War Room

by Michael Holley

  As Patriots fans knew, newspapers were different altogether. Serious newspapers were too serious to sponsor parties that anyone wanted to attend. What papers did, in the eyes of the fans, was screw up Super Bowl week. That was still the prevailing view from 1997, when the Boston Globe ran a breaking-news story that head coach Bill Parcells wouldn’t coach the Patriots after the Super Bowl. Indeed, it was a true story and Parcells was headed to the Jets, but fans didn’t want to hear it until after the game.

  Eleven years later, on February 1 and 2, the newspaper industry struck again at Patriots fans, in the form of a light jab from the New York Times on Friday and then an uppercut from the Boston Herald on Saturday.

  The Friday Times story quoted Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter extensively. He said he was considering bringing the Spygate issue before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he was a ranking member, to explain why the NFL destroyed evidence that was on the tapes. Also quoted in the story was an ex-Patriots employee, Matt Walsh, who was fired in 2002. He hinted that he was in possession of something that could change the Spygate discussion, but he wanted legal protection before going forward. The story couldn’t be taken completely seriously, though, after Specter’s suggestion that, for the first time in the history of the country, America might need to see tapes of NFL defensive coordinators giving signals: “What if there was something on the tapes we might want to be subpoenaed, for example? You can’t destroy it. That would be obstruction of justice.”

  The Saturday Herald had the more explosive piece. The paper had a source who claimed that the Patriots had taped the Saint Louis Rams’ final walk-through before New England’s upset win in Super Bowl XXXVI. It had been an underground rumor, similar to many others the Patriots had heard in September, but now it was in print on the day before the most significant game in team history. The story quickly made its way around the country and into a meeting with Belichick and his seven team captains.

  “We had done all our preparations already,” Tedy Bruschi remembers. “And he said, ‘A story is out there saying that we filmed the Rams’ Super Bowl walk-through, which is absolute bullshit. It’s not true. But the story’s out. Do you think I should address the team?’ And we looked at each other as captains and said no. Because we had been through the fire already all year about Spygate and all the accusations people were putting on us. And we were supposed to double up the fire at that point? He never really addressed it during the year, either, because we just kept going and focusing on what was next. So why now?”

  No matter what happened in the game, the season was going to end just as it had begun. There would be conversations about their greatness, mixed with commentary about mysterious cameras and tapes. The commissioner was on their side and believed them when they said the story was not true, but still, one day before the game was played, there was a five-hour meeting between Patriots executives and representatives of the commissioner’s office. Five hours. It was an exhausting process. All they would have to do is get through one more full day, and if they did their jobs, they could be standing next to the commissioner and, finally, talking about something good.

  On Sunday evening, when the Patriots’ offense entered a silver-paneled domed stadium in suburban Phoenix, they could have looked across the field and noticed a man who was paid to slow them down. His name was Steve Spagnuolo, and he was New England through and through. He had an accent that could have been his dad’s north Cambridge, his mom’s Dorchester, or his neighbors’ Grafton. He remembered the days when watching the Patriots play in a Super Bowl was a dream, especially if you had season tickets like he did in the early 1970s. The Patriots didn’t win much, but he still sat in end-zone seats and yelled for his guys, Mack Herron and Steve Grogan.

  Now, as defensive coordinator of the Giants, he was about to find out if his plan was going to work. He was one of the people who had disagreed with Tom Coughlin back in December: He didn’t want the head coach to play all of his starters in the regular-season finale against the Patriots. He worried about injuries, and he didn’t want to show too much that their first-round opponent, Tampa, could plan for. The best part about playing that game was that he had called for a number of vanilla defenses, so if the Patriots thought the same thing was coming, New York would have a slight advantage.

  “To be honest with you, I thought if we could keep them under thirty, maybe in the midtwenties, then we’d have a chance of beating them,” he says. “I thought that was just being realistic. The offensive line was unbelievable. The system was great. And the weapons…”

  Spagnuolo told his defensive players to think about two things: Hit Tom Brady, and be extra attentive to yards after the catch. The Patriots were certainly going to catch the ball, but they didn’t have to run free afterward. He knew his defenders were loose and confident. They were the last team to get in the play-offs, yet they went on the road and took out Tampa, Dallas, and Green Bay. Their easy smiles were not forced. What pressure did they have to worry about as 12-point underdogs in the eyes of Las Vegas? The Patriots were the ones wearing jewelry, real and imaginary. There were the three Super Bowl rings many of them had, and there was the gradual necklace that now included eighteen “W’s” that all of them had first worn in September. They weren’t sneaking up on anybody.

  Like most Super Bowls, you didn’t have to scan the crowd long to notice the cross-section of celebrities, but what made this different was the historic nature of it. Nobody among Alicia Keys, Jesse Jackson, Peter Farrelly, Amare Stoudemire, and Pamela Anderson had ever seen a team go 19–0. Thomas Dimitroff had helped build the team, but now he was a spectator like the people around him, in great seats overlooking the forty-yard line. He sat there with Angeline, along with a couple they’d be seeing a lot of in Atlanta: new head coach Mike Smith and his wife, Julie. His new life had begun, but he couldn’t help but feel that pregame belly knot for the Patriots. Scott Pioli got it, too, and there were times he’d be watching the game and unconsciously squeezing a plastic water bottle he was holding.

  Even Bruschi, who was playing in his fifth Super Bowl, could feel the weight of the season descending.

  “I think that we would have been considered the biggest joke in regular-season history if we would have lost in the divisional round or in the conference championship. So that was pressure. But I really felt it leading up to the game. It’s supposed to be just about playing the game and executing your assignment and doing those things. But I mean, you’re in the midst of a year where everyone is questioning your head coach, you know, and the validity of your world championships are questioned. It’s the most pressure I’ve ever felt in my entire career.”

  Anyone watching the Super Bowl, unaware of either the Vegas line or the undefeated stakes, would have seen two equals early in the second quarter. The Patriots led 7–3 at that point, although careful observers of the team should have followed the clues that this wasn’t New England’s typical 2007 game. Eli Manning threw a knuckleball down the left sideline, which Ellis Hobbs picked off at the ten and returned to the Patriots’ thirty-three. But strangely, an offensive line that protected and pushed better than any in the league twice couldn’t generate a surge on short-yardage plays. So with an opportunity to cash in on a turnover, the Patriots couldn’t pick up a first down.

  A few seconds later there was another chance: Manning fumbled at his own thirty-two, and Patriots linebacker Pierre Woods landed directly on top of it. He had it. But running back Ahmad Bradshaw went to the grass, fighting and wrestling Woods for the football. He got it. The Giants didn’t score when they got the ball back, but they had prevented what could have been an easy scoring chance for the Patriots.

  Meanwhile Spagnuolo, who spent eight years on Philadelphia blitz master Jim Johnson’s staff as a defensive backs and linebackers coach, was forcing Belichick and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels to come up with a strong counter-move. On back-to-back plays, Brady was sacked for seven-yard losses. He hadn’t been hit that hard in the
previous eighteen games. The Patriots would take their 7–3 halftime lead, but there would have to be a switch.

  “When they went to their nickel-and-dime packages, they had Osi Umenyiora, Michael Strahan, and Justin Tuck all on the field,” McDaniels says. “So we went to a package that would have them go with their base defense and keep an extra pass rusher from coming in.”

  It worked for a while, but then Spagnuolo saw what was happening.

  “They’d have two tight ends, two wide receivers on second and eight, second and long,” he says. “Usually they’d do that to run, but we figured they wanted to pass out of it. So we put our pass rushers in against that personnel.”

  Halfway through the third, with the score still 7–3, Brady dropped back to pass at the New York twenty-five. He may have had something, but he didn’t have time to react to it. Strahan dropped him for a six-yard loss. It was New York’s fourth sack of the day. The Patriots were in field goal range in a game that looked like it would be decided late. Maybe they would have tried it if they had Adam Vinatieri, a hero of previous New England Super Bowl wins. Vinatieri was in Indianapolis, and the Patriots had replaced him with a fourth-round pick in 2006, Stephen Gostkowski, who had missed just three kicks all year. The Patriots had a fourth-and-thirteen from the New York thirty-one, and if they had elected to kick, the attempt would have been for an ever-familiar forty-eight yards.

  But instead, they were going for it.

  Both coordinators were excited with what they had called. McDaniels acknowledged that it’s never a high-percentage play on fourth-and-thirteen, although the Patriots had played with an offensive fury the entire season. McDaniels thought Jabar Gaffney would be open in the seam. Spagnuolo had a new play for this situation called Tahoe Spin. Since the Giants usually blitzed on third-and fourth-and-long, he wanted it to appear that the weak corner was coming on a blitz. But the corner would fake the blitz and wind up playing a two-deep zone.

  “Great call on Spags’s part,” McDaniels says.

  Incomplete pass.

  The third quarter was scoreless, but a few seconds into the fourth, Manning found the least-likely man in the stadium for the biggest play of the day. Tight end Kevin Boss, a six-foot-seven rookie who had caught nine passes all season, chugged for forty-five yards. That led to a short touchdown catch from David Tyree, a player whom New Englanders would never forget.

  It was 10–7 Giants, with eleven minutes to play. The crowd started to sense an upset might happen when the Patriots responded to the Giants’ score with just four plays, but the Giants went three and out themselves and gave the ball right back. Spagnuolo had said he’d be pleased by keeping the Patriots in the twenties, yet they hadn’t even reached double digits. They had the ball at their twenty with eight minutes to play. With the way the defense had played, not allowing a play over nineteen yards all day, he could reasonably think about allowing a field goal at worst. But just as the same thought was circulating through the crowd, Brady went to work with a short passing game. Five minutes later Moss was in the end zone with a six-yard reception.

  With the score 14–10 with 2:40 to play, the ball at the Giants’ seventeen, did Spygate matter? Did senators and commissioners and newspaper columnists? Did ex-players and ex-coaches? What mattered was that a defense had eighty-three yards to defend, and if it could do that, the Patriots would have their fourth championship of the decade.

  Their first chance to end the game came with just over ninety seconds left. The Giants had a fourth-and-one at their own thirty-seven. If they didn’t pick that up, the Patriots could easily run out the clock. The Giants were going to give the ball to 265-pound Brandon Jacobs, who had an even bigger back, 270-pound Madison Hedgecock, blocking for him.

  “That was my play,” Bruschi says. “I went in, took on Hedgecock, and slowed him up a little bit, and Hedgecock and Jacobs, they ended up falling forward. I think about that play, just, man, maybe, should I have taken that block on different? Could I have gone over the top, which I’ve done many times? But I’ve seen that play over and over, and I did what I could to squeeze in between those offensive linemen in the B gap and get down on Hedgecock and hope that the cavalry came. And they came, it was just six inches to a foot too late.”

  The real just-too-late play came with seventy-five seconds left. This time it was third and five, Manning setting up from his own forty-four. He seemed to be caught between defensive ends Richard Seymour and Jarvis Green. “I look at that and say he’s so in the grasp,” Dimitroff says. The officials didn’t agree. Manning escaped and threw a pass to the middle of the field, and Tyree was there, covered by Rodney Harrison. Tyree was supposed to be covered by Asante Samuel in the Cover 2 man scheme, but Samuel’s greatest strength was his weakness, too. He was a freestyler, which had allowed him to make several big plays in his career, but this was his second Super Bowl in which he had been caught playing the wrong coverage at the worst time. In the Super Bowl win over the Eagles, he had been playing zone when he should have been playing man, and it led to a touchdown. Against the Giants, Samuel had gotten lost in the coverage, so Tyree became Harrison’s problem.

  Tyree reached for the ball and grabbed it with two hands stretched above his head, as if reaching for something on the top shelf. Before he could bring the ball to his body, he held it against his midnight-blue helmet. Harrison fought him for the ball the entire time, trying to dislodge it from his hands or his body. No luck. It was a huge, thirty-two-yard completion.

  The Patriots were in trouble.

  Sixty seconds remained.

  After converting yet another third-down play, to Steve Smith, Manning had his team at the Patriots’ thirteen with thirty-nine seconds left. The Patriots’ defense appeared to have the percentages in their favor two minutes earlier, forcing the Giants to look out at eighty-three long yards for a touchdown. But the Giants had gained seventy of the necessary eighty-three, the end zone close enough to smell and touch. New England defenders looked to the sideline and got the defensive call from Belichick, not defensive coordinator Dean Pees. Belichick’s call was not complicated. New England needed to be aggressive, so the call was for a blitz, with Hobbs playing Plaxico Burress inside for the skinny post. Hobbs had played half of the season with a labrum tear that often forced him, or a trainer, to pop his shoulder back into place to stay on the field. He also played with a persistent groin injury that led to “the trainers stretching me out on a table, with my legs spread, and giving me a shot in the balls.”

  He played hurt the last half of the season and through the postseason, which earned him a lot of unspoken respect in the locker room. There were times his shoulder hurt so much that he would feel stabbing pain even if he picked up a flimsy remote control and tried to hold it above his head. But on Super Bowl Sunday, no one cared about his injury. He was the target Manning chose, and when the blitz didn’t arrive, he and his pain were alone on an island. “I tried to protect that slim post,” he says. “Basically, it was an all-or-nothing play. When Plaxico went to the outside, I had no chance to recover.” Manning had an easy touchdown pass to Burress, who was open after Hobbs bit on a route that Burress never ran.

  The Patriots had a chance, maybe, at the end to get in position for a tying field goal. But for the fifth time of the evening, Brady was sacked. He tried to find what had worked in so many weeks, plays from the backyard from him to Moss, plays that had made record-holders of them both. But this was the Giants’ night. They won, 17–14.

  “I saw a guy walking around with hats and T-shirts that said ‘Undefeated’ and then he disappeared,” Rosevelt Colvin says. “I had a broken foot and was supposed to be using crutches, but I was so mad that I walked back to the bus, limping the whole time.”

  As the Giants celebrated the greatest upset in Super Bowl history, the stadium truly rocked. Walking away from it, the crowd could be heard taunting the bunch that couldn’t quite complete the historical run. “Eighteen and one,” they shouted, more delirious than drunk. “Eighteen
and one…”

  “It was the closest I had come to tears since my dad passed away two years earlier,” Jay Muraco says. “I hate to say that, because it’s just a game. I went to the postgame party afterward, and I don’t even remember who was there. I was there, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be at that party, but I also didn’t want to be in my room thinking about what happened.”

  Bruschi was at that party, too, and the only reason he went was to give people who had come to see him permission to have a good time. He knew they would be studying him to see if it was all right for them to smile. He had short conversations with them all, told them to eat and dance, and then he left the party so he could assess what had just happened.

  After the previous January in Indianapolis, when they’d blown a 21–6 halftime lead against the Colts, the Patriots didn’t think things could get worse. This was worse. They had lost, and therefore the country could be satisfied with the ending of the America Hates the Patriots documentary. America’s prize was the ability to look at the Patriots, who had raced and raged their way through eighteen games, and smirk. The Patriots would go down in history, all right, but it would be as the most famous Super Bowl runner-up the game had ever seen.

  Dimitroff left the stadium, sent a sympathy text to Pioli, and rode back to his hotel on a bus full of Patriots haters. Some were fans of the Falcons, and he wasn’t sure who the others were. They said things about New England that he had heard before, from fans and colleagues alike.

  “We’d always hear, ‘Ah, look at the Patriots scouts, you know, they think they’re above everyone else; they have all the freakin’ answers.’ And I remember being irritated, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ We never carried ourselves like that. Because of Scott and Bill, we had very definitive guidelines as far as what we were doing to help build the team, at least from our perspective as personnel guys.