Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  A pattern of financial mismanagement had settled in at Foxboro as well: the team was more than $10 million over the salary cap. Suddenly the Patriots were developing the tag of other unfortunate franchises: they were overpaying for a lack of production (Lane, Rucci) and unwilling or unable to be creative as productive players (Martin, Tom Tupa, Otis Smith) went to the Jets. It was not surprising to Belichick that as he took the job two of his best players— Tedy Bruschi and Troy Brown—were unsigned.

  As bad as the contract situation appeared to be, there was something worse. The Patriots were a divided team, a tiny nation of fiefdoms. That was true of the locker room, and it was true of the coach–general manager relationship. Pete Carroll and Bobby Grier did not present a united front, and the players knew it. If some of them couldn’t get what they wanted from Carroll, they were not above turning to Grier to see what he thought. The Patriots lacked leadership and knew nothing of meritocracy. Theirs was a culture of entitlement and preferential treatment.

  Given all of the Patriots’ poor qualities, a matchmaker would have never recommended that they go on a date with Belichick. He took an economist’s view of spending, and they did not. He believed that the scouting department should be run by one of his best friends, Scott Pioli, and he seemed unconcerned that a rift or power struggle might ever develop between them.

  “Why would it?” he once said. “I can’t do Scott’s job and he can’t do mine. We work perfectly together.”

  He believed in some of the principles of the Naval Academy, where one of the traditions is a classic teamwork exercise. The young midshipmen, or plebes, are required to climb the twenty-one-foot Herndon Monument after it’s been covered with 200 pounds of lard. They are expected to work together to find a way to change a hat atop the oily monument. Once they do that, they shed plebe status and move up a class.

  Belichick also was adamant about his teams being able to bridge any of their racial differences. He was a teenager in the mid-1960s, one decade after the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling. He remembered the tension between some white students at Annapolis High and some black students at Bates High. He saw a lot—certainly not all—of that uneasiness reduced when the high school on Chase Street in Annapolis fully embraced integration and, as a by-product, began producing stronger sports teams.

  Individually, the Patriots had a handful of players who were ready for the commitment that Belichick was going to demand. But the coach knew what this team was collectively when he helped create game plans against it in New York. It wasn’t his type of group, and he began to change that without even realizing it. He began to turn the franchise into a champion early in the spring when he gave quarterbacks coach Dick Rehbein a predraft assignment.

  Belichick told Rehbein the Patriots were planning to select a quarterback who could grow into Bledsoe’s backup. There were two players Belichick had in mind, and he told Rehbein to work out both of them. One of them, Tim Rattay, was in Lafayette, Louisiana. The other, Tom Brady, was in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

  Rehbein went to Louisiana first. He was instantly impressed with what he saw. He told Belichick that the only thing he didn’t like about the six-foot Rattay was that “he’s a little short,” but the ability was undeniable. Rattay played in a spread offense at Louisiana–Lafayette, and he averaged 386 passing yards per game for his college career. Rehbein guessed that, within a year, Rattay would be ready to be a number-two quarterback.

  After his visit to the University of Michigan, Rehbein made another enthusiastic trip home. He liked the Brady kid too, and the kid knew it. When friends asked Brady if he was getting any interest from pro teams, he told them that the Patriots were one of his suitors. Rehbein described him as a winner, a leader with a good attitude. The quarterbacks coach told Belichick that if a decision had to be made between the two, he would give the edge to Brady. Belichick had studied the tapes and felt the same way.

  On April 21, deep into the second day of their first draft with the Patriots, Belichick and Pioli looked at their board. They had already selected Dave Stachelski, Jeff Marriott, and Antwan Harris. Brady was available in the sixth round, at pick number 199, and Belichick stared at his name. “Brady shouldn’t be there,” he said. “He’s too good.”

  He had meant that Brady was good in a relief sense— good enough to fill the role that they had envisioned for him as a backup. He wasn’t thinking of the Brady who grew up admiring Steve Young and Joe Montana. He didn’t think of how much joy Brady had for playing just about anything as a kid in San Mateo, California, where he lived in a neighborhood with sixty kids. One family had nine children in the house, and the folks across the street from the Bradys had six. All of the neighborhood kids would run about playing football, baseball, capture the flag, and hide and seek. Brady was energized by competition. He liked to talk about it, and he liked to be a part of it. When he wasn’t throwing footballs with his right hand, he was trying to hit baseballs as a lefty, just like his favorite players—Wade Boggs, Don Mattingly, and Will Clark.

  The Patriots took Brady at 199 and watched the 49ers take Rattay at 212. It was as if they got a quarterback and the lead foreman of their cleanup crew with one pick. Brady would grow into Bledsoe’s backup, as predicted. But he would quickly outgrow the job.

  Before 2001 it had been eight years since Bill Belichick had had to make a tough quarterback call. Back then, in Cleveland, it wasn’t just a choice of quarterbacks. It was perceived as a cultural statement. Bernie Kosar was one of them, a northeastern Ohioan who wanted to play for the local team. Belichick was seen as the cold outsider, the Browns’ coach who could matter-of-factly say what the fans—and even owner Art Modell—didn’t want to hear. He said that Kosar had “diminishing skills” and that was why he was released midway through the 1993 season.

  “In the end, I just didn’t really feel like it was going to work out,” Belichick recalls. “Even though Vinny [Testaverde] was hurt, I knew he was coming back at some point. It was either deal with the problem or postpone the problem. So after we lost to Denver, Mike Lombardi and I talked to Art. We all sat in the office in the stadium and talked about it. I think we were all in agreement about what had to happen. And then the next day we had a staff meeting and talked about it again. Everybody was in agreement again.”

  So Kosar, from a town just sixty miles east of Cleveland, was loosed. It’s hard to make a bolder move than that.

  “I felt like it was the right thing to do. Here, more than ten years later, I think it’s clear-cut from a football standpoint,” Belichick says. “And I say that respectfully of Bernie, who did everything you would want a football player to do. He worked hard, was smart, understood the game—all those things. I just thought Vinny was a better player.”

  He thought Brady was better than Bledsoe in 2001 too. He had noticed Brady’s leadership qualities during the previous year’s rookie minicamp. If a group task needed to be done—if twenty-five guys needed to be organized—Brady was the one doing the organizing. His coach liked his approach, even when he was a fourth-stringer behind Michael Bishop. Brady often praised Bishop’s arm strength, said he was one of the most talented athletes he’d ever seen, and did some self-scouting of his own. He could learn a lot from Bledsoe, John Friesz, and Bishop. Brady thought he must have been a fourth-string quarterback for good reasons, so more work needed to be done.

  He took football seriously. He knew the playbook well and often imagined himself running the team. He developed a reputation as the hardest worker in the weight room, often causing strength coach Mike Woicik to say, “He works just as hard during the season as he does during the off-season program.” Brady had a leading man’s ability to hold the attention of the audience and a senator’s flair for working the room. He would talk and listen to anyone, regardless of how different they were from him.

  Brady kept pushing the people in front of him. He passed Bishop on the depth chart. At the end of the 2001 training camp he had passed veteran Damon Huard, w
ho had been expected to be the team’s number-two quarterback. Bledsoe did not have a good preseason, but it was going to be hard for Brady to pass him too. Bledsoe had just signed a ten-year, $103 million contract extension. He had become a familiar member of the greater Boston community and a favorite of the Krafts. But the coaches had noticed Brady’s ascent, and Bledsoe’s play early in the ’01 season was making the twenty-four-year-old Brady difficult to ignore.

  After losing their opener to the Bengals, the Patriots played the Jets on September 23 in Foxboro. It was one of Bledsoe’s worst days as a pro. His numbers didn’t dismay the coaches as much as his judgment did. He had a delay- of-game penalty after Belichick and offensive coordinator Charlie Weis had decided to go for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal from the 1. Four minutes apart in the first half, he had an intentional grounding penalty and an interception, both in New York territory. He was costing the team points and field position in what was obviously going to be a close game.

  With five minutes remaining, Bledsoe’s miserable play no longer was the day’s central issue. On a third-down scramble from his 19, Bledsoe moved toward the right sideline. He gained 8 yards and was cleanly and ferociously hit by linebacker Mo Lewis. Bledsoe didn’t know it then, but blood was beginning to leak into his chest cavity. An artery near his rib cage was partially torn, and he had what the team would call a sheared blood vessel. He returned to the game after the Lewis hit, but the pain had worsened. Brady took over in the final two minutes and drove the team to the New York 29 with fourteen seconds left. Four incomplete passes later, the Patriots had lost, 10–3.

  Bledsoe spent four days in Massachusetts General Hospital. A tube was inserted in his chest to remove blood and cycle it back into his circulatory system. When he was sent home on the 27th, he was told he couldn’t do any heavy lifting—carrying his young children included—for two weeks.

  He could attend meetings and help Brady on the job, but he couldn’t practice.

  The Patriots won their first game, on the 30th, against the Colts. They lost the next week in Miami and then came home to beat the Chargers in overtime. They were 2–3, and all along Bledsoe thought Brady was temping in his place. He was wrong for several reasons. Brady was better than Bledsoe thought, and the organization was different from the one he had known for the past three seasons. Under Belichick, all Patriot jobs could be classified as temporary. They were earned and held by performance, not status or longevity. Belichick didn’t go out of his way to antagonize stars, nor did he do anything special to accommodate them. He believed that one trait made all pro athletes equally created.

  “We can talk about money, we can talk about trophies, talk about all that shit, okay? But the thing that means the most to players is to be able to go out there and get on the stage,” Belichick says. “Once you take the stage away from them—whoever it is—they have nothing that can match it. You can talk about all the money they have in the bank, but if they don’t have their self-esteem and their pride, then they don’t have their stage.”

  After the Patriots lost to the Rams on November 18, Bledsoe wanted that stage back. He had been helpful in quarterback meetings and games, dispensing advice to Brady. Now his chest had healed and the doctors had cleared him to be on the field. He wanted to play. And Brady wanted to play. In the past those who were clearly not in his quarterbacking class had always backed up Bledsoe. Once upon a time a faction of New England fans had asked to see Bishop as the starter. It was a request any reasonable fan would like to forget, a low test score that should be mercifully struck from the record. Brady was different. He was a more composed quarterback than Bledsoe, although he lacked his arm strength, experience, and pedigree. There was a fight for a position that talent alone was not going to settle. A judge—in this case Belichick— was going to have to make a ruling.

  “It’s a competitive environment. I sure as hell didn’t want to give up the job,” Brady says. “Part of the reason I was ready then was that the year before I had prepared like I was going to play. I was confident, and the coaches were confident in what I could do.”

  For the fans, Bledsoe versus Brady had turned into Nixon versus Kennedy, circa 1960. It was the major topic on sports radio stations and the question with which the sports pages grappled. There was no predictable chart or grid for Bledsoe or Brady supporters: some husbands liked Bledsoe and some wives liked Brady; some brothers liked Brady and some sisters liked Bledsoe.

  This wasn’t necessarily Belichick’s repeat of the Cleveland Kosar-Testaverde controversy. He wasn’t going to have to cut a popular player. But he was in his second year, rattling a star who had spent nine years as the franchise’s best-paid and most marketed athlete. Belichick’s choice meant that he would have the most talented and most expensive backup quarterback in the NFL. Making the decision would not be a problem. Presenting that decision would turn the situation into an awkward and eventually nasty one. When Belichick did not return the job to Bledsoe or give him an opportunity to win it back with practice reps, Bledsoe interpreted that as the coach lying to him. The charge irked Belichick.

  “I don’t feel like I misled him. I really don’t. You know, that kind of bothered me. I understood his disappointment, I understood he wanted to play, I understood that he was a good competitor. He was a hardworking guy, he had been in the organization a long time, and I respected that. Nobody wanted him to get hurt and miss two months. There was nothing we could do about it. You don’t take a player who hasn’t played in two months and then just stick him back in there like nothing had happened.”

  It was too late. Bledsoe felt that he had been deceived. Belichick says that he offered Bledsoe the chance to get something back, all right: timing, not a job. “I wasn’t talking about him as a starter. I was talking about him at least throwing to guys that he might be throwing to in the game, if he had to play as a backup. Which ultimately happened in the AFC Championship game.”

  It was a long road to Pittsburgh, though. With the unexpected death of Rehbein in the summer of 2001, Belichick had become the quarterbacks coach. He often met with Brady, Bledsoe, and Huard in a small Foxboro Stadium office. It was uncomfortable in there, and not just because the stadium was outdated.

  “I knew he was unhappy,” Brady says of Bledsoe. “It was strained. When Coach Belichick was around, Drew would become quiet and reserved.” Bledsoe was the same way in the team captains’ meetings on Tuesday nights. The meetings were designed so that there could be an exchange between the coaching staff and the players. But the meetings were inadequate for Belichick-Bledsoe. The other captains noticed it and occasionally commented. One of the captains was Bryan Cox, the inimitable linebacker who always carried an extra opinion just in case you didn’t have one of your own. He had also lost his job to injury, but didn’t respond the way Bledsoe did. Of course, Cox brought that up once or twice in the captains’ meetings.

  “You could feel the strain in the relationship all the way around,” Belichick says. “I mean, I met with the quarterbacks every day: myself, Drew, the other two quarterbacks, and Charlie. There is no question that there was discomfort in the room.”

  Outside of the team, Bledsoe’s urban legend began to grow. The popular story was that the quarterback was the opposite of the modern athlete and that he didn’t let his agenda interfere with the overall mission of the team. It wasn’t quite that clean. Bledsoe wasn’t reckless in the office, but it was known how angry he was. He had his problems with Belichick, but he also wasn’t happy with Weis. He did have an outlet for his anger: Woicik’s and Markus Paul’s weight room. In there he became tougher and pushed himself harder than he ever had. Woicik and Paul didn’t find fault with his work habits and attitude. But this was Bledsoe-Brady, where no judgment was unanimous.

  During a staff meeting one of the coaches said of Bledsoe, “His shitty attitude means we have to do one of two things: trade him to the highest bidder [in the off-season] or tell him he’s the starter and Brady will compete with him.”

/>   Brady says Bledsoe was professional with him and never focused on the situation at work. “But it was definitely hard on our personal relationship. Drew and I were friendly, but we were already very different. I was twenty-four and he was twenty-nine. He had a family and I was single. Lots of things. We were never really great social friends.”

  They had a decent working relationship, good enough for the team to make it to the Super Bowl. On the way there, in the AFC Championship game on January 27, 2002, against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Brady sprained his left ankle in the second quarter and was replaced by Bledsoe. The veteran excitedly ran on the field and began whipping passes. He threw a touchdown pass to David Patten and made two difficult completions to Brown and fullback Marc Edwards. He completed 10 of his 21 passes that day for 102 yards. When it was over, he cried.

  As emotional as the Pittsburgh game was—Bledsoe received a game ball—the quarterback was still being evaluated. According to the coaches’ game breakdowns, Bledsoe’s statistics were: one mental error, four bad throws, and four bad choices. The logical counterargument to those unflattering numbers was rust. How could Bledsoe expect to play well when the majority of his reps hadn’t come with the starters? How could he be sharp when he hadn’t played in a game in four months?

  Belichick didn’t view it that way. As much as he respected Bledsoe, he had an idea of what his quarterback should do. The model for that idea was Brady. Brady had shown an ability to stay calm, recognize defensive nuances, and shout out the necessary adjustments for his receivers, backs, and linemen. When he coached against Bledsoe in New York, Belichick would often present the quarterback with a “Cover 5” defense. It features man-to-man coverage with two deep safeties to help on the receivers. Belichick would tell his defensive backs to be physical at the line of scrimmage. Then he would play the educated odds, going with scientific and anecdotal research that revealed Bledsoe would not be accurate enough or patient enough to make the throws that could defeat an effective “Cover 5.”