War Room

by Michael Holley

  He was going to Massachusetts General Hospital and would be introduced to a new team that would be with him for life, a team of cardiologists and neurologists. He learned that he had a hole in his heart, and a clot had traveled through his bloodstream and to his brain. He would spend three days in the hospital and then get ready for weeks of rehab. He had lost vision and balance, and when local TV stations showed his release from the hospital, it was obvious that he was fragile and incapable of walking alone. He and his fans had the same thought: His football career was over.

  It was going to be a year of transition for Bruschi and the Patriots. The team had officially promoted Eric Mangini to replace Romeo Crennel, and unofficially, Josh McDaniels was the coordinator who would take over for Charlie Weis. Those were football moves, and as nervous as some players were with them, they knew they were coming. Mangini certainly had the intellect for the job. The question was whether he could command the attention and respect of a room the same way Crennel, the son of a military man, could. As for McDaniels, he was taking over for one of the most deft play-callers in the league. Belichick tried to lessen the scrutiny on McDaniels by easing him into the position without making a public announcement. But it wasn’t just the public he had to worry about. Receivers coach Brian Daboll was a year older than McDaniels and had recommended him when the Patriots were looking for an entry-level employee in 2001. The fact that McDaniels was promoted ahead of him would eventually lead to problems.

  The biggest issue, clearly, was trying to find someone who could step in and approximate what the team’s productive and popular middle linebacker had given. You can’t just replace Tedy Bruschi, on a whim, in a matter of weeks. The Patriots signed a career backup linebacker, Monty Beisel, in April and drafted a long shot, Ryan Claridge, in the fifth round. They signed thirty-four-year-old Chad Brown, who was more of a natural outside linebacker than a middle one, in May.

  By that time, Bruschi had been through a range of emotions. He initially came to terms with retirement and had tearful goodbye conversations with Belichick and Robert Kraft. The Patriots were prepared to give him a job as an “organizational trainee.” After completing his rehab and feeling more like himself, he started thinking about playing again, which caused a month-long dispute with Heidi. She couldn’t believe that a stroke survivor would even dream of returning to work when work entailed knocking heads with 300-pound guards and 260-pound fullbacks. His counter was that he had easily cleared all the medical hurdles that were before him, and if that was the case, why couldn’t he do what no one else had even tried? The dispute dissolved in the summer and gave way to more stroke information and education, and by training camp in July, a hopeful Bruschi made sure the team knew that there was a chance he’d be ready to play sometime in 2005.

  Bruschi still hadn’t spoken to the public, so the assumption was that he couldn’t, and wouldn’t want to, play. He finally talked in September and said he was going to sit out a year before making a decision, but he quickly changed his mind a couple days later when he had an echocardiogram and the results were stellar. That morning, he and Heidi had breakfast and he said, “Let’s go for it this year.” She agreed. He was nearly two months away from one of the greatest comebacks in sports history.

  But he would return to a Patriots team that wasn’t the same. In the first six games of 2005, the Patriots were average, with a 3–3 record. Their biggest problems were on defense. Rodney Harrison had been injured in week three and was out for the season. Ty Law had been released for salary cap reasons and Tyrone Poole, whose signing in 2003 had led to hallway high-fives between Belichick and Scott Pioli, was hurt and developing an unflattering locker room reputation. Many players questioned his toughness and his ability to play through the slightest bit of pain. He had played at a near—Pro Bowl level in ’03, but early in 2005 there was a feeling among team leaders that his heart wasn’t in it.

  Poole’s absence led to Asante Samuel, a developing star, being paired with another cornerback who stood out for all the wrong reasons. The Patriots had sent a third-round pick to Arizona for Duane Starks, who had once been a top-ten pick of the Ravens. But that was in the late 1990s. When the Patriots got him, he performed as if he were determined to prove that he could do the exact opposite of all the things they valued. He was noncompetitive, temperamental, and slow to react to the ball. His low point came when he literally gave up before a game was over, walking back to the locker room and refusing to return. The team placed him on injured reserve, which ended his season and brief New England career.

  After all the early-season mediocrity and frustration, it was refreshing to see an inspiring human-interest story occur on October 30. That’s when Bruschi came running out of the Gillette Stadium tunnel to play in a game against Buffalo. It had been unthinkable in February and even in the spring, but Bruschi vowed to use his experience to raise stroke awareness. Bruschi would become an ambassador for stroke survivors and eventually go across America on speaking tours.

  But ambassadors are not saviors, and even the uplifting Bruschi tale couldn’t reverse the negative energy of the fall. When the Colts came to town in November, Peyton Manning passed for more than three hundred yards and led the offense to a 40-point performance on Monday Night Football. A couple weeks later, things got worse.

  On November 19, eighty-six-year-old Steve Belichick died of heart failure. He not only had given his son a love of football, he and his wife had given him a love of books as well. The elder Belichick had written an industry book for scouts, Football Scouting Methods, in 1960, when Bill was eight. It was edited, appropriately, by his wife, who loved good writing so much that she had a hard time throwing it away. She had dozens of copies of the New Yorker in the family basement, probably because there was no room upstairs, where bookshelves and ledges were lined with hundreds of books.

  Steve Belichick had been a football man all his life, but that’s not what stood out to his only child. The man himself was so influential that his son once said, “It just so happened that he was a football coach, but I would have chosen any career that he had. If he had been a fireman, I probably would have been a fireman, too.” His father’s eye for detail was exacting, and Steve’s thoroughness as an assistant coach at the Naval Academy rubbed off on him. Steve had been amazed by how his son’s mind worked, even when Bill was a preteen. “Any time I asked him why he did something, he always had a good answer and a good reason,” he said. “There was always a method to his thinking.”

  He learned how to break down film from his father. He also learned fiscal responsibility from the veteran of World War II. Steve Belichick was proud that he had paid for his modest house up front, because he didn’t believe in borrowing or deferring payments. He continued to live there until the Saturday evening he died, after a full day of watching college football.

  The Patriots had a game against the Saints on the twentieth, and Belichick didn’t plan to inform the team about his father. “He wanted to coach his way through it and not tell anyone,” Pioli says. “A couple of us knew. He didn’t even want people to know before the game because he didn’t want the distraction of pity.” Pioli believed that was taking selflessness too far and pulled aside Tom Brady and a few others and told them what was going on. The team responded with a 24–17 win, pushing their record to 6–4, and presented Belichick with a game ball.

  Afterward, everyone understood when Belichick announced that he wouldn’t be with the team in the beginning of the week as they prepared for their next game, in Kansas City. Instead he was going to be in his hometown of Annapolis, saying good-bye at the Naval Academy Chapel. Steve Belichick had met and coached many people over the years, so it wasn’t surprising that his funeral was attended by people from a wide range of fields, from the secretary of the navy to Joe Bellino, who won the Heisman Trophy at Navy in 1960, and several of Belichick’s colleagues, such as Pioli, Kraft, Charlie Weis, and Al Groh.

  During Belichick’s eulogy, he addressed his mother, Jeannette
: “You were the real strength behind two coaches in this family, and I love you.” He marveled at his father’s ability as a scout, how in the era before instant replay, he could see a play one time and recall what happened. He also put his father’s career as a coach and teacher into perspective.

  “Almost seventy-five years of football gave him a vast knowledge and reverence historically for the game that very few could match,” he said. “He coached everything, and his ability to teach and interact with people has really come back to me in my lifetime and in the last few days.”

  As Belichick looked down at the casket in front of him, draped with the American flag, he said, “Dad, may you rest in peace.”

  When he returned to Foxboro, Belichick showed no outward signs of emotion to the media or his team. He was asked how he was doing in a press conference and his reply was a respectful and quick, “Good.” He was back to focusing on football and the Chiefs. But the game wasn’t much to see, as Brady threw an uncharacteristic four interceptions in a 26–16 loss. A four-game winning streak would follow, but it didn’t feel like a championship season. In January, there was a play-off win over the Jaguars and then a grisly loss in Denver in which the team turned the ball over five times. Late in the game, Deion Branch was on the sideline with tears streaming down his cheeks. Maybe he knew it was his last game as a Patriot and that it would be the toughest, most dysfunctional off-season of them all.

  Depending on who’s telling the story, the problems began the week of the Denver game. Mangini knew that whenever the Patriots’ postseason run ended, he was going to become the next head coach of the New York Jets. While some claim that he was trying to recruit players and coaches to join him in New York, during a playoff week, he swears it never happened. The speculation combined with the fact that he was going to a divisional opponent led to an awkward parting.

  Other threads of the dynasty began to come apart, stitch by stitch, in the spring. In the middle of March, the wise enforcer from Long Beach, McGinest, signed a free-agent deal with Crennel’s Browns. A week later, the region was in a rage. Adam Vinatieri was New England royalty, hailed as the best clutch kicker in history. The first championship was possible because of his right foot. So when he signed with the reviled Colts, there was very little anger toward him. The bulk of it was reserved for Belichick and Pioli. Fans never imagined that Vinatieri—the locals knowingly called him “Adam” —was ever going to leave.

  The Colts knew the only way to secure the thirty-three-year-old free agent was to set the market, and they did, giving him a $3.5 million signing bonus as well as annual salaries that averaged $2.5 million a year. The Patriots’ offer was in the $2 million range, and they weren’t willing to go as high as the Colts were for the signing bonus. They also believed that Vinatieri was losing leg strength and, as a result, his kickoffs weren’t as effective as they had been a couple years earlier.

  It was all so analytical, and for followers of the team, Vinatieri was all about romanticism and nostalgia. It’s not often that people had pictures of kickers, but everyone knew the significance when they went into New England bars and stores and saw the photo of a Patriot in the snow, getting a low kick over the outstretched arms of Raiders and through the uprights. They also found significance anytime Vinatieri attempted a field goal from forty-eight yards, because forty-eight was the magic number in New Orleans for the game-winner against the Rams. There were other kickers in the league with stronger legs and better numbers, but there was such a trust in Adam that most Patriots fans wouldn’t have let him leave. Ever.

  In April, the public didn’t realize it, but another stitch loosened and fell out. As the Patriots made their final draft preparations, they began to focus on a couple players. This process was usually smooth since the staff saw so many prospects the same way. The Patriots had won three championships, aided by several key players the team had selected in the draft or acquired via their extra draft picks.

  Belichick and Pioli had completed six drafts together, and there was at least one major building block from each one. Brady had been first. Next were Richard Seymour and Matt Light. The following year brought a Super Bowl MVP, Deion Branch. In 2003, a starting cornerback, Asante Samuel, was there in the fourth round, followed by one of Brady’s favorite linemen, center Dan Koppen, in the fifth. The 2004 draft produced a nose tackle, Vince Wilfork, whom the Patriots didn’t expect to see at number 21. In 2005, there was a pick that confused all the experts. No one saw Logan Mankins, a guard from Fresno State, as a first-rounder. But the Patriots liked his athleticism and toughness, took him at number 32, and noticed early that he was their best offensive lineman.

  Weeks and now days before the 2006 draft, Belichick, Pioli, and Dimitroff had all asked their scouts for decisive, clear opinions on players. When they were asked about Minnesota running back Laurence Maroney and Florida receiver Chad Jackson, they couldn’t have been clearer: Most scouts didn’t want them to be Patriots. But something was happening during the process that hadn’t taken place before. Outside opinions were considered, as usual, but they seemed to be more weighted than they had in the past. For example, the internal report on Maroney was that he had great ability, but his work ethic was poor and he was immature. However, McDaniels, the man who would be his offensive coordinator, liked him, and there was probably a good reason for it: His brother, Ben, was a member of the Minnesota coaching staff and gave a breakdown that seemed to contradict the Patriots’ scouts.

  Even with the support of the two McDanielses, the numbers didn’t match up. Maroney didn’t have enough of an in-house consensus to be ranked as high as he was on the Patriots’ board, yet he remained there. Whether or not it was intended to be this way, the message to the scouts was that their exhaustive reports were not being considered as carefully as the opinions of the offensive coordinator, who understandably jumped into the draft process well after they did.

  As for Jackson, the team had brought him in for several visits and couldn’t agree on what his value was. Belichick had begun to develop a relationship with Florida coach Urban Meyer, who thought Jackson’s skills would translate to the pros. Receivers coach Brian Daboll, who had good instincts when it came to potential divas, disagreed. He said he didn’t want to coach him. Before his first season as receivers coach, Daboll had interviewed University of Pittsburgh receiver Antonio Bryant and had basically sprinted back to Belichick to say that he was not the Patriots’ type of guy. He had that same feeling about Jackson.

  The scouts agreed with Daboll. They said Jackson had a bad attitude, was a bad route runner, had excellent straight-line speed, and was a “me” guy. Belichick and Pioli had an understanding that they would never select a player whom they didn’t agree on, and certainly not two, but this was going to be a challenge for them. Pioli was leaning toward the scouts on the Maroney/Jackson debate and Belichick wasn’t. Draft debate was normal in Foxboro and everyone believed that it was healthy, but the Patriots rarely found themselves in such philosophical tangles as they got close to making a decision.

  They all weren’t on the same page, and those voting no on Maroney/Jackson could sense something bad was about to happen as draft day arrived. Those two players hovered on the board. When you’re a scout, and you’re not allowed in the room on draft day, all you can do is hope that someone else takes the player you don’t want your team to have. Or you hope that there’s a sudden change of heart with Belichick and that he sees something he doesn’t like at the last minute.

  One thing everyone did agree on was that the running back and receiver positions needed to be restocked. Corey Dillon had run for a team-record 1,635 yards in 2004, on 4.7 yards per carry. He looked just as powerful in 2005 but slower. He lost more than a yard off his per-carry average, down to 3.5. Meanwhile, the Patriots’ top receivers, Deion Branch and David Givens, had both been good in 2005 and both were in their midtwenties. Unfortunately, they both were contract concerns. Givens was an unrestricted free agent and had already left for Tennessee. B
ranch was under contract and felt he deserved a new deal, so he planned to hold out.

  If not Maroney and Jackson, some back-receiver tandem would be Patriots. On draft day, the scouts were sick when Maroney was New England’s choice at number 21, ahead of DeAngelo Williams and Joseph Addai. In the second round, the Patriots not only picked Jackson, they moved up to get him. There had never been this much disagreement over players drafted so high. The scouts, truly on the outside of the room looking in, were left to wonder: Did Belichick really value the analyses of two college coaches more than theirs? Or, as he had many years earlier with Branch, had he seen something overwhelmingly positive that they hadn’t? Even so, no one ever questioned Branch’s attitude and work ethic, just his size, because he was barely five-nine. If Belichick saw Jackson’s skills, that was fine, but there was no mistaking that the receiver who was bigger and faster than Branch didn’t have an ounce of his game smarts or game want-to.

  It had been an odd start to the draft. It didn’t feel like the old Foxboro anymore.

  Troy Brown knew the team was in trouble on a few counts in September 2006. First, he had been unimpressed by the attitude of the rookie Jackson. “Guys would try to pull him into meetings, and he’d be at his locker lying down,” Brown says. “Or a group of receivers would be watching film and we’d try to get him to come with us, but he wouldn’t. And he’d get an attitude when you’d ask. I’m not one to argue with anybody. If I ask you a few times and you don’t do it, forget it. Some guys would ask seven or eight times.