Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  Locally, in the Boston Globe, frequent Belichick critic Ron Borges warned that the glare of the Lombardi Trophy was blinding fans, and team personnel, to the risks in the trade. Specifically, Borges pointed out, Brady’s numbers began to decline as the games became more important and teams familiarized themselves with his weaknesses. The team scored just three offensive touchdowns in the postseason “and one of them was thrown by Bledsoe.”

  “The moment Belichick nodded his head in the direction of Scott Pioli and OK’d trading Drew Bledsoe to Buffalo for the Bills’ number one draft choice in 2003, he said ‘I do’ to Tom Brady,” Borges wrote. “They’re wedded now, the coach from Wesleyan and the quarterback from Michigan. Either they go on to a future of unbridled success in the National Football League or they go together into this good night.”

  If the Patriots had lost to the Rams in the final seconds, the trade might have unsettled the majority of New Englanders. A loss in that game, after leading by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, would have strengthened the fear that every big game, and transaction, was somehow going to lead to humiliation. But the win provided an alternative to the shared wall of misery that some Boston fans automatically went to.

  There was a change afoot in town, and it was tangible. There was the trophy, of course, which would be the first thing moved into the new home, Gillette Stadium. There was also a new vocabulary for a generation that wasn’t used to talking about clutch plays and smart decisions that led to parades in their city. In the spring of 2001, they had been the ones asking for a wide receiver in the first round and looking for something beyond the low-priced free agents that had been signed. In 2002, people took pride in not having to rely on high-maintenance receivers, and they wondered, Belichick-like, if the newest Patriots would submit to the team-first ethic that had been established.

  So on his way out of town, Bledsoe was generally applauded for his dignified run with the Patriots. He gained even more respect throughout the region when he paid for local newspaper ads and thanked fans for their support during his career as a Patriot. He was sent off to western New York with blessings and bouquets.

  It was a remarkable transition. Bledsoe’s job had been taken by Brady, and his stardom had been eclipsed by Belichick. The championship had turned Belichick into the region’s biggest nonplaying star since Red Auerbach, the coach and craftsman of the dynastic Celtics. The new era story line from the Super Bowl had naturally focused on Brady because of his age and the position he played. But Belichick had entered a new realm as well, although that point was lost in the rush to compare him to Bill Parcells. It had nothing to do with winning without Parcells. For Belichick, now fifty years old, the title was validation of all the ways he saw himself fitting into a franchise. Public perception had always locked Belichick into one of two circles, neither of which captured him or his passions.

  One was a circle of success, ironically, perfectly illustrated on the front page of the New York Times fifteen years earlier. There he was at Giants Stadium, moments after winning the conference championship, being carried off the field by his Giants players. He was called a defensive genius, over and over, which in a way is not a bad thing. Who has a problem with being known as a genius? The picture was there, but it was incomplete. He was the genius of defense because that was his assigned area. Before that, he had been the Giants’ special-teams coach and had excelled there as well. He was just thirty-four, and he had been in the pros for a dozen years. His was still a young, evolving football mind. He had his own ideas about the business, ideas that went beyond defense, the head coaching methods of Bill Parcells, and the general managing of George Young. He loved everything about football: watching and teaching it, reading about it, thinking of ways to improve it and what he’d like to do if he were given resources and tools in a football organization and told to build it.

  The second circle, then, was more complicated. He had become that builder in Cleveland when he was thirty-eight. One of his football gods was Paul Brown, who was also thirty-eight when he began coaching in Cleveland. This seemed destined to work. When the results weren’t good enough, one play-off appearance in five seasons, he was dismissed as someone who couldn’t shape an entire franchise. He was well rounded only within the dimensions of that first circle. He was trapped in those confines from the day he drove out of Cleveland, in 1996, until the moment the first strand of confetti fell on him in New Orleans.

  In April 2002, like Brady, Belichick was just getting started in this new phase of his career. He, too, had been underestimated, and had invested more time in remaking himself than anyone had considered. The remake did not always include smooth public relations with the media or sometimes with his players. He was a good listener and weighed all information before making a decision, but when it was time to declare a direction, he was forceful and left no wiggle room. He asked his scouts to be the same way. Be thorough, be clear, and be decisive. That was his approach to in-house communication; for outsiders, it wasn’t as satisfying. Sometimes he played the media game, smiled, and gave them the anecdotal and expansive responses that they craved. At times, mostly on Fridays, he even engaged reporters with playful trivia questions. Usually, though, his comments to them were stick-figure sketches of his true thoughts.

  That approach was a virtual guarantee of critical coverage, regardless of the decisions he made as a coach. There was an implied reciprocity that the sports media sought. Full cooperation didn’t give a subject full immunity, but it at least ensured a degree of humanity within the reporting. One of Belichick’s first hires in New England had been Berj Najarian, who had been an assistant in the Jets’ public-relations department. Najarian, from Long Island, was a Boston University graduate and had initially planned to be a sportswriter. He wound up in PR, with the Knicks and Jets on his résumé. Belichick trusted his scouting reports on the media, his intelligence, and his organizational skills, which at least rivaled Belichick’s and sometimes exceeded them. Najarian was going to need to stay close by, because there was plenty of controversy on the way.

  Some of Belichick’s decisions were made by other teams. The new franchise, the Texans, decided not to select linebackers McGinest and Ted Johnson in the expansion draft. The Patriots sliced their salaries and brought them both back. The status of two other linebackers, Bryan Cox and Roman Phifer, was pending. Cox, the fearless mouth of the defense, got tired of waiting and signed with the Saints. He wasn’t happy about it, telling the Globe’s Will McDonough, “I talked with them after the year to find out my future, and they said they would get back to me. Never did. Never even gave me a phone call… Roman Phifer was the MVP of our defense last year, in my opinion, and they haven’t called him either. He doesn’t know what is going on.”

  Phifer did hear back, and he was returning. Jermaine Wiggins, the tight end from East Boston who caught Brady’s final pass in the Super Bowl, was not. The collegial atmosphere of the parade had given way to economics. The chief economist planned to upgrade the tight end position through free agency and the draft. He began by targeting thirty-year-old Christian Fauria, who wanted to be anywhere but New England.

  Fauria had remembered the intense Belichick from years earlier, when the coach was still in Cleveland and the player was a draft prospect from Colorado. They were at the Shrine Bowl in San Francisco, and Fauria had watched film in Belichick’s hotel suite.

  “He had a bunch of tapes in his room, all of my tapes from college,” Fauria recalls. “It was like Roy Hobbs in The Natural: dark room, one light. He said, ‘Pick out your best game and your worst game.’ I thought it was some type of trick. My worst game, I thought, was Nebraska. We put it on and I was kicking somebody’s ass. He said, ‘That’s your worst game?’ He was going over every game, and he knew about everybody on the field. I was thinking, ‘Please don’t draft me.’ He had a reputation as a taskmaster, and I just didn’t want to deal with it.”

  In the spring of 2002, Belichick was asking about Fauria again. Once again,
Fauria didn’t want to go. He loved football and had gone through some excruciating medical procedures so he could stay on the field. Once, there was pain like he’d never experienced, when he tore every ligament in his right ankle. It had taken a plate, eight screws, and a stabilizing bolt to put him back together again. He’d had three microfracture surgeries. Shattered and dislocated fingers. An old back injury from college that would flare up every now and then. Pulled hamstrings. He played through many of the injuries, convincing himself that he could start caring about his body at the end of the season. His brother, a foot specialist, was one of the many people who told him he was nuts. It didn’t matter. He played, with frequent help from Tylenol and Vicodin.

  Despite all that, Fauria wanted to play six more years. There’s no way he could pull that off with daily gladiator practices. He expressed his concerns to Belichick, and to his surprise, the coach listened and said, “Once training camp starts, we’ll take care of you.”

  Belichick didn’t always do what was expected, whether it was a conversation with a player, a signing, a release, or a draft pick. That, combined with his poker player style with the media, made it impossible to predict what he would do next.

  He surprised many in April, including Fauria, when he traded up eleven spots in the first round, from thirty-two to twenty-one, to select Colorado tight end Daniel Graham. At the end of round two, he went for a five-foot-nine-inch receiver from Louisville named Deion Branch. The surprise there had actually happened weeks earlier, when Belichick had gone to the team’s war room and stared for a long time at the draft board. He looked at the magnetic strip containing Branch’s name and draft grade, and then weighed it versus what he had seen on film and the player’s production. In the Patriots’ 1 to 9.99 grading system, a system that did not acknowledge perfect 10s, Branch’s number fell below the 5.50 minimum to be considered a “Make It,” or backup player. He thought Branch was out of position, so he moved the strip from the “back board,” where “Free Agents” and “Pats Rejects” reside, to the front board, with the best prospects.

  It was clear, in rookie minicamp, that Branch wasn’t going to have a problem learning the offense of coordinator Charlie Weis. His understanding of the concepts seemed natural and, physically, he almost always caught what was thrown his way. When the entire team was together, the new additions blended with the holdovers, and it was as if this were the postscript to 2001. Fauria, for example, had no idea what to expect from his new quarterback, the Super Bowl MVP. He was immediately taken by Brady’s confidence and his odd sense of humor.

  When Fauria introduced himself as “Christian,” Brady smiled and started calling him “Motoring.” He noticed Fauria’s bewildered look and began singing “Sister Christian” by the early 1980s band Night Ranger to explain himself. A lyric about motoring was tucked in there. Random. An instant friendship was born with Fauria. It was much the same with Branch, who was struck by how grounded and competitive his quarterback was. The season hadn’t started yet, and already Ping-Pong paddles had been broken after Brady challenged Branch and lost to him.

  Weis watched it all and was pleased. He was looking forward to the season where, theoretically, this team would have more offensive talent than the Super Bowl winners. That was his professional outlook. Personally, he planned to have routine gastric bypass surgery before the season opener in September.

  In the summer, he entered Massachusetts General Hospital for what was known casually as “stomach-stapling” surgery. There was nothing routine about the procedure. The surgery had turned out disastrously, and a supposedly simple operation had become life-threatening for Weis. He had internal bleeding for two days and required a blood transfusion of seven pints. He faded in and out of consciousness, at times being alert enough to recognize his wife, Maura, and sometimes looking near his bed and seeing Brady. It was dire. He was given last rites by a Catholic priest.

  Fortunately, his condition began to improve and, after a month in rehab, he was sent home. It was time for training camp now, and Weis wasn’t well enough to rejoin the coaching staff full-time. He watched film from his Rhode Island home and constantly checked in with Belichick and the quarterbacks. He still had a burning sensation in his legs and feet, from nerve damage, and he knew when he got back to the team he’d have to use a golf cart to get around. It was still good news that he could coach again, and doctors were encouraged by his progress.

  In fact, September in New England was brimming with the positivity that was there during the run through the play-offs. The Patriots had won their final nine games, and the entire region had responded in kind to the success. Now it seemed that many of the stale and ineffectual things in the city were shifting, too. The Red Sox, who had been either owned or controlled by one family since 1933, were sold to a group led by a man named John Henry. Henry was a risk-taker, and he promised changes to the team that had flattened more dreams over the years than any franchise in the region. Rumors were that the Celtics were for sale as well, and two lifelong fans, Wyc Grousbeck and Steve Pagliuca, were prepared to present a $360 million offer.

  There was a lot to celebrate and the venerable Rolling Stones were up for it. They planned to go on a fortieth-anniversary tour, with Boston as the kickoff city. One day while the Patriots were in meetings preparing for their game with the Steelers, they heard start-and-stop pulsing through the Gillette Stadium walls; the Stones had to practice, too. They were still the hard-living Stones, though, so it wasn’t a shock when the Herald reported that during one of their nights out in Boston, Mick, Keith, and some of their friends got a private room in a restaurant and drank $13,000 worth of booze in two hours. The drinking was left to others on the night of the show, and after going through all the hits, including a “Satisfaction” encore with fireworks, it felt like the perfect time to start the season.

  Two weeks before the first game, there was some contractual business to handle. Brady was up for a huge raise. He had been the league’s lowest-paid starting quarterback in 2001, making $375,000. In 2002, he signed a four-year extension worth $30 million. There were still a few people who said that he was a fluke and a “system quarterback,” but the feelings about him in New England were now in print. He was being paid like the top quarterbacks in the game.

  If there was any doubt about the legitimacy of Brady in his first full season as a starter, it went away after an easy 30–14 win. Brady threw three touchdown passes, all to new guys: Fauria, Branch, and Donald Hayes. After the Hayes score, a forty-yarder that was made possible by a beautiful Branch block, assistant coach Jeff Davidson yelled to receivers coach Brian Daboll through the coaching headsets, “Make sure you congratulate his ass! That was a GREAT block.” Weis and his staff loved receivers who had the ability to block, so this kid was going to be all right.

  The early part of the season, three wins in three games, was a test against human nature. And the Patriots were human. There was no way they could avoid connecting the seasons. Those of them who had been on the championship team knew that they had won twelve games in a row since November of 2001. Brady and receiver David Patten, chatting on the field before the fourth game in San Diego, even talked about going undefeated.

  And that’s where the slide began, with the Patriots afflicted by a different plague each week. They were gashed on the ground by the Chargers; denied the ball for two-thirds of the game in Miami; mentally slow at home against Green Bay (Belichick was aghast that the offense stood unaware as a live ball rested on the turf and was recovered by a Packer who had been thirty yards away); and unable to move the ball against Denver.

  This was what previous champions talked about, in retrospect. They talked about the difficulty of the next season, in which the ability to sneak up on people goes away. The first-place schedule guarantees a stiffer challenge, as does the adrenaline from the opposition, eager to prove itself against the best. But even after blasting Bledsoe and the Bills by 31 points, the Patriots’ excellence was in what they had done in New Orle
ans, not who they were in the present.

  Sometimes after games at home, Belichick would retreat to his office and educate his football-loving sons, fifteen-year-old Stephen (named after Belichick’s father) and ten-year-old Brian, on the basics of the game. They were all happy in there, totally satisfied by a whiteboard, a couple of Sharpies, and some formations. It was a side of Belichick rarely seen, and what made it even more touching was his ability to compartmentalize. Because whatever his considerable happiness was with his boys, the inverse was true of the team. He didn’t like how it played or practiced. He questioned his own coaching, as well as the instruction of the assistants. It wasn’t unusual for him to criticize himself and his staff during team meetings. Even the players who gave him everything they had, the true professionals, a few of them were too close to the end to make a difference on the field.

  Defensive end Anthony Pleasant, thirty-four, a respected locker room evangelist and counselor, was one of those guys. So was cornerback Otis Smith, thirty-seven, who was a master of defensive positioning in the secondary. Even a couple of new additions, thirty-two-year-old Victor Green and thirty-one-year-old Rick Lyle, proved that they had the high football aptitude that would easily translate to coaching one day. But this was a young man’s game, and those ages told part of the story about the defense: not fast enough, not youthful enough. It was mid-December now, and the Patriots were technically in contention for the division title and the play-offs. Technicalities are tricky. These Patriots were average, and if they were fortunate enough to slip into the postseason, they’d be pushed aside humbly.

  As for the Bills and Bledsoe, they were the only team in the division less happy than the Patriots. Bledsoe had a good season. He passed for 4,359 yards, roughly 600 more than Brady, and twenty-four touchdowns, which was four fewer than Brady’s league-leading total. He went 0-2 against his old team, though, and the Bills finished last in the division. The Patriots, just one game better at 9-7, found no consolation in that. They learned that they had missed the play-offs late on a Sunday evening. There was a team meeting the next morning at nine. Later that afternoon, Belichick was joined in his office by Pioli and Ernie Adams, the coach’s multifaceted adviser. Each man had a legal notepad, filled with team needs. The short-term focus that the players saw was on display here, too. On to the offseason.