These rookies appeared to be the jolt that the offense needed. Gronk was all business in practice and backed up his remarks from the combine: He really did look like the best tight end from his draft class. Brady found that if a pass was in the area of Gronk, it was a ball that would be vacuumed by the tight end and his reliable hands. He was a force in the running game as well. With Gronk and Hernandez added to an offense with Wes Welker and Randy Moss, the days of being easily disassembled were over.
The abilities of the top two draft choices, McCourty and Gronk, were a reminder of how far the Patriots had come in their drafts of the past four years. The 2006 first-rounder, Laurence Maroney, had spent several one-on-one sessions in Belichick’s office the previous year, watching film and being tutored on the art of hard, inside running. Actually, that was the way a less-talented runner, BenJarvus Green-Ellis, naturally attacked opponents. Green-Ellis was undrafted and worked his way up from the practice squad. Each time he carried the ball it was as if he were fighting for his job. He pushed Maroney so much that it eventually made him expendable.
It’s how a former first-rounder, number twenty-one overall, was traded to the Broncos for a fourth-round pick. Add that to the release of Maroney’s draft classmate, Chad Jackson, and the Patriots’ ability to accurately gauge their own Personal/Behavior questions had become a concern over a two-year period. Maroney and Jackson, class of 2006, didn’t succeed in part due to immaturity and less-than-strong work ethic. And although Brandon Meriweather, class of 2007, had been selected to the 2009 Pro Bowl, the Patriots were already planning to replace him after 2010. Belichick and his staff weren’t risk-averse overall, but they usually didn’t tread there in the first round.
With Maroney traded, it seemed likely that another deal was on the way. Mankins, the pickup-driving, straight-talking, lineman-crushing guard, was upset and said he wanted to leave. He had skipped minicamp and training camp, and none of his public comments sounded conciliatory. As the Patriots were a few days away from their first game of the season, September 12 against the Bengals, Mankins wasn’t there like usual to protect Brady.
The quarterback did seem to have a protector, the heavenly kind, close to his home on September 9. It was 6:34 a.m. and he was driving his Audi S8 near the intersection of Commonwealth and Gloucester in the Back Bay section of Boston. Brady had a green light and was starting to drive through it when his sedan was struck by a Mercury Villager minivan. The driver, twenty-one, had failed to stop for a red light. There were several witnesses on the scene, and many of them called 911 because of the severity of the crash. No one knew then that the most famous athlete in the city was involved.
“There was just a huge crash!” a frantic 911 caller reported. She was asked if anyone was hurt. “I think so,” she replied. “There’s someone in the back of the car screaming and crying.”
She was right. It was the minivan driver’s father, forty-nine, who was in the passenger seat and had been on his way to a doctor’s appointment. The collision caused fractures to his nose and ribs and had cracked some teeth. He was also feeling sharp pain in his back. Boston firefighters needed to use the Jaws of Life to remove the man from the minivan. Brady was not injured. He declined medical attention, went to practice a few hours later, and, as fate would have it, signed a new four-year $72 million contract that temporarily made him the highest paid player in football. What a day.
He was thirty-three, and the terms of the contract ensured that he would be a Patriot until he was thirty-seven. It certainly seemed that he would play his entire career with the Patriots. That fact, along with the events at the corner of Commonwealth and Gloucester, made him appreciative of what he had.
“I was looking in the other car to make sure they were okay,” Brady said as he recapped that day on WEEI radio in Boston. “I was kind of sitting there in the car, looking around, trying to get my bearings. I was just thinking, ‘How am I going to—I’ve got to call Coach Belichick. I’m going to be late for practice.’ And then once I got home, then it really hits you.”
Helicopters and serious reporters had flocked to the stadium to see how Brady moved and practiced after the crash, but he and the rest of the team waved off all the attention.
He was more excited about the game against the Bengals, eager to see the debut of his new offense. It couldn’t have begun better, with the rookie Hernandez catching a pass, getting into the open field, and cleverly weaving for a forty-five-yard pass play. The kid was an artist with the ball, and he wasn’t the only one. Brady threw for three touchdowns, two to Welker and one, of course, to a six-foot-six tight end who was playing his first football game in two years. It was Gronk, for the score. That’s all he did in college, and apparently that was going to continue in the pros.
There was nothing to complain about after the game, a 38–24 win over a good Bengals team. Welker was scheduled to talk with the media about his quick return from a January ACL injury and his two touchdowns against Cincinnati. Unfortunately for him, Moss got to the podium before he did. What followed was a season-altering press conference.
Moss had begun talking about his contract in February at a softball game hosted by former teammate Heath Evans. He tried to get clarity on his status in June. In August, agitated and offended now, he isolated himself at the team’s Kickoff Gala, a charity event in which donors sit and interact with players. Not Moss. He put on his headphones and wouldn’t talk with anyone. After game one, he sounded like the Moss that his teammates had only read about but had never seen in person.
“I love being here, but from a business standpoint, this will probably be my last year as a Patriot and I’m not retiring. I’m still gonna play some football. I just wanted to get that off my chest and let you all understand that this is business.”
He had a lot more on his mind.
“I think in the New England area, I don’t want to say here in the organization, but a lot of people don’t want to see me do good,” he said. “And the reason why, I don’t know and I really don’t care.”
What his teammates in New England had come to love and understand about him is that he really did care. He had been portrayed as many things, but rarely the one that stood out to them: sensitive. In a good way. “He’s one of the best, most caring human beings I’ve ever met in my life,” Evans says now. Although Moss said he wasn’t talking about people in the organization, he couldn’t shake what he perceived as dismissiveness. Brady, Vince Wilfork, and even kicker Stephen Gostkowski had new contracts that gave them security. He wanted what they had.
“Sometimes, you want your boss to tell you that you are doing a good job,” he said. “If you do a good job and think you are doing a good job, you want to be appreciated. I really don’t think that, me personally, that I’m appreciated.”
He talked for nearly twenty minutes, with Welker going in and out of the room, checking to see if he was finished yet. The first win of the season wasn’t even an hour old, and this was already the story. This wasn’t going to be sustainable. Belichick was going to have to make an in-season assessment of what to do with Moss, and it wasn’t going to be a simple fix. Telling some players to forget about the contract until after the season worked. For Moss, he had locked in on the contractual issue at the beginning of the year and, nine months in, he was still with it. Telling him to move on from it at this point didn’t seem realistic. Besides, this year was different; a player couldn’t think, I’ll wait until 2011 free agency because, players had been warned, a lockout was coming.
With the contract on his mind, he might even start to misinterpret what offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien was doing with the offense. On orders from the boss, O’Brien had diversified the scheme, and now there would be significant involvement from the rookie tight ends in addition to Moss and Welker. There was also the fledgling talent of Julian Edelman and Green-Ellis’s ability to provide a power running game when necessary. This was not going to be like 2009, when Moss was targeted roughly nine times per game.
>
Things got worse the next week on the road against the Jets. Moss did get those targets, ten of them in fact. He even caught one of the most memorable touchdowns of his career, a one-handed grab over New York’s Darrelle Revis. But the Patriots lost the game by two touchdowns, and Brady’s focus on Moss was not the spirit of the offense that Belichick and O’Brien had in mind. It seemed as if catering to Moss came at the expense of every other offensive resource that they had. The team got a win the next week in Buffalo, with three targets and two scores from Moss. And then, at the one-quarter mark of the season, it was time for a change.
The Patriots had scored 40-plus points seventeen times since Belichick became their head coach, so seeing routs like those were not unique. But the eighteenth 40-plus game of his Patriots career, on October 4 in Miami, would qualify as his favorite. No head coach in the league loved special teams as much as Belichick, and he backed it up with capital. His top draft choices in 2009 and 2010, Patrick Chung and Devin McCourty, rose on New England’s draft boards because of their value on teams. That was on display in south Florida when the Patriots turned a 7–6 halftime deficit into a 41–14 win over the Dolphins on Monday Night Football. The obvious game standout was Chung, who blocked a punt, blocked a field goal, and had a fifty-one-yard interception return for a touchdown.
There were other notables as well. It was the one hundredth regular-season win of Brady’s career, and one hundred fourteenth overall. He won those hundred games faster than any quarterback in league history, getting there eight games faster than Joe Montana had. Brady’s career winning percentage stood at .760. It was a statistical head trip: Since Brady had been in the NFL, the rest of the league was successful against him less than 25 percent of the time.
“I’ve played on a great team for my entire career, the same organization that’s committed to winning,” he said after the game. “I’m privileged to be a quarterback for this team. I hope I’m here forever.”
The contrast to that was Moss. Even with the big win, he’d had a tough night. He’d screamed at O’Brien at halftime, pushing him to make offensive adjustments. There were wrinkles in the second half, but they didn’t include Moss. He left the game with one target and no receptions, the first time in four years that he’d left a game without catching a ball. He didn’t say much after the game, but he was angry. He had done everything he could to get their attention, to let them know that while he wanted to be in New England, he wanted them to want him here. And to prove it with that contract. It wasn’t going to happen, now or ever. After his press conference in week one, he’d talked with his agent and asked him to explore a trade. The agent was dutiful and so were the Patriots. When Belichick approached Moss on the plane ride home from Miami and found an unresponsive player, he knew it was time to put the plan in motion.
The Patriots landed in Providence early Tuesday morning, October 5. Less than forty-eight hours later, on October 7, Moss’s career in New England was over. He was traded, along with a seventh-round pick, to Minnesota, the franchise that drafted him in 1998. The Patriots received a third-round pick in return. It closed off a fascinating room in Brady’s career, a forty-game exhibit that would forever answer the question, “What do you think Brady could do with a truly elite number one receiver?” In their forty games together, Brady and Moss combined for thirty-nine touchdowns. It really was iron sharpening iron, an unspoken athletic-mental understanding that was reserved for the greats. If it were strictly about football, Brady and Moss would have been teammates for a lifetime. They got each other. But pro football is a game of hyperevolution and cap slots, so it was time for Moss to leave.
“Randy really knows how I feel about him,” Brady said. “I love him as a guy, as a person, as a player. He did a lot of great things for this team.”
While Moss was going back to where his career began, so was his replacement.
As tough as the Patriots’ offense was for some to learn, there weren’t many players capable of joining their season in progress and actually contributing. One of them, probably the perfect one, was Deion Branch. He had been traded to Seattle as a twenty-six-year-old rising star. A few knee, groin, and foot injuries later, he was now viewed as a thirty-one-year-old solid professional. The Seahawks had a completely different offense than the Patriots’, yet he had mastered both of them. In Seattle, the quarterback was throwing to a spot in the West Coast offense; in New England, Brady was throwing to the actual receiver. The Seattle offensive verbiage was all numbers and words; New England’s was strictly words.
Branch retained everything he had learned his first time in New England. When the Patriots gave up one of their extra fourth-round picks to bring him back, he was thrilled. The faces had changed, no question, as he had played with just eleven of the players on the fifty-three-man roster, but the offense was in him. Everything was positive about his return, even the potential negative: Two months before the trade, he had finally sold the condo that he’d had the first time around with the Patriots.
As soon as he played his first game, Branch made an impact. He got the most targets, twelve, of anyone on the team, scored a touchdown, and made two big catches in overtime for a 23–20 win over the Ravens.
The points, and wins, without Moss continued to rapidly stack:
Thirty-nine points in Pittsburgh, with the rookie touchdown-maker, Gronk, scoring three times.
Thirty-one points at home against the Colts, with solid performances from rookie costars: a touchdown reception from Hernandez and an interception from McCourty.
Forty-five points on the road in Detroit, featuring a trio of twos: two more interceptions for McCourty, two touchdowns for Branch, and two for Welker.
They were 9-2 after their Thanksgiving win over the Lions. Nine wins by Thanksgiving usually means it’s time to wrap up the division. This year was different. They were tied for the divisional lead with the Jets, and the teams were scheduled for an early December matchup in Foxboro on Monday Night Football. Rex Ryan’s style was working in New York. He had a Let’s go for beers persona, a guy who could have the headset on one second and be calling in to WFAN, Rex from East Rutherford, the next. He was more of a friend than a boss with his players, and they loved him for it. He also had an outstanding defense, led by cornerback Darrelle Revis.
In week two, Revis had to leave the Jets’ 28–14 win early because he pulled his hamstring. He missed a couple of games after that, but he was healthy and willing to meet any challenge. He usually trailed a team’s number one receiver and silenced him for an entire afternoon and/or evening. The Patriots’ offense was completely different from that first meeting, when they were lukewarmly buying into having a traditional number one like Moss. It was hard to say who that was now, as the Patriots were spreading teams out and generally doing whatever they wanted.
It was more of the same on that December night. The windchill was fifteen degrees, although fifteen seemed to be a misreading; that number was too high. Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, a second-year player from Southern Cal, trotted to the field for some practice throws and sprinted back to the locker room a short time later. “It’s too cold for football,” he said as he left the field. Maybe he was joking. His play indicated that he wasn’t.
It was 17–0, Patriots, after the first quarter, with a short touchdown run from Green-Ellis and a twenty-five-yard scoring pass from Brady to Branch. At halftime, when it was 24–3, Tedy Bruschi was honored. He engaged the crowd with a call-and-response technique: He called out the names of his Super Bowl–winning teammates and they responded with delirium.
Everyone had the same idea after three quarters, when it was 31–3: This team is going to hang yet another of those banners that Bruschi referred to. Who was going to beat them? No one in the entire conference appeared to be capable.
Brady, as he had been all season, was dazzling. He saw mismatches all over the field, negating the brilliance of Revis. He threw four touchdown passes in a 45–3 wipeout, and the productive evening helped h
im bring his season totals to twenty-seven touchdown passes and four interceptions. He hadn’t thrown an interception since the Baltimore game, in week four, or 228 passes ago.
The Jets, with a three-interception night from Sanchez, filled hearts and notebooks with doubt. THE FOXBORO FLOP declared a headline in the Bergen County Record. More than twenty-two thousand fans responded to a New York Post poll asking, “Does this loss convince you that the Jets are pretenders?” Nearly 68 percent of the respondents said yes.
“I came here to kick Belichick’s ass,” Ryan said after the game, “and he kicked mine.”
That wasn’t unusual for the Patriots. They reached the thirties in points per game for the remainder of the regular season, pausing at the end of it for some intimidating totals:
Brady was certainly going to be the league MVP with thirty-six touchdowns and, still, those four interceptions. His streak of passes without an interception had reached 335; Gronkowski and Hernandez combined for sixteen touchdowns, which doubled the production of last year’s duo, Ben Watson and Chris Baker; Green-Ellis rushed for thirteen touchdowns, many of them behind Logan Mankins, who settled his differences with Kraft. Mankins played just half a season, yet that was still good enough to make him one of six Patriots Pro Bowlers; one of the rookies, McCourty, also made the Pro Bowl; the Patriots led the league in scoring, averaging 32 points per game. And with a league-best 14-2 record, they didn’t have to leave the comfort of home during the postseason.
The Jets began to struggle after their loss to the Patriots, with the 9-2 start turning into a 2-3 finish. Ryan had talked about winning the Super Bowl at the beginning of the season, but for that to happen the Jets had to begin the play-offs on the road against Peyton Manning and the Colts.
Belichick and Brady Page 23