Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  “All he wants is perfection,” says Ryan, who is now the defensive coordinator of the Oakland Raiders. “If you can give him perfection, you’ll be all right. He wants it as close as you can get. And he knows what you have to give.”

  Some of the coaches are less tolerant of their own imperfections than Belichick himself. Once during training camp there was a scheduling miscommunication that led to strength-and-conditioning coach Woicik arriving late for a practice. Belichick understood that it wasn’t Woicick’s fault, but the strength coach was torn up about it. He showed up at Belichick’s office and tried to pay a fine. But the coach, knowing Woicik’s thoroughness, wouldn’t accept it.

  On Saturdays, sometimes the coaches arrive in the conference room before Belichick does. The conversation is often light and humorous, with the coaches teasing each other about their picks in the office college football pool or a loss by someone’s alma mater. When Belichick approaches and walks toward the head of the long conference table, it’s as if the judge has entered the courtroom. He rarely jokes in these meetings. Most of the humor comes from comments he makes in the context of player or game evaluation. He is not easily pleased, and neither are they. He goes around the room and gets final status reports from Crennel, Weis, Woicik, and special-teams coach Brad Seely. He misses nothing—weather, officials, inactives, what’s at stake.

  At the December 7 meeting, the Patriots were 7–5 and seeking their fifth win in six weeks. They would play Drew Bledsoe and the Buffalo Bills—for the second time that season—the next day at Gillette. After a four-game losing streak, the Patriots were now beginning to climb toward the top of the AFC East standings. They had ended their skid a month earlier in Buffalo, winning 38–7. A few days before the November 3 Buffalo game, Belichick sensed two issues that could cause the slide to continue: selfishness and too much focus on Bledsoe. He touched on both in an October 28 team meeting, leaving no doubts about his position on both subjects.

  “We need to have everybody together on this team. Now, there’s not one person in this room—not one—who can’t improve. And it starts with me. I’ll sit down with any of you and show you where you can improve. Any of you. Okay? So all of us can be better and need to be better. That’s where your focus needs to be: what can you do better to help this football team? There’s not going to be any toleration for ‘I’m doing my job, someone else can do theirs better.’ Well, maybe they can. But all of us need to do a better fuckin’ job too. So let’s start with that and move forward.”

  This season was frustrating him, on the field and in the meetings. He questioned himself several times, wondering if he and his staff had properly prepared the players. Were they giving them things that they couldn’t handle? Were they making themselves clear? After the team’s fourth consecutive loss, 24–16 against Denver, a dejected Belichick had retreated to his office and had a long conversation with Scott Pioli. The team had warts, sure, and some of them couldn’t be corrected until the off-season. But other things—attitude and communication—could be fixed before training camp of 2003. He wanted to make that clear in the October meeting.

  “You’ve got three choices,” he continued. “Talk about yourself, either say something constructive or be supportive. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. Okay? Shut the fuck up. We don’t need anything other than one of those three options. Either you get better, you support someone else who is trying to get better, or you have a constructive suggestion that will help this football team. If it will help, we’d all love to hear it. Otherwise, shut the fuck up, all right? And let’s look in a positive direction. Everybody understand that? That’s the only way it’s going to work, fellas. Stick together as a team, support each other as a team.”

  He knew his trade of Bledsoe would be reprised and analyzed all week. He knew that there were still pockets of Bledsoe supporters, inside the organization and out.

  “Obviously there’s going to be some extracurricular activity this week as far as press and the media and TV and everybody else talking about a lot of other shit besides the game itself. Let’s cut right to the chase: I’m responsible for making personnel decisions on this team. I made them two years ago, I made them last year, I make them this year, and I’ll make them next year. So if there’s any personnel decision made on this team, ultimately I’m the one who is going to be responsible for it. You guys aren’t making them. You guys really don’t have any input into making them. So just refer everything to me and stay out of it…. Don’t worry about last year or last week or the off-season. Don’t worry about any of that shit. If I have to answer it, I’ll answer it. You guys don’t have to worry about that. It wasn’t your decision, it’s not your job, and it’s really not anything that you need to concentrate on.”

  They went to Buffalo later in the week and began Sunday afternoon by scoring the game’s first 17 points. They led 31–7 after three quarters and were never threatened. As one of the team buses cruised away from the stadium and toward the airport, Mangini looked out the window and saw debris strewn in the parking lots and the last fires simmering from tailgaters’ grills. “It looks like one of those scenes from the end of a war,” he said.

  Back in the Sheraton a month later, it is time to approach Buffalo again. If New England can win the game, it will make the Patriots’ record against the Bills 5–1 since 2000.

  “Until they have some success against us, there’s got to be some doubt,” Belichick says to the coaches. “They don’t know if they can beat us.”

  He asks Woicik about defensive lineman Rick Lyle, and Woicik says he plans to work him out before the game. He asks about the health of safety Tebucky Jones, and he is assured that Jones will be ready to play. He goes over the list of possible inactives, and he asks Weis if he has a strong opinion on either going into the game with an eighth lineman or going with seven and making tight end Cam Cleeland active. “I’m indifferent,” Weis says. He decides to activate Cleeland and leave Greg Randall, Tom Ashworth, and Russ Hochstein inactive. He says the team had a good week of practice, and he wants to see if Buffalo can sustain an eight- to ten-play drive.

  No one is animated during these rundowns, no matter how strong the statements are. The coaches are dressed casually, but the room has the spirit of a business meeting. There have been elements of game-plan review during the week, but this is the only time when it all comes together for everyone to see and hear. This is the time to remind everyone that the Patriots must throw on the Buffalo safeties and break tackles in the secondary. There is a note to “throw deep or deeper routes on Clements (not 10- to 12- yard routes unless pressed).” Clements is cornerback Nate Clements, whom the offensive coaches believe to be vulnerable deep. They have also noticed that the Buffalo safeties bite hard on play-action passes.

  They are comfortable with the way they plan to defend Bledsoe. And they have a grasp of what the Bills are going to attempt against them. Buffalo’s primary defensive coverage is “Cover 8.” The Bills’ safeties line up 9 to 12 yards deep and rotate on the snap. They make it difficult for teams to detect any pre-snap rotation. The weak safety and weak corner line up even and then rotate on the snap. It is mentioned that last year Buffalo’s approach played as “Cover 8 Weak Sky.” There are six single-spaced pages of notes on the Bills. It is up to the Cabinet to reduce its detailed information into digestible points that players can remember when they are on the field trying to control Bledsoe and jam Peerless Price and Eric Moulds. Each coach brings his own twist and own experience to getting the message across. The beauty and measure of temporary relief comes on Sunday evenings, when the message has been received and the game has been won.

  Winning Sundays are the most quiet and satisfying moments of the week. They are quiet because, for those wearing headsets, the loud voice traffic in their heads is gone. They don’t realize how much noise is there until they remove the headsets and no longer feel the rush of competition, intensified by the desires of 70,000 fans. During the game the coordinators are receiving information
from the coaches in the box: down and distance, formation, their sense of what the other team is going to attempt to do. The coordinators then take that information and make a quick decision on what the call will be, relaying it either to quarterback Tom Brady, if you’re Weis, or to the defensive players on the field, if you’re Crennel.

  “It’s the competition,” Crennel says. “It’s the crowd— although you try to tune the crowd out. It’s the challenge and excitement of ‘Okay, it’s third-and-8. What is this guy going to call? What am I going to call? Can I make the play? Can my guys make the play and get off the field? And can we do it enough to win the game?’ ” Sometimes Belichick’s deep voice can be heard over the headsets: “Good call.” He watches the game and makes decisions when his authority is needed. If he sees something developing, he’ll tell his coordinators so it can be reflected in their calls. His mission is always to subtly lift the field, like a man lifting a car hood, so opponents will be slightly off balance and never quite right as they try to sustain drives. He is so relentless with study and preparation because of game day. What good is it if he sees it and no one else does? He wants them all to see it. He would actually prefer that his players make their own adjustments on the sideline instead of watching the game.

  Pioli does watch the game. He is upstairs in the coaching box, a box too small to contain the competitive zeal of men who define their professional success by what happens on the field. For them, there are no throwaway plays. Every call on both sides of the ball was carefully selected, their response to something they see or anticipate seeing from the other team. There is never a moment of impulse: no one ever shouts into the headsets, “Hell, let’s just throw it deep.” A few times during the game a team will come out in a formation that is not part of its usual package. “I smell shit, RAC,” Ryan will warn. “Look out for a trick here.”

  Often, Belichick will be buzzed during the game. It will be Ernie Adams, who is intensely watching—with head- sets—from the coaches’ box. “Bill, I’m expecting some kind of pressure here,” Adams will say. Or he’ll review a controversial call and handicap the coach’s chances of success on a challenge. “A catch is defined as firm grasp and control, and he doesn’t have it,” Adams will report. “Let’s challenge this one.”

  The manic NFL coaching atmosphere tends to attract smart risk-takers who love the mixture of physical and intellectual competition. It is like that in New England and in other cities throughout the league. The average NFL team is a storefront propped before the public, with a range of activity going on in backrooms. Assistants and staff members who will not be featured in media reports lead these activities, which are sometimes as basic as listening to venting or making runs to the airport. What makes the leaders of Patriots football operations different from heads of some companies is the value they place on jobs that have no glamour. They truly respect those who do grunt work, so much so that they are willing to promote them if they show the aptitude to be promoted.

  Belichick is trying to construct a meritocracy where no one is placed in a categorical box and chained there for the rest of his coaching career. He looks at his own start in coaching, with little pay and not even a piece of glory in black and white. (In the official Colts history, he is not listed on the coaches’ page.) If others are willing to take a similar path, without whining about it, he knows he has someone special. That’s why he has so much confidence during his coaches’ meetings and during games: hard workers surround him.

  In Woicik he knows he has someone who takes all assignments seriously. Before each game officials ask Belichick who his “get-back coach” is. It is Woicik. The get-back coach is the one who makes sure players are not too close to the sideline. The first time Belichick gave Woicik the job, Woicik was so into it that Belichick said he had never seen anyone do it better. The strength coach also impressed him when he arrived for his job interview with detailed charts and presentations. Woicik has a thick booklet for the Patriots’ off- season program. It includes everything from his pyramid of physical success—skill, movement, power, strength, conditioning, flexibility—to his attention to nutrition and recovery. Players reading Woicik’s manual never lack information. He even includes grocery lists and fat analyses of food from fast-food chains McDonald’s, Burger King, Dairy Queen, KFC, and Taco Bell.

  In Crennel, Belichick sees a man who chased football in Kentucky, Texas, Georgia, and Mississippi. He was at Ole Miss just sixteen years after James Meredith became the first black student to integrate the Oxford campus. Crennel, who is black, talked with his wife before taking the Ole Miss job. She said she’d be willing to give it a try.

  “Probably the biggest thing that made you wonder was the Rebel flag and the Klan and all that,” he says. “But if you were helping their team to win, even though they might have some of those vices in the back of their minds, they’d choose to forget about it for a little while. My experience in Mississippi was not a bad one, because the people I dealt with wanted to be helpful.” Crennel went from Ole Miss to Georgia Tech, and from Georgia Tech to the New York Giants.

  While in New York, Crennel, Belichick, and Weis all worked together. Weis was a Giants coaching assistant in 1990, nine years after Crennel began there. He had been a head coach in high school and an assistant coach in college before going to New York. Weis remembers a conversation he had with Belichick in ’90, the week before a November 18 game with the Lions. Detroit was on its way to scoring the fifth-most points in the NFL, and Weis told Belichick he had some ideas about the team’s run-and-shoot offense. “Let’s hear them,” Belichick said. Weis told him what he knew. The Giants won the game 20–0, limiting the Lions to 208 total yards. Weis says he never forgot how gracious it was of Belichick to mention him—an assistant to the assistants—when speaking with the media afterward.

  Brady says Weis’s creativity and toughness inspire him. “Charlie goes through surgery where he almost died, and he’s back trying to coach us,” Brady marvels. The coach had gastric bypass surgery in the summer of 2002. He thought the procedure was going to be an uncomplicated one, but he came so close to death, owing to excessive internal bleeding, that he was twice given last rites. He remembers waking up in the hospital and seeing Brady in his room.

  It was Brady who also said that he enjoyed playing football because it was an opportunity for him to be around like-minded “high achievers” who love the game. It’s the same with the coaching staff. Some of them, like Davidson, Pepper Johnson, and Markus Paul, played in the NFL. Others, such as Belichick, Weis, and Ivan Fears, did not. The link is that they are high achievers, immersed in a scrupulous culture of winning.

  On December 8, a windy Sunday in Foxboro, the Patriots prepared for Bledsoe’s return to New England. The quarterback was a well-liked player in the region, and he gained new fans on his way to Buffalo. Before leaving, he placed full-page ads in both the Boston Globe and the Boston Herald, thanking local fans for their support. The fact that he was traded was not a surprise; the fact that he went to Buffalo was startling.

  The Patriots were willing to risk trading a former Pro Bowl player to a team in their own division. They were willing to trade him to a team with an offensive coordinator, Kevin Gilbride, who enjoyed long passes as much as Bledsoe did. The Bills had Moulds and Price, two receivers on their way to 1,200-yard seasons. It appeared to be a good match. The Bills had a record of 6–6, trailing the Patriots by one game in the division. They had beaten Miami the previous week, 38–21.

  Mangini, the Patriots defensive backs coach, was ready for the return. Before the game in Buffalo, he had given his players a sheet outlining the Bills’ passing principles. Some of the same rules applied a month later:

  This offense is built on vertical routes and big plays. The coordinator is pass-oriented, and Drew wants to throw the ball down the field.

  We must force Drew to throw into tight coverage or hold the football. Do not give up any easy completions.

  There will be some game-plan formati
ons, but they will be limited. They have not run any bunch or stacked receivers this season.

  The Bills will run their two-minute offense anywhere on the field.

  There has been no shifting and very little motion. What you see is pretty much what it will be.

  As the coaches had discussed the night before, Woicik had indeed worked out Jones and declared him ready to play. So that would help Mangini’s unit as well. Victor Green would start, but Jones would be able to contribute. He would soon be in position to make one of the best plays of the game.

  When it was time to play, Bledsoe stepped on the field to a nice ovation. It was respectful and a bit restrained, a collective tip of the cap but nothing too indulgent. It was the nicest thing that would happen to him all day. He and his teammates couldn’t get into a flow at all. They appeared to have a 27-yard completion to the New England 15, but an illegal motion penalty wiped it out and they were forced to punt. They were still in the game in the first quarter, even though they were down 10–0, when Bledsoe threw a pass that was intercepted by lineman Richard Seymour. Two plays later, Brady threw a 9-yard touchdown pass to receiver Donald Hayes.

  Seventeen to nothing. Now Bledsoe was really playing into the Patriots’ hands, because he was going to have to do what they expected anyway: throw it long. They were ready for him. He was able to prove Belichick wrong in one sense. He was able to end the first quarter and begin the second with a long drive, a drive that exceeded eight to ten plays. He was able to lead a fourteen-play drive from his own 9 all the way to the New England 1. But on second down, he dropped back to pass and tried to force the ball into coverage. Jones was watching him the whole time, anticipating the throw. The ball was thrown for tight end Dave Moore, but it was a poor throw and a poor decision. Jones intercepted it. The Patriots converted the turnover into 3 points, and now it was a matter of running out the clock.