Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  How could you have those talents and watch those talents and not be affected?

  He briefly thought of leaving Michigan and transferring to Cal, the school most people expected him to attend after high school. But the challenge, or the need, of getting to the top of that depth chart was far greater than the urge to go back home and play. People were too caught up in appearances. They didn’t understand that this place, the anti-California, was home now. He was going to play at Michigan. It was another competition, climbing that chart, and thus another opportunity for him to get a win. All he had to do was make everyone see it and get it.

  Michigan coaches and others saw some of it when they recruited him, but not as much as they should have. On national signing day, when the country’s championship contenders beam over their rising stars, the Wolverines got credit for securing four players among the nation’s top 100. Brady was obviously good, just not mentioned with those four: Daydrion Taylor, Josh Williams, and two athletes who could seemingly play any sport in the world, Tai Streets and Charles Woodson. Streets once long-jumped twenty-three feet and seven inches in high school. Woodson was a record-setting running back, Mr. Ohio from nearby Fremont, who had it all. But he wanted to be something new in college, so he decided to be a defensive back. Just like that. And he was immediately an impact player. It’s supposed to be a hard game, but those guys and their supreme adaptability made you wonder. Brady’s athleticism seemed quiet next to those outsized two, and so it went for the rest of his time in Ann Arbor.

  With all the things happening on campus, it would have been intolerable for Brady if he lacked a sense of humor. He enjoyed pranks as much as anyone, even though if you traced the anatomy of his jokes, there seemed to be a lesson for the good of the group. He and buddy Aaron Shea once got hours of entertainment at the expense of brash teammate David Terrell. They called the receiver, pretending to be reporters from a fictitious Michigan paper, the Brighton Bee. In the course of their mock interview, they managed to be put on hold several times by the player and they also got Terrell to quickly acknowledge that one of his big goals at school was to win the Heisman. The kicker: It was just his first week on campus. The message, if they had chosen to share it with the rest of the team, was to stay humble. But they laughed so hard at the outrageousness of the interview that they couldn’t share its contents with anyone but themselves.

  At quarterback, Michigan always seemed to be looking for something else. Even when Brady took over the job and won his teammates’ trust by being named a captain, head coach Lloyd Carr and his staff had roving eyes. Brady was a winner and a good athlete. The coaches seemed to view “winner” all wrong, as if it were a pejorative linked to “limited” or “unathletic.” There was a sense that good athletes weren’t enough; they wanted athletes who wouldn’t be out of place in the Olympics. That’s how Brady, despite a 20-5 record as a starter, wound up sharing time with a highly recruited Michigan native named Drew Henson. Henson was viewed as a serious two-sport threat, football and baseball, while Brady, who had technically come to Michigan with the same credentials, was… well, all Brady had done was win.

  If the presence of Henson didn’t undermine Brady as a captain, it crushed his stature in the job market at the end of his Michigan career. He played his final college game two days before Pete Carroll was fired by the Patriots, and it was one of his best. He passed for 369 yards and four touchdowns, and he helped his team overcome two 14-point deficits on the way to an Orange Bowl win over Alabama.

  There were some commonsense hints in that game and others that, at the very least, suggested that Brady wouldn’t embarrass himself in the NFL. His teams won in college, and he was a respected leader on those winning teams. The scouts said he was skinny, which was true. He was twenty-two years old and college skinny, a condition that could be cured easily with consistent meals, training, and rest. He was smart and composed in any situation, whether it was taking a sack or an unspoken slight from the coaching staff. His hands were unusually large, and fitting for a former baseball catcher, he was adept at securing the ball when it was anywhere near him. This was not going to be a high-turnover quarterback in the pros. Finally, there was the weather. He had passed the weekly tests of playing in some bad-weather towns, from Hoosier country in Bloomington, Indiana, to Happy Valley in State College, Pennsylvania. He wasn’t a polished pro yet, but all the elements were in place for exactly that, which made him a prospect in whom a team would be wise to invest.

  Shortly before the 2000 NFL draft, he temporarily moved to Metairie, a New Orleans suburb, so he could work on his body and impress the experts. As it was, they were more impressed with some of his roommates and training partners. Corey Simon, Adrian Klemm, and Tee Martin were all there with him, with the pull of the French Quarter testing their collective self-restraint. Simon, from Florida State, was being discussed as a top 10 selection. Klemm, a Los Angeles native who ambitiously went to the University of Hawaii, was optimistic about being called late in the first round or early in the second. Martin, a Tennessee quarterback, had a higher ceiling than Brady, and therefore was targeted between rounds three and four.

  The best news for Brady actually happened 1,500 miles away in Massachusetts, and it was described in a brief Boston Herald article. Belichick had hired a new quarterbacks coach for the Patriots and, as the story highlighted, the coach had picked “a veteran NFL assistant who’s never before coached quarterbacks.” The coach’s name was Dick Rehbein. He had played some college ball himself, at center. While he didn’t have the perspective of someone who had played quarterback, he was often the quarterback of the offensive line. Even better, he was an informed outsider. He had coached for fifteen years, but analyzing quarterbacks was new to him. He’d bring fresh eyes to the job. He was hired eight weeks before the draft, and there was plenty of work to do. One of his assignments from Belichick was to study college quarterbacks and find one who could potentially back up Patriots starter Drew Bledsoe.

  On April 16, 2000, the second day of the draft (as well as Belichick’s forty-eighth birthday), many selections had unfolded as planned. Simon went sixth overall to the Eagles. Klemm, the kid whose wardrobe had consisted of flip-flops and surfer shorts in Honolulu, was going to need some winter boots and a parka now. The Patriots called his name in the second round. Martin, who followed Peyton Manning at Tennessee and won a national championship, was expected to go shortly after Klemm. But the next quarterback taken, Gio Carmazzi, was the embodiment of the road less traveled. As in, the Long Island Expressway and Hofstra. That was a long way from Martin’s prestigious Southeastern Conference, but the draft could be funny that way. He slid all the way to the fifth round and went to the Steelers.

  Brady was watching it all in California with his parents. Once again, there was a sizable gap between the way Brady viewed himself and the way professional evaluators like Belichick viewed him. The same thing happened to Joe Montana. Well, almost. He was also a great college player who had to wait for someone to verbalize what he already knew: He could play. But Montana had gone in the third round. The Bradys had watched the third round pass hours ago. They got some joy in the fourth round when a couple of Michigan guys, Shea and Josh Williams, one of those top 100 recruits from freshman year, went off the board. In the fifth round, there was a smile for Martin. At the beginning of the sixth round now, two men who had never met, Belichick and Brady, were thousands of miles apart, going through various anxieties.

  For Brady, it was a matter of being drafted before all the selections were exhausted. He hadn’t made the top 100 players as he entered college; it was officially worse on the exit because the arrow was on pick 167 and his phone still hadn’t rung. For Belichick, now three months into the job, the reality was sinking in. His new team stunk. It was the unfortunate kind, too, when the public thinks you’re a couple of players away from being good and the truth is that most of the roster needs to be on a curbside.

  Belichick had managed to re-sign those talented vetera
ns, Troy Brown and Tedy Bruschi, but the team needed much more than that. It needed everything except a quarterback. Bledsoe was twenty-eight and had already been to three Pro Bowls. The general sense in New England was that he needed help, not competition for his job.

  At pick 177, Dhani Jones, another Michigan player, was drafted by the Giants. Those player reunions in Ann Arbor were going to be something. All of Brady’s old teammates could talk about the NFL and Brady could ask them about their insurance. The thought had crossed his mind. He was a college graduate, and he was going to need a job. If not football, premiums. Luckily for Brady, the new quarterbacks coach in New England, Rehbein, had a few things going for him. He was wildly respected by his boss; he had been remarkably thorough in his first quarterbacks analysis; and he loved what he saw from Tom Brady. As a result, Brady’s name and draft grade practically shouted from the whiteboard in the Patriots’ war room. He was clearly the best remaining talent.

  The economist, Belichick, weighed the team’s needs and resources. He was trying to extract the team from financial mismanagement, and the Patriots needed cheap talent to fill out roster spots. He reluctantly passed on Brady at 187, instead taking Antwan Harris, a defensive back from Virginia with sprinter’s speed.

  Just to add more intrigue to Brady’s already dramatic Sunday, the two picks before him weren’t players he played with. This time they were opponents, from Michigan State and Iowa. In this prank, God was on the phone and Brady played the role of the unsuspecting David Terrell. Come on, now. Who else was going to have his name called before the starting quarterback of the fifth-best team in the country heard his?

  There was an uproar on the West Coast, similar to a Montana-to-Rice celebration, when Brady was drafted by the Patriots at pick 199. It was the perfect Brady pick because no one could quite explain it. It was a compensatory selection that the Patriots had received as a result of NFL math, in which the league distributes bonus choices based on a value formula of players who left via free agency. Someone’s New England departure created a slot for Brady, but no one is sure whose. That didn’t dampen the celebration in the Bay Area, and it didn’t cause much of a reaction in the quiet New England war room.

  Belichick hadn’t run his own draft in five years, and he was much more focused now than he was then. He had a vision for what his team in New England was going to be, and he had talked about it so passionately with his staff that the conversations flipped the calendar. A Saturday night could easily become a Sunday morning, with the main topic being organizational dreams. The new quarterback, Brady, could have added valuable insight to their conversations because his favorite childhood team is who the Patriots wanted to be. Belichick and his staff loved the rhythmic drumbeat of the 49ers, winning year after year. Some years they were the favorite to win it all, some years there were a few teams better, but in all years they were championship threats. Always. It was that way for nearly two decades. It was exactly the idea Belichick had for himself and everyone who played and worked for him.

  They would be that one day, Belichick thought. The modern-day 49ers. They were a long way from that when they called Brady’s name at 199. At number 201, the Patriots selected a defensive end who would become one of Brady’s roommates. Soon after that, the team signed a local free agent, a tight end, who would also live with Brady. The quarterback had gotten a step closer to the pros, and he and his new housemates would have plenty to discuss at dinner. They had barely entered the league, through the back door. They weren’t expected to stay for long.

  CHAPTER TWO

  A NEW WAY OF DOING BUSINESS

  As Bill Belichick prepared for work on April 17, 2000, one day after directing his first draft in five years, he was aware of something that ran counter to everything he believed in as a coach. He was rushing.

  Here he was, nearly five months into the year, and he still hadn’t taken the necessary deep dive into the Patriots, piece by piece. He was normally the guy who loved homework, so much so that when he finished, he’d find even more to devour. But not now. There wasn’t enough time.

  He had spent most of January trying to free himself from his contract with the New York Jets. He had tried to do it first through a subversive press conference, in which he was supposed to be accepting the head coaching job but instead scrawled a desperate note of resignation/escape. “I resign as HC of the NYJ” was how he coded it. Next he threw himself at the mercy of the commissioner, and then the courts, failing both times until he finally landed in New England when his old boss came to a token truce with his new one. Bill Parcells agreed to trade Belichick to the Patriots as long as Robert Kraft included a first-round pick in the 2000 draft. February felt like a month of errands and catch-up. Hire new coaches. Hire new scouts. Re-sign players. Go to the scouting combine, heavily relying on information from scouts you don’t know and haven’t trained.

  March was a monthlong cram for the test. By draft day, normally, he’d have had a handle on everyone’s story.

  On April 17, when everyone took an early assessment of how great their draft weekends had gone, there were a couple of truths that football insiders didn’t even try to debate. One was that the Patriots had done an okay job on their draft homework. The other was that the Jets had gotten straight A’s. The Patriots’ closest and most hated rival entered the draft with four first-round picks, which was the most first-round capital in league history. They selected two defensive ends, a tight end, and, all the experts agreed, the draft’s best available quarterback in Chad Pennington from Marshall University.

  Will McDonough, the legendary Boston Globe columnist and close friend of Parcells’s, captured the spirit of the day in a column entitled MASTER STROKES FROM GROH AND THE JETS. Parcells was still the Jets’ general manager, and he had turned to longtime assistant Al Groh to coach the team when Belichick very publicly displayed his defiance. Groh recapped the Jets’ plum draft choice with McDonough.

  “At the start of the day we didn’t figure on taking Pennington,” Groh said. “On our board we had him going to Pittsburgh in the eight spot, which would let Plaxico Burress [Michigan State wide receiver] drop to us. But they took Burress, and when Pennington was still on the board at eighteen, his value was just too great to let go. Teams try for five or six years to get a quarterback this highly regarded, so we took him for the future.”

  In yet another Globe article on the same day, New Englanders were told exactly what they didn’t want to hear: The New Yorkers, under the leadership of sure Hall of Famer Parcells, had done well. Parts of the article by football columnist Ron Borges downright taunted. “Sorry, Patriots fans,” it read, “the Jets did some damage.” There was another reference to Pennington and how his selection gave the Jets “possession of the only signal-caller who should have been in the first round this year.” Locally and nationally, the mentions of Tom Brady were dismissive. Borges’s and the Globe’s competition, Kevin Mannix at the crosstown Herald, found the selection of Brady incomprehensible: “With one of their three picks in the sixth round, the Patriots took Michigan quarterback Tom Brady. So what’s with that? Why another quarterback? The Patriots already have their franchise starter in Drew Bledsoe, a proven veteran backup in John Friesz, and a young developmental player in Michael Bishop.”

  This wasn’t Michigan, just the professional version of it in Massachusetts. He was once again Tommy Anonymous.

  Pennington was being lauded as a smart quarterback who didn’t have superior arm strength. The same label had been attached to Brady. Pennington’s passing statistics were gaudier, and his team had finished undefeated. But he was reading the defenses of Northern Illinois and Liberty and Western Michigan, earning a destination, the Motor City Bowl, that would get a Michigan coach fired if he wound up there more than once. Brady had just completed a season in which Notre Dame, Ohio State, and Alabama were on the schedule. His team had finished fifth in the country, and there was a sense of disappointment because it wasn’t first.

  All things consid
ered, he had dominated his opponents equal to the way Pennington had done his. But when it was time to pick… You could spin yourself into a dozen philosophical circles trying to understand the nature of the draft and the visions of the people who conducted it.

  If the newest Patriots quarterback had been paying attention to the reports, he would have taken the advice given to many borderline talents, which is to rent and not buy. But what fun was that?

  He needed a place to live, and so did Dave Nugent, a Purdue defensive end whom the Patriots drafted two slots after Brady. Chris Eitzmann, an undrafted tight end from Harvard, was also a friend of theirs who needed a better housing situation. Technically, Eitzmann resided in a lovely Canton, Massachusetts, home. The reality was that the home belonged to one of his classmates’ parents, and Eitzmann was living in the basement. Luckily for the three rookies, there was a condominium available in Franklin, about twenty minutes from Foxboro.

  The place, located at 9 Cherrywood Lane, had been in the Patriots family for several years. It was originally bought by Scott Zolak, Bledsoe’s former backup, in 1993. It had over two thousand square feet, a couple of bedrooms, a nice basement, and a shared wall that often led an elderly couple next door to call the police in music-volume disputes with Zolak. Two years after buying the place, Zolak sold it to the team’s first-round draft pick, cornerback Ty Law.