War Room

by Michael Holley

  “But the whole situation made me want to beat everyone by more than we did. I wanted to indirectly respond to the Spygate criticism. I wanted to say, ‘All right, look at the players that we have and what we’re able to do. We’ll beat your team by fifty, forty, thirty, or whatever it takes. We’ll still win. That’s how good we are.’ I used it as motivation. I had been using things that people had said about me ever since I was in high school. And now you’re trying to stomp on the essence of why I play the game, which is to win world championships? You want us to prove that we’re great? Well, all right. Here you go, Jets fans. There’s Moss for fifty yards.”

  The mission could be seen in the season’s first five games. The Patriots scored at least 34 points in each game, had at least four hundred total yards of offense in each, and barely allowed Brady to be touched as he was sacked a total of three times. They appeared to be a team constructed in one of John Madden’s video games, a team in real life imitating electronic art. The only difference was that in the video games, there was no button you could push on the controller to give your team a grudge.

  Every week, there was a new Spygate quote or column to add to the smoldering logs. If it wasn’t the words of a former coach, it was the words of a current one. Colts coach Tony Dungy, one of the most respected voices in sports and a Patriots adversary, checked in to say that Spygate was sad for the league. He then wondered how Belichick would be perceived historically and made a reference to Barry Bonds. The insinuation was that Belichick and the use of a camera was comparable to Bonds’s alleged performance-enhancing drug use on his way to seven MVPs and the all-time home-run record. Every week there was something the Patriots did on the field that would incite bloggers and talk-show callers.

  In weeks six through eight, they were accused of running up the score. They started with a 48–27 win in Dallas, followed by a 49–28 victory in Miami. After what everyone else thought was a cruise over the Dolphins, Belichick tore into his defense and told them they were playing like the worst defense in the league. The whole team responded with a shutdown of Washington, 52–7. The Patriots had scoring drives in that game of sixty-seven, seventy-three, eighty-five, eighty-eight, and ninety yards. They were 8–0 and Brady had already set his career high in touchdown passes with thirty. Eleven of those TD passes had gone to Moss. On the flip side, Mangini’s Jets were 1–7.

  Halfway through their season, the Patriots were still tethered to week one in Jersey. Gregg Easterbrook, an intellectual who contributed to the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic, wrote about the difference between the Patriots and Colts in his weekly column on ESPN.com. While the Colts and Dungy represented all that is good, the Patriots and Belichick were evil and “scoundrels in the service of that which is baleful: Dishonesty, cheating, arrogance, hubris, endless complaining, even in success.” The writer went on to question Tom Brady’s work with charity and compared his “smirk” to vice president Dick Cheney’s. “People who smirk,” Easterbrook wrote, “are fairly broadcasting the message: ‘I’m hiding something.’”

  The atmosphere created by Spygate, combined with the all-around force of what was happening on the field, brought out the strongest emotions from the unlikeliest Patriots.

  Rosevelt Colvin had suffered a career-threatening hip injury in 2003, was back on the field in 2004, and had fully recovered by 2005. In 2007, he was part of a strong starting linebacker group that included Bruschi, Mike Vrabel, and Adalius Thomas. Colvin was one of the most devout Christians on the team. He didn’t drink alcohol or curse, and as part of his faith, he gave 10 percent of his $4.6 million annual salary to his church. He was a big believer in humility because, as they say in Baptist churches like Colvin’s, he had a testimony.

  When he was a senior in high school, he wasn’t just thinking about wearing a big-time school’s hat on national signing day. He also had to think of his parents, who were being evicted from their home. They were forced to live in a place owned by friends of theirs until they regained their financial footing. Several years later, Colvin says he was headed down a bleak financial path himself. He was a young NFL player who wasn’t saving his money and instead wasting it on cars and clothes that he didn’t really want. The turnaround came when he renewed his faith and actually started saving more money than he ever had, even with the tithing to his church.

  Colvin wasn’t the type to take things for granted. Yet in 2007 he also thirsted for the Patriots’ big plays and high scores, driven to prove that, unlike in Bonds’s case, records could be broken without artificial help.

  “Honestly, I loved it when we scored as much as we did,” he says. “I think it was an ‘F-you’ to the league. What’s funny is that some teams that were commenting about stealing signals, like the Colts, were some of the teams that were stealing signals. I know for a fact that the Colts were stealing; we’d talk about it before we played them. But it never offended me because it’s football. People have to understand that it’s not like a class where you get the answers to the test and do well. You can steal all you want in football, but you still have to play and figure out how to get around that three-hundred-pounder.

  “I knew I wasn’t giving my rings back. We played the way we did because we were good. Not because of film.”

  The issue Colvin raised was at the heart of dozens of Spygate-inspired conversations around the country. How much was too much? Everyone knew that stealing signs was fairly common in the history of football. One of Belichick’s boyhood memories was going to scout college games with his father, Steve, and watching his dad decipher the hand signals of both teams by the second quarter. That was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In modern pro football, most teams had someone giving “dummy signals” and someone communicating the real thing. The disagreement was over the act of taping the signals and studying them. The unspoken message, then, seemed to be that it’s okay to steal what all of the public can see, as long as you do it without the use of a camera. Once the camera was introduced, the conversation changed, and most people couldn’t explain why. But the consensus was that stealing and studying with the naked eye was acceptable, but stealing and studying on tape was not.

  On November 4, Colvin had a chance to show his hometown just how good his team was. He grew up in Indianapolis and attended Broad Ripple High, fewer than ten miles from where the Patriots and Colts would play the most hyped game of the half season. Both teams were undefeated, with the Patriots at eight wins and the Colts at seven, and even if they hadn’t been, there was always the inimitable Patriots-Colts backdrop. While the game was sloppy at times and didn’t live up to the billing, it was the first real scare the Patriots had gotten all season.

  With just under ten minutes to play, Peyton Manning scored on a sneak and the Patriots trailed 20–10. As had been the case the entire season, the biggest play occurred when Brady found Moss. The six-four receiver noticed that he was in a mismatch against five-eleven defensive back Antoine Bethea, and like a basketball player, Moss positioned himself so he could complete his end of a fifty-five-yard pass play. That set up a short touchdown pass from Brady to Wes Welker. The entire series had taken less than two minutes.

  When the Colts got the ball back, still ahead 20–17, they didn’t do much with it. Colvin was disruptive on a key third-down play, sacking Manning and forcing a fumble. The Colts recovered but were forced to punt, and when they did Welker put together a twenty-three-yard return. Another big play, this one from Brady to Donté Stallworth for thirty-three yards, set up another touchdown. Brady saw an open Kevin Faulk in the middle of the field and hit him for an easy thirteen-yard score. In about four minutes, Brady had thrown two TD passes. Appropriately, the 24–20 win was secured when Colvin, a graduate of the Indianapolis public schools as well as Purdue University, smothered a Manning fumble and allowed the Patriots to run out the clock.

  The win over the Colts allowed the Patriots to go into their bye week a confident 9–0. They came out of it, on November 18, roaring. They were in Buffalo
, playing for the first time all season in weather that was going to be similar to that of the play-offs. It was western New York in the fall, so of course it was freezing. Playing as if they heard whispers that they would crack in temperatures below 40, the Patriots offense produced a 35-point first half against the Bills. Brady threw four touchdown passes in the half, all to Moss. After just thirty minutes and a 35–7 lead, it was obvious that the Patriots and Bills were not playing the same game. But everyone associated with New England wanted more, even if the scoreboard showed that it was late and the eyes of their opponents were closed. More. Everyone wanted more. Not just on a cold November Sunday in Buffalo, where they’d go on to win 56–10, but every week.

  “I remember every game that I watched, hoping, even though it was not the right way to think, that we’d win by at least twenty-something points,” says Thomas Dimitroff. “I wanted sixty points or forty-five points, just as a member of that organization, to show: This is utter dominance. And I remember every game that came along, there was such a drive, it was this fueled desire to do something. And I didn’t care if people thought, ‘Oh, they’re a bunch of bullies.’ I wanted to be a bully one time in my life, where it was like, ‘Let’s just do something outrageous and be a part of history that way as well.’ It was amazing, because that’s not normally my makeup.”

  It was tough to define what normal was for Dimitroff, because things were beginning to change in his personal and professional life. He and wife, Angeline, had recently welcomed a son, Mason, to the world. Raising a child is challenging enough, and even more so when one of the parents is on the road for 225 days a year. That was Dimitroff’s schedule as he hotel-hopped around the country, scouting, interviewing, and watching film at dozens of colleges. Even when he was in familiar Foxboro he was on the road, staying in a nearby Sheraton that acted as the team’s Saturday-night headquarters before home games. He and other Patriot scouts had a job tougher than most of their peers since their college reports were directly tied to their knowledge of pro players. Dimitroff didn’t complain about the schedule and the constant mint on the pillow and neither did Angeline, but the frenzy was going to change if he was able to take the next step for which he and Pioli had been planning.

  No one in the organization was aware of it, but after Dimitroff and Pioli had completed their necessary work, they often had long talks about what Dimitroff needed to do to become a general manager. Pioli gave him a taste for what the job was like by making sure he was in the loop on contract talks and free-agent conversations, allowing him to speak at certain marketing functions in which Pioli would normally be the keynote speaker and giving him some media experience by permitting him to speak, off the record, with a handful of local and national beat writers and football columnists.

  The depth of their relationship was apparent on several levels, including an ironic one: Pioli was preparing Dimitroff for a job that he technically didn’t have himself. Everyone knew that Pioli was the Patriots’ GM in action and responsibilities, but he was officially the team’s vice president of player personnel. He didn’t have the GM title because the Patriots liked how there was already an understanding of the team’s hierarchy and believed naming Pioli as a GM would have confused things. By helping a friend, Pioli was also potentially weakening his department, but he couldn’t deny that Dimitroff was ready to lead his own personnel group. While Dimitroff’s scouting was greatly influenced by his father, who marveled over tough players, his area of focus was different. He was most intrigued by athleticism and movement, along with the ability to compete and be tough. He also had the benefit of his father’s hindsight.

  “My dad always said that if he had gone back to coaching, he would have evaluated more and coached less. He said he would have backed off and let the athleticism of some of his players take over.”

  Tom Dimitroff also had words about being a GM. He told his son that if he ever secured one of those jobs, he hoped he’d stay true to who he is. “Don’t become one of those big shots,” his father had said, “who thinks they’re better than everybody else.”

  In 2007, Pioli had such trust in Dimitroff’s judgment and intelligence that he realized that he could ease up a bit, which allowed his staff to see the boss’s other dimensions. Once a week, his wife and four-and-a-half-year-old daughter would come to the office and his demeanor would change instantly. His daughter, Mia, could get him to do things that no one else could.

  “He started wearing nail polish on his toes,” says a laughing Jay Muraco, who became the Patriots’ college coordinator in 2000. “Mia would paint his toes and he wouldn’t dare remove the paint. Everything started to revolve around his family. When he could, he was spending time with her. And if that meant something as simple as driving her to school, or getting out of the building a little earlier on Fridays than he had in the past, he was going to do it.”

  Now that they were both fathers, Pioli and Dimitroff could relate to the pursuit of excellence at work and at home. Their appetite for scouting and winning football games, as the 10–0 Patriots were doing in historic fashion, didn’t change; what changed was a bigger appetite for things away from football. What they both hoped for was success in the business they loved, along with a sliver of stability, although stability was not what the NFL was known for.

  Pioli knew what it had been like for his wife, Dallas, growing up as Bill Parcells’s daughter. Before Parcells was a popular and witty pro head coach, he moved between several jobs in the college game, and his family moved with him. Dallas attended three different high schools, in three states, over four years. Pioli hoped that Mia wouldn’t have to go through the same thing, but if the job did force him to relocate, he was certain that a couple things would never be affected by new cities and new friends.

  Number one, of course, was the relationship with Mia. He had listened to enough family advice from people in his profession, and heard too many tales of regret, not to learn his lesson. He’d heard from men who were away so much, and so distracted by the game, that their kids became young adults in a flash, and they truly didn’t know the people who held their last name. Pioli didn’t need to be convinced. His daughter, with her deep blue eyes, seemed to see his thoughts before he said them, so sometimes as the two of them sat together quietly, driving on a father-daughter date, they’d glance at each other and just giggle.

  The second thing went back fifteen years, to Cleveland. As a single and low-paid employee of the Browns, Pioli was told by Belichick to make sure there was always someplace in the country that the family could call home. One day you’re a Cleveland Brown, for example, and with the stroke of a pen you become a Baltimore Raven. As the job changes, the family needs an anchor. It wasn’t relevant news to Pioli’s life at the time, but as he advanced in the league, married, became a father, and commanded a generous salary, the advice resonated. Like Belichick, Pioli also found that permanent family place on Nantucket. Many people on the island followed an unofficial tradition and put quarterboards on their homes, displaying a name. The Piolis did as well. Their quarterboard reads CASA MIA.

  As the Patriots moved toward the 2007 holidays, they were scheduled to take on two mediocre teams, the Eagles and Ravens. They were drawing record TV numbers each time they played, with the audience still having a distaste for who they were yet not wanting to miss what they might do from game to game or series to series. In terms of the offensive standard they’d set in the first ten games, weeks eleven and twelve were a disappointment.

  Three days after Thanksgiving, they couldn’t shake the Eagles, playing without injured quarterback Donovan McNabb, at home. They were able to escape with a 31–28 win when Asante Samuel came up with an interception, his second of the game, with four minutes to play. They came out of the game with two news items, one each for the present and near future. The item that needed to be responded to immediately was the health of Colvin. He’d broken a bone in the middle of his right foot and would be out for the rest of the year. The other news involve
d the Eagles and their defensive approach.

  Belichick had a lot of respect for Eagles coordinator Jim Johnson, and the men talked strategy several times during the season. He had been with the Eagles for nine seasons and was given complete control of their defense. He was one of the best coaches in the league at disguising his blitzes, and it’s why the Eagles had accumulated more sacks than most teams in football over an eight-year period. Belichick enjoyed talking with Johnson because when Johnson was looking at football, he had a knack for seeing beyond the obvious.

  Johnson had the right idea in the game against the Patriots, but he didn’t have the right team with which to pull off the plan. If the Patriots ran into a play-off team with a Jim Johnson disciple leading the defense, it might be a problem. Johnson’s defenses blitzed more than they brawled. The defensive ends and outside linebackers were built like ripped sprinters and small forwards, zipping past you before you could line them up and knock them down. They ran you to exhaustion when they were going well and then, when you were unsteady in the fourth quarter, they’d finally throw a jab. And knock you out.

  After the 3-point win over the Eagles, the Patriots did the same thing against the Ravens on the road, although the win had twice as many theatrical moments as the Philadelphia game. It started with ESPN’s Monday Night Football booth, which included Don Shula for a quarter and a half as a guest commentator. As the last coach of an undefeated team in the NFL, his presence made a lot of sense. At times, the legendary coach could be heard celebrating with analyst Tony Kornheiser when it appeared that the Patriots were going to lose.

  That was a strong possibility with the Patriots trailing 24–20 with 1:48 to play and facing a fourth-and-one. Brady went for a sneak and appeared to be stopped. The Ravens, led by emotional players such as Bart Scott, Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, and Terrell Suggs, briefly danced on the field. But the players became angry when they learned that the play was dead because Rex Ryan, their defensive coordinator, had called a time-out. When the Patriots eventually scored to win, 27–24, the Ravens went crazy.