A few days later Belichick left his Gillette Stadium office for two hours so he could go to Brookline and watch one of his son Brian’s football games at Dexter. As he stood on the sideline, waiting for the boys without jersey numbers and face masks to play the game in its most wholesome form, he was noticed by a few parents. They were respectful, understanding that he was there in his role as “Dad” and not “Coach.” But that safety was irresistible. “Great job in Denver, Coach,” one of the parents said. “What a great finish.” Belichick thanked him, talked with Debby, and shouted out, “Nice tackle, Brian,” when his son—skinny legs poking out from loose-fitting pants—displayed flawless technique on a takedown.
Belichick had spent his bye week checking in on Brian, Stephen, and Amanda. He had done some self-scouting and game-planning as well. As he stood in front of his players in the Gillette Stadium auditorium on the 10th, the first thing he told them was that he hoped they also had been able to relax. He made that statement shortly after one o’clock. And soon after that, the game resumed. It didn’t matter that it was Monday afternoon and the Patriots were scheduled to play the Dallas Cowboys on Sunday night, the 16th. The only people who believe that the games begin on Sunday are the people who watch the games to be entertained. In Foxboro it was time for the business and drama of playing the Cowboys.
It would be the first time Belichick faced Parcells since the longtime colleagues split in January 2000. Both men were storing a lot of emotions, emotions that they were too wise to reveal to the media. They had first worked together in 1981, and that working relationship lasted uninterrupted for a decade. They took a five-year break when Belichick went to Cleveland, but they remained friendly. They picked up again in 1996, and that’s when the first signs of wear started to show, just below the shiny surface. Even before football in New York and New England became a Parcells-Belichick docudrama, Belichick had thought of leading a team again—with no link to Parcells.
The next time, he thought, he would do some things differently. He would want to work for an owner with whom he could communicate, and not someone who was easily swayed by the outside opinion of the day. He would want to have some influence over personnel and have someone he trusted leading the personnel/scouting department. He most certainly would hire someone who could help with media relations, his biggest weakness. He just didn’t pay enough attention to what was being said and written about him and his team. That was good at times because it eliminated distractions, but it could also undermine what he was trying to do because—whether he liked it or not—it was a part of coaching. And in his first shot at being a head coach, he had left that part of the game unattended. He knew he had the perfect candidate for a position that would encompass several aspects of football operations. The Jets had a public relations assistant named Berj Najarian. Najarian was in his late twenties, grew up on Long Island—he attended Manhasset High, which produced Jim Brown—and graduated from Boston University. Belichick quickly noticed three things about Najarian: he was smart, he was even more organized than the coach (which was hard to do), and he seemed to get along easily with everyone.
Belichick had ideas about a staff. He just needed an opportunity. He got it in 2000, even after Parcells’s initial reaction to the Patriots’ request to interview Belichick. The official fax from Foxboro to Hempstead, New York, was sent on January 2, 2000, a couple of minutes after Pete Carroll coached New England to a win over the Ravens. Carroll had asked owner Robert Kraft before the game if it was his last day on the job. It was. So the fax was sent before Carroll began his postgame remarks. When Parcells finally saw the transmission from Massachusetts, he scanned it, crumpled it, and continued the conversation he was having. He resigned as Jets head coach the next day, symbolically and contractually handing the Jet keys to Belichick. They were keys that Belichick didn’t want because he knew Parcells would always be nearby, jangling the master copies.
As Belichick stood before his players in 2003, he told them that the past didn’t matter. He reminded them that there would be a weigh-in the next day and that they were a 7–2 team that needed to be ready for the 7–2 Cowboys. He told them they should know that the Cowboys were leading the league in defense and had 93 more rushing attempts and five more minutes of possession time than their opponents. Well into the meeting he talked about the subject that was going to be topical all week.
Bill versus Bill.
“Don’t get distracted by irrelevant aspects of this game,” he said. “Belichick versus Parcells? We’re both assholes. We started coaching together when some of you were in diapers. The last time we coached together was five years ago. Think about how much has changed in the last five years. What were you doing five years ago and what people were you doing it with? …A lot has changed. What happened five or twenty-five years ago doesn’t really matter. Nothing could be less relevant to this game or more detrimental to our preparation. Don’t get into Belichick versus Parcells. If you want the easy way out, tell them that I won’t let you comment.”
He made a short detour from that subject, because the no-comment allusion reminded him of injuries. If Belichick is asked about his players’ injuries, he tries to guard their confidentiality more than their family doctors might. As much as he likes specificity and certainty in football, he is just the opposite when talking about injuries. He will report the problem area, but in the most general terms allowed. He asked his players not to talk about the injuries to Ted Washington, Richard Seymour, Ted Johnson, or anyone else. “And it goes without saying, we don’t have anything to say—as in nothing—about the play-off race. Nobody knows better than us how quickly things can turn around.”
Then he returned to his course.
“If the media want to hype it, great. I’m taking myself out of it. If they want to make this a soap opera, fine. But it will be without me, RAC, Charlie, Pioli, and everybody else with connections—including some of you. Let’s figure out what we’re going to do about Glover, Ellis, Galloway, Adams, Roy Williams, and Coakley.”
He was right about the cross-pollination. It was as if Parcells used to be governor of a giant state that broke off into northern and southern sections. Romeo Crennel, or RAC, had known Parcells since the 1970s, when they worked together at Texas Tech. Charlie Weis had worked with Parcells as a Giant, Jet, and Patriot. During the 1999 season Parcells had taken away Weis’s play-calling—he didn’t think Weis used the running game enough. There was no shortage of history between New England’s head coach, its coordinators, and Parcells. But no one on the team could claim to have Scott Pioli’s complex association with Parcells.
Pioli and Belichick were friends when Pioli was in college at Central Connecticut and Belichick was the defensive coordinator of the Giants. Pioli worked for Belichick in Cleveland and spent one year in Baltimore when the “Browns” moved there. With the Jets, Pioli and Belichick had a different dynamic. They were great friends, with offices near each other’s, working for the same supervisor. They knew each other’s families, worked out together, and participated in office pools. Sometimes one would be treated to an earful when the boss went off on the other. Between Belichick and Parcells, Pioli plainly had more in common with Belichick—until the day he saw a woman with blond hair walk into Parcells’s office.
Pioli’s question to secretary Linda Leoni—“Who’s the blonde?”—was still echoing when Parcells walked out of his office and asked if Pioli had met his daughter, Dallas. He said he hadn’t, but he was very glad to now. They talked a lot, found out they knew some of the same people, and had similar interests. They dated. They waited for a while before she would tell her dad and he would tell his boss that each was dating someone Parcells knew. Dallas finally told him, while he was driving, and he reacted as if she had said she was seeing a nice young man from down the street. It was clear that they had his blessing.
The dating went well. It went so well that Pioli decided that he was going to have to get on the boss’s calendar for a serious discussion. H
e couldn’t have picked a more hectic day. Parcells was busy, and he wasn’t in a very good mood. But Pioli was determined to talk to him. “This had better be important,” Parcells said. Pioli was deeply in love with Dallas and wanted to marry her. He told her father that in his office. Parcells was quiet for just a moment, and then he reached out and shook the hand of his future son-in-law.
Eventually that son-in-law would travel to New England with Belichick. And eventually, in the middle of November 2003, there would be sixty minutes of gripping nonfiction. The Cowboys and Patriots would play a physically violent game on the field while a lot of unspoken hostilities played out on each sideline. All the elements were there: love, bitterness, respect, regret. Belichick tried to push it all aside on a November afternoon. Let the critics organize the drama. There was a game to win. “Study up on the Cowboys,” he said at the end of the Monday meeting. “I’ll have a few questions later.”
A few questions. Of course, they knew he was understating. On Wednesday he had exactly thirty-two questions about the Cowboys. He randomly went around the room, asking players things they should know about the players they were facing. They did.
Rodney Harrison knew that the Cowboys were more of a play-action than dropback team. The receiving foursome of Givens, Troy Brown, Deion Branch, and Bethel Johnson knew the Cowboys’ four main coverages: “Cover 1,” “Cover 2,” “Cover 4,” and blitz zone. When Antowain Smith was asked, “Which linebacker plays to the 3 technique?” he knew the correct answer was Dexter Coakley. Tedy Bruschi knew that on third-and-7-plus the Cowboys went to max protection. And speaking of protections, Mike Vrabel knew the Cowboys were unlikely to favor seven-man protections rather than six.
This is the implicit agreement between the players and coaches every week: we’re all going to know what we’re doing; we may lose some games, but lack of preparation is an unacceptable reason to fail. That’s why Brady sometimes calls Weis at home, asking about plays that could go in the game plan or telling him that he’s uncomfortable with some that are in there. It’s why Ernie Adams, whose office is a few steps down the hall from Belichick’s, often takes a short walk for strategy meetings with the coach. Adams’s recall is impressive. He references games from all decades and specific plays from those games that might help the Patriots on Sunday. It’s why all the coaches truly become filmmakers as they study the practice tape. They watch the simulated plays in practice and then predict how the opposing team, based on its identified strengths and weaknesses, will react to the plays. “Does he have it?” is a popular question in the darkened room. That usually means a judgment call: there is some skepticism as to whether a play will work or not. Sometimes “Does he have it?” is a more definitive “He doesn’t have it.”
This prodding, rewinding, planning, and practicing goes on for hours. It is aided by instinct, research, and computerized trends on what exactly a team does in a given situation. So, for example, Seymour knew what to expect from the Cowboys when they were in the third-and-1 to third-and-6 range: play-action, bootleg, or quarterback run. It was guesswork to some, but not to the coaches. When Belichick, Crennel, and Al Groh all worked together under Parcells, they could look at formations and shout out the correct plays before they happened. If they missed on five calls in a season, they were angry.
There would be no misses on Sunday. The game plan was not complicated. After their analysis of the Cowboys, the coaches came up with the following reminders for the players:
DEFENSE
Get ahead and take Dallas out of their ball-control offense. Force them to pass to win.
Disguise coverages.
Set edge versus run.
Keep Quincy Carter in pocket.
Be physical, jam, disrupt, and reroute the receivers—especially number 88 (Terry Glenn).
Jam number 20 (Richie Anderson).
No big plays.
OFFENSE
No turnovers.
Control the ball.
Beat man-to-man coverage.
Pick up the blitz.
Block number 59 (Dat Nguyen) on runs.
Third-down conversions.
Belichick told his players not to be distracted by the soap opera, so he literally followed his own advice on Sunday. Television cameras captured him with his back to Parcells during pregame warm-ups. At that time there was no acknowledgment of the man nicknamed “the Tuna.” Earlier in the day Parcells had been visiting Scott and Dallas’s four-month-old daughter, Mia. Now he was trying to guide the surprising Cowboys to another win, a win that would at least guarantee an even 8–8 season.
The Tuna’s former coaches were no dummies. They had put their microscopes on the obvious flaws of his team. They knew they could confuse Carter by mixing three- and four-man fronts. Even if Carter knew what was coming, the Patriots were going to force him to have the most accurate day of his career to win. And if he did those two things, there still was the issue of his running game—the Patriots believed they could stop it too.
Offensively, the Patriots got everything they wanted, and they got it early. Maybe too early, Belichick realized later. The Cowboys blitzed, as the Patriots expected, which meant man-to-man coverage for the receivers. On a third-and-6 play in the second quarter, Brady threw to Givens, and the young receiver ran for 57 yards. That set up a 2-yard touch- down run by Smith, good for a 9–0 Patriots lead. Brady could have picked apart the Dallas blitzes all day, which was why the Cowboys stopped. And that was a problem.
“Our blitz game plan was effective early and led to 9 points,” Belichick explained afterward. “But when Dallas went to coverage, we did not have enough in the passing game to attack them.”
So it became a zone game, and the scoring slowed. There were no problems defensively. Troy Hambrick averaged 2.6 yards per carry, Glenn caught one pass, and Carter had a quarterback rating of 38—20 completions, 37 attempts, 3 interceptions. Just like in the old days, the coaches saw the formations and knew what was coming. One adjustment they did make was checking to zone when the Cowboys receivers came out in tight splits. They made the switch so they wouldn’t get picked on crossing patterns. That situation came up four times during the game.
There was no way the Patriots were going to lose. They knew what was coming, they knew they had the talent to stop what was coming, and they stopped it. Simple. Belichick had some things to quibble with, such as the 10 unassisted tackles by Nguyen, 4 dropped balls, and 33 yards rushing by Carter. But he was happy. His team won, 12–0. He walked to midfield after the game to greet Parcells, and his former boss surprised him with an awkward hug. Belichick walked off the field and wrapped up another game week with an unemotional press conference. This game—with its buildup and context and personalities—wasn’t like all the others. Some observant and mischievous person on Belichick’s staff apparently realized that. When the coach walked through the locker room and into a back office, he saw a small item resting on his desk. It was a stuffed tuna.
With Parcells and the Cowboys off the schedule, there wasn’t going to be any other off-field opponent for the Patriots. Playing the rest of the season would be comparatively easy—at least in terms of concentration. The week after Dallas, on November 23, the Patriots went to Houston and won a game they probably should have lost. Trailing 20–13 with 48 seconds to play, they got a touchdown from Brady to Daniel Graham—on fourth-and-1. In overtime the Texans advanced to the New England 40, apparently inching into field-goal position. But Willie McGinest dropped running back Domanick Davis for a 5-yard loss to take the Texans out of range.
Finally, with forty-one seconds left in overtime, they won the game on Adam Vinatieri’s 28-yard field goal. “There are at least 1,000 ways to win a football game,” Michael Smith wrote in the Boston Globe, “and the New England Patriots obviously intend on sampling every one.”
He was right. They were 9–2, winners of seven consecutive games. They had Harrison, who did for them what Bryan Cox had done in 2001. Cox was the linebacker who had come on the t
eam and earned respect instantly. Harrison was the same way. He was a gentleman during the week. Sometimes reporters would crowd around his locker and try to ask questions at the same time. “Ladies first,” he would say, noticing a female journalist. He would check around the locker room, making sure that players were getting the proper rest and nutrition. “Are you hydrating?” was one of his popular questions. He was one of the players who instituted a fine system for mistakes in games and practices. If coaches made mistakes on calls, they would get fined too. He brought some nastiness to the field. He wanted to make sure that players would remember that the punishment he delivered was different from the average player’s. You couldn’t find the gentleman during the game.
The defense had gone from one of the league’s worst to its best. The Patriots would position now-healthy Ted Washington toward the side of the line where the other team most wanted to run the ball—and the team wouldn’t run the way it wanted to. Washington was also a force in defensive line meetings, making sure that other players knew their assignments and what two or three plays had to be stopped. There were cerebral players at every position. The strong-side linebacker, Mike Vrabel, always surprised the coaches by what he was able to remember and what he had the audacity to say. Vrabel could recite coaching notes—“They’re ninety-two percent run out of this formation”—and still be instinctive enough to make plays. He was funny too. Once Belichick was warning the players about what the media were going to say to the team. “They’re going to come in here and blow smoke up your ass,” the coach was saying. “They’re going to give you blow jobs, tell you how great you are, they’re going to pile it on thick….” He finished talking and looked around the room. Vrabel’s hand was raised. The coach braced himself for some kind of comeback.
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