Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  “Half of you guys have never played organized sports at this level or college, and you don’t understand how much damage you can do by just starting a bunch of mess,” Cox lectured. “To get caught up in who’s the guy, that’s taking away from both of those guys. Both of them are very capable, and I won’t get into it and I won’t take sides. Whoever is the starter, I’ll support. Whoever comes off the bench I’ll support. I ain’t feeding into that foolishness.”

  Bledsoe prepared to take a good share of practice repetitions before the game against the Rams on November 18. He was disappointed when he didn’t get as much time as he’d envisioned. He sounded angry and looked hurt when Belichick told him the plan for the rest of the season shortly after a 24–17 loss to St. Louis: He was the backup. Brady was the starter.

  Bledsoe’s return, in part, served as a reminder that there was nothing proprietary about player positions in the league. They were all tenants at will, the head coach included, and the comfortable slot could be flipped at any time for any reason. Belichick didn’t expect the players to understand it while they were playing; in fact, it was probably better that they didn’t think like he did as they prepared for this sport featuring millionaires masquerading as gladiators. Belichick couldn’t be inhibited by fear of criticism, public sentiment, or the uncomfortable moments that hovered during the weekly quarterback meetings.

  Everyone wasn’t going to like him. Bledsoe wasn’t going to like him. But he insisted to Bledsoe, the rest of the team, ownership, and the media that he didn’t make this or any other decision simply for his own enjoyment.

  Belichick was definitive, but the debate was an organism unto itself now. Brady or Bledsoe? You couldn’t straddle. You couldn’t take a long time to answer. You had to pick one. The Herald’s TV reporter, Jim Baker, talked with several ex-players and asked them what they thought.

  Troy Aikman: “Right now, it’s the right decision to stick with Brady. Is he a better quarterback than Bledsoe? I don’t think so.”

  Boomer Esiason: “I have a lot of respect for Drew, but frankly the team was not responding and not playing well under him… in this situation, the way the team has responded to Brady, I’d leave him in.”

  Cris Collinsworth: “Maybe I’m crazy, but I think substitute quarterbacks can have a run and then scouting reports develop, teams start to figure them out, and you get game plans against them. In my heart, Bledsoe will be the guy down the stretch.”

  The best comment of all, though, came from a general manager whom the newspaper quoted anonymously: “If they’re giving Brady the job because Bledsoe isn’t medically ready to play, it makes sense. If they think that Brady gives them a better chance of winning than a healthy Bledsoe, that’s another story. If that’s the case, they’re in trouble. It will be a while before they’ll see the play-offs.”

  Belichick said he sought definition for one position; what he got instead was an entire team growing into its personality. Brady was a fast learner in all quarterbacking matters, and one of the subtle changes he made underlined a message to his teammates. While Bledsoe often drew such a large media crowd that his press conferences were held in a separate room, Brady refused to do it that way. He made a point of standing at his locker, with his peers nearby, to speak with reporters. It wasn’t practical, but it was in line with what the rest of the team was doing. He wanted the other players to always be mindful that he was one of them. That mentality encircled the team.

  “It’s the most fun I ever had playing football,” Seymour says now. “We bonded. We joked together, had dinner together, and hung out together. Even the kids of players would hang out together. It was like we were a college team in the NFL. I just felt that on the field or personally, I’d be willing to do anything for those guys.”

  Seymour wore number 93, and because the lockers were positioned numerically, his neighbor was number 95, Roman Phifer. They had both looked at New England from afar and hoped to be playing football elsewhere. Seymour was a southerner, from a small town in South Carolina, and the idea of the Northeast and its polar conditions didn’t appeal to him. Phifer was thirty-three, and he still longed to experience what one of his early pro coaches, Chuck Knox, described as an ideal: “The best combination in football is winning and getting paid.”

  Phifer was in his eleventh NFL season, so he had gotten paid. His struggle to be a part of a winner, though, had been epic. As the Patriots piled up wins after the Brady announcement, four in a row heading into a late December game with the Dolphins, Phifer teased Seymour about the rookie’s instant success. He told him that the league really wasn’t like this, and that winning seasons should never be taken for granted. He thought of his time with the Rams and Jets and compared it to what he was experiencing with the Patriots. He concluded that he was part of the problem with his first two franchises.

  “I wasn’t a good leader with the Rams,” he says. “And when I went to the Jets, I was jumping on the bandwagon. They had lost the year before in the AFC Championship Game, and everyone was saying that they were stacked, that they were a couple of players away from getting to the Super Bowl. But when I got there, I found a lot of guys like me. They weren’t bad guys at all, but it was more about individuals than team. I was the same way. I was that way when I tried to avoid New England, because I wasn’t thinking from the perspective of team. I wound up there by divine intervention.”

  Phifer’s father, James, was a minister, and he frequently taught from the book of Proverbs. Specifically, the passage that reads, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Phifer had been talking to his father about football for twenty-five years, and this was the first time that he could see his own career within a sermon. Indeed, he had been the proud one for a decade.

  He had become a dutiful note-taker, and his notebook pages were filled with painstaking instructions from Belichick. He thought to himself, This could be an MBA program. It’s like I’m going to grad school for football, and Bill is the professor. He knew that Belichick and the other coaches got to the old stadium long before the players did, and departed who knew when. They had watched more film than the players had, and considered more game possibilities than the players had. Given that, it always amazed Phifer that the professor could stand in front of the group and condense that mass of information into three things. It was always, Do these three things and we should be in position to win.

  It was genius, and several layers of it: of football, of efficiency, of leadership. James Phifer sure had been onto something when he preached about humility. His son’s team was 9-5, getting ready to take on the 9-4 Dolphins, with the winner likely to finish first in the division. That was surprising to most people, but it wasn’t even the best part of the story. The stadium, the bland jewel of Route 1 in Foxboro, was coming to a close. A sprawling construction site was next door, preparing the way for a new stadium, opening in 2002, that would bring the organization into the twenty-first century.

  The good fortune of the Patriots had extended beyond the drafting and emergence of Brady, the immediate impact of Seymour, and the sparkling success rate of the free agents. The Jets had appeared to be thousands of miles beyond their grasp one year earlier. They had all those draft picks, and they still had Parcells in the front office. But Parcells learned that he wasn’t made for the executive life, and he resigned shortly after his coach, Al Groh, left the Jets for the University of Virginia. The Bills had a new coach and general manager and had replaced the Patriots at the bottom of the division; the Colts, young and talented, were moved out of the AFC East due to league expansion; and the Dolphins, who had won six of their previous seven games against the Patriots, were suddenly at eye level.

  Maybe they were temporary, but the headlines and the stories beneath them began to change as well. In two games against the Dolphins, Brady hadn’t totaled two hundred passing yards. But the Brady-Bledsoe election was over, and the focus had long shifted to overall results. The Patriots beat the Dolphins, 20–13, on a da
y that was all about smiles and storytelling. At the urging of an enthusiastic Belichick, dozens of Patriots players ran to the packed stands and celebrated with their fans. Former Patriots players and coaches paraded through the stadium, waving and high-fiving in all directions, for what they thought was the final game in the stadium’s history. Someone even tracked down Mark Henderson, who in 1982 famously drove a John Deere on the field to clear the snow, making it easier for a Patriots kicker to provide the only points in a 3–0 snowstorm win over the Dolphins.

  Even the appearance of Henderson seemed like a Christmas miracle because, for at least ten years, he was reported to be dead. When he was seen driving his John Deere again, he easily qualified as the author of the greatest comeback in stadium history.

  It was hard to top Henderson’s narrative, but the Patriots tried over the next several weeks. They finished the regular season with an easy win over the Panthers.

  With eleven wins, the Patriots had not only reversed their record from 2000; they had captured the division title. As soon as they found out their play-off opponent and the forecast for the game at Foxboro Stadium, they might have been wishing for Henderson again. The Oakland Raiders were coming to town, and so was a blizzard.

  Both Belichick and Brady had connections to the franchise, personal and professional alike. Belichick was drawn to the iconoclastic owner of the Raiders, Al Davis. Slicked-back hair, tinted glasses, all-white track suits, and an accent dripping Brooklyn by way of Brockton, Massachusetts, Davis was begging to be caricatured. But that aside, Belichick respected his football savvy and his history of coaching in the American Football League. He often referred to him as “Coach Davis.” A few years earlier, the two had discussed the head coaching vacancy with the Raiders. They spent the day talking football and had great, lengthy talks about the game they both loved. Belichick, though, finally mentioned an important point that hadn’t been covered.

  “Why are you trying to hire me?” the coach asked. “You only hire offensive coaches, because you’re the one who wants to run the defense. You’ve never hired a defensive head coach.”

  It was true, and Coach Davis knew it. He wouldn’t be happy letting someone else set the defensive philosophy for the Raiders, and neither would Belichick. They kept their relationship intact, and Davis hired the offensive-minded Jon Gruden as head coach. A few months later, the first draft choice on Gruden’s watch was someone Brady knew very well. His name was Charles Woodson, the superhero from Michigan.

  He and Brady were in the same recruiting class in 1995, although Woodson was considered class valedictorian. He never gave anyone time to ponder why. He started as a true freshman, became a defensive standout on a national championship team, and became the first defensive player ever to win the Heisman Trophy. Brady had practiced against him many times, and he knew how lethal Woodson’s combination of length, athleticism, and intelligence could be.

  The postseason, then, made way for a new campaign. This one was Brady versus Woodson, and it became the story of the night. A national TV audience got a chance to see a New England storm in progress, with the tufts of snow making it appear as if Foxboro Stadium had been staged by overzealous set designers. The field was essentially a snow-covered slick, with the yard lines visible only occasionally.

  “Bear with us on the placement of the ball,” broadcaster Gil Santos warned his radio audience in his authoritative bass, “because it isn’t going to be easy.” The Patriots started the game slowly, so slowly that as they ran off the field trailing 7–0 at the half, they were booed. Tough crowd. Many of the same folks, less than a month earlier, had tried to pull players into the seats for hugs and kisses.

  The game became more interesting in the second half with the Patriots trailing 13–10 with two minutes remaining. Brady had smartly avoided Woodson for most of the night, knowing that the cornerback thrived on the baiting game. He liked to appear to be distracted, not seeming to be aware of a small passing window. But as soon as a throw went in that direction, he’d quickly seal the space and intercept the ball.

  He had a more traditional move with 1:50 remaining: He blitzed. Brady dropped back to pass, and a sprinting Woodson was on his right arm in two seconds. The ball came loose, the Raiders recovered, and the season of surprises appeared to be over. People in Oakland thought it was clearly a fumble; people in New England saw it differently.

  “As we looked at it, Brady’s arm was coming forward,” Santos said as officials reviewed the play.

  Santos was making a reference to the Tuck Rule, a phrase that would send the majority of puzzled fans and media scrambling to the NFL rulebook. There, it stated, “When [an offensive] player is holding the ball to pass it forward, any intentional forward movement of his arm starts a forward pass, even if the player loses possession of the ball as he is attempting to tuck it back toward his body.”

  The broadcaster, who had begun calling Patriots games thirty-six years earlier, had seen his share of bizarre and arcane football business. His instincts were correct in this case. The official ruling was that Brady had been attempting to throw the ball just as Woodson hit him. The game-ending fumble recovery had simply become an incomplete pass that extended the season.

  Coach Davis, a longtime NFL critic, believed that this was some league conspiracy to hurt the Raiders and reward the Patriots. (It would be several years before anyone could see the irony in the suggestion that the league would do anything to benefit the Patriots.) Woodson and his teammates were stunned. The Patriots continued their drive until they got themselves in position for kicker Adam Vinatieri. The confident Vinatieri cleared the snow with his shoe and then powered the ball forty-five yards through the wind and snow to send the game into overtime. Once there, as everyone could see coming, he made the winning kick to vault the Patriots into Pittsburgh and the conference championship game.

  Beyond the breaks, though, was an identity. The team loved its reputation of being a bunch of starless rejects, knowing full well that the label was inaccurate. They had stars. They just didn’t have hyped stars. They loved the concept of crashing the parties of the entitled and becoming uninvited dancers on the red carpet. The very thought became real to them as they prepared to play the Steelers.

  There was just one week of prep time between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, so it would take precise planning from all four participants to transition from their home cities to New Orleans, the site of the game. Three teams planned their contingencies in private. The Steelers went the other way, and even allowed their players to devote an entire day to Super Bowl planning.

  “They didn’t respect us and we knew it,” Damien Woody, the Patriots’ center, recalls. “That whole team, that whole city, thought there was no way that we could win the game. You could tell by the way they were talking. Even in our hotel, it seemed like the whole city of Pittsburgh was there. It was like the whole city was there to intimidate us.”

  The Patriots were convinced that they could expose two things: the Steelers’ overconfidence and their poor special teams. Anyone who played in New England understood how obsessive Belichick was about the kicking game. “It didn’t matter who you were,” Phifer says. “Bill was going to put you on special teams if he thought that you could help. You had no choice.”

  In that spirit, the Patriots’ best receiver, Troy Brown, was a core member on teams. If the Belichick ideal could be distilled into a single player, it would be Brown. He thought the game, long before it was played. He was athletic and versatile, a highly capable football handyman. Like Brady, he had been marginalized by the draft and had to listen to 197 names called before it was his turn. The Patriots, under Parcells, had cut him once and brought him back. He made himself indispensable with all of his skills, and he set a tone in the locker room both with his toughness and his usual combo of few words, bold actions.

  He was responsible for the first points of the game, taking a punt in the middle of the field and weaving fifty-five yards for a touc
hdown. It was a good start, but a snag came late in the second quarter. Brady completed a long pass and was hit low by safety Lee Flowers. He immediately grabbed his left ankle, was attended to by doctors and trainers, and limped off the field. That left an opening for the best backup quarterback in the league, Drew Bledsoe.

  The preseason words of Brady resonated again. They’re going to need all three of us. The biggest conflict of the season had been Brady versus Bledsoe, but now the only path to the Super Bowl was Brady and Bledsoe. The older quarterback sprung off the bench and quickly completed a pass. Then he did something that made you wonder if the entire Patriots season was just a satirical reality show. He ran toward the sideline, just like he had against the Jets. And he got hit high by a defender, similar to the blow by Mo Lewis. Fortunately for Bledsoe, he was hit by a cornerback this time, and he bounced up shouting and clapping his hands. The next play was a touchdown in the corner of the end zone to David Patten.

  The entire day wasn’t perfect for Bledsoe, but it didn’t need to be. There was joy in watching yet another special-teams touchdown, this one in the third quarter, that Brown helped create. There was joy in playing and feeling like a playing contributor and not just a meeting-room intellectual. There was joy in winning, 24–17, and putting his hands on that conference championship trophy.

  They did things in the game that often went unnoticed, such as having a role player like Adrian Klemm play left and right tackle and left and right guard. This was the Belichick view of team-building as much as a player’s height, weight, and speed. This game, won this way, was perfect for a Belichick team: game-changing plays on special teams, a starring role for a backup, and multiple players capable of excelling in multiple positions. The Patriots lingered on the field, wave after wave of them going to Bledsoe and squeezing him for several seconds. They didn’t have to say much, and neither did he. They had all added something to this game, from the Rehbein family’s presence as honorary captains, to the 14 points off special teams, to the forgotten quarterback on the bench. They’d all been a part of it.