In one of his first team meetings as head coach of the Patriots, Bill Belichick stood before a roomful of players and coaches and began speaking calmly. He planned to tell this group what he expected in the 2000 season, and he hadn’t been talking for very long, maybe two minutes, when a player entered, walked past the coach, and tried to take an empty seat in the second row.
“Katzenmoyer!” Belichick snapped at the linebacker, one of the team’s two first-round picks in 1999. “Who in the hell do you think you are? Get your ass outta here! I’ll talk to you after the meeting.”
A big man at six feet three inches and 260 pounds, Andy Katzenmoyer was made to feel small perhaps for the first time in his entitled, athletic life. While in college at Ohio State, he was the cliché star athlete who suspiciously slid through the academic system, having failing grades changed to passing ones and remaining eligible by taking intro-level golf, tennis, and music classes. When he was drafted by the Patriots, he joined a team that was often coddled by its head coach, Pete Carroll, and he took advantage of the relaxed working environment.
Being kicked out of a Belichick meeting for lateness was just a glimpse of what was to come for Katzenmoyer. He wasn’t going to make it in New England. Not with this coach. He wasn’t alone, because many people in the organization, from players to coaches to scouts, wouldn’t be able to adjust to the cultural makeover, either. For many of them, the problem would be simple: They believed in things that Belichick didn’t.
The players had gotten used to workdays in which pads were worn for half of practice, and the other half the pads would be taken off. Under the collegial and perpetually positive Carroll, special names were given to practice days, like “Turnover Thursday” and “No-Repeat Friday.” Some players had found that they could glide into meetings a minute or two after they had begun without consequences from the coach or the captains, leading to an atmosphere that lacked tension. They knew that Carroll was the head coach but not the de facto general manager, so a few of them would take trips to the personnel department for an audience with Bobby Grier, who was the top personnel man at the time. All the while, the victory totals went from ten to nine to eight.
It took just a couple days to see that things were going to change under Belichick. His first press conference was in the evening on January 27, 2000. The next morning he fired a longtime strength coach who had four years left on his contract. When it came to one of his favorite topics, team-building, Belichick was likely to be unsentimental and blunt with his decision-making. It had been five years since his Cleveland dismissal, and he’d spent much of that time growing as a coach and football thinker.
He had weighed two intriguing job offers in February 1996, after being fired for the first time in his career. Jimmy Johnson, the former Cowboys coach, had taken over in Miami and wanted Belichick to be his defensive coordinator with the Dolphins. Belichick respected Johnson as a coach and collector of draft chips. In Dallas, before the era of true unrestricted free agency, Johnson took the one-win Cowboys and turned them into back-to-back Super Bowl champions in just five years. He did it exclusively through the draft. He was helped by one of the biggest trades in sports history, when in 1989 he cashed in his most valuable asset, running back Herschel Walker, in exchange for five Minnesota Vikings role players and six draft picks. The picks were always what excited Johnson, and he stacked them and dealt them more aggressively than anyone in the NFL. He approached picks like they were quarters for Vegas slot machines, continually feeding with the expectation that a big payoff would eventually come. While in Dallas, he drafted two Hall of Famers and five other players who all would make at least four Pro Bowls.
Belichick turned Johnson down, but the two maintained a good relationship, a relationship that would help Belichick sharpen his draft focus. Instead of Miami, Belichick decided to go to New England, a region where he’d spent a year in high school, four years in college, and several summers as a resident of Nantucket. It was also where Bill Parcells, his former boss, was the head coach of the Patriots. Parcells named Belichick as an assistant head coach, and in their lone New England season together, Parcells and Belichick watched the young Patriots advance to the Super Bowl before losing to the heavily favored Green Bay Packers.
A feud over personnel power between Parcells and Patriots owner Robert Kraft led to Parcells departing New England for one of the area’s most despised sports and cultural rivals: New York. Kraft wanted Parcells to focus on coaching and have Grier pick the players; Parcells wanted the full control and the cash that the New York Jets would give him. While the Jets searched for loopholes that would allow Parcells to be their coach without compensating the Patriots, they named Parcells as a consultant and Belichick as their head coach. Everyone, including Belichick, knew it was a ruse, and it lasted ten days. Still, Belichick knew what to do with authority, even if it was temporary. He used that week and a half to call the old Cleveland Browns, the Baltimore Ravens, so he could get permission to hire away Scott Pioli and Eric Mangini, two of his former star employees who had made the transition from Cleveland to Baltimore.
The Jets didn’t have a losing season when Parcells and Belichick were there, advancing as far as the conference championship game in 1998. But when Parcells said he was done with coaching, moving into the role of GM and trying to appoint Belichick as his Jets successor after the 1999 season, his longtime assistant bristled. Belichick knew he had made mistakes in Cleveland, from player evaluation to dealing with the media. But the five years there didn’t make him doubt his ability to be his own man, away from Parcells. If he had taken the Jets job, he wouldn’t have been able to fully steer the franchise the way he wanted because Parcells would still have final say over how things were done. He surprised Parcells and Jets upper management when he rejected the job in a press conference that had been arranged to announce his acceptance. The episode infuriated Parcells as well as New York fans and media, and it guaranteed that Belichick would never again be described as a dutiful Parcells follower. The head coaching job he wanted was in New England, where, despite Parcells’s problems with ownership, Belichick had enjoyed his year of conversations with Kraft and his oldest son, Jonathan.
He may have wanted to go to New England, but the Jets weren’t going to let it happen without a legal fight. After a staggering amount of billable hours, Belichick became the head coach of the Patriots and the Jets received multiple draft picks, including a first-rounder in 2000.
One early morning in New York, just as the conflict was coming to an end, Belichick talked with Pioli for twenty minutes. He was likely going to ask him to join him in New England so they could resume building the draft system that they had started in Cleveland. After a year of being in pro personnel in Baltimore and three in New York, Pioli was ready to assume the role that Mike Lombardi held for Belichick with the Browns. But that wasn’t the talk Belichick wanted to have at four A.M. Pioli had followed the coach to the Jets facility in Hempstead, where Belichick was going to drop off his team-issued car. Pioli would then drive him home since they lived in the same neighborhood.
During the drive, Belichick did most of the talking.
“There are highs and lows in this business,” he said, “and this is one of those moments where you’re reminded that we all in this business don’t treat our families well enough. We don’t give them what they deserve. You know, the only people who are going to support you unconditionally are your family.”
The recently married Pioli drove and listened. Belichick had given him a similar talk eight years earlier in Cleveland. But that one had felt more speculative and far-off. This was more relevant and pointed, especially since Pioli was going to have to learn to expertly balance professional success with family connections.
His wife, Dallas, was Parcells’s daughter. Parcells had been in the business long enough to understand how to compartmentalize. From one perspective, Pioli was someone who had known Belichick for more than a decade and was loyal to him for bringing him to the NFL. Looking at it that way, of course Parcells was going to allow him the opportunity to advance professionally under someone who guided him through the business. As for holidays and family dinners and birthdays, Pioli and Parcells would give those the attention they deserved and keep them separate from their shoptalk.
Belichick’s arrival in Foxboro, Massachusetts, was layered with significance. He had disagreed with Parcells many times over the years, but this was the first time the public got any hint of a rift. As a result, whatever he did in New England would now be viewed without a Parcells prism, and that hadn’t happened since he was in his early thirties, before Parcells became head coach of the Giants. There would be no assisting Parcells or cynical whispers that he was trying to be Parcells. His actions had said it all. The last person he wanted to pattern himself after was the man he had said, “No, thanks,” to in New York.
He was certainly going to bring some of the Parcells familiarity back to the Patriots, with no tolerance for excuses and a disdain for employees with a sense of entitlement. But he would do it his way, and it would start with the clout given to him by Kraft. This was his team to build, in all aspects of football operations. He officially had the autonomy that Kraft hadn’t given Parcells. The only thing missing from Belichick’s return, four years after he had left, was a Welcome Home banner.
“When Belichick took over in New England, there was a sort of purging of the Pete Carroll mentality,” says Tedy Bruschi, who had been coached by Parcells and Belichick in 1996, his rookie year. “You know, Pete had that ‘Everything’s going to be okay’ type of attitude. No, everything’s not going to be okay. It’s not going to be okay if you don’t do anything about it. And that’s the attitude that I always wanted.
“I made the most of what Pete was trying to do. I felt like I was one of his guys, too, to tell you the truth. Because I would believe in the head man in charge and try to convey his message to the team. But a lot of guys weren’t hearing it. I truly believe you have to put pressure on professional athletes to get the most out of them. You have to threaten them with their jobs. Especially certain guys who get contracts and get comfortable—and add to that a coach who enables them—and they forget to work.
“Pete never used pressure. He was a very positive-reinforcement type of guy. And that coming in after Parcells was a stark contrast.”
At the end of 2000, a five-win season, the Patriots parted ways with twenty-eight players who had spent at least one game on the roster. Included in the cuts were popular left tackle Bruce Armstrong and four high draft picks from Grier’s classes. As for Grier, he was gone, too.
Fortunately for Belichick, he had good instincts when it came to football guys. When he hired Pioli in Cleveland, he felt the best place for him was in scouting. Pioli quickly proved himself with his willingness to work at all hours, and by the time the Browns left for Baltimore, he was one of the best personnel men in the league. When he was with the Jets, he displayed an ability to recognize all talent, from the obviously great players to the ones who would be subtle pieces in the machine. He fully endorsed pursuing Seattle free agent Kevin Mawae and making him the highest-paid center in the league, but he also pushed for players in their late twenties and early thirties whom other teams had discarded. Those were the gritty players, such as Anthony Pleasant, Rick Lyle, and Bryan Cox, who had such impactful personalities that they could be team leaders whether they started or became specialists.
In Cleveland, there had been more of a traditional boss-employee relationship between Belichick and the young man he hired in 1992, the twenty-seven-year-old Pioli. But in early 2001, with Belichick still clearly in command in New England, the working relationship had evolved into more of a partnership. Pioli was thirty-six and on the very short list of people whom Belichick trusted as advisers and confidants. Those who didn’t know Belichick well were occasionally intimidated by his curiosity. The coach would sometimes ask people around him what they thought, which could lead to nervous rambling from those who weren’t sure what the “right” answer was. But Pioli always knew the right answer: There wasn’t one. Belichick was just asking for opinions. He wasn’t trying to set people up. He might challenge a position that didn’t seem quite right, but overall he was generally interested in the football thoughts of people on his staff and how they saw certain situations.
“I think it’s this way with a lot of leaders: There are certain people they’ll allow to disagree with them and continue to seek their opinions, and there are others they won’t,” Pioli says. “Bill never discouraged me. Because even when we disagreed and got into it, he never discouraged me from having a different opinion.
“But there were a lot of times where, because of Bill’s personality, he would just ask questions. A lot of times he would just get your position on things and never tell you his. Now, this is why Bill is so different than so many people I’ve encountered in life, period: When he’s asking those questions, you know that every fiber in his body is about winning and doing what is best for the team, with no personal and/or selfish motive.
“I knew him so well and trusted him implicitly; I didn’t even have to consider if there was a backroom game going on in his head. And that makes the work environment easy, man. You knew he was all about winning, doing the job well, doing it thoroughly, and being prepared.”
There were times Belichick didn’t have to share his opinion with Pioli because their ideas were so similar. Pioli had Belichick’s trust, so when it was time to reshape the team in the spring of 2001, the head coach knew he had a man in personnel who had a sharp mind for free agency and the draft. He needed all the power and wit of the minds around him, because his team had finished last in the AFC East.
Pioli found one of those gritty players with leadership potential in Pittsburgh. He was twenty-five, 260 pounds, and projected as a starting outside linebacker in New England. Those were the positives. What took some faith was the fact that he had played in fifty-one games in his career, started none of them, and had just eleven tackles in 2000. His name was Mike Vrabel. He was one of many linebackers who signed with the Patriots in the off-season, joining Cox, Roman Phifer, and Larry Izzo.
Few people outside of football operations realized what was happening in Foxboro. The firm but flexible scouting system that Belichick had dreamed of a decade earlier was finally ready to be put into practice. In the early 1990s, he had asked for a system that was specific but not oppressively so. He asked for a grading scale that was easy to understand yet complex enough to reflect, for example, the value of an average offensive lineman who could play two positions vs. an above-average lineman who could just play one. He wanted to assign letters, numbers, and words that would accurately describe every player in pro and college football. In turn, he and Pioli could approach each draft and free-agency period with the best chance of scientifically building the team they wanted: bigger and stronger than most; tough enough to practice and play in the unpredictable weather of the Northeast; fast; infused with football smarts and passion.
The system borrowed from other places, but overall it was original, so it truly was creating another language. It had a basic overall grading scale, from 1 to 9. But arriving at that grade could be quite a process because some positions, such as safety, required a scout to consider as many as twenty-four different factors (from the ability to quarterback the secondary to effectiveness in deep zone coverage to catching skills). The three general areas from which grades were derived were called Major Factors, Critical Factors, and Position Skills. Most players were graded on Major Factors, which measure seven specific areas from athletic ability to personal behavior and toughness. The specifics of the other two categories changed depending on what position is being analyzed.
What made such an exhaustive system fun was that it was built with football evolution in mind. It could be expanded or reduced to capture the changes and trends in the game. The emergence of pass-catching tight ends and slot receivers increased the value of those positions, while the opposite is true of fullbacks, since the position has been recently deemphasized. One of the things that made the system different was that it absolutely required a scout to know his college area or region of coverage in addition to each member of the Patriots’ fifty-three-man roster. All reports, without exception, were comparative and were based on what a given prospect could do vs. any current Patriot playing his position.
In April 2001, the Patriots went into the draft knowing that they wanted to spend their first two picks improving the defensive and offensive lines. They had detailed descriptions for the type of players they wanted at defensive end and left tackle. Now all they had to do was hope they fell to them. Their first two selections were in slots 6 and 39, which is proof that they were a bad team, but Belichick was still able to find an advantage from those draft positions.
“When you’re picking at number six, in terms of your draft preparation, I think that’s a relatively easy position to be in,” he says. “You’ve got five teams ahead of you, and you know who a couple of those players are going to be. So then, what’s left? And maybe it’s A or B, but you have a pretty good idea what you’re going to do. And then once you solidify that first pick, you know a lot of players will be gone when you pick at thirty-nine, and you know who those players are. I mean, not all of them, but certainly a big portion of them. So if you know who your pick’s going to be at six, and you’re not going to trade it, well, in the process now you’re way ahead of the game.”
To Belichick’s point, three picks in the top five were locks: Michael Vick, Leonard Davis, and LaDainian Tomlinson. That left the Patriots sure they’d get the number one player on their board, six-foot-six-inch Richard Seymour from Georgia, a three-hundred-plus-pound defensive end. The fans wanted a receiver, but the Patriots were certain Seymour had All-Pro abilities and that he’d have no problems fulfilling any part of the system ideally at his position; he matched the team’s player description perfectly: “This player must have explosive strength and leverage to stuff an offensive lineman and win the battle for the neutral zone… He must be able to play with strong, fast hands… He must be able to knock the offensive line back and establish a new line of scrimmage… This is a disciplined position that requires discipline in technique and responsibility. Other defenders’ ability and production is tied directly to this player’s performance.”
When Seymour came off the board and the draft unfolded, the Patriots realized they still had several players they liked when they got to 39. So they traded back in the draft, and when the tackle they wanted, Purdue University’s Matt Light, appeared to be on the Jets’ radar, they moved one slot ahead of them and picked him.
The first two picks alone made it a successful and smart day of drafting and had already put Belichick far ahead of where he was with the Browns. He and Pioli had just picked two immediate starters with Pro Bowl talents.
On September 23, 2001, the Patriots trailed the Jets by a touchdown, 10–3, in the fourth quarter. With five minutes to play, Drew Bledsoe rolled to his right and began to run upfield. He seemed to be indecisive. He couldn’t figure out if he wanted to run out of bounds and come up short of the first-down marker or stay in play and take on linebacker Mo Lewis.
Bledsoe took on Lewis, and the rest is both sports and medical history. Lewis hit Bledsoe with such force that the collision led to a sheared blood vessel in the quarterback’s chest cavity. No one was aware just how severe the injury was until Bledsoe got to Massachusetts General Hospital and had to have blood drained from the left side of his chest. One of the doctors who treated Bledsoe said he had never seen an injury like it in a professional athlete. The Patriots lost that game, fell to 0–2, and decided to play the rest of the season with Bledsoe’s backup, Tom Brady.
When Bledsoe recovered and was ready to take his starting job back, he was told that such a thing didn’t exist. He still had a job, just not one as a starter. He had signed a ten-year contract extension in the off-season that could be worth up to $103 million if he reached each roster bonus and incentive. He was a smart man, though, and whenever he asked Belichick about the job the answer was the same: The job was Brady’s. Bledsoe was the first Patriots star who believed that Belichick had swindled him out of a position, but he would have had more perspective if he could have seen the future or even considered what had happened with Bernie Kosar in Belichick’s past. Over the years, making tough decisions and replacing seemingly indispensable players would become the Patriots’ way of doing business.
“I’ll tell you this story, and it’s mean and it’s, you know, the brutality of the NFL,” Bruschi says. “I didn’t know how seriously Drew had been hurt after that hit by Mo Lewis. I was driving home after the game by myself, talking to my brother on the phone. I told him, ‘It’s no wonder Drew got the crap knocked out of him. He’s been holding the ball too long all year.’ That’s the frustration I was having with Drew at the time, and we’re talking about a guy who was one of my good friends on the team. That’s just the way football is. It’s either you’re helping us win or you’re not.
“Honestly, I saw Brady in there and thought, ‘Man, it’s time. It really is time.’ I saw that we had good players and were getting a foundation. I thought we could take that step and get better.”
Brady-Bledsoe was a local story that became national when the Patriots started to put together some wins under second-year quarterback Brady. He had been the best and luckiest pick of Belichick’s first draft class in 2000, lasting until the sixth round and the 199th overall selection. He was a throwing and breathing reminder that sometimes karma and chance sneak into the scouting process, which is usually the realm of cold analysis and lots of cold cash.
Belichick had no problem with that. He had been around long enough to remember lucky and unlucky breaks. He still recalls a player he wanted in the third round and was just ten spots away from selecting. It was 1995, his last year in Cleveland and Parcells’s next-to-last in New England.
“I called Bill and said, ‘Look, we’ll move up ten spots and give you a fourth.’ It was a good deal. It was way more than what it should have been for that move,” Belichick says. “And Bill was usually looking to accumulate picks. He said, ‘It’s pretty good. Yeah, I think we might be interested in doing that. Let me think about it.’ So he called back and said he was going to stay and pick. He only saw one guy left who he really wanted. We saw one guy left, too. Once Bill turned down the deal, I knew he was going to pick him.”
It was running back Curtis Martin, who played for the Patriots and Jets. He ended his career as the fourth-leading rusher in NFL history. Sometimes you just miss on Curtis Martin and land a quarterback named Eric Zeier instead. Sometimes you pick Adrian Klemm and Dave Stachelski before stumbling into Tom Brady.
With all the 2001 focus on Bledsoe and Brady and their leading dramatic roles in The Franchise vs. the Near Freshman, it was easy to forget that similar battles for starting jobs were happening on defense, too.
Bruschi had not begun the season as the starting inside linebacker. He was part of the rotation, but a lot of the reps had gone to Cox and Ted Johnson. When they both got hurt, Bruschi stepped in and never came out. He would go to work on Wednesday mornings, eager to see the game plans. That’s where players found out everything they needed to know. If their numbers were listed on those pages in starting positions, they knew they’d be getting a heavy workload in the game. Each Wednesday, Bruschi saw a “54” in the space for starting inside linebacker. The coaches had continually told the players that they would go with whoever was playing best at the time, no matter what, and they were proving it by playing the best middle linebacker and the best quarterback.
While the Patriots on the field were gaining confidence, the same could be said for upstart Patriots in the front office. Since his Cleveland days, Belichick had been a believer in developing young coaching and scouting talent. In 2001, he brought in an entry-level employee who would be used as a helper for coaches and scouts. Josh McDaniels was twenty-five and grew up in the birthplace of pro football, Canton, Ohio. His father, Thom, was a high school football coach who once led Canton’s McKinley High to an undefeated season and a national championship. That team was quarterbacked by Josh’s brother, Ben. Josh McDaniels had worked at Michigan State for one of Belichick’s best friends in coaching, Nick Saban. In New England, he was expected to do whatever Pioli asked in scouting, and he was also given an important and tedious coaching task that Belichick would carefully inspect.
“I used to do what were called pads, which were the game breakdowns,” McDaniels says. “Everything you saw on film, you had to draw and put on those pads. It wasn’t easy and they took forever to get done. I remember the first time I handed them in to Bill, he sent them back with what must have been sixty sticky notes on them. ‘This is wrong… That guy wasn’t there… This was the halfback, not the fullback.’ On and on. And I thought, ‘Okay, obviously I have some work to do.’
“The next one I did had twenty notes on them. The one after that came back with four. And then they weren’t sent back anymore. It was simple: If I was given something to do, I was expected to do it absolutely perfectly, as best as I could, every time I did it. And if I did those things right, I’d get something else to do.”
McDaniels also got a chance to see Pioli in action, whether it was managing the scouts, constructing contracts, speaking with agents, or looking for in-season ways to improve the roster. Pioli had tried to improve the ’01 scouting staff as well by extending an offer to Thomas Dimitroff, trying to get one of his closest friends in football to scout for the Patriots.
Professionally, the move would make sense for everyone involved. Dimitroff would be a perfect fit for all aspects of the Patriots’ culture. He was meticulous and efficient in writing his reports, just like his father had been. He believed in what he saw and didn’t waste a lot of words trying to convince a director, or himself, that he was right. (“Some people want to write a portion of The Iliad,” he liked to joke. “Let’s stick with crisp, descriptive words and not get lost in the verbiage.”) He trusted Belichick and Pioli more than anyone in the league, and he knew there was a better chance of sustained success in New England than with his organization, the new Cleveland Browns.
The NFL had granted Cleveland an expansion team after the original Browns left town in 1995. Dimitroff had been working with the Lions at that time and eventually began scouting the West. Scouts are typically based in the region that they cover, so Dimitroff settled in the utopia for lovers of the outdoors and clean living, Boulder, Colorado. He left the Lions for the Browns in 1998, a year before the new Browns took the field, and continued scouting the West.
It wasn’t coincidental that he decided to work for the same team that his father proudly called an employer. He thought of his father’s impassioned advice often, and he consciously thought of walking the same halls that the Bulldog had. He also knew that working for the Browns meant that, for job purposes, he would be in northeast Ohio for long stretches three different times during the season. He’d be in for two weeks during training camp and a week apiece for the December and February draft meetings. That would allow him to spend more time with his mother, Helen, who had decided that she didn’t want to have another companion after losing her husband. It had been five years since Tom Dimitroff had passed, but he was still a presence.
Thomas Dimitroff told Pioli that the following season, 2002, would probably be a better time to work for the Patriots.
The story lines with the Patriots began to change in December and January. Only hard-core members of the Bledsoe Fan Club thought he should be the Patriots’ starter. The offense, with 240-pound running back Antowain Smith as the hammer and receiver Troy Brown negotiating the slot and perimeter, clicked when Brady ran it. He also seemed to buy into the team mind-set that the starting quarterback was no different from a special-teamer who was clinging to the roster. He modestly deflected any suggestions that he was becoming an idol for teenage girls and their moms, too, due to his leading-man good looks. He parroted everything that the coaches and team captains said, repeatedly found nice words to share about Bledsoe, and tried to prove that he saw himself as just a piece of the operation.
But as much as he tried, it was hard to slow down Brady Mania. If Brady was willing, advertisers were there for him, and they knew they could have him pitching almost any product on the market. America would buy a likable kid with a simple name. America would buy cover-boy handsome with a tinge of aw-shucks sensibility. America would buy a winner.
Three days before Christmas, the Patriots played their last home game of the regular season. They had won four in a row, which made their record 9–5. They were facing the Dolphins, a team they hadn’t beaten since Belichick became their coach. The Patriots won, 20–13, and jogged around Foxboro Stadium for ten minutes afterward. They were probably going to the play-offs, although it wasn’t official. And even if they did, there was no guarantee that they would play at home. So as far as the fans and players knew, it was the last game in the stadium’s history. A new facility, Gillette Stadium, was being constructed next door and would be ready for the 2002 season. But the demolition of Old Foxboro, with its aluminum seats and Division 2 luxuries, would have to wait.
“Our transformation was magical with the emergence of Brady,” Bruschi says. “That’s what happened. Before Brady got in there, did I think we were good? No. I didn’t think we were upper-echelon. I thought if Drew had a Pro Bowl year, it would give us a chance of getting out of that so-so group and also give us a chance in the play-offs. But when Tom came in, boom, we took off.”
But that was just part of it. For some reason, the real-life Patriots continued to encounter situations that seemed torn from the pages of fiction, and the fiction writer was always pro—New England. The fiction, either inspirational or horror, depending on where you lived, was tangible on January 19 in Foxboro. The Patriots had won their division and secured the number two seed in the play-offs. It truly was a dark and stormy night as they played their divisional game against Oakland in five inches of snow. If not for handheld snowblowers, no one would have been able to distinguish the yard lines.
The game appeared to be over with 1:47 remaining and the Patriots trailing 13–10. Brady hadn’t recognized his college teammate, Charles Woodson, coming on a corner blitz. Woodson struck Brady, the ball fell to the ground, and Raiders linebacker Greg Biekert smothered the ball, recovering the apparent fumble. The Patriots were out of time-outs, so all the Raiders had to do was call a few plays and run out the clock.
Except one of the replay officials in the press box had called for a review of the play. On CBS, which televised the game, announcer Greg Gumbel said that the previous play had “pretty much sealed” the win for Oakland. As he looked at the replays during the review, which was unusually long, he didn’t see anything that changed his mind. But his broadcast partner, Phil Simms, alluded to an obscure rule that he couldn’t remember the name of and said it might give possession to the Patriots.
During the delay, an ecstatic Woodson pranced around the stadium with his helmet off, acknowledging the crowd. But the longer the review took, the more sixty-thousand-plus fans believed that they had a chance, even if many of them couldn’t make a case for why they felt that way.
“We thought the same thing that everyone else in the stadium thought: It was a fumble,” says Roland Williams, the Raiders’ starting tight end. “Tom Brady thought it was a fumble, too. Watch the replay and you can see his head sink. He was dejected. And then came the review of infamy. It makes you wonder if it was a personal vendetta against [Raiders owner] Al Davis. That review took so long that you had time to call your cousin, your auntie, and your girl.”
The suspense built, almost in lockstep with the song that was playing at the time, Phil Collins’s tense and trancelike “In the Air Tonight.” Brady stayed on the field for most of the review, his helmet pulled low near his eyes, fresh snow accumulating on the crown.
Remarkably, the play was overturned by virtue of the rule Simms couldn’t remember the name of: the Tuck Rule. In the view of the officials, Brady was initially attempting to pass, with his arm going forward. As he tried to pull the ball, or tuck it, back to his body, it was knocked free, resulting in an incomplete pass. When the Raiders heard the explanation from referee Walt Coleman, all of them had the look of bitter employees who had completed their jobs yet somehow found themselves still on the clock.
They must have known it wasn’t going to end well for them, even though kicker Adam Vinatieri still had to make the most difficult kick of his career, a forty-five-yarder, to tie the game. He had certainly made kicks from that distance before, although all but one of the six kicks he missed during the regular season were in the forty-to forty-nine-yard range. The snow was the obvious hurdle, causing Vinatieri to alter his approach. His kick would have been perfect for Fenway Park: a low line drive headed for the top of the manual scoreboard on the Green Monster. Vinatieri’s low and powerful kick pierced the snow and then got lost in it, a football competing with a New England snowstorm. Those in the crowd who couldn’t actually see it looked at the officials, and they signaled that the kick, which barely cleared the crossbar, was good.
The rest of the night, and season, would be in the hands of storytellers and dreamers. Eventually, Vinatieri would make another kick, much easier than his forty-five-yarder, and the Patriots were on their way to the conference championship game.
“I respect the hell out of Tom Brady for what he said after the game,” Williams says. “He was shaking guys’ hands and he said to a lot of us, ‘Good game… I fumbled.’ We got screwed. I don’t know if the NFL was against us or not, but I want you to think about something: We played back-to-back play-off games, against the Jets and Patriots, and our opponents had a total of one penalty. One! Is that even possible?”
It was one of the topics the Raiders would debate on the way home. They called the back of their team plane “Club Taliban” for its collection of intimidating trash-talkers, card and dice players, and unofficial scouts who liked to tell you, through sips of alcohol, how you could have played better that day. Anyone who wanted to use the bathroom on the cross-country flight had to pass through that area. “It was a helluva ride,” Williams says. “At least we can all say we catapulted Brady’s and Vinatieri’s careers.”
For Belichick and Pioli, who arrived in New England with a vision for decades-long excellence, the unexpected success of the Patriots was going to require open minds and discipline. They had to be open-minded because they knew the team had flaws. Both of them had virtually grown up with the New York Giants, one of them as a coach and the other as a fan, and they knew how true greatness was supposed to look. The Patriots had elements of greatness, but through and through, they weren’t there yet. The men in charge of building the roster knew that they would have to take second and third looks at free agents who were appearing to be more than stopgaps and veteran players who were playing far above what their capabilities were supposed to be.
They’d also need to be disciplined enough to avoid getting swept in the region’s and, increasingly, nation’s emotions about the team. The Patriots were embraceable because of how they were perceived. They were a starless group, the story went, that was powered by heart, luck, and Belichick’s brain. If Belichick and Pioli made future personnel decisions based on local sentiment, they’d be tempted to keep the team as-is.
New England was deeply in love with the team, even before it arrived in Pittsburgh and upset the Steelers for the conference title, 24–17. In that game, the literary theme was redemption, with Brady spraining an ankle and turning the game over to his backup, Drew Bledsoe. Bledsoe was so excited to play, for the first time since he had gotten hurt, that he practically skipped on the field. He didn’t throw passes as much as he launched them, the football coming out of his hand with such velocity that it seemed as if it were fired from a throwing machine. On one play, he even rolled to the sideline, in a Mo Lewis redux, and was popped as he went out of bounds. But this time he leapt up, smiling and clapping his hands. Usually buttoned-down and restrained, Bledsoe was more emotional than he’d ever been in his nine seasons in New England. He completed ten passes, one of them a touchdown to David Patten. After the game, he held the Lamar Hunt Trophy and wept.
When the Patriots arrived in New Orleans for the Super Bowl, they may have been the only ones in the city looking forward to the actual game. Their opponent would be the last team they had lost to, the Saint Louis Rams, and it wasn’t supposed to be close. Leading up to the game, the general conversations were about the surreal New Orleans parties, the irresistible food at dozens of city restaurants, the approaching Mardi Gras season, and the fact that the Rams might be on their way to a dynasty with a second Super Bowl win in three seasons.
Most of the Patriots were too confident to listen to the consensus of Football America, and a couple of them weren’t even in town to hear it. Because of the quick turnaround of traveling from Pittsburgh to Foxboro to New Orleans, Belichick came up with an idea. His coordinators, Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel, would stay in New England an extra day and prepare their game plans. That way, Weis and Crennel could focus on a normal workday, travel after work, and not have to worry about disrupting their routine and losing time.
Belichick traveled with the team and then huddled with Ernie Adams, a man he had known since they were both teenage football players at Phillips Academy, a prestigious New England prep school. Adams had many roles for the Patriots. He sat in the coaches’ box on game days and had frequent conversations with Belichick about what he saw from the sky. He sat in on scouting meetings. He was a football historian-savant who, off the top of his head, could connect a formation from the present to a similar one that someone used in 1955. He was a sounding board and adviser, just another smart voice that Belichick could go to for opinions.
With Belichick and Adams in one city and Weis and Crennel in the other, the group faxed ideas back and forth until they came up with a collaborative, Best of Our Ideas plan to upset the Rams. They had a blizzard of schemes and stats, but they would never present those to the team. Belichick, the son of a coach and a schoolteacher, knew how to make complex ideas simple. He was going to stress just a few things to the defense, with number one being stopping Marshall Faulk. They believed that he truly was the team’s quarterback, even though Kurt Warner played the position. They could learn a lot about what the Rams’ offense wanted to do by studying Faulk, so he was the key man for the week.
The nation wasn’t buying it. As lovable as the Patriots were, Las Vegas saw a runaway coming. Oddsmakers installed the Rams as 14-point favorites. Many believed that it would be a mini-upset if the Patriots were still competitive by halftime. But the day before the game, Belichick sat in his work suite at the team’s French Quarter hotel, the Fairmont, and coolly answered, “Sure,” when asked if he saw a way of slowing the Rams down.
“Oh, they’re definitely more talented than we are,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “And they’re fast. But think of a fast-break team in basketball. They usually don’t want to play a half-court game. They don’t want to be pushed around. It makes them a different team.”
True to what they had become during the season, the Patriots began Super Bowl XXXVI unlike anyone else. For years, Super Bowl tradition had been solo introductions of team members. It might be your only chance to play in such a big game, recognized by a worldwide audience, so why not at least take off your helmet and let the world hear your name and see your face? The previous year, Baltimore’s Ray Lewis was introduced and took the opportunity to do an elaborate fraternity dance. But the Patriots, who had talked all year of the group being more powerful than the individual, chose to be introduced as a team.
“It was us making a statement that this was how we were going to win,” Troy Brown says. “We had come together many times that season and become closer, from 9/11 to the death of [quarterbacks coach] Dick Rehbein. We didn’t think it was the time to be taking off our helmets and celebrating ourselves. We thought, ‘If you’re going to beat us, you’re going to have to beat us this way.’”
“I knew it was over as soon as I saw that,” says Williams, the Raiders’ tight end. “They just destroyed everybody’s psyche with that move. Whoever came up with it was a freakin’ genius.”
In the second quarter, all aspects of teamwork got everyone’s attention in the Superdome. Warner dropped back to pass and appeared to be surprised by Crennel’s defensive call. The Patriots were in a 46 defense, popularized in the 1980s by Buddy Ryan, the father of Patriots linebackers coach Rob Ryan. The call was Turkey Zero, and it left Vrabel with a free shot at Warner. He hit him just as he threw, causing the ball to float. Cornerback Ty Law quickly read the play, caught the ball while he was in stride, and ran forty-seven yards down the sideline for a touchdown.
A couple of series later, the “half-court football” continued. Rams receiver Ricky Proehl was hit hard by the Patriots’ Antwan Harris and fumbled. That led to another touchdown, Brady to Patten, and a 14–3 Patriots lead. Just as they had planned, the Patriots followed Faulk and pushed him whenever they could. Even when he didn’t appear to be the primary option on passing plays, Faulk got a bump or shiver from a defensive lineman or linebacker. It seemed to disrupt the Rams until the fourth quarter.
The Patriots were on the verge of a blowout with ten minutes to play. The Rams had driven to the Patriots’ three, but Warner fumbled the ball into the hands of safety Tebucky Jones. Jones sprinted ninety-seven yards for what was thought to be a touchdown and 24–3 lead. But the officials had noticed Willie McGinest bear-hugging the game’s target, Faulk, and called holding. The Rams eventually scored to make it 17–10.
Brady and the offense were having a hard time moving against the quick and aggressive Rams defense. They were the third-best unit in the league, and they seemed to know exactly what the Patriots wanted to do. They kept giving Warner and the offense chances to produce, and the offense finally delivered with 1:37 to play to tie the score at 17.
By the time Brown returned the kickoff to the Patriots’ seventeen-yard line, there was just 1:21 to play. Both teams were out of time-outs. John Madden, a Fox broadcaster and Hall of Fame coach, went on the air and outlined what the Patriots should do: “With this field position, you have to just run the clock out. You have to play for overtime now. I don’t think you want to force anything here. You don’t want to do anything stupid. Because you have no time-outs and you’re backed up.”
After a four-yard pass to J. R. Redmond, Madden continued.
“I don’t agree with what the Patriots are doing right here,” he said. He stuttered a bit over the next thought, seeming to slightly doubt himself as he said it: “I would play for overtime. If I had good field position I wouldn’t. But in this field position I would play for overtime.”
But Brady had been told the opposite on the sideline by Belichick and Weis. They trusted him, and they didn’t trust leaving their fate to a coin flip and, perhaps, an escape from the box by Faulk. Who could chance it? And why would they, since they hadn’t thought and played that way all season? Despite the effective game plan, the Rams still had gained significantly more yards. The Rams had an edge in time of possession. The Rams had momentum. Yet the Patriots, with no turnovers, had the ball and an opportunity to go for the win.
Robert Kraft; his wife, Myra; and his son Jonathan were paying no attention to John Madden. They weren’t listening to an NFL official, either, who had come to their private box with six minutes to play and offered to escort them to the field. No chance. The official came back a few minutes later. Still, not interested. They’d watch the entire game and then worry about getting to the field later.
What they were able to see was confidence and precision from Brady. The one time he could have been flustered, on a Rams blitz, he stepped to his right and threw the ball out of bounds. On the next play, from the Patriots’ forty-one, Brady and Weis displayed just how much they believed in what they were doing. They called a play, RT 64 MAX ALL IN XQ, that had gone for an incompletion earlier. So they called it again.
“When I saw how they lined up, I knew they weren’t going to be in a man defense,” Brown says. “I said, ‘There’s going to be a hole somewhere, I just have to find it.’ Once I caught the ball and got close to the sideline, I knew I could have made a better move to make the defender miss. But I wanted to be sure we had enough time to run one more play and spike, so I ran out of bounds. But I know I could have had more.”
What he gave them was good enough, a twenty-three-yard play that moved the ball to the Rams’ thirty-six. Twenty-one seconds remained. The Patriots needed just a few more yards to be in comfortable field-goal range.
In a season of unintentional poetry, it was fitting that the next play would practically be a catch by all who had been with the Patriots since their local TV blackouts, one-and two-win seasons, and franchise coffers that had more singles than hundred-dollar bills. Jermaine Wiggins, a tight end from East Boston, was the only Patriots player who had been born and raised in the area. He understood what it would mean for the Patriots to win something. This was a team that almost moved to Saint Louis after the 1993 season. Of the Red Sox, Bruins, and Celtics, it was the only local franchise that couldn’t claim a single championship. So it was perfect that the Boston kid, Wiggy, would represent the city and catch Brady’s final pass of the day for six yards.
“What Tom Brady just did gives me goose bumps,” the converted Madden told his TV audience as the Patriots prepared for the win.
With seven seconds left, Vinatieri took the field. No one had been steadier in the postseason. He had gotten the team here by kicking his way through snowflakes, and in the temperature-controlled dome, he knew that confetti would be the only thing that might be falling from above. As he walked to the field, white lights flashed around him. He heard chatter from his own team and the Rams, too, but he blocked them all out. This is what he had mapped out the night before as he sat in his hotel room, halfway paging through a few magazines, and what he thought of the next morning as he determinedly took the first team bus to the stadium. He was as confident in his abilities as Brady was in his, so there was nothing anyone could say or do in this moment to bother him.
The ball was snapped and Vinatieri stepped into it and kicked as if there was a chance someone would move the goalposts back ten yards. It was a wallop. It exploded off his right black shoe, purposefully one size smaller than normal so there wouldn’t be slippage, and it required neither prayers nor body English. It was something everyone could understand: right down the middle and good from forty-eight yards. The Patriots were Super Bowl champions.
Belichick had won his first Super Bowl as a head coach, and he had done it standing near his father, Steve, the man who taught him the game. The eldest of his three children, daughter Amanda, was the first person to reach him and wrap him in a hug. Safety Lawyer Milloy was next. There were hugs in the owner’s box, where the Krafts still were, before they were taken to the field in a rickety freight elevator. In the coaches’ box, Scott Pioli had been so excited that he tumbled down the stairs and into a massive embrace with screaming colleagues. Brady found Drew Bledsoe and excitedly slapped his shoulder pads. Some players dropped to their knees and cried.
In the vision of Belichick and Pioli, this was just part of what they had in mind when they thought of the New England Patriots. This was the part of the story where they win the championship, but it’s not where the story ends. The plan all along was to win and be in position to repeat the process, year after year. Some would call it the pursuit of the impossible in a salary-cap league, a league that is designed to make things even. But Belichick was passionate about who the Patriots were and who they could become.
As he sat in a nearly empty coaches’ locker room, well after the game had ended, he was asked to describe what he had just seen. He shook his head in disbelief.
“This was miraculous,” he said.
He then went on to say, with all respect, that the team that had just won the Super Bowl had a lot of work to do to reach the ideal of consistent championship contender. It meant that the team in the front office, coaches and scouts, were going to have to get back to work soon. And the team on the field shouldn’t get too comfortable. He was asked how many players on the Super Bowl champs would have to be replaced before he could call them perennial championship threats. He didn’t hesitate:
“About twenty.”