Patten indeed got triple the money that the Patriots were offering, and happily took a $3.5 million bonus from Washington. Law was released. Seymour decided to hold out. Troy Brown, who had been a receiver, punt returner, and defensive back for the team, didn’t have his option picked up and was encouraged to test the market. Belichick’s first Patriots draft pick, Adrian Klemm, signed with the Packers. And Phifer had that private conversation with Belichick, the one where Belichick said there were no hard feelings and Phifer said he wasn’t ready to say good-bye to football yet. So the Patriots released him.
The math was adding up quickly. More than one-third of the Patriots with three rings were now either leaving or in limbo. There was a pattern starting to emerge, and most people on the team either didn’t see it or didn’t want to say it aloud: These Patriots, under Belichick, were capable of breaking up with just about anybody, with the exception of one player. Brady.
If the Patriots were known for their study habits, then they knew the reason Brady was one of the guys yet not like them at all. For example, his agents were never heard from on contract issues, and he and the team agreed to deals long before the media started countdown clocks on his expiring contracts. In the spring of 2005, Brady’s contract was extended six years for $60 million. He got a $14.5 million signing bonus. He further endeared himself to New England because he made it clear that he wasn’t interested in every available dollar. Locally, he got a halo from fans for not demanding as much as Peyton Manning ($34.5 million signing bonus in 2004) and Michael Vick ($37.5 million).
Good quarterbacks were hard to find. Great quarterbacks were untouchable. Quarterbacks who understood the cap game and how to motivate their teammates were perhaps one of a kind.
“There’s just so much to consider at that position,” Louis Riddick, currently an ESPN analyst, says now. “It starts with decision-making and accuracy. But it’s more than the physical aspect of it. Can he make decisions under pressure? On third down? How about if his left tackle gets knocked out of the game; can he still be consistent? I’ve been on the headsets and heard coaches change the play call because they didn’t think the quarterback could bounce back from a negative play. The position is about physical ability, communication, and leadership.”
Brady was a quarterback; he’d allow Belichick, Scott Pioli, and Kraft to stock the team. For all that Belichick didn’t give to the media in press conferences, he certainly made up for it in daring personnel moves.
Previously, Belichick’s media management, or even his media awareness, had been viewed as a weakness. He now understood that he could use the media to his benefit by knowing what they were saying about him, other teams, and his own players. The latter point interested him most of all: another way of knowing just how on-message players were could be gleaned by seeing, hearing, and reading what they had to say to the public.
Reporters would have been surprised to know how much time he spent doing elements of their jobs. That is, he spent a significant amount of phone time, talking with various football sources, trying to get information. He did more questioning and listening than talking, which was the opposite of his one-dimensional profile in the media. Part of his homework was taking notes from other coaches in town, such as Doc Rivers with the Celtics and Jerry York, Boston College’s championship hockey coach.
He had a few issues to manage just after free agency and before the draft. The departures of Weis and Crennel meant that he’d have to replace two significant staff positions in the same offseason. Eric Mangini, a Wesleyan graduate like Belichick, would take over the defense. Although Belichick didn’t give Josh McDaniels the official offensive coordinator’s title, the job belonged to him. He was confident that both men, studious and bright, had the intellect to be successful on the job. The only thing lacking was their experience.
Belichick also offered advice to Bruschi, who had already walked into his office and tearfully retired. The linebacker had intentionally gone to the locker room first, put all of his locker belongings in a huge trash bag, and placed them near an exit before going in to talk with Belichick. He’d asked Heidi and his sons to wait in the car, and as soon as the meeting was over, he grabbed the belongings and left the building for what he believed to be his last time as a player.
Bruschi didn’t have all the information on stroke recovery, and Belichick had even less information than Bruschi did. But Belichick’s tendency to impartially ask questions was a strength in this case. He continued to tell Bruschi to be patient and see how he felt in several weeks before he made any hasty decisions.
In the meantime, there was a draft to get ready for and, per usual, Belichick was trying to catch up as quickly as possible.
Many were surprised and confused when the Patriots drafted a cowboy from Fresno State. His name was Logan Mankins, and he grew up on a cattle farm. He was big and strong and wanted to be a professional roper. He was good at football, so he played at Fresno, playing both tackle and guard. He was the definition of a Patriot with his low-maintenance lifestyle, on-field toughness, and suspicion of the spotlight. In a comical and organic exchange, the Patriots had asked Mankins to wear his “Sunday best” to his first press conference. He was prepared to go with a cowboy hat, dress shirt, jeans, and his doing-business boots. Learning that, the team directed him to a Men’s Wearhouse so he could purchase his first suit.
Since none of the draft experts had Mankins going to the Patriots, and very few of them had him being drafted in the first round at all, the pick was not initially well received.
“The Pats’ decision to take offensive lineman Logan Mankins and pass on much higher-rated players like safety Brodney Pool and linebacker Barrett Ruud seemed even ‘woise’ a day later,” wrote Kevin Mannix in the Herald. He used the analogy of boxer Jake LaMotta being bloodied even worse than he imagined. “Nobody was expecting the Pats to walk away with ‘Best in Show’ hardware. Not many Super Bowl champs get that honor. Picking at the end of each round and without the benefit of multiple picks in the early rounds pretty much eliminates that chance. But even when you factor in the position of the picks, the Patriots came away looking barely average because they blew the chance to get a playmaker with that first pick.”
No one seemed to consider the timing of the poor review. While Belichick was being ripped for supposedly making a bad draft pick, he was being forced to problem-solve the situation with Seymour, another onetime “bad pick” who was now holding out because he was one of the best defensive linemen in football. Seymour was in the fourth year of a contract that had since become illegal. The deal was for six years, and the Players Association had argued, successfully, that such long contracts had allowed teams to take advantage of players who had outperformed those deals. Seymour was a perfect example and he knew it.
“I wanted the business side to be taken care of,” he says. “For a team to just rip up a contract was seen as business. But if a player asked for that, he was being selfish. I looked at it as business from my perspective, and it was one of my proudest moments. I never compromised who I was as a man to fit in.”
At the beginning of the 2005 season, perhaps as an indication of what was to come, Belichick seemed to trade one set of problems for others. He had resolved the contract dispute with Seymour by giving him a $1.5 million salary bump, and Bruschi had enthusiastically come to him saying that his career wasn’t over after all. But now there were impending contractual issues with Branch, McGinest, David Givens, and Adam Vinatieri. It was going to be difficult to keep all of those players at the numbers they were requesting.
Even if they could, was it practical? He truly wanted to sign Branch, who was young, productive, and shared a football brain with Brady. But the sides couldn’t seem to agree on the receiver’s value, and they were at a stalemate halfway through the season. Bruschi had returned, miraculously, from a stroke—the first NFL player who had ever done that. Wasn’t that an indication that it might be time for a real youth movement on defense, if not the entire
team? Harrison was out for the season, having torn three ligaments in his knee. On offense, tight end Christian Fauria had been told, in a candid conversation with tight ends coach Jeff Davidson, that this was likely his last year in Foxboro. The young tight ends, Daniel Graham and Ben Watson, needed more time to play. Fauria sulked when he heard the news and then, he says, “I told myself, ‘You’re such a baby.’ I was pissed at myself for acting that way. In that instant, I decided to change my attitude.”
Belichick was so engrossed with team-building, so prepared with any football situation about which he was asked, sometimes it was easy to forget how he got that way. He was doing what he did only because of his mother and father. He studied and taught football, he researched and collected dozens of football books, only because of what they valued. His father was to college scouting what Belichick was to pro coaching. He covered every situation so no player on his team could possibly complain that he didn’t see something coming.
The senior Belichick had a way of being funny, too, even during tense times. In 1962, with the United States and the Soviet Union in the thick of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Steve Belichick noticed that his Midshipmen football players were overwhelmed. Earlier in the week, they had heard President Kennedy’s warning that the Soviets had put themselves in position for “nuclear strike capability against the Western Hemisphere.” They were stunned and a little scared, and Steve Belichick knew it as he scanned the players’ faces before a team meeting. He talked about these important world leaders, President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev, and joked, “I don’t think those guys realize that we are playing Pittsburgh this weekend.”
The team laughed and relaxed. And they also beat Pitt, 32–9.
Bill Belichick wasn’t as loquacious as his father, at least not publicly, but he was an observer of people and moods. He knew when a team was too tight or too casual, and a lot of that insight came from his father. Steve Belichick had been on the sideline for all three Super Bowl victories, including the most recent one over the Eagles. His mind was still computer-quick, and there genuinely wasn’t anything in the game that he hadn’t seen before. But he loved the modern game, especially college football. He watched college football every Saturday, in the same house where he and his wife had raised their only child.
On Saturday night, November 19, Steve Belichick was watching college football when his heart stopped. Bill Belichick heard the crushing news and didn’t share it with many people. The Patriots were playing the Saints the next day, and Belichick planned to coach the team. All of the players didn’t know the details until after the Patriots had defeated the Saints, 24–17.
Belichick was presented with a game ball after the win, and a line of Patriots offered hugs and kind words. The team was 6–4. But for the first time in Belichick’s head coaching career, preparing for the next game was not the most important thing to do. As the team devised a plan for Kansas City, Belichick was on his way to Annapolis to eulogize his hero.
On November 23, usually the first day of game-plan installation in Foxboro, the head coach of the Patriots was in the Naval Academy Chapel. He had been there many times, and he had been married there nearly thirty years earlier. Now he and hundreds of others from the college and pro football world were here to memorialize a man who devoted his life to his country, his family, and football. Patriots owner Robert Kraft was in attendance, along with Charlie Weis and Ernie Accorsi, who had worked with Bill Belichick in Cleveland and was now the general manager of the Giants.
Everyone in attendance could feel and see the impact that Steve Belichick had on those he met. He was able to balance a love for rigor and discipline with an earnest love for the uniqueness of people. He liked to joke that in the house intelligence rankings, he was a distant third behind his wife and son. But on the day he said good-bye to his father, Bill Belichick also honored his mother, saying, “You were the real strength behind two coaches in this family, and I love you.” He may have cried during this time, but the public didn’t see it. What Bill Belichick wanted the world to know, and remember, was that Steve Belichick represented all that was good about fatherhood, coaching, and football.
When Belichick got back to New England, he was in business mode again. He talked about the challenges of playing the Chiefs and the difficulty of dealing with the raucous atmosphere at Arrowhead Stadium. Those difficulties could be easily seen a couple of days later when Brady had one of the worst days of his career. He threw four interceptions in a 10-point loss.
Typical of their season, the Patriots followed the loss to Kansas City with a win. The rhythm of the season had been erratic, and it wasn’t clear what the identity of the 2005 Patriots was. The same could not be said of their opponent after Kansas City, the Jets. They had a new, playmaking cornerback, Ty Law, who had signed with them to reestablish his market value after teams had concerns about his injured foot. His individual season had been great, with five interceptions through twelve games. His team had been miserable; the Jets were 2-10 after a 16–3 loss to the Patriots. The two teams played again, the day after Christmas, and the Patriots walked away with a 10-point victory. One of the few highlights in the game for the Jets was Law picking off Brady and running seventy-four yards for a touchdown. It was his seventh interception in what would eventually become a ten-interception season. New York would soon be looking for a new coach. But that was next year.
A couple of days after the game, Law got a phone call. He recognized the number, the voice, and the question.
“Hey Ty,” Brady said. “What did you see on that interception? What did I give away?”
Three titles and two MVPs later, he was still searching the way he had when he was trying to take the job from Bledsoe.
“Tom, I played with you longer than anybody over there, right?” Law explained. “It’s obvious what you do: You do this exaggerated throwing motion and I knew you were coming back the other way. I played with you long enough to know that. As soon as I saw that motion, it’s not a real throwing motion, I just stopped. You threw it right there.”
The flaw would be corrected for the play-offs, where the Patriots were headed. Law was going to be looking for a new team and, truly, there were no hard feelings for New England. He wanted to return to Foxboro.
Since the Patriots were in season, and had cobbled together a wobbly 10-6 division winner, they didn’t have time to reflect the way Phifer did. Since being released by the Patriots in March, he had searched for a job until finding one, briefly, with the Giants. But something wasn’t right. He’d taken a hit in practice, nothing out of the ordinary, and twisted his knee. He’d had it drained a couple of times, yet it wasn’t responding to treatment. He was living in a Jersey hotel at the time, and one day he lay there on his bed and looked at the ceiling. He was away from his family, and he was down about that. He was forever aware of that problematic knee, and he knew what his body was telling him. This was it. It was over. He called his wife and cried.
“It felt like a breakup after a long relationship,” Phifer says. “The game has done so much for me and my family. It’s the only thing that I really loved. It gave me passion. It’s something that I was blessed to do since I was eight years old. It’s something that I shared with my father. And you know, there’s nothing like that locker room. The relationships. Going to work on a winning streak with guys you care about and admire. It’s hard when that’s taken away from you.”
That was Phifer’s story for the end of his career. But there was a larger truth to his words about the end, and several Patriots were going to have similar feelings after a tough night in Denver.
CHAPTER NINE
UNEXPECTED ENDINGS
It ended just before midnight on the East Coast, and the New Englanders who watched it finally understood what they had been envied over and warned about for years. It’s one thing to comprehend that your team can lose in the postseason, but when it doesn’t happen in ten consecutive games, do you truly believe it?
If there
is a problem with winning (imagine that), this is it: The ability to earnestly listen becomes difficult. You go over all the clichéd checklists, recite all the things you’ve been programmed to say. How it’s hard to win games in a league where the difference in talent is as faint as a whisper. How it’s challenging to just drop into someone’s city, mute their stadium, and erase their football season. And, best of all, from the wise ones: how the current run of success should be appreciated now, because the future most certainly will have troubled paths.
It would have all made sense, if not for the results in that ten-game stretch. The first win had come in 2002, one month before the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The tenth win had come in 2006, one month before the Winter Olympics in Turin. In between, there had been anomalies, too many of them to be called anomalies anymore. The Steelers were a combined 17-3 at Heinz Field during two dominant seasons, and two of those three home losses were delivered by the Patriots. Peyton Manning had thrown fifty-three touchdown passes in seventeen games, an average of three per, and in game eighteen, against the Patriots, he led his team to just a field goal. A fumble recovery by the Raiders had become a Tom Brady incompletion. A kicker, Adam Vinatieri, had become a rock star. A guy who was once on the 2002 expansion list, Willie McGinest, set a league record with four and a half sacks in a play-off game in 2006.
A ten-game winning streak in the worst conditions, against the best competition; it’s not supposed to happen. So even though the 2005 regular season had not been great, and the odds of winning a January game in Denver were low, the winning memories were powerful. Humility usually comes from experiencing the bitterness of failure, not being lectured about it. You hear the words, clear and thoughtful, about what you can’t do and still expect to win. But the tug of memory says, It won’t happen to us. It never has.
Late in the game, when they had often worn out opponents by wit and will, the Patriots finally felt it. They trailed 17–6 in the fourth quarter, and Vinatieri missed an easy field-goal attempt. Still trailing by the same score, with ten minutes remaining, the Patriots were about to get the ball and would no doubt cut into the lead. Then Troy Brown muffed a punt and lost the ball. Three plays and two minutes later, it was 24–6.
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