Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  There are actually written tests—no multiple-choice here—in which players show their position coaches that they have grasped the key points of the week. Prior to the Green Bay game, the quarterbacks were given a six-page test with some of the following questions:

  From the “Under Tom” front, what is their favorite blitz?

  If the Packers play “1 Weak,” on what down and distance can we expect to see it? How do the corners play this coverage?

  The huddle call is “1 T 34 Bob/T39 Boss.” Identify the “Mike” linebacker and explain your procedure.

  When running “R32 Away A Flip” vs. “1 Weak” or “8 Sky,” what should you expect to do with the football?

  The final question—not including the “What year was Bryant Westbrook drafted?” bonus—was, “What will you do this week in order to lead your team to victory?” It may have been on the quarterbacks’ test, but it was understood that the question was for everybody.

  At this Monday meeting, October 14, it is apparent that watching the game tape has annoyed Belichick. He likes to see a correlation between what has been taught and practiced and what happens on the field. He hasn’t seen enough of it. He didn’t see it in San Diego when LaDainian Tomlinson ran for 217 yards, and he didn’t see it the previous day in Foxboro, when Ahman Green ran for 136. The Patriots are 3–3, one of the most penalized teams in the league, and terrible at stopping the run. “You want to sum up the season in one play?” he says. “I’ll tell you what it is: Tim Dwight coming from 15 yards behind Tomlinson, outrunning Tomlinson, knocking our ass out of the way down the sideline, and then Tomlinson goes in for a touchdown. That one play. He’s playing at one speed, at one kind of effort, and we’re playing at another one.”

  Belichick still is several weeks away from a healthy personnel disagreement with defensive backs coach Eric Mangini. He still is several weeks away from conceding—in a production meeting with CBS—that the constant references to and expectations from Super Bowl XXXVI have made this a stressful season for his team. Right now, though, he doesn’t want to talk about the complex psyche of a defending champion.

  “It’s really embarrassing,” he tells the team. “It really is. It’s embarrassing. Can’t hit the snap count. Can’t line up on side. There are fucking holding penalties in the defensive passing game every week for key conversions. There are holding penalties on offense, giving the ball away like we don’t give a shit about it. Just turn it over to ’em. Leave the ball lying on the field there for five seconds while they come from 30 yards away to recover it. It’s just dumb football, fellas.”

  He stands in the front of the room. They sit in black, theater-style seats with cherry-wood desktops swinging from the sides. If this is their movie, he is their unsparing critic. If this is their classroom, he is their hawk of a teacher.

  “I’ll tell you one other thing too,” he says. “I’ve read a couple of comments. Now, I don’t spend a lot of time reading the paper. I really don’t. But I do watch a little about what we say and what we think. I’ve seen a couple comments here, some of the players talking about we need to get our ‘swagger’ back. Our attitude back….” They have been around him long enough to know that he is about to debunk a myth. You can hear it in his pronunciation of the word, the way he spits it out in the light so everyone can see how ridiculous it is.

  “You know what? We didn’t have a ‘swagger’ last year. If you fucking think about it, we didn’t have a swagger. What we had was a sense of urgency, a sense of urgency about playing well, being smart, and capitalizing on every opportunity and situation that came our way….It wasn’t about a fucking swagger. You can take that swagger and shove it up your ass, okay?”

  He is a versatile man, one who can easily navigate the disparate worlds of NPR and rated-R. He attended Phillips Academy, the same prep school as U.S. presidents, Pulitzer Prize winners, Academy Award winners, and the architect who designed Central Park. He attended Wesleyan University, the same college attended by federal judges, directors and writers of popular movies, governors, and a lyricist for the Grateful Dead. He could have wielded power in their worlds, but he always wanted this one. He always wanted to know football as well as his father the coach and to know teaching as well as his mother the language instructor.

  He always wanted to be here, a football answer man at the front of the room. Coaches who have worked with him have acknowledged that much: he either has the answers or knows where to find them quickly. If you listen to what he has to say, if you play it the way he asks you to, you’ll be in position to fulfill the prophecy. He doesn’t see the game in four quarters. He sees it as a series of situations—could be four, could be twelve—where he tries to force the other coaches to declare what they are doing before he declares what he’s doing. That’s part of the plan all week, finding all areas where he can tilt the field so his team has some type of advantage. There is no debate that the other team has strengths. What he and his staff try to deduce is the source of the strength and whether there’s any repetition, so to speak, that makes a team look stronger than it really is.

  If he were interviewing somewhere, he would ace that old standard question, “What do you know about our company?” Oh, only everything. He tries to go to the root of teams, systems, and coordinators. He is looking for obvious trends as well as clever ones. All of that, along with swift recognition of what a team is attempting to do, could be the difference in the game. In his mind, “halftime adjustments” is one of the worst clichés of all. You’re always adjusting, declaring, bluffing. Wait until halftime to do all that and you may be out of it already.

  During the week he takes a private investigator’s approach to Sunday’s game. He is watching tapes, talking on the phone to anyone who may have a morsel of insight, meeting with Ernie, meeting with Scott, meeting with the coaches, meeting with head trainer Jim Whalen, and studying practices and practice tape. He finds time to get on the treadmill, talk with his wife and three children, and grab a Styrofoam bowl of something from the Gillette Stadium cafeteria. It almost doesn’t matter what’s in the bowl. Whatever it is usually has a lot of salt added to it.

  No one questions how much time he puts into this. No one questions how much he sees and remembers. (Talk about a memory: once, in dreary Buffalo, he and Ernie actually tried to count the number of times they’d seen the sun in western New York.) And no one speaks on the rough days when he goes in front of a group of men and tells them what he saw and what he is seeing.

  When he asks right tackle Kenyatta Jones how long he is going to continue to get his ass kicked on a play called “Toss 38 Bob,” everyone knows he is really asking the team the same thing he is asking Jones. It’s one of his best devices. He knows how to craft critiques in such a way that they go from being personal evaluations to collective ones, and suddenly everyone feels accountable.

  “Do we have to see that again next week, and the week after that? When is it going to get fixed? When? When are we going to run ‘Toss 38 Bob’ at least for no gain? Forget about gaining yardage. When are we going to run it at least back to the fucking line of scrimmage?

  “How long is that shit going to take? When are we ever going to see—well, we did see one last week by Givens—but when are we going to see a chip on kickoff coverage? When is that going to happen again? When are we going to chip on coverage, help our teammates out, and free someone up on one of those returns? Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, I don’t know. But the sooner we get that shit fixed, the sooner we start doing it right, the better things will be.”

  He doesn’t leave it like that. He never does. The obscenities are never the last thing the Patriots hear in their meetings. The essence of Belichick is that he is a problem solver. Since he has already clearly identified the problems, he is now here to offer solutions. The solutions are easy to follow. He tells his players he needs to see more effort, more concentration, and more discipline when it comes to doing their jobs. It’s easy. Do what he asks you to do and you’ll
always have a chance.

  On a November afternoon in 2002, Pioli was sitting in his Gillette Stadium office. There were several times during the day when the entire room rattled, as if it were located next to a subway station. The unexpected eruptions—from vehicles passing in a nearby concourse—smothered the music coming from Pioli’s CD player. He was listening to Dave Brubeck, with Miles Davis on standby. Pioli had been on the phone all day.

  One of his first calls was with Lions president Matt Millen. They talked about cornerback Jimmy Hitchcock for a while. The Patriots had released him and the Lions had picked him up. But since Hitchcock failed his physical— “Was it the ACL thing, Matt? When he came out of college, he never had an ACL”—the Lions had let him go too. Pioli told Millen that he’d like to visit with him on Thanksgiving, when the Patriots would be in Detroit. “I know you have some insight and I’d love to hear your thoughts,” Pioli said into the phone. “I’m sure there are some similar battles we’re fighting.”

  The Patriots were 5–5, coming off a 27–20 loss at Oakland. Ten games into the season, their deficiencies were apparent to casual fans and experts alike. They were old. They were slow. They couldn’t stop the run. And they couldn’t help referencing the year before. Pioli was on the phone so much because he was trying to do something to make it better. He had college tapes to view and draft reports to read, yes. But he also had to do something about right now.

  He was trying to work out a deal with agent Brian Levy, who represented a linebacker named Jashon Sykes. Sykes was on the Broncos’ practice squad, which technically made him a free agent. Sykes was twenty-three, stood six feet two inches, and weighed 236 pounds. Pioli thought he could help the Patriots that year and next. He planned to tell Levy that when they talked again, but here was another phone call getting in the way.

  “Let me see what this is all about,” he said. “This is Scott.”

  “Hey, Scott, this is Jason. How you doing?”

  “Good. Thanks, Jason.”

  “Sorry to bother you. Just wanted to bring to your attention. I didn’t know if you guys were looking for a kickoff specialist or not. But I have a kid—”

  “Jason, are you working with someone?”

  “Yeah, sorry about that. I didn’t make that clear to your girl. But J. R. Jenkins—”

  “No interest. We’ve got a full roster. I’m not sure—”

  “But kickoff specialists are so hard to find. I guess Baltimore used him for that purpose—”

  Pioli rolled his eyes. He brought out his sarcastic wit.

  “I guess he can take Deion’s job, huh?” he said, referring to impressive rookie Deion Branch.

  “Yeah? Paying the same money?”

  “I’m sure Deion would love that. People are calling to send us someone to take his job.”

  “Hey, I’m just looking out for my guy.”

  Pioli hung up.

  “I get a hundred calls like that a week. The best is when you’re losing games and they call you and tell you, ‘Yeah, you guys are really struggling. It looks like you need some help on your offensive line.’ I mean, how would you react to that? It’s so insulting.”

  Jason insulted Pioli in many ways, and not just with his football comments. Pioli said he couldn’t do his job without Nancy Meier, who has lived Patriots history since she was nineteen. She is a wife, a mother of two children, and a woman who has seen a whole lot of football.

  “She’s probably been in the league longer than he’s been alive, and he’s saying ‘your girl.’ He was pooping his diapers when she was fricking working in the league.”

  This was yet another sign that the Patriots were not the same team they were in 2001. When you are winning, these phone calls do not come. When your flaws are not obvious, you don’t have Jasons on the periphery, tugging at your coat and telling you to look over here. The calls were reminders that the night in New Orleans, with the colors falling from the top of the Superdome, was from another football time zone. By any measure, 5–5 equals average. On an average day, average teams receive average phone calls.

  “And when we get someone hurt, it’s like pit bulls on pork chop underwear the day after a game. Somebody gets hurt, especially on a national game, my phone’s ringing off the wall. A lot of it is ambulance chasing. I understand.”

  Meier told Pioli that the last flight from Denver to Boston was at 6:20. Theoretically, if Jashon Sykes decided to accept the $9,000 weekly raise that the Patriots were going to offer him, he could throw a few things in a travel bag and hop that 6:20. Sean Gustus, a recent Richmond University graduate who was trying to break into scouting, would pick him up at the airport. Gustus would drop him off at the Residence Inn and then return in the morning. There would be doctors to see, papers to sign, and new coaches and teammates to meet.

  At least that was the plan. When Pioli talked with Sykes, there wasn’t any noticeable excitement in the linebacker’s voice. He attended Colorado University, and the feeling was that if the Broncos put him on their fifty-three-man roster, he would be content to stay in Denver. He didn’t say that, although you could hear it.

  “Why don’t you give Brian a call back and then tell him to give me a call when you decide what you want to do,” Pioli said to Sykes. “There’s a six-twenty flight tonight out of Denver. It’s the last flight getting you into Boston. And we could have you on the practice field tomorrow.”

  “Okay,” Sykes said.

  “All right, so give Brian a holler and give me a call.”

  “I will.”

  He didn’t. Sykes was staying in Denver.

  There are phone calls, draft meetings, contract negotiations, and film studies all folded into Pioli’s job. But what it can be reduced to is this: every day he goes to the office wondering how and where he can find the right kind of players for Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots.

  There is nothing outwardly unusual about the Four Points Sheraton Hotel in Norwood, Massachusetts. It has a “casual upscale” restaurant on the first level, with sports showing on the televisions near the bar. It has a spacious ballroom, which has been the site of numerous class reunions and wedding receptions. On the second floor, at the top of the stairs and to the right, it has a conference room that resembles hundreds of others in the state. But the conference room becomes distinct, at least on several Saturday nights in the fall and early winter. The room becomes the place where 20 men meet and review the plan for the Patriots’ game the next day.

  Many of these men, the members of Bill Belichick’s football Cabinet, could sit among the sports fans at the bar and remain unnoticed for hours. They are assistant coaches, coaching assistants, and members of the support staff. They are officially silent, permitted to speak with the media only on special occasions, yet each of them has control over an aspect of the game and is equally responsible for helping to shape and enforce Patriots policy. Their biggest fear is a team breakdown in general and a breakdown in their department in particular. They work for an organization where accountability is one of the sacred codes: there is no place to hide if things get sloppy. And if sloppiness happens too often, they know that the sympathy card cliché—“We all have bad days at the office; we’ll get ’em tomorrow”— will not console the bosses.

  Romeo Crennel is in charge of the department in which Belichick made his name. Defense. He explains the simple coaching ethos: “When we lose, I always feel like there’s something I did wrong. There’s something I could have done better—there’s a call I should have made to help us. I think if you’re going to survive in this business, you cannot accept losing, you don’t like losing, and you take losses extremely hard. I take losses hard because I have to: if you lose, you’re going to get fired.”

  The coaches—different ages, races, and politics—are as diverse as the routes they took to the NFL.

  One of them, Jeff Davidson, was the starting left tackle who protected John Elway’s blind side in 1991. The Denver Broncos drafted Davidson in the fifth round
in 1990, two rounds before they selected a receiver out of Savannah State named Shannon Sharpe. Another assistant, Rob Ryan, was the only white coach on an all-black staff at a historically black university in Nashville. Ryan used to gas up a 1989 Thunderbird and travel through Georgia and Florida trying to convince young men that there were many academic and athletic reasons to choose a school such as Tennessee State. “And then I’d remind them that the school’s female-to-male ratio was seventeen to one,” he says. One coach, Eric Mangini, is a member of Chi Psi, which makes him Belichick’s fraternity brother. That status didn’t get him any special privileges in Cleveland, where he handed out media notes in the press box and picked up dirty jerseys in the locker room. One worker, Brian Smith, is an avid hip-hop fan and 2004 Providence College honors graduate. He was nicknamed “Reeses” by receivers coach Brian Daboll because “he’s not cool enough to be Eminem.”

  Biology does not make all of them a family; time and aspirations do. When they arrived in Norwood on December 7, 2002, it was the 145th day of their football season. With an exception or two, they had spent all of those days— Thanksgiving included—together. Whether it was at the hotel for seven A.M. coaches’ meetings or at Gillette Stadium for staff meetings in the afternoon, they were always discussing ways to win football games. A few of them are quietly talented strategists themselves, destined to one day lead their own “programs.” Followers of pro teams usually don’t call them programs, but that’s exactly what Belichick is trying to build in New England. He wants coaches and scouts to be developed in the Patriots system, just as players are.

  It’s part of the reason football operations will always have a few young and smart trainees, thirty-and-under football enthusiasts who can come into the company at entry level and be promoted in two or three seasons. Daboll and Josh McDaniels arrived in Foxboro as coaching assistants. Both became position coaches before turning thirty. As a teenager, Smith performed several odd jobs with the Patriots and still found time to excel in his classes. Now he is the team’s director of operations. Nick Caserio was hired as a personnel assistant in 2001 and became an area scout in 2003. They join veterans such as Charlie Weis, Mike Woicik, and Dante Scarnecchia, father of video assistant Steve Scarnecchia. All of them understand what’s expected of them, from the team meetings in Foxboro on Monday afternoons to the coaches’ meetings in Norwood on Saturday nights.