One of Pioli’s personal connections had been with the best of all, the late Lamar Hunt, who died in December 2006. Not only had Hunt founded the Chiefs, he’d founded the entire American Football League in 1960. At the time, he was still in his late twenties. He was the reason a team like the Patriots, an AFL original, had life, and it was his ingenuity that led to the merger between the AFL and NFL. He was a wealthy man without airs, “relentlessly modest,” as the Dallas Morning News put it, as legendary for his humility as he was for his contributions to pro football, soccer, and tennis. He was a Hall of Famer in all three sports, elected in three different decades. He wasn’t a bad investor, either: He and seven others invested in the Chicago Bulls in 1966, a deal that would eventually allow him to enjoy having six championship rings and Michael Jordan on his side. Even his nickname, Games, was understated given his impact on pro sports.
Pioli met Hunt for the first time in 2004. They were at the owners’ meetings in Palm Beach, and one day after business had been done, Pioli wandered off to a hospitality suite. He entered the room at the luxurious Breakers Hotel, an oceanfront resort, and found it to be nearly empty. There was one man in there and Pioli did a double take when he saw him. He recognized Hunt and suddenly became a nervous fan. He had deep respect for the history of the league, so he knew the story of Hunt as well as many other men who first met in hotels that weren’t nearly as posh as the Breakers. They were the ones who built the league that made Pioli’s NFL life possible. It was one of the subjects Pioli was passionate about, and sometimes he’d start talking about it and become so emotional that he’d well up with tears. After fidgeting and talking himself in and out of saying something, he finally decided to say hello to Hunt, and the two had a friendly and short conversation.
After New England won its third Super Bowl in February 2005, Pioli received a handwritten note from the man whose family was responsible for naming the game the Patriots had just won. It was the Hunt children’s 1960s toy, the bounce-to-the-sky Super Ball, that sparked an idea and led to their father giving the championship game its now-famous moniker. He was also the one who decided that Roman numerals should be attached to the game because they had a “dignified” look. So he sent that congratulatory note after Super Bowl XXXIX, and Pioli wrote a note of his own to Hunt after the Chiefs beat the Patriots in November 2005. Pioli was surprised when he received yet another letter from Hunt, once again handwritten, a few weeks later. He thanked Pioli for the thoughtful note, mentioned that the Chiefs had been lucky that day against the Patriots, applauded Pioli on his “very important part in the team-building process there in New England,” and wished “continued success to [Pioli] and the organization.” He was genuinely happy for someone else’s success, so true to his character he modestly concluded, “I kind of look at it like everyone in the NFL is in this ‘project’ together. I feel very fortunate to have been able to be a small part of it for a lot of years. Regards, Lamar Hunt.”
“It was very typical for my dad to drop people notes. In fact, he was famous for it, and we all still marvel at his ability to produce either short notes or long memos on a daily basis,” says Clark Hunt, one of Lamar’s three sons. “He would absolutely turn them out. And everybody who’s ever worked for him has a file of Lamar Hunt letters. And they’re very interesting, on a wide range of subjects, and it really shows his creativity, because he was always an idea guy. But he was also one of the best people I knew in terms of being thoughtful and just dropping people notes. ‘Hey, congratulations, I read that you won this award.’ Or, ‘Congrats on the Super Bowl.’
“It’s not like today, where people are hitting stuff on their BlackBerry or where the English is garbled at best. His writing was very well thought out and there were no missed commas or missed periods or anything like that. I don’t know what he would think about all the e-mail and texting and Twitter and so forth.”
In his notes to Pioli, Hunt never made a reference to his cancer, first diagnosed in his prostate in 1998. It wouldn’t be completely accurate to say he “battled” health problems from that moment on, because it would paint the picture of someone whose body and spirit were noticeably beaten. The truth is that Hunt lived, played, and worked around any issue that arose, and he embraced that philosophy until his death. He took a two-week trip to the Caribbean shortly after publicly announcing he had prostate cancer. He was always watching or listening to his Chiefs, whether he was at Arrowhead or in some hospital room. And he spun out big ideas, as usual, but maybe even Lamar Hunt didn’t dream that the Patriots executive he encouraged would one day become a Chief.
Unfortunately for Chiefs fans, they knew long before the 2008 season began that the championship drought in Kansas City was going to continue. It had been fifteen years since they’d won a playoff game and thirty-eight since they’d won a Super Bowl. They’d pieced together four wins in 2007, and when the season was over they fully committed to the kids. Jared Allen, their best defensive player, was traded for three draft picks, and eleven of the twelve players the Chiefs selected on draft day made the 2008 roster. Not one of those picks was a quarterback, although they could have had Joe Flacco if they wanted him, so they entered Gillette with Brodie Croyle as their starter.
It was game time. Pioli settled into his seat next to Ernie Adams, a longtime Belichick adviser. As usual, the coaches’ box came to life. It was an audio box, as it buzzed with coaches’ observations and curses, but it was a future box, too, because anyone who experienced the game there was always several seconds ahead of the crowd. If you put on a headset, you were getting the director’s cut of the game, mostly narrated by Belichick, Josh McDaniels, and defensive coordinator Dean Pees, with cameos from Adams and various coaches. You knew the proper name and purpose of each play, long before the huddle broke. You knew exactly who blew the assignment, who made the key block, and what Belichick instantly thought of it all, minus the filter of It is what it is.
Seven and a half minutes into the season, the buzz in the box stopped. The headsets went quiet. It was one of the first times that those in the box saw things exactly the same way as the sixty-eight thousand fans on the other side of the glass. Tom Brady had dropped back to pass and was hit low by safety Bernard Pollard. Brady’s left leg bent too far just as he was throwing and his anterior cruciate ligament snapped. There was an alarming scream, startling even Pollard, and Brady instinctively held his injured knee and leg. The gesture was the obvious giveaway: This was serious and season-ending. For a few seconds, no coach said anything, and the silence hung there the way it does in the room after a tasteless joke. What do you say after that? Around the NFL, coaches are trained not to become overly emotional about injuries. So the noise in the box and headsets returned slowly, eventually building back up to the point where it was before Brady got hurt. They knew they were going to beat the Chiefs, even if their eventual 17–10 win would be much tougher than anyone expected. But that wasn’t the story. The real story was that everyone in the organization was going to have to accept that the Patriots’ starting quarterback for the rest of the season was going to be Matt Cassel.
Finding a replacement for Tom Brady isn’t in anyone’s job description, but technically that was the simplistic answer to the What do you do? question Pioli had gotten at that Boston restaurant. The reason he spent hours upon hours away from home was because he was either on or presiding over a constant talent search to be discussed and debated with his staff. For Pioli and his staff, that debate was never at the top of the roster, at quarterback. It was somewhere in the thirty-to-fifty-three range, for Brady’s backup. On the weekend of the 2005 draft, the Patriots weren’t thinking of someone who could take snaps behind Brady. Their first four picks that year were guard Logan Mankins, cornerback Ellis Hobbs, tackle Nick Kaczur, and safety James Sanders. They had two seventh-round picks, which was a wasteland for many teams. The Packers and Giants, who had found productive players like Donald Driver, Mark Tauscher, Ahmad Bradshaw, Derrick Ward, and Kevin Walter in
the seventh, as well as the Patriots, were among the rare teams that saw and selected reliable players at the low end of the draft. Pioli and Belichick had become draft students in their time working together, so they knew the typical profiles of what teams faced in the last round.
“If you look at the player and say, ‘Okay, we think that they’re going to develop based on their work ethic, their intelligence, their commitment,’ then that’s a good seventh-round pick. But there are lots of guys in the seventh round that don’t have that, in all honesty,” Belichick says. “They’re just not good enough. You just draft them to cut. Then there are some character guys. Those guys that have slid down the board and their character is an issue. There are some players where you say, ‘Look, I do not want this guy on my team under any circumstances.’ There are other guys that you say, ‘Okay, this guy’s got problems but we think we can handle it.’ We think we can… I wouldn’t say really get him straightened out; I’d say we think we can handle and manage the problem.”
The Patriots’ first seventh-rounder in ’05, Cassel, was part of the initial group that Belichick described. But the projection was more complicated because he had barely played in college. He backed up Heisman Trophy winners Carson Palmer and Matt Leinart at USC, and by the time he got to New England it was as if he was backing up Hollywood itself. Brady had championships and Super Bowl MVPs. He had contracts and endorsements worth millions. He was pursued by women so attractive that they were insulted if you simply called them beautiful. Cassel? He had a spot on the team.
In his first two seasons in the league, Cassel was once again surrounded by Heisman Trophy winners. But these guys, Doug Flutie and Vinny Testaverde, had won the trophy before Cassel had started first grade. He really didn’t have to worry about being replaced by men in their early forties. But 2008 was different. The Patriots spent a third-round pick on a quarterback named Kevin O’Connell, and that was viewed as an indictment of Cassel’s skills. Things got shakier when Cassel didn’t look good in the preseason, yet he made the team and beat out the rookie for the backup job.
Halfway through the first quarter of 2008, he did more than take over for the injured Brady. He was now one of those people responsible for making the nightmare in the desert disappear. That Super Bowl loss to the Giants had deeply affected some players and coaches to the point where they sometimes had 2007 flashbacks. They were haunted by calls and plays they could have made but didn’t. Tedy Bruschi had been ready to announce his retirement if they won, but the loss stung him so much that he was determined to return so the football memory in the Phoenix suburbs wouldn’t be his final one. The man who would be calling plays for Cassel, McDaniels, had spent a restless off-season thinking of the game, too.
“You know, some of us were fortunate enough to be there in ’01 and ’03 and ’04, and those years, statistically, weren’t the same as ’07. But the ending was better,” he says. “And the taste in your mouth was a whole different thing. And I think that’s what sticks with you. I know it made me want to get back to that game in a worse way, just to try to have that feeling that we had in ’01, ’03, and ’04 again.”
Just as there was a sense that the dynamics were changing in 2004, which was the final season Belichick had Romeo Crennel and Charlie Weis as his coordinators, there was also a feeling that 2008 represented something different. It wasn’t just the loss of Brady. It was the knowledge that owners from other teams might come knocking after the season, taking away someone else from the Patriots’ fountain of winning. The brand, whether the Patriots wanted to use that word or not, had been established. Belichick wasn’t going to leave, so teams were looking for the next best thing, someone the head coach had shined on, as if they would get what he had by osmosis. McDaniels was one of the prime candidates to leave. He had gotten the league’s attention the previous two years with his offensive diversity. One year he took an offense that lost its top two receivers and turned it into a top-ten unit, and the next season he called the plays for the most explosive offensive force in NFL history. He was confident and smart and had worked with Belichick for the previous seven seasons. It was a tough résumé to ignore.
The 2008 season was also the ground floor of a different locker-room mix, the nexus of a championship Patriots generation with a generation that was a combination of youth and imports. Bruschi, Mike Vrabel, and Rodney Harrison were in their early to midthirties. This wasn’t going to be their team for long. They could try to be enforcers like they were five years earlier, but there were too many new guys to reach. There were times Bruschi and Vrabel would be sitting at their lockers and Vrabel would turn to Bruschi and say, “So this is the next generation, huh? This is the next generation?”
The next generation provided speed and athleticism that the veterans no longer had, but the veterans knew what it took to build the infrastructure of a championship locker room. The next generation was looser and louder than the generation that came before them, which was okay, except that the wise veterans wondered why a group that had accomplished nothing was seemingly so relaxed. It was evolution, and it happened in football as well as dozens of other industries in America. It wouldn’t bring down the Patriots in 2008, but a few bad seeds were in place for problems in the near future.
One game into Cassel’s career as a starter, it was obvious that the Patriots were going to be a lot better than expected at quarterback. In the week leading up to their second game of the season, in New York against the Jets, there had been wild rumors and hysteria. If it wasn’t a call to bring in free agent Daunte Culpepper to be the quarterback, it was a report that Chris Simms and Tim Rattay were coming to town. No one wanted to hear about the system and how no street free agent could possibly be better for the Patriots than Cassel, who was carefully selected as one of the right fifty-three. It was hard for many to grasp that the Patriots didn’t see Cassel as a scrub. He was going into his fourth season in New England for an obvious reason: Belichick and Pioli believed in him.
His first test was against Eric Mangini’s Jets, who had devoted three straight drafts to beating the Patriots. Center Nick Mangold was drafted with nose tackle Vince Wilfork in mind, linebacker Vernon Gholston was brought in to be a hybrid player similar to what Willie McGinest was with the Patriots, and the Jets had cashed in some draft chips, Patriot-like, to move up the board and select cornerback Darrelle Revis. They believed Revis could defend any receiver, large or small, and when they graded him before the draft, he received their version of straight A’s. They used green dots to indicate when a player was exceptional, and he had those dots in intelligence, character, athletic ability, strength, speed, and even his ability to return kicks and punts.
Cassel was smart enough not to throw too many balls in Revis’s direction, which meant there were times he’d hold the football and take sacks. He was going to have to work on that, but it was clear to McDaniels that the offense wouldn’t have to be radically modified when Cassel ran it. They started him off slowly against the Jets, and he passed for 165 yards in an impressive 19–10 win. By the time the Patriots saw the Jets again, in mid-November, Cassel would be running the offense with no restrictions. In some games, he’d put up Brady-like numbers, which put him on the path to a Brady-like contract.
In November, a little more than a week before Thanksgiving, Pioli decided that he could take a scouting trip and visit a friend at the same time. So he headed to Atlanta to see how Thomas Dimitroff was doing. The Falcons had already surpassed their four-win total from the previous season, and each of their new additions was contributing as planned, if not better. Quarterback Matt Ryan, the team’s first-round pick, was playing with poise and was the favorite to win Rookie of the Year. Running back Michael Turner, the team’s top free-agent target, immediately lived up to expectations by breaking the team’s single-game rushing record in the first game of the season. Curtis Lofton, a second-round pick, looked like a natural as a starting middle linebacker. In a 24–0 shutout of the Raiders, Lofton and the rest of the
defense couldn’t have played better as they allowed just three first downs the entire game. As for the Raiders and their new cornerback, former Falcon DeAngelo Hall, Al Davis regretted trading two picks for him and handing him a $70 million contract. Halfway through the year, Hall had played so poorly, giving up more yards than any corner in football, that he was released.
Dimitroff’s father always had career advice for him, even in casual settings, and one of the things he told his younger son was to be himself if an opportunity to run a department ever came his way. Pioli noticed that Dimitroff was living his father’s words. This had become a mission for Dimitroff. He knew there had been raised eyebrows around the league when Arthur Blank hired a college director who’d never managed day-to-day in an office, as a general manager would have to do. He knew he was also viewed by some old-guard traditionalists as some New Age freak, a forty-two-year-old outdoors lover with his head in the clouds. But he was confident that he didn’t have to compromise all his interests just to look the part of a hard-core football man, whatever that was. The Falcons’ office became a reflection of him, from scouting philosophy to patronizing Whole Foods.
Les Snead, the player personnel director, had the office closest to the general manager’s, and he got used to the consistent aroma of cooked chickpeas, tomatoes, and rice coming from Dimitroff’s direction. “It always smells good,” Snead says, “but I’m not sure about the taste.” Dimitroff’s executive assistant Laura Moore, a former Virginia Tech soccer player, quickly learned to build certain things into his schedule: reading time, limited appointments before ten A.M., and a workout. She also learned to listen carefully for context clues because some of the words he used were as long as sectionals. “Each person in the office has a word he’s used on them that they don’t understand,” she says. “Sometimes he’ll see the look on my face and say, ‘Do you know what that means?’” His office was equipped with an expensive stationary bike, which received monthly maintenance from Atlanta Cycle. Sometimes he’d be in there riding and watching film, and sometimes it was just a ride to the sounds of the Zac Brown Band.
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