“He was an athletic kid. Strong. He just wasn’t willing to put in the work.”
To their credit, the Patriots often didn’t rely on draft choices to immediately save them. They liked to develop them on their terms and wait for them to naturally grow into their talent. But they had issues with a veteran, too. Branch was looking for that new deal and the Patriots weren’t willing to meet his number. After going back and forth and granting him permission to speak with other teams, the Patriots traded Branch to the Seahawks for a 2007 first-round pick. As a sidebar, they also filed tampering charges against Eric Mangini’s Jets. In the world of stocks, the Patriots believed the Jets would have been guilty of insider trading. The claim was that the Jets gave Branch knowledge that weakened the Patriots’ position to make the best deal. The league reviewed the Patriots’ claims and cleared the Jets of any wrongdoing five months later.
For the players, the reality was that they didn’t have their best receiver.
“I wasn’t expecting to play a role as a starting receiver,” Brown says. He was the ultimate gamer but he was thirty-five, coming to the end of a career in which he had been a receiver, cornerback, and punt returner. “I remember telling Daboll, ‘I don’t know if I can play sixty to seventy plays a game… I was thinking thirty to forty.’ Plus my knee wasn’t the same after that 2002 season. I never felt quite right after that.”
Since the Patriots had also lost Givens to free agency, Brady was throwing to the likes of Reche Caldwell, Doug Gabriel, and a few games into the season, Jabar Gaffney. Given the circumstances, it was probably the finest collaborative work of Brady and McDaniels, now officially the offensive coordinator. Brady threw for over thirty-five hundred yards and had twenty-four touchdown passes. His leading receiver was Caldwell, who, at best, was a number three receiver for most NFL teams.
The team finished with a 12–4 record, which gave Brady a winning percentage of .737 since becoming the full-time starter in 2002. He guided the team past the Jets at home in a wild-card game. The only drama in that one was how Belichick would address Mangini, who had once been one of his favorite pupils but now was on the enemies list. They upset the Chargers, the conference’s number one seed, in San Diego. Big plays were made by Brown, who used his defensive-back training to force a fumble on a potentially game-ending Brady interception, and Caldwell, who recovered the fumble and also had a huge reception to set up the winning kick.
Of course, that set up another play-off game with the Colts, this one for the conference championship. The outcome of the game would affect the way the Patriots did business and, by extension, force all of America to pay attention, week after historic week.
5
The Desert
On a gray and drizzly Sunday morning, typical of late April in New England, Randy Moss waited near a curb at Boston’s Logan Airport, looking for his ride. The hood of his sweatshirt was pulled over his head but Moss, who stood six feet four inches, was easy for Josh McDaniels to recognize.
“What up, homie?” Moss said as he jumped into the passenger seat of the offensive coordinator’s SUV.
For most people in America, it was simply April 29, 2007. For Football America, it was the second day of the NFL draft, and Moss was officially a member of the Patriots. He had just been acquired from Oakland for a fourth-round pick, a bargain in itself considering that Moss had recently turned thirty and had talent to burn. The risk for the Patriots was that the wide receiver had burned some of that talent the previous year in Northern California, pouting and going half speed during a season in which the Raiders were the Patriots in reverse, losing nine consecutive games and finishing with two wins.
McDaniels didn’t normally make airport runs to meet his players, but Bill Belichick had made a special request the night before. He and Scott Pioli already had a chance to interview Moss to see what he was thinking, and he wanted McDaniels to be able to do the same thing. He thought the forty-minute drive to the stadium would be a good chance for McDaniels and Moss to set the tone for their relationship. They hadn’t been driving long before Moss did a double take at something McDaniels said.
“You’re the offensive coordinator?” Moss said in disbelief and admiration. All along, he thought he had been riding with one of the Patriots’ college-age interns. “Damn.”
McDaniels was thirty-one and could have passed for much younger. His brown hair was often cut to a buzz and he didn’t have a trace of facial hair. He had a quick and bright smile, a sure candidate for class president. He and Moss talked for a bit longer and then Moss tried to catch a nap. Instead, his cell phone rang and a player from another team was on the line. Moss explained that he had just arrived in Boston and was a Patriot, and the player told him that New England was on their 2007 schedule.
“Dawg,” Moss said in his thick West Virginia accent, “we could play y’all in a parking lot and we’d still tear y’all’s hearts out.”
McDaniels kept his eyes locked on the road, but it was difficult for him to contain his excitement. Moss had just answered several of his questions with that exchange. Now he didn’t need to ask how much fire he had or what his mentality was as he prepared for the season. It was the same as theirs. Moss and the Patriots both had something to prove in 2007. Moss, forever scrutinized over his desire to win, would have to answer the unspoken yet implied Patriots question: Is football important to you? He was known for doing what he wanted, when he wanted, whether it was playing the game, leaving the field, celebrating a touchdown, or giving an interview. He was a notorious freestyler, at times a renegade, and he was always a sound bite away from scorching a franchise’s reputation or, worse, his own. In New England, for the first time in Moss’s nine-season career, an organization was literally going to take the money out of his pocket—he had agreed to waive the final $21 million remaining on his contract and sign a $3 million deal instead—and force him to be his dynamic self within a greater team structure. If not, they’d let him go.
As for the Patriots, they would have to prove that they could bounce back after the latest episode in their play-off trilogy with the Colts. It had been crushing three months earlier and the outcome continued to sting in April. For the first time, the Patriots had to travel to Indianapolis in January for a postseason game. They had dominated the Colts in the first half, holding them to 6 points. It appeared to be over in the second quarter when Asante Samuel read Marvin Harrison’s route better than he did, snatched the Peyton Manning pass out of the air, and returned it thirty-nine yards for a touchdown. Samuel’s score made it 21–3. When Samuel stood in the end zone and pounded his chest twice to celebrate what he’d done, you could hear the thump thump along with the Patriots’ shouts in the quiet building.
The second half was a game-changer, short-and long-term. Not only did the result of it, being outscored 28–13, prevent the Patriots from matching the 1970s Steelers and winning four Super Bowls in six years. Not only did it expose weaknesses they had at receiver and linebacker, weaknesses that couldn’t be disguised by scheme. It altered their outlook on when to strike in free agency, how much money they were willing to spend, and the type of weapons they were going to put around Tom Brady.
They weren’t planning to match their rivals, step by step, in an arms race, but what they were designing on offense wasn’t all that dissimilar from what the Colts had done over the years. It would no longer be accurate to claim that the Patriots didn’t have a number one receiver. By the time the off-season was over, they’d have two contenders for that spot. Maybe January in Indianapolis didn’t change them as much as it brought out a side that few had ever seen. The loss had taken them around the emotional globe. They were hurt and angered and embarrassed by it, and thus the off-season started to take on the feel of a movie trailer from one of those revenge thrillers, including the baritone of an overly dramatic narrator: The Patriots had something taken away from them, and now they’re on a mission to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs… They were bolder, edgier, more uncompromisin
g than usual, and anyone who watched or came across them could feel just how piercing their vision for the 2007 season was. Within a couple weeks of the Colts’ loss, all aspects of business were already in motion.
In late January and early February, receivers coach Brian Daboll tried to persuade Belichick to also make him the quarterbacks coach. Daboll, thirty-one, thought he had a case. He had been Belichick’s first rise-through-the-system coaching assistant in New England. He had worked well with the receivers in his first five years as full-time assistant coach, getting the maximum out of Deion Branch, David Givens, Jabar Gaffney, and even Reche Caldwell, and he had tried to save the team from drafting Chad Jackson, who was already a bust. Yet McDaniels had gained more responsibilities and ultimately earned a higher-profile job. This was one of the drawbacks of putting young, bright, and highly motivated coaches through the system at the same time. Once in a while, one will hold a position that the other one wants, and it could create a superintense environment of job climbers and job cannibals.
The Patriots had been fortunate that they rarely came across those situations. The young coaches and scouts usually got along and were too occupied with satisfying the demands of Belichick to think of anything else. Belichick respected Daboll but he had no intention of making him the quarterbacks coach and taking the job from McDaniels, who was doing double duty as coach and offensive coordinator. There had to be a good enough reason to make a move that would disrupt the trust and chemistry that Brady had with McDaniels. Adding the title would have been good for Daboll and brought him closer to being an offensive coordinator, but it wasn’t best for the Patriots.
They were going to remain as they were, and that realization had sunk in when the entire Patriots’ coaching staff was in Hawaii for the Pro Bowl in February. A couple assistant coaches noticed that Daboll seemed more defiant than usual during meetings, once even putting his feet on the table when no one else was, and one coach pulled him aside and told him that he was being disrespectful. They wouldn’t be able to pull him aside for long: In Foxboro, he’d already had someone clean out his office for him, and when the staff returned from the tropics they learned that Daboll was no longer one of them. He had gotten the quarterbacks job he was looking for. It was in New York, with Eric Mangini and the Jets.
Patriots-Jets stories and The Godfather analogies would be abundant in the fall, but no one was thinking that way in March. Belichick and Pioli were on deal-making sprees. Not even two full days into free agency, they had gone against form and jumped in early for linebacker Adalius Thomas. Usually, the Patriots waited for the market to reveal itself before they went in with an offer. But Thomas was their guy and they hooked him with a proposal that would pay $24 million in the first three years of a seven-year contract. He was their type, from being one of the largest linebackers in the league at 270 pounds, to his ability to play multiple positions on defense, to his 11½-sack, 106-tackle season in 2006. Legend was that he could even play corner and safety if you needed him to, and the Patriots, whose lack of speed at linebacker had been exploited in the loss to the Colts, needed his athleticism. He even sounded like a Patriot when speaking to reporters: “I’m a football player. I don’t play a position. Whatever is needed for me to do here, I’m going to do.” After Thomas, the Patriots picked up two receivers. They signed speedy free agent Donté Stallworth to a creatively structured deal that could be as long as six years or as short as one. Belichick and Pioli both loved the Dolphins’ Wes Welker, so they cajoled, sweet-talked, and seduced their divisional rival to trade their top pass-catcher for second-and seventh-round picks.
It got even better just over a month later during the two days of the draft. On day one, the Patriots entered with two first-round picks and were open to trading whatever they had in any round. They didn’t think the draft was particularly rich, so they were more interested in watching the phones than watching the board. They eventually used their higher first-rounder, number 24, on Miami safety Brandon Meriweather. They rejoiced when they got a phone call about the other one, number 28. San Francisco wanted back in the first round to take tackle Joe Staley, so the 49ers were offering the Patriots their first-round pick for the next season, when the prospects were projected to be much better. It was exactly what Belichick and Pioli wanted. They thought the draft was weak, and they didn’t see many players on the board who could definitively fit into a spot currently held by one of their top fifty-three players. The 49ers, who had won seven games in 2006, believed they were close to being a winning team. But the trade was a gamble for the 49ers, and if they had even a hint of slippage, they risked handing a top-ten selection to one of the best teams in the league.
As much as they wanted to, the Patriots couldn’t trade out of the entire draft. One of the issues was that they had a handful of compensatory picks, which were essentially refund picks from the NFL offices and couldn’t be traded. Compensatory picks are awarded based on what happened in free agency the previous year. If you lose more free agents than you gain, based on the quality of player you lost, a compensatory (or consolation) pick is given somewhere between rounds three and seven. An even bigger issue was that league coaches and general managers saw the same thin talent pool that they did, so it was inevitable: Before the draft was over, the Patriots would be forced to select several players whom they had graded as wholly undraftable.
Late on day one, April 28, Belichick made the phone call to his offensive coordinator.
“What do you have going on tomorrow morning?” he asked. When McDaniels replied that he was available, Belichick confirmed the deal that McDaniels knew he had been working on but wasn’t sure when or if he could close it. “We got Moss. I need you to pick him up from the airport.”
And so it was. Randy Moss, who sometimes made plays that seemed possible only in the world of special effects, was going to be catching passes from Tom Brady, who had won well over 70 percent of his starts with receivers far less skilled than Moss. McDaniels was busy as soon as he dropped Moss off at the stadium on that Sunday morning. He had intense closed-door meetings with his offensive coaches every day for a week, repeatedly telling them, and himself, that it was time to think differently. When McDaniels and his staff finished working, they had conceived an offense that would become the best the league had ever seen.
One of the Patriots’ most basic plays in 2007 was called Zero Out Slot 66 D Prick Snow. It was a play everyone on offense could recite without much thought, and they knew exactly what every letter, number, and word meant. The “Zero Out Slot” represented the formation, which would have its strength to the right and require the slot receiver to always line up away from the tight end. The “66” told everyone about the protection. In this case, six players would be protecting Brady. “D Prick Snow” was the route manual for all the potential receivers on the play: The tight end and slot would both run diagonal routes, the wide receiver would run an outside curl, and the halfback, after satisfying any blitz-pickup responsibilities, would leak out and be available for a short pass.
With the new Patriots being added to the offense, even the basic plays weren’t quite so basic.
“All of a sudden it was, ‘Okay, we’re not dealing with the same menu of people that we were just a few months ago,’” McDaniels says. “I remember thinking about certain concepts when we got Stallworth and then Welker. We started thinking about what Welker could do inside and the flexibility Stallworth gave us on the perimeter. And there was a certain way of thinking about the new toys we had and tinkering with them a bit. Then, wow, Moss gets put into the mix.
“Now we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do to use him. It’s like you’ve got something wonderful and you’re not going to waste it. And it would have been a waste to just make him conform to things we had planned for other guys who didn’t have his skill set. There were plays we created, and there were plays that we copied and stole from other teams with the thought being, ‘Okay, these are things that this guy has done before. He’s g
ood at them. We haven’t done them before. We need to get good at them.’ So that spring was, I would say, a rather large undertaking in terms of where we were trying to be by the time we rolled the ball out there in June and July.”
One thing everyone seemed comfortable with was the thought of Moss as a teammate. He was a bit of a contradiction, and it was a contradiction that the Patriots could embrace: Although Moss always seemed to be in the spotlight, he didn’t seek it. He felt that he had been burned by reporters in the past, reporters unwilling to be fair and thorough, so he shut most of them down. It was different with his teammates and coaches. They loved his stories, his accent, his hilariously profane outbursts in the locker room, and, of course, his talent.
Even before minicamp in early June, he proved he could fit in with the biggest Patriot of them all. The team had a charity golf tournament a week before minicamp, and it was as much a family reunion as it was a tournament. Players greeted one another excitedly in the relaxed clubhouse atmosphere; proudly carried their modest swag bags; razzed each other during a spirited long-drive contest, which was won by Brady; and finally separated into small groups so they could actually play golf. Belichick had a blast in his group, often listening to and laughing at the tales of Moss, who was his golfing partner for the day.
Not much had changed a week later in Foxboro, nor in the weeks that followed going into training camp. Moss quickly grasped the offense— “One of the most intelligent players I’ve ever coached,” says McDaniels—and proved to the coaches that he understood his role on each play they presented to him. But mastering the offense during drills and practices with your teammates isn’t always the biggest challenge. What about the games? The problem for Moss in late July and all of August was that he had a slight pull in his left hamstring. The Patriots didn’t want to take any chances so they took the most conservative tack possible. They held him out of the entire preseason. So despite all of McDaniels’s work to integrate Moss into the offense, no one knew how it looked on the field against actual competition.
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