Milloy, by the way, never made another Pro Bowl.
The Patriots ended the season as Super Bowl champs.
Belichick has repeated this formula—unceremoniously cutting ties with beloved vets before their trade value significantly drops—so many times that I’ve lost track. But the list includes Deion Branch, Mike Vrabel, Richard Seymour, Adam Vinatieri, Vince Wilfork, Logan Mankins, and Jamie Collins, to name a few.
In San Francisco, Walsh made decisions the same way, often meeting with the same kind of blowback, which he handled in the exact same manner—by not caring at all. In 1985, for instance, he made the tough—and unpopular—choice to push wide receiver Freddie Solomon into retirement to make room for Jerry Rice. As much as Walsh loved his players, the team always came first. In Walsh’s mind, thinking of his players as human beings first meant only that he was obligated to not let them twist in the wind until he came to a resolution.
Walsh called this the three F’s of decision making: firmness, fairness, fast.
Having all the necessary information, Walsh said, allows the decision maker to be firm and unmoved by outside influences. That’s why guys like Walsh and Belichick weigh each move, understanding every consequence, before acting. Knowledge breeds conviction. And with all three Fs working in unison, the team has the best chance of coming out ahead.
In 1986 I added my own F to Walsh’s list: fibbing. That year we took a third-round chance on a talented but raw receiver and return man named John Taylor out of tiny Delaware State. I had seen Taylor in action and loved what I saw, so I pushed hard for him. But in rookie camp and then in the preseason, it was clear that he was not ready to play on Sundays. His talent was NFL-ready, but he couldn’t handle the volume of the offense or lock down all the skills needed for the pro game. Walsh saw his talent, too, but the roster numbers weren’t adding up. John McVay, our general manager, would torture me by whispering that my guy wasn’t going to make it. He wasn’t being mean; he was just reading the signs. He told me to call other teams to gauge interest in Taylor. I almost got a bite from my friend Gary Horton, a pro scout with Tampa Bay, but in the end the Bucs passed. Horton’s superiors figured that if Walsh was willing to get rid of Taylor, he couldn’t be any good.
Back then, I was the Turk, the guy who got the names from McVay on cutdown day before fetching doomed players for the meeting they did not want to have. In those days there was no practice squad, and so a player either made the roster or was out of a job. The only leeway was provided by the injured reserve list, which allowed teams to keep a rehabbing player under contract until he was healthy. Teams often took advantage of that loophole, stashing a player on the IR to keep him around for the next season. Well, I knew Taylor was on the cut list, so I pulled him over in the hallway and advised him to see our head trainer, Lindsy McLean. “You need to tell him you hurt your lower back and that you’re in significant pain,” I advised. Taylor stared at me a little confused but then nodded and ran off to the training room. The next thing I saw was McLean running down the hall toward the steps to find McVay to let him know we didn’t need to cut Taylor because he wasn’t healthy.
With Taylor safely stockpiled, we were soon on the road again to scout the next batch of college talent. By the time I got back to the office later in the season, Taylor was the talk of the team. His back had, ahem, healed, and with just a few more weeks of reps and study he looked like a completely different player. Walsh was impressed. So was McVay. Taylor went on to catch 393 passes and score 49 touchdowns in the regular season and playoffs, and he won three Super Bowls in San Francisco, including one in which he made a last-minute game-winning catch.
One way or the other, we got the Taylor decision right, and almost 30 years later it still feels good. I bet Belichick feels the same way with 99 percent of the personnel moves he made over the years. Of course, there is at least one with which he may never be at peace: trading Jimmy Garoppolo. As I described earlier in the book, Belichick loves Garoppolo; we drafted him because we were as sure as we could be that he would be the heir apparent to Brady. He already had shown that he could fill those shoes—I don’t need to tell you just how big those shoes are—whenever he was asked to. During Brady’s suspension at the start of the 2016 season, Garoppolo ran the team flawlessly. The kid was the real deal.
And the rest of the league knew it. During the 2017 off-season, lots of GMs came calling for the young star in waiting, but Belichick had no intention of giving him up. Brady was 40, for heaven’s sake. His days had to be numbered, right? The Patriots looked to lock up Garoppolo with an extension. The only problem was that Brady is a beloved idol who shares an agent—Don Yee—with Garoppolo. That meant Yee held all the cards and for once Belichick wouldn’t be dealing from strength. To keep Garoppolo, the Patriots probably were going to have to franchise him, pay him like a starting QB (which would blow up their salary cap), or watch him walk in free agency.
There was a fourth option: He could have made an impossibly tough call and cut Brady—risking being run out of New England for the reward of handing the job to Garoppolo. With his track record of calculated, unemotional personnel judgments informed only by the long-term needs of the team, that’s what you would expect Belichick to do.
If the call was his alone to make anyway—which, the word is, it was not. Because when Belichick passed on those off-season offers, it was clear that he had no intention of losing Garoppolo, and the assumption had to be that he was preparing to franchise him. Otherwise, it meant Belichick was just keeping his fingers crossed in the hope that Brady would opt to retire on his own. And Belichick does not depend on fate.
But for whatever reason—Belichick has been as closed-lipped about this as he is about everything—the option to tag Garoppolo was dropped. And once it was, Belichick had to act fast, before he lost all his leverage and a franchise quarterback with nothing to show for it. So he did the next most clear-eyed thing. He traded Garoppolo to the 49ers.
It may well be that this trade—a franchise QB for a second-round pick—goes down as the worst deal of Belichick’s career. And the question will be hard to ignore: In the ultimate WWBD moment, did Belichick, of all people, stray from the tenets of his own philosophy?
DEVELOPING A WINNING TEMPERAMENT: WWBD?
When Belichick and I were together in Cleveland, Bill Parcells would call me to ask, “How’s Doom doing?” At first I had no earthly idea who “Doom” was. But after Parcells explained his favorite nickname for Belichick, it made perfect sense. Belichick does not present as the most positive, fun-loving person in the world, and Parcells, who is one of those guys who always know exactly what buttons to push, enjoyed needling Belichick about his dour reputation.
But I can promise you this: Belichick’s world is not nearly as dire as he makes it out to be. In fact, away from the media, he is caring and kind, and he actually has a dry, wicked sense of humor. The human side of Belichick is different from the one most people see on Sunday: less intense and incredibly generous. During our time in Cleveland he gave money he earned from his radio show to the coaching staff as a bonus at the end of the year. When we beat a team in our division, he passed out hundred-dollar bills as thank-yous. Trust me, if he calls you a friend, he will give you whatever you need. Most people never see that side of him. They see only a gruff media-unfriendly cipher, and that’s too bad. Of course, Belichick couldn’t care less that only a few select people know his warmer, more upbeat side.
In season Belichick is actually at his most positive at the start of his Wednesday team meeting as he convincingly details the strengths of the next opponent. In this role he’s a spin doctor extraordinaire, making even the lamest quarterback seem like Peyton Manning. But in his own way, Belichick means it. He points out worst-case scenarios because that helps him sell the message that each game has to be taken seriously. What makes his players listen is that they know that every complimenta
ry thing he says about the opponent is plausibly true, because it’s all backed up by facts. He never cries wolf about a wolf that isn’t there. Doom always has the tracks in the snow to prove the wolf exists.
I hate to contradict Parcells, but a better description of Belichick’s temperament is a term I coined called realistic optimism. (Which, I’ll grant you, isn’t great for nickname purposes.) Walsh was the same way. He saw himself as a teacher and therefore believed in being positive with his pupils, building them up rather than breaking them down. Still, he was too well informed not to understand that trouble always lurked. But it’s unfair to call either Belichick or Walsh a pessimist, let alone an agent of doom. A pessimist leads an unhappy life, waiting for the next bad thing, never trusting the emotional highs. A realistic optimist may seem a crank to casual observers, but in actuality he’s quite content.
That’s the case because he sees the world as it is and knows he has the means to conquer whatever challenges await. Realistic optimism is the offspring of confidence and self-assurance, something that both Walsh and Belichick had in abundance. These two coaches achieved spectacularly because at their core they knew exactly who they were, and they knew those traits were unique and extremely valuable in a copycat league such as the NFL.
When one team has success, another wants to duplicate its path to good fortune. It’s what I call the “Texas snake problem.” Texas is home to two species—the Texas coral snake and the Mexican milk snake—which look very much alike. The Texas coral snake is almost black-mamba-level dangerous; its venom can kill. The Mexican milk snake can’t hurt you; it’s an impostor. It thrives only as long as it can dupe predators into thinking it is dangerous. Teams try to get away with this kind of lazy copycatting all the time. They try to succeed by hiring a coach who has all the same markings and temperaments as Belichick or Walsh without really understanding what makes both men killers: drive, decision making, and realistic optimism.
But mimicking success rarely earns success. Even in New England. Every once in a while a Patriots coach will watch tape on the treadmill because Belichick does or tailor his clothes with a pair of scissors. But when that’s as deep as the imitation goes, the players and the rest of the staff see right through it. A guy like that is inevitably a short-timer.
What wouldn’t Belichick do? Fake it.
10
FEARLESS FORECAST
THE FUTURE OF FOOTBALL
If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrevelance even less.
—ERIC SHINSEKI, US ARMY GENERAL (RET.)
One of my first memories of color television (yes, I am old) was watching Batman on ABC every Tuesday and Wednesday night in the 1960s; the program featured Adam West in the title role and Burt Ward as Robin, his trusted companion in tights. I loved how the dynamic duo always managed to catch the archvillains by the end of each two-episode story arc even though I secretly wondered why the Joker or King Tut never pulled out a revolver and, you know, just shot the unarmed Caped Crusaders. I have to say that my all-time-favorite scenes were the ones that took place down in the Batcave. I just loved that Batcave. All those crime-fighting gadgets seemed so far-fetched and impossible. I mean, the Batcomputer solving one of the Riddler’s riddles? How’d it do that? Of course, if you watch the show today—and I’m not too proud to admit that I do—one of the first things you notice is that most of those crazy make-believe contraptions down in the Batcave are now part of our daily lives. Batcomputers, Batmaps, Batphones, Batcircuit streaming TV; as crazy as it sounds, the show was actually a fairly accurate peek into tomorrow. It reminds me (of course) of a lyric from a Springsteen song that says we’re all “Livin’ in the future…And none of this has happened yet.”
Except now it has.
So…what’s next? I’m often asked what the game will look like 10 years from now—or 20. Some worry—and more than a few hope—that there won’t even be football down the line. It’s safe to say that the game I love is at a crossroads. Unfortunately, those inside that world just aren’t conditioned to think that way. The nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle said: “Our main business is not to see what lies dimly at a distance, but to do what lies clearly at hand.” That is the essence of football. Inside the game, what matters most is the next opponent, the next series, the next play. However, from my current perspective I can see that change will be necessary to keep football alive. I’m convinced that it can actually be a good thing, because the changes most needed—adjustments to safety regimens, improvements in technology—will spark an evolution in strategies and the game itself. The futuristic elements of football that we can only dream about today will come to fruition one day, and if you love this sport the way I do, that’s an exciting and uplifting thought to consider.
As we come to the end of this book, I thought it would be fun and maybe even helpful to spend a few pages imagining what comes next for my favorite game.
* * *
—
Player health is the top agenda item for owners, players, and fans alike. At least that’s what they all claim. And whether they’re being truthful or just mouthing platitudes, it needs to be—today, tomorrow, next week, next year, and for as long as football is played.
Trying to make what is a brutal game less dangerous has always been a challenge, and that isn’t about to change. Modern football was actually launched—in 1906—with rules that made the forward pass explicitly legal to make the game safer. The technique had been “invented” a few years earlier by Native American players at what were then called Indian schools, who used it to great effect when playing against larger white players. Most high school and college coaches—there was no professional game to speak of then—disliked forward passing, which they thought of as a gimmick. But in 1905, around 20 prep and college players died as a result of injuries sustained on the gridiron. (In that era, most organized football was a “mass momentum” rushing game in which all 22 guys on the field went headfirst at one another.) Spurred on by President Theodore Roosevelt, a football fan who was being pressured to ban the game, college rule makers hoped that by encouraging forward passing—and later by lengthening the distance needed for a first down from 5 to 10 yards and increasing the number of downs from three to four—they would open up the game, making it more exciting even as they made it less hazardous.
And it worked—until it didn’t. Some people blame larger and faster athletes. Others blame improved equipment that gives players a false sense of invulnerability. Still others blame poor tackling techniques. I think it’s a combination of all three, but whatever the root causes, no one wants to see what happened to Steelers linebacker Ryan Shazier on a Monday Night Football broadcast late in the 2017 season. Defending a short crossing route, Shazier lowered his head to make a tackle—as players do hundreds of times a game—and immediately grabbed at his back before going limp. As he was taken off the field, immobilized on a stretcher, everyone watching could only hope he would be all right. (Although he continues to improve, his return to football is highly unlikely.) There’s no getting around the fact that horrific injuries stemming from routine plays are increasingly common on NFL fields.
Can we prevent it from happening?
No.
I’m sorry, but that’s the unvarnished truth. That said, in the last few years there has been a concerted effort to make the game safe—or as safe as it can be—and it has begun to influence the way things are done on the field.
When I was with the 49ers in the 1980s, we had Ronnie Lott, one of the greatest cornerbacks ever to grace the field. Did he lead with his head? Sometimes. Did he hit harder than just about anyone else? Always. Did he use those two parts of his game to physically intimidate opponents and take over games? Absolutely. In fact, when we faced the Los Angeles Rams and their Hall of Fame running back Eric Dickerson, we swapped our free safety Dwight Hicks with Lott so that Lott could patrol the middle of the
field and use his power—and his sheer presence—to wear down Dickerson. A few years later, Belichick, looking for his own Ronnie Lott, drafted Eric Turner, a big guy with a love for contact, at the top of the 1991 draft for the Browns. In Lott and Turner’s day, receivers weren’t eager to range across the middle for fear of being demolished as they laid out to make a catch. The rib-crushing reputations of Lott and Turner were like a twelfth defender.
That said, I’m not so sure we’d take Turner or Lott so high in the draft today.
Recent safety-first changes make me think that guys like that, even when they tackle with the proper technique, can’t have the same impact. In fact, when the Jets made LSU’s Jamal Adams a high pick in 2017, my initial reaction was, “Sure, the guy is a great player, but the rules will prevent him from dominating in the league.” Nowadays, why would you spend a high draft pick or pay a lot of money to protect the middle of the field or intimidate receivers when both tactics have been legislated out of the game? Cutting across the middle is a less fraught proposition now that “defenseless” receivers are protected by the prospect of unnecessary roughness penalties on overly aggressive defensive backs, who also face huge fines and even suspensions. To be fair, such protections go only so far: Eagles safety Malcolm Jenkins knocked Patriots wide receiver Brandin Cooks out of Super Bowl LII with a crushing blow that was completely legal; a lot of good those rules did Cooks. Still, a player’s ability to intimidate definitely has been curtailed by those “defenseless player” rules and the crackdown on helmet-to-helmet collisions. Thus, using a top-10 pick on a guy whose game features intimidation feels like a bit of a waste.
I still think Adams will be an excellent pro, but will he be a force, a presence? I don’t believe so. And going forward, this will be an issue in front offices. Talent executives will have to understand how increased safety initiatives change certain players’ value. More and more, defending the pass is about coverage, not collision. The game is a skill and space game now. No matter how hard he hits, if a defensive back cannot hit in space or make plays in the passing game—bat down balls or intercept them—it won’t matter. Unless a player can have an impact on the game on all three downs, he will lose value. I sympathize with players now being punished for playing the game in the physical style they were taught when they were young, but the rules have turned bangers into more of a liability than an asset.
Gridiron Genius Page 25