War Room

by Michael Holley

  In one of his first meetings with his bosses in 2007, Moss wasn’t as brazen. He was introspective and humble as he answered their questions, and when he spoke of his desire for a new start in New England, he began to cry.

  “I’ll play for the minimum,” he said through tears that day. “I just want to be here.”

  The Patriots tore up his existing contract, gave him a team-friendly one, above the minimum, and after he set an NFL record with twenty-three touchdown receptions in ’07, they signed him to a three-year, $27 million deal. He got along well with Bill Belichick, Tom Brady, and most of his teammates. He was named a team captain in 2008 and 2009. Except for the incident where he showed up late for work, he mostly stayed out of trouble and out of the news. But as he prepared for the 2010 season, the last year of his contract, getting a new deal was the one subject that seemed to preoccupy the thirty-three-year-old Moss.

  As early as February, he began making public comments about how the Patriots “don’t really pay” and that he understood he wouldn’t be with the team after his contract expired. He emphasized that he knew it was business and he wasn’t mad at anybody, but he sounded like a man who was trying to convince himself each time he said it. When it was time for mini and training camp activities on the field, he was the Moss everyone remembered: keeping practices competitive and entertaining by taunting the defense, leading to playful shouts of, “Shut up, Moss! Get your ass back to the huddle.” In one practice, he spiked the ball after making a reception to incite the defense. A few of them wisely jumped on the football and said, “Hey, Moss. I didn’t hear a whistle. That’s a fumble, baby.”

  He knew how to have fun in practice, but when football activities were over he’d return to his contract obsession. He mentioned it to teammates during training camp, told a reporter he felt that he was unwanted because he didn’t have a deal, and in an act that many saw as one of protest, he intentionally isolated himself at the team’s Kickoff Gala, which raised money for charity. As his teammates sat at tables with fans and advertisers, Moss rejected autograph requests and sat alone, wearing his headphones and occasionally moving to the music.

  He was getting closer and closer to the old Moss, the one the coaches and players in New England had seen only in short sports clips on TV and had been warned about from people who watched him in Minnesota and Oakland. After the first game of the season, a 38–24 win over the Bengals, he went to the interview room and spent nearly fifteen minutes talking about his lack of a contract, his “fair” relationship with ownership, and how it would be a “smack in [his] face” if the Patriots waited until after the season to sign him. Belichick had to be briefed on the highlights of the performance because as it was happening, the coach was smiling and talking football in his office with his youngest son, Brian. Brian was a postgraduate football player at Suffield Academy, about two hours away from Boston. He’d been a fixture at Patriots games for ten years, and it wasn’t unusual for him and his brother, Stephen, to ask for and receive extensive football tutorials from their dad in his office, win or lose. As soon as Belichick heard what Moss had done, he went from thinking about teaching to maneuvering. It was clear he and his front-office staff were going to have to find a market for Moss and trade him, but another player on the roster was going to be traded first.

  Laurence Maroney was traded to the Broncos a few days before the Patriots played their second game of the season, against the Jets. If Maroney, who was traded for a fourth-rounder in 2011, didn’t make it in Denver, he probably wasn’t going to make it anywhere. Four years after the 2006 draft, the book was ready to be titled for the Patriots’ top two picks that year: A Tale of Two Pities. Both Maroney and Chad Jackson had squandered immense talent because of their refusal to work as hard as some of their peers in Foxboro. An undrafted free-agent running back, BenJarvus Green-Ellis, had worked his way from waivers to the practice squad to the roster and, finally, past Maroney on the depth chart. He ran and worked harder than the first-round pick. Maroney wouldn’t be the featured back in Denver, but McDaniels, his new head coach and old advocate, was going to give him some opportunities. The Patriots believed that they could replace Maroney with the backs they already had on their roster, and one, Danny Woodhead, whom they signed a day before the Jets game.

  Although the Patriots lost that game to their lifelong rivals, there was a revelation of sorts in the 28–14 defeat. When McDaniels was the Patriots’ offensive coordinator and learned that the team was getting Moss, he instructed his offensive coaches to make sure there were plenty of plays, for Moss and everyone else, that New England hadn’t run before.

  “When you’ve got a player like Randy on the field, you have to consider all the things that are available to you,” McDaniels says. “You get a lot more Cover 2 looks when he’s on the field. He helps your running game because he draws so much attention. You’re getting, in general, simpler looks for the quarterback and more space for the slot receivers and running backs.”

  Except in 2010, that wasn’t happening as much as it had in the past. Moss was able to put a move on cornerback Darrelle Revis in game two and then finish off the play with a one-handed, thirty-four-yard touchdown reception. But there were also several passes thrown his way that were forced into coverage and could be considered nothing less than low percentage. It wasn’t 2007 anymore, or even 2009. Maybe the offense could be just as productive without Moss, playing a more efficient style.

  Two weeks later in Miami, the Patriots scored 41 points, albeit with the help of a kickoff return for a touchdown, a blocked field goal that led to a touchdown, and a fifty-one-yard interception return for a score. The draft pick the Patriots got from the Chiefs in the Matt Cassel trade, Patrick Chung, blocked two kicks on the night and had the interception return. Patriots players talked afterward about what a great team win it was. But there was a statistical oddity on the stat sheet: no catches for Moss. It was the first time since ’06 that he had gone without a reception, and based on his comments that year about being in a bad mood, maybe that wasn’t a coincidence.

  His shutout in Miami didn’t make him happy, and he was sure to let the man calling the plays, Bill O’Brien, know about it. O’Brien, who grew up in the Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, was not a back-down type. He commanded the players’ respect by knowing what he was doing and sometimes delivering his message with an edge. He and Moss were not always the perfect mix. They exchanged words that night in Miami, but the inevitable was already in motion.

  While it was clear Moss was being a distraction and Belichick knew it, the head coach still had great affection for him. The irony is that if Moss had followed the path of his first three seasons in New England, Belichick might have looked at his situation differently. It wasn’t always true that the Patriots moved on from veteran players and it wasn’t always true that they felt receivers in their early to midthirties had no production to offer. If Moss had left Belichick with strictly a personnel decision to make during and after the 2010 season, he might have had a chance to return. But it was obvious that Moss’s mind wasn’t on football, at least not in New England, so three and a half years after they acquired him from Oakland, the Patriots traded Moss to his first professional home, Minnesota, for a third-round pick. He was informed of the trade by Belichick, and even after Moss was gone, the coach went out of his way to knock down media reports that Moss had been a distraction or uncoachable. Moss played fifty-four games in his New England career and produced an astounding fifty touchdowns.

  It wasn’t long before the Patriots saw Moss again at Gillette Stadium. The Vikings returned for a game on Halloween, and by the looks and sounds of it, Moss believed he was dressed up in the wrong uniform. He had just one catch for eight yards in Minnesota’s loss, with the Patriots indeed using deep safety help to stop him, and he was moved by all the hugs, kind words, and applause he received during his return.

  As a Patriot, Moss was never one for spending a lot of time speaking with reporters. In fact, that’
s one of the things Belichick liked about him. There would be weeks and weeks where he’d go without a single on-the-record comment. He did the same thing when he got to Minnesota, but the NFL received complaints about it from the local chapter of the Pro Football Writers Association. Moss was fined $25,000, another incident that fueled a press conference that was even more memorable than the one he gave after the season opener.

  When he entered the room to meet with the media, he wore a black Red Sox cap. He then instructed everyone that this would not be the type of interview that they were all used to: “I’m going to go ahead and say this: Look, I got fined twenty-five thousand dollars for not talking to y’all. And I do answer questions throughout the week, but if the league’s going to fine me twenty-five thousand dollars, I’m not going to answer any more questions for the rest of the year. If there’s going to be an interview, I’m going to conduct it. So I’ll answer my own questions. Ask myself the questions, and then give y’all the answers.”

  The next several minutes were a public love letter to the New England region, the fans, the Patriots’ ownership, the team’s captains and players, and Belichick, whom he called “the best coach in football history.” When he mentioned the Vikings, he second-guessed a decision by head coach Brad Childress to go for a touchdown on fourth down when he could have had an easy field goal. He was also critical of the Vikings’ coaching staff, who he claimed didn’t incorporate any of the suggestions he made during the week on how to slow down the Patriots.

  “Coach Belichick gave me an opportunity to be a part of something special and that’s something I really take to heart,” Moss said, conducting a one-man show that was vastly more entertaining than the standard question-and-answer sessions with postgame media crowds. “I actually salute Coach Belichick and his team for the success they’ve had before me, during me, and after me.

  “So I’m actually stuck for words just because of the fact there’s a lot of memories here. To the New England Patriots’ fans, that ovation at the end of the game, that really was heartwarming. I think I actually shed a tear for that.”

  He ended his session with an actual salute, to Belichick and New England, and added, “I’m out.” He left the room.

  The next day he was fired.

  Less than a month into his second stint in the Twin Cities, Moss was waived by the Vikings, who basically conceded that the third-rounder to the Patriots was a handout.

  November began the firing and departure season not just for the former Patriots player but also for former Patriots coaches, who would begin to lose their grip on job security as well. In Cleveland, where the Patriots and their 6–1 record arrived on November 7, head coach Eric Mangini had spent an extra week preparing for what was essentially the Super Bowl for his coaching staff.

  The Browns were 2–5 but had gone into their bye week with a surprising win in New Orleans. Everyone always said Mangini was smart, so he had to know that already having five losses by November, playing in the AFC North, was not an indicator of the play-offs. The previous year, just a few games into his first season coaching in Cleveland, Mangini had begun to wonder if he and team owner Randy Lerner were on the same page. It seemed to him that Lerner was panicking, and after a 34–3 loss to Baltimore in 2009, Mangini already wondered if Lerner was the same man he’d had an engaging interview with shortly after leaving the Jets. Mangini had significant personnel power then and had been able to handpick the general manager, George Kokinis. But by the time the Browns hosted the Patriots in 2010, Kokinis was out and Mangini found himself answering to a new team president, Mike Holmgren, and a new GM, Tom Heckert. Those hires wouldn’t have been a problem if the Browns were winning, which they weren’t, but the coaching staff put an incredible amount of thought into making sure there would be a win against the Patriots.

  On defense, in an attempt to simply make Brady think, the Browns switched everyone’s positions: A player who normally lined up at left outside linebacker lined up on the right; the right outside linebacker went left; the strong safety became the free safety, even if it wasn’t his best position. On offense, they jumped on the back of Peyton Hillis and rode along for 184 rushing yards and two scores. As the game was winding down, offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, who had left New England angrily, went to jump and celebrate with one of his players and found himself tumbling on the ground. The Browns won 34–14 but would have trouble winning the rest of the year. The Patriots would begin a run where they seemingly couldn’t lose nor be stopped on offense.

  One of the many reasons for the Patriots’ success on offense was Woodhead, an undrafted back out of Division 2 Chadron State. As soon as the 2008 draft ended, he got a call from Mangini, who was coaching the Jets at the time. “As the head coach, I make one of these calls a year,” Mangini said that day. “We can offer you $2,500 to sign with the Jets. Do I need to call your agent?” Woodhead said the agent wasn’t necessary and that he’d be there.

  When he got to New York, he didn’t look out of place with his talent, but he got hurt. When Mangini was fired and Rex Ryan took over, Ryan didn’t have the affinity for Woodhead that Mangini did. He was cut in September to make room for receiver David Clowney, and the Patriots were able to get a player that Mangini begged Heckert to pick up. “I’ll even try him at defensive back,” he told the GM. “Let’s just get him.” He was so intrigued by Woodhead because the back basically blew the lid off the metrics that Mangini had created in his advanced Browns computer system. The system was known as the “football Google” around the office, with answers to every question imaginable about a player, team, agent, or system. When Mangini punched in various stats on Woodhead and measured them against every other player in the league, he concluded that Woodhead was a hidden star.

  The Patriots got him, though, and used him as the replacement for veteran third-down back Kevin Faulk, who blew out his right knee in the loss to the Jets. Woodhead filled in for him nicely and seemed to blend in with Aaron Hernandez, Rob Gronkowski, Wes Welker, BenJarvus Green-Ellis, and Deion Branch, who was reacquired from Seattle after Moss was traded. At times during the season, it seemed like the offense was even better without the record-setting receiver. It just hadn’t been the first Sunday in November.

  The next week, in Denver, the Kansas City Chiefs went into a Colorado atmosphere that was even more bizarre than most people realized. And what they saw, during and after the game, was strange enough. The Chiefs arrived at Invesco Field with a 5–3 record, the best in the AFC West. Head coach Todd Haley, an unofficial nutritionist, said he knew it was going to be a good year in training camp. That’s when he saw Dwayne Bowe check in at 212 pounds, compared to 242 the previous year, and Branden Albert check in at 305, down from 350. Haley would pull some players aside in camp and plainly tell them that they had no chance of success if they were too fat. Everyone knew the coach, who considers snarling Hall of Fame linebacker Jack Lambert one of his heroes, wasn’t shy about sharing his opinion, which he did in Denver as well.

  It was hard to imagine that the Chiefs could actually lose a game in which Matt Cassel threw for 469 yards, four touchdowns, and no interceptions, but they did. The Chiefs helped their running game in the off-season by adding rugged back Thomas Jones, whom they often told to leave the weight room because he worked so long and hard in there, as well as offensive linemen Ryan Lilja and Casey Wiegmann. But they couldn’t run the ball all day against the Broncos, which allowed McDaniels’s team to walk away with a surprising 49–29 win.

  After the game, Haley and McDaniels approached each other for what’s usually a nondescript handshake and pat on the back. But instead of shaking McDaniels’s hand, Haley wagged a finger at him, apparently upset with the Broncos’ late-game approach. McDaniels believed in aggressive offense at all times, so the criticism didn’t bother him. Haley later publicly apologized for the incident in Denver.

  But McDaniels had much more serious issues to worry about. When the Broncos traveled to England in late October to play the 49
ers, the team’s video director, Steve Scarnecchia, taped six minutes of the San Francisco walk-through. He told McDaniels about it and the coach, who had experienced the national wrath of Spygate in 2007, refused to watch it. Scarnecchia knew about Spygate on a personal and professional level, too. He worked in New England and so did his father, Dante, the team’s respected offensive line coach.

  By the time the Chiefs came to town in mid-November, Broncos executives had been made aware of the incident and the league had begun its investigation. It was determined that McDaniels had not authorized Scarnecchia to do what he did, and in a scene straight from CSI, the league conducted a forensic analysis of the Broncos’ computers and was satisfied that no one watched Scarnecchia’s work. The videographer was fired, and the Broncos and McDaniels were both fined $50,000.

  All of the investigating took place in November. By the time the story went national and people had time to digest what had happened, it was nearly time for the Chiefs and Broncos to play again, this time in Kansas City. Broncos president Joe Ellis had said that the taping incident was not a fireable offense for McDaniels, but people who have been around sports long enough understand that public votes of confidence are iffy at best. Besides, there was the issue of winning. The Broncos were 3–8 going into Kansas City and had lost sixteen of their last twenty-one since McDaniels got the team off to a 6–0 start in his rookie year. The Broncos were not known as an impulsive franchise when it came to their coaches. They’d had just four in the previous twenty-nine seasons, with McDaniels following Dan Reeves, Wade Phillips, and Mike Shanahan.

  The game at Arrowhead, where he saw dozens of familiar faces, was his last as a head coach. He had seen Scott Pioli, Romeo Crennel, Charlie Weis, Anthony Pleasant, and all the faces from the good ol’ days. It was funny, because he wasn’t that old, at thirty-four, and his time in New England wasn’t that long ago. Belichick had told him that being a head coach was difficult, but even he had five years to fail or succeed during his first head-coaching job. McDaniels didn’t even have two full seasons in Denver and he was out. That sure went fast.