Patriot Reign

by Michael Holley

  “Yeah, Mike,” Belichick said.

  “What was that you were saying about blow jobs?”

  The whole team laughed. And there was a good combination of laughter and business during the season. Josh McDaniels, one of the coaching assistants, came up with a Friday segment called “bonus cuts.” He would show twenty-five plays that illustrated the key points the players needed to remember. He realized that attention spans were short on Fridays, so he made the package must-see film by adding the bonus cuts at the end of them. Sometimes it was footage of himself and Eric Mangini in high school and Pepper Johnson and Rob Ryan in college. There was a clip from Johnson’s brief announcing career in New York. The anchors went to him on a live shot, and Pepper, seemingly surprised, threw up his hand in front of the camera and said, “Hi, guys.” The players walked around saying that for weeks. They even included the quick wave to sell the joke, a joke that never got old. Later in the season one of the bonus cuts showed a drawling Joe Namath saying to ESPN reporter Suzy Kolber, “I want to kiss you.” That exchange took place in New Jersey, when the Patriots were playing the Jets. The players loved bonus cuts. The three or four times McDaniels didn’t include them at the end of his presentations there would be groans in the auditorium.

  It was turning into a great season for the Patriots. Their defense was reliable and accountable. And now they were on their way to Indianapolis, where, when it mattered most, they wouldn’t relinquish a single yard.

  This is how quickly things can change in professional sports. Over the course of eleven weeks, “The Lawyer Milloy Situation” had become “The Buffalo Game” for the New England Patriots. Whenever anyone got cocky in Foxboro, the response was always, “Remember Buffalo.” There was no mention of the fact that one had helped create the other.

  It was an old topic anyway, and few people referenced it. Too many things had changed. Eugene Wilson, the rookie cornerback, was now playing safety with Harrison. Tyrone Poole, whom his teammates nicknamed “Chompers” (he has large teeth), was playing like a Pro Bowler at the corner opposite of Law. In training camp Poole seemed indifferent about being with the team. A religious man, he said God had cleared his mind and helped him concentrate on football again. And Washington, the defensive tackle who liked to shout out, “Mornin’!” for no apparent reason, was back in the middle of a defense that alternated between three-four and four-three fronts.

  The Patriots were in downtown Indianapolis, preparing to face the 9–2 Colts. They probably would have been favorites if the game had been in Foxboro. But the Colts were in their climate-controlled comfort, and they were averaging 27 points per game. They were going to be tough to stop.

  It wasn’t so tough in the beginning: the Patriots took a 31–10 lead into the third quarter. But then the Colts tied it at 31 in the fourth. New England went ahead on a Deion Branch touchdown, but Mike Vanderjagt’s 29-yard field goal made it 38–34. That’s when the RCA Dome carpet was transformed into a stage, the venue for one of the most dramatic finishes of the season. When the Patriots couldn’t move the ball and had compounded their problems with an 18-yard Ken Walter punt, the Colts had the ball at the New England 48 with 2:57 to play. (Walter was released the next day, after a season of bad punting. During the Patriots’ evaluations in ’02 one of the coaches had suggested that Walter see a sports psychologist.)

  The Colts were moving now, quarterback Peyton Manning pointing and directing at the line of scrimmage. It took Manning two minutes and seventeen seconds to get the Colts to the 2. There were forty seconds left. And if anything justified Belichick’s insistence that the defense had to be better, this was it. This was a stand. The ball was six feet away from the goal line. It was also a measurement of a different kind. This was going to show how far the Patriots had come. It was going to show how study and preparation could aid athletic ability.

  The ball got three feet closer to the goal after one Edgerrin James run, with twenty-four seconds to play. The coaches had called for Harrison to blitz from the edge. But he noticed that the play was heading inside and changed on his own, stopping James’s progress. The Colts tried to run a quick play on second down and sneak James in. But Washington was positioned to the side where the play was to be run, and he was good at splitting the guard-center gap. He led the up-front pushing, and Harrison, Tedy Bruschi, and Wilson stopped James for no gain. There were eighteen seconds left, and it was third down.

  Three feet away.

  Manning called time. The Patriots knew it was going to be a pass, most likely a fade route on Poole. “Smell shit,” Rob Ryan said from the coaches’ box. The Colts were bringing in a rookie receiver, Aaron Moorehead, who hadn’t been a factor all day. Of course, they were going to him. Wilson told Poole that he would help him on the jam, so Moore- head was out of position from the start. The Patriots were ready for the fade, and it sailed out of the end zone.

  Fourth down with fourteen seconds to play and thirty-six inches to defend. The Colts went with James, and McGinest, for the second week in a row, blew up a key play in the backfield. He was able to get there because Washington was in that gap again. If McGinest—who had bluffed a jam and decided to charge instead—hadn’t taken out James, someone else would have gotten him.

  The Patriots won, 38–34. They weren’t a lot better than the teams they played. Sometimes the difference between them and others could be measured in points. Other times it was inches. The wins had begun to take on styles and themes, like the work from your favorite artist. The Patriots were becoming a brand. There was such a thing as a “Patriots’ Guy” and a “Patriots’ Win.” The games were close enough to be dramatic, but physical enough for teams to understand that they weren’t going to win.

  Consecutive win number 9 was the division winner in the snow, 12–0 over the Dolphins. Fans, with at least eighteen inches of it at their feet, made snow confetti when Bruschi scored the lone touchdown. He got into the end zone and fell to his knees, surprised that he had turned the game with a pluck of a Jay Fiedler pass. As “Rock & Roll Part 2” played, the snow flew into the air on each “Hey!” Number 10 was a knockoff snow sequel—the snow came late—over the Jaguars. Eleven was worthy of an off-off- Broadway location—or New Jersey—against the struggling Jets. Number 12 was destined for song or poem, one with the closing line an ironic twist of the first line.

  That’s because number 12 was Buffalo. The Bills were 6–9, incapable of scoring consistently. Bledsoe looked bad, nothing like the quarterback who had commanded so much of New England’s attention in the Bledsoe-Brady debates. Milloy was not a factor. The Bills, statistically, were worse than they had been the previous year.

  They lost to the Patriots two days after Christmas, 31–0. It was a perfect score. Perfect for Jackson, who would occasionally pop up on Belichick’s TV saying, “They love their coach!” Belichick didn’t think it was funny. Why no phone call from Jackson? No letter? No admission staring into the camera, just as he had done on September 14? Belichick wasn’t done with him, and the Patriots weren’t done with the NFL. They were going to the play-offs, with the top seed in the conference throughout. They were going to claim the trophy that they couldn’t even defend one year before. The next time they went into that auditorium, it wasn’t going to be a breakup meeting. They were going to sneak by Tennessee in the cold and beat Indianapolis again, this time in the snow.

  Against Buffalo, they knew they had gained some type of redemption. “The way this season went for us was definitely a shock,” Milloy told Ron Borges of the Boston Globe. “We opened the year beating them 31–0, and now we lose to them by the same score. That puts the exclamation point on the difference between us. I’m ready to go home for a while and just get away from football.”

  Milloy had not finished on top. Financially, yes. But he was going home to get away from football, and his old teammates were headed to Houston to play more of it. For the second time in three years the New England Patriots were going to the Super Bowl.

  CHAPTER 1
3

  PATRIOT REIGN

  REVISITED

  Between the live music and the conversations of six thousand people, it was difficult to hear anyone talking at the dinner table. You could look at the person sitting across from you and attempt to read his lips, but if you wanted to talk without straining, it was best to turn to your immediate left or right. Since that was the story on a Monday night in Houston, Bill Belichick could have made the case that he had the best seat in the house.

  It was January 26, 2004, and Jim Nantz was hosting the first big event of Super Bowl Week at Houston’s Reliant Arena. This was a gala celebrating the city’s most impressive sports stars, a function so heavy with celebrity that the Houston Chronicle correctly noted that Carl Lewis and Hakeem Olajuwon couldn’t make it and the star power of the roster still was not diminished. The roll call sprawled like the six hundred square miles of the city itself, from Bum Phillips and Earl Campbell to Roger Clemens and Nolan Ryan to Rudy Tomjanovich and Moses Malone back to Sheryl Swoopes and Mary Lou Retton. This was “A Houston Salute,” but it was an event for all of Texas: large, colorful, and bold. For those keeping tabs on karma, it was the first clue that the New England Patriots and the Carolina Panthers were six days away from italicizing the NFL’s championship game. Super Bowl XXXVIII, without a doubt.

  So much had changed for Belichick and the Patriots in the two years since they had last played for a title. They were the subjects of pity and condescension then, a group of players expected to aspire to silver medals rather than the silver Lombardi Trophy. But they beat the St. Louis Rams, earned the trophy, and eventually lost their ability to reside on the margins. They were not the anonymous Patriots anymore. They were not the underdogs. They were winners of fourteen games in a row, the second-longest streak in league history. They could no longer take the position of critical outsiders, here to surprise the privileged of their sport. They were the insiders now, and their privilege could be seen in the seating chart for dinner.

  Mark Fredland, Belichick’s friend from high school and college, sat to the coach’s right. George Herbert Walker Bush, the forty-first president of the United States, sat to the coach’s left. (Barbara Bush was sitting at a table with Panthers head coach John Fox.) Patriots owner Robert Kraft sat to the left of Bush, and NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue sat to the left of Kraft. There was no way to downplay it: this table was special. Berj Najarian found that out as he sat across the table and prepared to snap a casual photo of Belichick and President Bush. As soon as Najarian took the picture, he heard disapproving voices: “Hey, hey….”

  Two Secret Service men suddenly approached the table.

  “He’s okay,” Dan Kraft, one of the owner’s four sons, assured them. The agents were at ease again. There is no such thing as casual or private when a president joins you for dinner.

  Bush and Belichick talked about the Massachusetts school they both attended, Phillips Academy in Andover. They remembered that Bush spoke to Belichick’s class— the class of 1971—and that one of the coach’s classmates was a kid from Texas named John Ellis. Yep. John Ellis Bush, also known as “Jeb.” Belichick was impressed with the fullness of the eighty-year-old man’s career. Like Steve Belichick, Bush had been an officer in the Navy. He had been a businessman, a member of the House of Representatives, and director of the CIA. He was now a sportsman, into skydiving and football. He was a Patriots fan who developed a friendship with Robert Kraft in the early 1990s; Bush was even at the first regular-season game at Gillette Stadium in September 2002.

  As he sat at dinner—surrounded by sports, entertainment, and political celebrity—Belichick had no idea that the entire week would unfold like this. There would be more celebrities sitting, standing, and sometimes controversially performing in the vicinity of his team. There would be more coincidence, a trend that ended with their quarterback and kicker reprising the dramatic moments from New Orleans in 2002. There would be surprises, a mild fight with the league, a frightening close call that would have nothing to do with football, and late-night curses for Tom Jackson and Warren Sapp.

  One day after seeing stars at the gala, Belichick was back in a more normal setting. He was having dinner at Houston’s, a few minutes away from the Inter-Continental, the Patriots’ hotel. Fredland and Najarian were there again— Najarian didn’t have a camera this time—along with a few members of the media. Armen Keteyian of CBS, Steve Cohen of WFAN in New York, and Wendi Nix of WHDH-TV in Boston were all able to see a relaxed Belichick cover a number of topics. He is conversant in several areas, so there was no need to cling to football subjects. But with that said, on January 27, Belichick knew exactly what his team needed to do to beat the Panthers. His players felt the same way.

  “I felt like I was ready to play the game on the Sunday we landed in Houston,” Tom Brady says. “We had an extra week of preparation, and it helped. I felt like I was more prepared for that game than any other one of the year.”

  There were some things about the Panthers that concerned Belichick. This was a group that had begun to identify with the Patriots of 2001. They believed they were among the toughest and most overlooked players in the league and had not received their proper due all season. They had won two play-off games on the road, including an NFC Championship game win in which they allowed just 3 points to the Philadelphia Eagles. The perception was that they were a conservative offense that relied on the legs of running back Stephen Davis. But Belichick, Romeo Crennel, and Charlie Weis knew better. They respected Fox, offensive coordinator Dan Henning, and special-teams coach Scott O’Brien, who had been on Belichick’s staff in Cleveland. The Panthers were clever with their offense. They would give the appearance of a pure, empty backfield but remix that look by having a six-man protection scheme. They liked to send receiver Muhsin Muhammad in motion to take advantage of his exceptional blocking. They liked “wide routes” where they would pass to the halfback in the flat and suddenly turn the play into a moving screen. The receiver they’d send deep was Steve Smith, who was effective because he was quick and aggressive enough to escape the jam at the line of scrimmage.

  They didn’t have to be studied and decoded, as the Rams had been two years before. But they were difficult to prepare for because they took the Patriots’ approach: they didn’t make it easy for you; they made you plan for everything.

  The Panthers had one of the most impressive defensive lines in football with Kris Jenkins, Julius Peppers, Brentson Buckner, and Mike Rucker. The foursome allowed Carolina to have defensive depth and range. The Panthers had four versions of “Cover 2” and three versions of “Cover 1.” They blitzed corners, safeties, and linebackers. Sometimes they would sit in a zone and let the pressure come naturally from their line.

  Tampa Bay had played the Panthers twice in the regular season and lost both times. Warren Sapp, a Buccaneers defensive tackle, believed he had seen enough of the Panthers to know what the difference in the game would be. During an interview with Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser of ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption, Sapp said the Panthers’ defensive line would overwhelm the men assigned to protect Brady. He threw in a shot at Patriots guard Russ Hochstein, who would have to start because regular Damien Woody suffered a torn MCL in the divisional play-off win against Tennessee.

  “I don’t even think it’s a fair matchup,” Sapp said. “I don’t see how they’re going to get it done, because I think Russ Hochstein started for them in the AFC Championship game, and I’ve seen Russ Hochstein block, and he couldn’t block either of you two fellas. Damien Woody was the best lineman they had, but Russ Hochstein, trust me, my friend, he couldn’t block either of you two.”

  What Sapp didn’t understand was that the Patriots had planned for this situation, specifically and generally. They knew when and where Carolina was going to try to shoot the gaps, and they were ready to counter it. They would ask tight end Daniel Graham to stay in and help with the blocking on some plays. At other times they were comfortable enough to have a running bac
k pick up the blitz if it came from the weak side. They realized that the back might be, in certain situations, five-foot-eight-inch Kevin Faulk. The assignment wouldn’t be as tough as expected for other reasons too. One was Brady, who could quickly read defenses and change the protection if necessary. “Having Brady is like having Belichick on the field—only Brady has a better arm,” Rob Ryan says. It was also a plus that all of the New England linemen were astute enough to make calls. The job wasn’t just left to the center.

  The larger point, though, was the development program for linemen that the Patriots had written into their scouting manual. It was an outline for those players who weren’t ready to contribute but “may be able to compete within a year with strength and development and intense individual technique refining.”

  Hochstein was not ready to play when he came out of Nebraska, even though he had arrived in Lincoln as a 240- pounder and left as a 295-pound All-American. He still wasn’t ready when Tampa selected him in the fifth round in 2001 and then released him a year later. He wasn’t initially ready for the Patriots or their offensive line coach when he was signed in 2002. Dante Scarnecchia was similar to many coaches on the New England staff. He wanted things done right, and he wanted you to stay until you got it right. In Hochstein’s first year with New England, Scarnecchia didn’t think the guard brought enough vigor to his upper- body training. He called him a “bullshitter in the weight room.”