Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  A few of them questioned the toughness of Patrick Pass, who could play on special teams and at fullback. “This guy gets a hangnail and you think you have to call the mortuary. He’s dead,” said Brad Seely, the special-teams coach. Weis said there were lots of phrases for guys—coach-killer, enigma—and all of them described Pass. “The only thing in his defense—and believe me, I can’t stand the mother- fucker—is that the quarterbacks like him. They ask me, ‘What about Pass?’ I don’t know why.”

  Belichick jumped in with an idea: “Let’s try to run him off and see if he responds to that.” Ernie Adams said Pass was a good guy to make an example of and that it was time to ship him out.

  The strongest reaction of the day shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. The subject was defense, and Belichick had a real problem with some of the comments about line- backer Ula Tuitele. The problem was that the comments were positive and Belichick didn’t want to hear it. You could tell that he was on edge and that this wasn’t about Tuitele as much as it was desperation to improve a defense that couldn’t defend itself. This wasn’t about Tuitele as much as it was a late response to Pepper Johnson’s comment that Larry Izzo had the potential to be “a Bill Romanowski–type player.” Izzo was a Pro Bowler on special teams; Romanowski was one of the top “SAM” or strong- side linebackers in the league. “That’s a reach,” Belichick had told Johnson. Now he had to hear several coaches praise Tuitele. It was too much for him to handle.

  “I don’t know if we’re seeing the same guy,” he said. He asked Josh McDaniels to turn out the lights. He went to the Pinnacle system, a computerized library that contains every play that a coach can dream of watching. If you want to see all the team’s plays that begin from the left hash mark on third down, you can do it. The system helps keep track of trends—percentage of plays run left, right, and up the middle—and it helps a coach better understand a player’s strengths. Belichick wanted McDaniels to show some clips of Tuitele. What he saw didn’t impress him. “The guy is slow as shit,” he said. “I don’t see how we get faster on defense with guys like this on the field. He wasn’t blocked. He just can’t run.” There was going to be a twenty-minute break coming up, because now Belichick was about to explode: “I’m tired of thinking our team is good against Detroit, Buffalo’s horseshit offensive line, and Philly’s third-string offense. I don’t give a fuck about that. We’re one of the bottom five teams defensively in the league. We suck at stopping the run. We’re bad in the red area. And we can’t get off the field on third down.”

  It was time for that break. No one needed to guess where the Patriots would be looking in free agency and the draft.

  CHAPTER 9

  FINDING THE

  MISSING PIECES

  There aren’t many people who better understand Belichick than Scott Pioli. This is what happens when your boss doubles as a best friend: you know when he is venting, and you know when he truly wants something drastic to happen. You know when he is being reasonable, and you know when he is being unfair because of a bad day. You know some of his football catchphrases like “That’s not what we’re looking for” and “It doesn’t get any worse than that” and “Look at this ass- hole” (which is sometimes intended as a compliment).

  Pioli has seen Belichick’s growth as a father, husband, manager, and coach. If Pioli were given 20 random questions and told to answer them as Belichick might, he wouldn’t embarrass himself with his responses. He knew, without it being said, that his department would have to have its best year. He and his scouts were going to be reshaping the infrastructure of the team. They were going to be evaluating players and recommending that the Patriots either draft or sign some of them. As a friend, Pioli knew how much the 9–7 season had hurt Belichick. As an employee, he knew he was going to have to do something to prevent the hurt from recurring. So when Pioli enters the second-floor conference room and listens to the opinions of his scouts, he is carefully considering every point. He is an intense listener and note-taker. There are times when the scouts are reading their early draft reports aloud and they glance at Pioli to see if he has any reaction. For a moment they are all back in junior high, trying to satisfy a teacher with a probing eye and a red pen.

  Pioli usually is at the front of the room for these sessions. He sits in a black chair, tilting and listening. He has copies of their reports in binders, and his pens and highlighters are not far away. Away from here, his jokes are always good and his one-liners come as often as blinks. (Nancy Meier, a personnel administrator who has been with the Patriots since the mid-1970s, says Pioli’s wit reminds her of a former New England coach. That coach happens to be Pioli’s father-in-law, Bill Parcells.) Away from here, he has been known to ask younger members of his department about slang, wanting to know the difference between “bling-bling” and “ice.” But this place—which morphs into the draft room for one weekend each April—is where he often points out inconsistencies, oversights, and sloppiness. He circles in red and writes, “What are you saying?” or “What does this mean?” or “This is weak.”

  It is not always about wanting to be right—he will be the first to tell you that he shouldn’t have pushed for the signing of Eric Bjornson or the drafting of Jabari Holloway. For Pioli, it is about being thorough so that his department can hold up its end of the deal with Belichick. The coach wants players who can fit in or adjust to his system. Pioli is responsible for making sure his men know what that system is, can communicate in that system, can make comparisons to other players who have been or are in the system, and can ultimately recommend players who might replenish the system and reject those who don’t.

  Belichick didn’t have a winning record for four of his five seasons in Cleveland. Although several factors contributed to the mediocrity—inheriting an awful team in the pre–free agency era and the unprecedented distraction of an owner moving a franchise during the season—poor drafts and poor signings were part of the problem as well. Pioli witnessed it himself. In his midtwenties then, he was there with Belichick in the early 1990s, a Browns employee with little money—he wouldn’t order cable TV because it was too expensive—and no authority. He saw the way low-character, high-maintenance players could deplete a team. He saw how a low-performing team could turn a city and organization against you. Because of that, he understood why no one really stops thinking about security in this business. Moments after the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI in New Orleans, Pioli and his wife lay on their bed in the Fairmont Hotel. As a raucous party began in the Imperial Ballroom, Dallas Pioli looked at her husband and said, “We’re safe for another year.”

  He agreed. It’s not like a championship is worth a lifetime of grace and immunity. This is part of the reason mistakes haunt him, even though he can walk down the hallway and see photos and mementos of Super Bowl bliss. Some people have photographic memories. Pioli’s memory is a leather-bound photo album, going all the way back to Little League in Washingtonville, New York, in 1972. He played for a team called the Royals then, and their record was 2–13. The losses upset him so much that his parents threatened to remove him from the league. He still doesn’t lose well. It is yet another thing he and Belichick have in common. They don’t put their feet on tables and reflect on their greatness. They are analysts, stalking themselves for loopholes and weaknesses. When they find them, especially in retrospect, they want to perform autopsies on the errors so they won’t happen again.

  In the Jabari Holloway case, for example, Pioli says he should have trusted his instincts. The tight end from Notre Dame made him nervous as soon as Pioli found out why he was late for practice.

  Chemistry class.

  “By your senior year, football had better be a priority if you’re going to be an NFL player,” he says. “And I don’t care about chemistry labs. You know what? You can come back and get your grades. To me that explained that something larger was going on. That there were other things in life clearly more important than football. He could have done it some other way where
it didn’t interfere with his football. That bothered me.”

  The Patriots drafted Holloway with their second fourth- round pick in the spring of 2001. He didn’t last long. The team drafted a tight end, Daniel Graham, in the first round in 2002. Holloway was released and signed by the Houston Texans.

  This is how a segment of the Patriots’ program works. It is driven by a concept that is rare not only in sports but in American society. The idea, in a country full of social and entertainment options, is that the obligations of the job— and devotion to and mastery of the job—are an employee’s top priority. The Patriots are attempting to stack their roster with productive players who either think that way now or are on the cusp of a conversion. They don’t want to be paternalistic figures asking their players, “Did you put in extra film time?” They want the kind of players who want to do it without being asked.

  “I’m looking at it from an employer’s standpoint,” Pioli says. “What else is this player going to have in his life that’s more important than football, other than a chemistry lab? I can’t always put my values onto people. But here is what I know: my job is to find players for a head coach who wants football to be the most important thing in their worlds. I believe in it.

  “I miss time with my family, my wife. Bill misses time with his children. Not that football is more important, but we’ve got a job to do. Football is going to pay a kid a minimum of $200,000 or $225,000 a year as soon as he gets out of college. There’s summer courses to pick up grades; there’s the spring semester.”

  Pioli’s opinions, like Belichick’s, are so clear and blunt that there’s little if any room for misunderstandings. In fact, it’s written in the manual that all scouts must have a clear opinion. Neutrality or passive-aggressiveness can get you fired. You actually get credit when you logically disagree with the boss. “I want them to know their opinion is important,” says Pioli. “As a matter of fact, it’s so important that part of the evaluation of you is going to be whether or not you have one.”

  Pioli isn’t the only one who realizes what is at stake prior to the 2003 draft. His scouts do as well, and they don’t lack opinions. They talk for hours so they can come to some agreement on a player. They talk about every aspect of a player, from his body type to his favorite movie. They have conversations about wide butts, big butts, high cuts, large thighs, barrel chests, big bones, and stiff hips. Scout Jake Hallum describes a player as having a “wood hauler’s ass”—which is good. One former Patriots scout, Jason Licht, describes a player as being “stiffer than a wedding dick”—which is not good.

  They talk about diets: “I’m telling you, Scott. This kid has always had poor eating habits. This kid has a sensitive stomach. I don’t know if you’ve talked to his people.”

  They talk about lifestyles: “In reference to his marijuana use, I’m positive that he has used in the past. …I knowthat football is important to this guy. I don’t think he’s a dumb kid. We were talking about football, and he seemed to have a pretty good grasp of it. He doesn’t really care about school; he wants to be a football player.”

  They talk about character: “He’s a book-smart guy. He had some accountability problems early in his career with his classes and labs and stuff like that. He wouldn’t call over and let ’em know what was going on. So he would be late for stuff, but they got all that straight. And he hasn’t had a problem since.”

  One floor above the cafeteria, they talk about the prospects who might replace a few players who are eating below: “As far as Marc Edwards goes, I don’t think this kid has the versatility that Edwards has in our system. I know that Charlie [Weis] likes to split him out a little bit and leak him into the flat. I thought this kid was a little too stiff to be able to do that. I do think he’s a draftable guy, and I think he could help us in our running game.”

  They talk about their own waffling: “You know, I guess as we move along here we’re going to have to nut up here and decide.”

  Pioli has no problems staying objective in most of these discussions, but sometimes he lends his personal experiences to balance the arguments. The characterization of one player as “aloof” and “not overly bright” gets his attention.

  “Are the people at the school saying he’s not smart?” he asks. “The guy’s got a 22 test, which isn’t bad. Is it just because he’s—”

  “No, no,” the scout interrupts. “Mathematically he’s okay. But he has no communication skills. He’s not a communicating type, but he can pick up numbers. So—”

  “This guy goes five years of school and gets in trouble one time. I’m saying, let’s not kill him on that. Let’s not ignore it, but let’s not kill him on it. The other thing is, he’s a Detroit kid. Let’s not kill him because of the way he speaks either. Do you remember A. P. in 1992?”

  “A. P.” is Anthony Pleasant, a player who may not have become an All-Pro but who had a significant impact on Pioli personally. Pleasant grew up in Century, Florida, a classic one-stoplight town on the Florida-Alabama border. He went to college at Tennessee State, arriving there as a six- foot-five-inch, 208-pound defensive end. Pioli understands that if someone chooses to focus on or be distracted by Pleasant’s deep southern accent, that person is missing a gem. He understands that the Pleasant story has to be a part of scouting because the Patriots’ type of player can’t be based purely on numbers.

  The scouting manual emphasizes leadership in some areas. How many players would be confident enough to gather all the black players around him in training camp and say, “Do you hear white guys calling themselves ‘honkies’? No. So why do we call each other ‘niggas’? When are we gonna grow up? There ain’t nothing positive about that word at all. From now on, we ain’t gonna have that word used in here no more.”

  Pleasant did that with the Patriots and got immediate results.

  Ten years earlier, in 1994, he began to change the way Pioli thought about spirituality. The Browns were returning from a December trip to Dallas. Pioli noticed that Pleasant was reading the Bible, and the men began to converse about it. They talked about creation versus evolution and the big bang theory. This went on for the remainder of that trip and several times afterward. Pioli would pose philosophical questions to Pleasant, and Pleasant would give spiritual answers. If Pioli stumped him on something, Pleasant would research and return with an answer that satisfied him. Eventually Pioli went to church with Pleasant. Toward the end of the service the preacher made an altar call, inviting anyone to come forward for individualized prayer.

  “The first time that happened, he said he just got in a cold sweat,” Pleasant says. “You know, he said he couldn’t move. He came back another Sunday, and he said, ‘I’m going up this time.’ He went, and I could see how relieved he was. Now, I hope he can have an impact on this organization. I hope he will continue to grow and not be ashamed of his faith.”

  Scout discussions can go on for at least eight hours a day during some of the draft meetings. And it’s not like these scouts aren’t used to long days. All of them have sat in offices for hours, watching film. They have been on the road for two weeks at a time, football drifters who absorb as much information as they can before moving on to State College or Lincoln or Corvallis. The best ones have developed sources at each stop. They chat with head coaches as well as cops. They pay attention to strength coaches, trainers, graduate assistants, and third- and fourth-stringers who watch the stars when the stars may be oblivious to them. They often check into their hotels at eight or nine P.M. They power their laptops shortly after that, catching up on reports that will be sent back to Foxboro. If they had time to hold court in sports bars, they’d be the brainiacs of any joint in the country. That’s the case for dozens of scouts around the league. A few of them who work for one of the national services—National Football Scouting and Blesto— are amused at draft time. They can see their verbatim reports in football magazines because, presumably, one among them has sold the reports to an agent.

  The Patriots are on
e of four teams with no affiliation to either National or Blesto. Their scouts are supposed to have the football skills to recognize talent and the journalistic skills to find untold stories. They are respectful and relentless when they are on the nation’s campuses. They play by a school’s rules, but they are resourceful enough to find the answers they need.

  “Let’s say you and I are scouting and we’re at Virginia today,” says Licht, who was a trusted Patriots’ evaluator until he left for Philadelphia after the 2003 draft. “You might be close friends with the defensive backs coach. He’s going to tell you things that he’s not going to tell me. So I’m going to try to dig to get that information. But in the end I know he’s not telling me the whole …he’s not lying, but he’s not telling me what I want to hear. He’s not addressing some of the concerns I have. My job as a scout is to find it out. Whether that’s trying to take you out for drinks, getting it out of you that way. Or giving you something so you give me something back. Every scout has his own little way of doing it.”

  Bobby Grier, who hired Licht in 1999, oversaw the Patriots’ scouting system before Pioli did. Grier made nine first- and second-round draft picks between 1997 and 1999. Just one of the nine picks, Kevin Faulk, is still with the team. The Patriots began to rot in those years, from their talent to their salary cap to their spirit. Grier and former head coach Pete Carroll—a pair who did not vacation together on Nantucket as Pioli and Belichick do—took the brunt of the blame and lost their jobs because of it. Their scouting philosophy was different from this one.

  “Your balls weren’t on the line if a guy didn’t make it,” Licht says. “It was clear that the scouts were telling them who the players were and they were going to make the decisions. Bill and Scott make the decisions now. But your balls are on the line if you say a player isn’t going to be a problem off the field. If he is, then it’s your fault. You’re responsible for the players the Patriots draft. You’re not responsible for how players turn out somewhere else.