour. And he just— he clearly got it. It was certainly different than talking to Bill Parcells and Pete Carroll. It was on another plane, another dimension.�
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  And it was Belichick who would say of Robert, “He has outstanding business sense. In today’s game it helps the coach so much to have a resource like that. By virtue of someone with a business mind like his being around us, it helps the coaches coach, helps people manage others, and that translates to results on the field.”

  But they didn’t hire him. They couldn’t. How do you experience what they had with Parcells and then hire someone who has known him and been associated with him for more than a decade? The question held no weight instinctively, because Belichick’s candidacy felt right. Logically, though, they kept coming back to this: they had known Belichick for several months, and Belichick had known Parcells for several years.

  There was also bitterness. Jets-Patriots was a nasty rivalry on its own. Now it had elements of Auburn-Alabama and Michigan–Ohio State. They were competing in the same division, for the same ring, with some of the same players and coaches. The Patriots would have to compete without Belichick. After the whir of compensation, hiring, and organizational reordering, this is how everything looked:

  Belichick and Parcells (along with Weis and Romeo Crennel) were in New York

  Former Jets coach Pete Carroll, who had been the defensive coordinator with the 49ers, was the new man in Foxboro

  Bobby Grier was in charge of New England’s personnel department

  The Patriots, a young team fresh from a Super Bowl loss, were stocked with extra draft picks from a division rival.

  The atmosphere may have seemed calm, but the Patriots had already begun declining. They didn’t have unity in their management team, and that set the fractious tone for what would happen on the field. Carroll was a fine defensive coach, one who would eventually turn the University of Southern California program into one of the best in college football. But he was not the right hire for the Patriots. He was a nice man. He played the piano. He believed in the power of positive thinking and often talked about mind over matter. He was smart and decent. Yet his players could see the ceiling on his power. With Parcells, there was no compassion committee anywhere else in football operations. You had a problem? You dealt with him or you didn’t play. In the new Patriot hierarchy, Grier found the players and Carroll coached them.

  “I never heard people complain about his Xs and Os. I think people thought he actually knew the game of football,” Jonathan says. “But beyond that, you know, as a manager of people—which is what a coach has to be too— he didn’t know how to manage people. He would have been a good schoolteacher. He is a good teacher. A good teacher, not a good manager.”

  Carroll was the face of the post-Parcells Foxboro, even though he had just a fraction of Parcells’s influence. He went 10–6 in his first season. He saved his job in his second year by going 9–7 and making the play-offs, despite a late-season injury to quarterback Drew Bledsoe. After Carroll went 8–8 in 1999, he lost his job, and so did Grier.

  The organization was going to have to start over, but not over in the sense of the days before Robert Kraft. Technologically, the Krafts had an advanced organization. They had a vibrant website and a full-color weekly newspaper. They had good contracts—and contacts—with local television and radio stations. They were clever and conscientious marketers. They didn’t have their new stadium yet, but they did have plans to build a privately financed facility for $325 million.

  They also did not have the economist, the coach they should have hired in 1997. They knew they had to hire Belichick this time, and they knew they were the ones who were going to have to come up with the compensation. Coming up with the right package was just as difficult as talking about what the package would be; the Jets and Patriots were hostile neighbors. In the early stages of the talks to bring Belichick to New England, Steve Gutman of the Jets and Andy Wasynczuk of the Patriots did the negotiating. Jonathan Kraft was not going to speak to Parcells, and Robert talked with him only when the compensation package had been agreed to and approved by the league. Once they hired Belichick, the Krafts knew they could get what they had dreamed of back in 1988, when Robert Kraft outbid Victor Kiam by $6 million and plucked Foxboro Stadium out of bankruptcy court. Kiam had called the stadium a “pig” in ’89, and he was probably right—aesthetically. But Kraft had outbid him because he knew the stadium was the key to Patriot survival: you couldn’t, as Kiam did, buy the team without the stadium and do well. Kraft knew that when things were right, his organization would not have repulsive scandals, as it did in ’86 and ’90. He knew that one day a disappointing season would be defined strictly in football terms.

  “This used to be a laughingstock,” Jonathan says now in his stadium office. There is a flat-screen television turned to a financial channel. There are photos of recent exuberance just around the corner. In another room there is a Lombardi Trophy. “We had to prove to people you could give us your confidence, your trust, your money. No one ever wanted to invest confidence, passion, trust, time, money in the Patriots because they were going to be let down. Someone was going to do something stupid. The organization wasn’t going to commit the resources. It wouldn’t have been worth it. Well, we wanted to make it worth our resources to the general public. And that’s what we did externally, and that’s what we told our marketing department. And we said to the football side: ‘We want to compete every year. How do we go about creating a system to do that?’ ”

  In 2000 they knew the answers would lie in the hiring of Bill Belichick. If there was anyone who understood systems, how to apply them, and how to hire personnel to execute them, it was him. The fighting between the Jets and Patriots almost prevented it from happening. Robert Kraft was aware that he might need a backup plan if Belichick couldn’t be released from his New York contract, so the owner traveled all the way to Palm Beach Country Club to secretly meet with an alternative candidate. He interviewed Butch Davis, who was then the head coach at the University of Miami. Davis intrigued him enough to earn a second interview. He took a private jet to Boston and checked into a hotel under an assumed name. The pursuit of Davis ended when the relationship between the Jets and Patriots softened enough to make a deal. The Patriots gave the Jets three draft choices, including a first-rounder in 2000, and the Jets freed the coach from his contract.

  The twenty-four-day New England–New York episode was over. It had begun with Belichick scrawling his resignation on a piece of paper—he wrote that he was resigning as “HC of the NYJ”—and it had ended, technically, with the professional phone call between Kraft and Parcells. But it really wasn’t over for anyone. The arguments, accusations, and stalemates had elicited emotions and thoughts that couldn’t be easily reversed. Some relationships, like the one between Belichick and Parcells, would never be the same. Parcells would stay in the New York front office and Belichick would travel to New England and work for Kraft again. Soon Belichick would reconnect with old Patriots and introduce himself to new ones. He would shake hands, meet with heads of departments, and heads of businesses. There was an office in Foxboro waiting for him. He was going to need to fill that office with his football knowledge, his economic sensibility, and a symbolic hard hat. He had some rebuilding to do.

  CHAPTER 3

  TOM BRADY AND THE

  RECONSTRUCTION

  One of the best things about February 14, 2000, was the clarity it brought to Bill Belichick and his new employer, the New England Patriots. It was a switch from the first three weeks of the year, when nothing had been clear for either the coach or the organization. Belichick hadn’t been sure if he could win his professional and psychological freedom from the New York Jets. Now that he had, he was rewarded with what could be best described as strange love.

  It was Valentine’s Day—Drew Bledsoe’s birthday, ironically—and there was a piece of paper on the coach’s desk spelling out the Patriots’ depth chart in black and white. On this day the good news and bad news were the same for Belichick: this was his team now. It was exciting. And depressing. There had been hours of commentary on the public breakup of
Bill Parcells and Belichick, but a larger point was often overlooked: the Patriots were terrible, in more ways than most people knew.

  The roster was uneven, flecked with veterans too close to the end and young players who were never going to meet projections. The offensive line was made up of twenty-two-year-old Damien Woody and four players—Max Lane, Derrick Fletcher, Todd Rucci, and Zefross Moss—on their way out of the NFL. In 1996 and 1997 the team had received six additional draft picks as compensation for losing Parcells and running back Curtis Martin, who was signed by the Jets as a restricted free agent. Five of those six picks were wasted on below-average players who combined to play 129 NFL games. Just one of the picks, running back Robert Edwards, was a good player. But after rushing for 1,115 yards in his rookie season, Edwards completely tore three ligaments in his left knee and partially tore another during a rookie flag-football game—on the beach—as part of the Pro Bowl festivities in Hawaii. His victory was avoiding an amputation and being able to walk without a limp. He would return to football, but he wouldn’t be as skilled.