The conference room, filled with coaches, was mostly dark. There was a giant screen on the wall farthest away from the door, and all eyes were on that screen. The coaches met like this daily, shuttling into the room to analyze what they had just seen in practice. They came armed with pens and notepads, bottled water, coffee, packs of gum or mints, and, in some cases, spitting cups for their tobacco.
There was always something to be found on the big screen that they hadn’t seen live in practice. But on this fall afternoon in 2002, it didn’t take the Patriots’ coaching audience long to realize that this was not going to be a good day at the movies. Bill Belichick was in control of the clicker, and he continued to do the same thing for what seemed like twenty-five minutes: He would let the practice images roll for a few seconds, stop, rewind, and shake his head.
“Not good,” he would say after one sequence.
“This is bad,” he’d say after another.
“This is terrible … what kind of technique is that? Are any of us teaching him to play like that?” he’d add to yet another replay.
On this October day, all of his commentary was reserved for one of the new guys, defensive tackle Steve Martin, who was signed to help stop the run. No one was happy with Martin’s play, but he at least was a reminder of how blessed the Patriots had been in 2001. It had been one of those years that few people, in any profession, experience. It was a year when all negatives became positive. The starting quarterback got hurt and his backup turned out to be better. A game was won in Buffalo when it was determined that an unconscious receiver, sprawled near the sideline, had possession of the ball. A fumble that would have ended the season was ruled an incompletion, which opened the door for not one but two successful field goals in a blizzard. A two-touchdown underdog won the Super Bowl.
Even every free agent the Patriots touched had been golden. They were the I-can’t-believe-it stars of a bargain-shopping commercial. They had found: a discarded running back in Antowain Smith who gave them 1,100 rushing yards and 12 touchdowns; a special-teams captain, Larry Izzo; a wide receiver in David Patten, unwanted by the 3–13 Browns, who became a starter and deep threat; a young, starting outside linebacker, Mike Vrabel, who was both good enough to play in their system and smart enough to teach it; and a versatile, starting guard in Mike Compton who could flip between playing center and guard within a series.
The Patriots had been good for most of 2001, and when the games were most important they had been great. It carried them to one of the most unlikely championships in the history of pro sports. But the truth was that they had been lucky, too. The phrases usually don’t go together, but they were a defending Super Bowl champion that was in the middle of rebuilding. They knew that internally, although they forever lost the right to say it publicly as soon as the red, white, and blue confetti swirled among them on an unforgettable February night in the Superdome.
They were agitated in 2002. They weren’t living up to their billing, and the shine from their luck was gone. At best, their signings could be described as marginal. The 320-pound Martin, a frequent target of the coaches, was supposed to add a dimension that the Super Bowl champs didn’t have the previous year. He’d be their true, two-gapping nose tackle. It meant that he would have the discipline and strength to stay square at the point of attack. He’d be able to control the gaps to his left and right, be tough, and allow his teammates to get the glory for his dirty work. But Martin wanted media glory more than anything else, and as Belichick pointed out to the coaches in the film room, his technique was inconsistent and substandard.
It was an odd position for a champion to be in. There hadn’t been a rush by Belichick and Scott Pioli to retain the team they had. On the contrary, at their end-of-season self-scouting meetings with the coaches, they pointed to several positions where they needed to improve.
They thought they could upgrade the safety spot, where Matt Stevens and Tebucky Jones had split time in ’01. Stevens had an off-the-charts score on the Wonderlic, the predraft test used to see how quickly a player could process information, but the coaches didn’t always feel he played smart. Jones was big and athletically gifted, but he had poor technique. So veteran safety Victor Green was signed away from the Jets, and despite his guile and want-to, the Patriots discovered Green’s speed had fallen off dramatically and the team suddenly had a player at the end of his career. They had gone most of the previous season without a reliable third receiver, so they drafted Louisville’s Deion Branch late in the second round and took a chance in the seventh round on Notre Dame’s David Givens. Those were hits. The big miss came in free agency, when they looked to Carolina and thought they had a found a young star, twenty-seven-year-old Donald Hayes, who was ready to break out. But the multiple route options in the Patriots’ offense tripped up Hayes, and he became a nonfactor after admitting in an interview that he didn’t know the plays.
It was a return to most teams’ normal: one up, one down. They wanted to be better at tight end, even if East Boston’s own Jermaine Wiggins had caught ten balls in the play-off win against the Raiders and had made the last catch against the Rams to set up Adam Vinatieri’s Super Bowl—winning kick. (In fact, one of the coaches had derisively said that Wiggins was only able to create separation when the games were in the snow.) Wiggins left as a free agent and the Patriots moved up eleven spots in the first round for Colorado tight end Daniel Graham. He was a ferocious blocker, but he spent a lot of his rookie season watching as most of the catches went to free-agent signee Christian Fauria.
The Patriots would go through the entire month of October without a victory, and by the time they got to November a few realities were tough to ignore. Sure, they were like many other champions who had to endure a sixteen-game season-after tour in which they got every opponent’s complete focus and best game. And they had to develop new chemistry, too, with Drew Bledsoe traded to Buffalo for a 2003 first-round pick and Tom Brady, in his first full season as a starter, expected to become one of the league’s top quarterbacks. More than that, though, were the words of Belichick after winning the Super Bowl. He had said they were twenty players away from consistent greatness, and he was right. The Patriots had a solid core, but they could point to a couple of areas where players were starting and the team didn’t think they should be. For example, the starting defensive ends from the Super Bowl season, Anthony Pleasant and Bobby Hamilton, were both smart players. Yet Pleasant was thirty-four and well past his prime, and Hamilton, despite his strong technique, was someone the coaches ultimately saw as a rotation guy. It was only a matter of time, maybe a draft or two, before both players would be replaced.
Belichick and Pioli knew all of this logically, but their competitiveness led them to expect more than what was possible during the games. Belichick had become so frustrated with Martin that at times he put Hamilton, forty pounds lighter than Martin, at nose tackle just to illustrate what technique he was looking for. It didn’t matter. Martin’s performance was unchanged. Pioli would watch games in the coaches’ box, see a breakdown, and say to no one in particular, “Are you kidding me with that? Come on.” Brilliant coaching and scouting and player leadership wouldn’t be enough to fix some of the Patriots’ issues during the season. It was a good thing for them that they officially had people in-house who could diagnose and correct the problems.
After trying for more than a year, Pioli, with a new vice president’s title and salary bump, had finally been able to sell Thomas Dimitroff on joining the scouting staff in New England. Dimitroff would continue to live in Boulder, Colorado, one of the most liberal and laid-back cities in the country, while being a national scout for the Patriots. From afar, it seemed like a personality-balancing exercise: There was the clearly defined, militaristic hierarchy of the Patriots paired with the live-and-let-live spirit of the small city in the Rockies.
Dimitroff was planted in both worlds. He was an avid mountain biker and snowboarder who once thought of opening his own bike-outfitting shop if he didn’t have a career in football. He was passionate about the environment, animal rights, and nutrition, and had been either a vegan or vegetarian for a decade. He was a Presbyterian but was also intrigued by Taoism and had educated himself on its teachings by reading numerous books. Once, while living in Saskatchewan, his primary mode of transportation was a bicycle. His friends nicknamed it “Steel Wind” because he would ride it in any conditions. He would pedal through the prairies, the unplowed side roads packed with snow, in minus-15-degree temperatures (he didn’t own his first car until he was twenty-six). At the time, his living situation could have been the inspiration for a reality show on Canadian TV: He was a fledgling scout residing in the basement of a house, and his four housemates, all women, were members of the Canadian national volleyball team.
He may have looked, talked, and dressed differently from most scouts he came across, but he was as in tune with what the Patriots expected as anyone in the NFL. He considered Pioli a brother, and six years after the passing of his father, he was grateful that Belichick had continued to stay in touch with his mother. Dimitroff also had studied enough of Belichick’s and Pioli’s hiring practices to sense a trend: “Bill and Scott have a knack for hiring people who are their own worst critics. Those two send a clear message: Do your job as well as you can, do your part, play your role. They rarely have to come down hard on their employees, because they pick their employees so well. You never would see anyone with a sense of entitlement there. They wouldn’t survive.”
Dimitroff became one of those employees in 2002, and he could quickly sense what was at stake for the Patriots when he was in Foxboro for the December scouting meetings. The Patriots were 8–5 then, with a Monday-night game scheduled in Tennessee. The decent record hadn’t fooled many careful observers of the team. The Patriots were at or near the bottom of the league in run defense the entire season. There were too many missed tackles in the secondary and not enough speed, a couple of facts that automatically put Belichick on edge and would lead him to challenge anyone who had something positive to say about any of the team’s safeties.
All the scouts had an idea of what the Patriots needed going forward, and those needs played out twice before national TV audiences in less than a week. The Monday-night game against the Titans was the worst of everything: The Titans ran whenever they wanted, the Patriots couldn’t do anything offensively, and Brady suffered a separated right shoulder—although the team wouldn’t confirm that until the season was over. They were scheduled to play the Jets six days later in Foxboro, with an opportunity to take control of the AFC East. Belichick tried to emphasize how significant the week was by imploring the team to study and focus on what was important. The next day, he awoke to headlines that pointed out that the ever-quotable Martin had called Jets center Kevin Mawae a dirty player. Belichick had already seen enough from Martin, and now he was hearing and reading it, too. Martin either had misread the rising anger and frustration from the head coach or he didn’t care. He was cut, mostly because he didn’t do the job, but also as a message to the rest of the team.
It didn’t translate to a win against New York. The Patriots lost, 30–17.
After the loss to the Jets, Jeannette Belichick showed her mother’s intuition. The coach’s mom, an octogenarian, wasn’t even privy to the team’s true injury report. But she had been around long enough to know something was wrong with Brady. She stood near her husband, Steve, and whispered that Brady wasn’t okay. A few minutes later she saw the quarterback as he was leaving the stadium. He leaned over to make better eye contact with the petite woman, and she gently placed her right hand on his face, told him how concerned she was about him, and kissed him on the cheek. The Patriots were 8–7 and play-off outsiders, looking for help in the final week of the season.
Pioli understood that no matter what happened at the end of the week, his department was going to need to do its best work for the 2003 season. There had been too many conversations, either in Belichick’s office after home games or on buses and planes on the road, for Pioli to misunderstand what the head coach was thinking. He didn’t always have to listen to Belichick to know what was on his mind. There was a brooding that the coach went through, well after the normal postgame venting period was over. Pioli had known him for years, so he could easily sense it, but it was so obvious in 2002 that all the coaches could, too. Many of the assistants would get to coaches’ meetings five and ten minutes ahead of Belichick and trade stories about what college football games they’d seen or something they’d heard Howard Stern say. But as soon as Belichick walked into a room, it was almost a scramble to prove that no one had been joking or had even thought of it. They laughed when he did. But he was rarely happy. He was so unhappy that in a few areas, he wasn’t just looking for a tweak, he wanted an overhaul.
The Patriots’ 2002 season ended, unofficially, as Belichick was driving home following a 27–24 win over the Dolphins. It was an awful feeling: The Patriots were 9–7 and needed help or else the Jets were going to take the division in a tiebreaker. There was no help coming, and Belichick could see that as he watched the first half of the Jets-Packers game from his office. His family and friends were there, but as the game got out of hand, he announced he was leaving. They could stay if they wanted, but he would be more comfortable sitting in postgame traffic, thinking of how to improve the Patriots in 2003. Some reinforcements were going to come, naturally, through the draft. But he already had a few free agents in mind, and it was going to take a lot of the owner’s money to get them.
Robert Kraft was more than a football fan who grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was a lifelong football risk-taker. As a college student at Columbia, he would sneak out to play intramural football, keeping the news from his parents. Practicing their Jewish faith, Kraft’s parents didn’t answer their phone until after sundown on the Sabbath, and that’s when they learned that their son in New York was up to something: They received a call from the school and were told that he had been hurt in a game and needed knee surgery.
When he was twenty-nine, in 1971, Kraft bought his family Patriots season tickets. At the time they lived in a charming brick house on Gralynn Road in Newton, and the family tradition was that the Kraft children would swarm their father at the door as he entered the front foyer after work. He was a hero that day with his oldest son, seven-year-old Jonathan, as he opened his briefcase and held up the tickets. But the woman of the house, wife Myra, thought season tickets for a young family building its wealth was a stretch. The stretch became an elaborate chess game in the 1980s and early 1990s, as Kraft systematically put himself in position to buy the Patriots. The climactic moment came after the 1993 season, when the financially unstable franchise appeared to be headed to Saint Louis until Kraft, who already owned Foxboro Stadium, purchased the team for a record sum at the time, nearly $200 million.
The owner was invested in the team, by any definition.
Like everyone else in his organization in February 2002, he had the time of his life during Super Bowl week in New Orleans. He was the prince of the French Quarter. People he didn’t know treated him as if he was an old buddy from their hometown and they needed to buy a few rounds to catch up and toast the memories. They bought him drinks and called him “Bobby,” thankful that he presided over a franchise that had taken them on such an unpredictable journey. But historically, the Patriots’ 2002 season was as predictable as it was disappointing. Just three teams in the previous twenty years, the 49ers, Cowboys, and Broncos, had won back-to-back Super Bowls. Excluding the repeat champions, all of the Super Bowl winners in that period had combined to win nine play-off games the year after winning the championship.
Still, Kraft searched for answers in January 2003. During one of the coaches’ self-scouting meetings, Kraft quietly entered the conference room and took a seat by the door. The idea of the exercise was to rigorously analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each Patriot so everyone could understand where they were and where they needed to go. What was the point of diving into free-agency and draft needs if they weren’t tuned in to their own personnel? The coaches were talking about offensive linemen, and when they got to the young and talented Damien Woody, they had good things to say. Woody had been drafted as a center but often played guard, especially when the team was in the shotgun formation. They called him smart, tough, competitive, and durable.
Kraft was annoyed. He raised his hand, signaling that he wanted to speak.
“I have an issue with the analysis of Woody,” he said. “How do we say all those things about him and not mention his problems with shotgun snapping? It’s either something that he needs to work on or something he can’t do, but I think it should be mentioned.”
A couple coaches made eye contact with the owner but didn’t respond. Really, did any of them want to pick this issue as their battle point? A couple weeks earlier, still jolted by the non-play-off season, Kraft had left late-night voice mails for Belichick and Pioli, requesting a meeting to talk about why they thought the season unfolded the way it did. This clearly was not a case of absentee ownership. Just as quietly as he entered the room, Kraft completed his statement and walked out the door.
There were a few stunned glances just after he left, and then business continued as usual. There wasn’t an assistant coach in the room who was going to stand up and challenge the owner for questioning their reports. And the one man who could have done it, Belichick, understood Kraft’s thinking. The owner routinely negotiated a complicated pass in professional sports. He was able to regularly check in on football operations without meddling. He asked questions and threw out topics that could be debated, but he never made suggestions to Belichick about players he wanted to see signed or drafted. If there was a message to his visit, it was simply that he was paying attention.
All the Patriots coaches and scouts were used to animated debates, especially when they were trying to trim the fat and get to a bottom line. It was that time of year for the scouts, who were trying to bring the draft board into focus, and it was like that for the coaches, who were making their cases for players who should stay or go. One of the loudest and most uncomfortable arguments contained a bit of foreshadowing. It pitted Belichick vs. Eric Mangini, a thirty-two-year-old coach who had aced all of the projects Belichick had given him in Cleveland, New York, and New England and therefore advanced through the system.
Mangini was in charge of the secondary, and a few times during the season he seemed to take it personally when Belichick picked apart players whom he had coached. He was close to safety Tebucky Jones, and Jones happened to be one of the players with whom Belichick had a problem. Belichick liked for his scouts and assistant coaches to have opinions and voice them, but this would go beyond that. It would be an argument that didn’t have an easy, agree-to-disagree exit button. Belichick had been disgusted by his defense, which had given up just 10 fewer points than the Houston Texans, who were in their first year of existence. He was embarrassed by it. He was on edge. He almost dared someone to make a case that he didn’t think could be made: that Victor Green was fast and that Jones could tackle. Mangini took the bait.
Belichick sat at the head of a conference table and Mangini sat three or four seats away to his right. Pioli was in the room, too, along with the coaches, and many of them followed the points and counterpoints with their heads. It was like watching a profane match of verbal tennis. While Mangini held his ground making the case for Green’s production, citing his team-leading three fumble recoveries and one touchdown off an interception, Belichick’s argument was unassailable when the film came on. Green seemed to take forever running from Point A to B. He was tough and determined, and both men agreed on that. But it was clear, no matter how much Mangini protested, that he wouldn’t be coaching Green or Jones, and maybe not even fan favorite Lawyer Milloy, in 2003.
The argument wasn’t going anywhere fast, so someone suggested that they should all take a break. During the break, a couple of people who witnessed the disagreement shook their heads, whispering that Mangini had been too aggressive and crossed the line. Perhaps he had, but it was nothing compared to what Belichick vs. Mangini would become in the future.
On the other hand, Kraft’s input was pointed yet always measured. He was one of the richest men in America and had dominated the paper products industry, but he wasn’t afraid to ask football people questions that he didn’t know the answer to. He would sit in on squad meetings and take notes. He worked at truly learning the ins and outs of the game. He occasionally challenged and questioned his football operations people in January and February, and in March he did something else: He sprang open his checkbook.
In 2003, the top available free agent was twenty-five-year-old linebacker Rosevelt Colvin III. He had what every team in the league was looking for: size, speed, and the ability to rush the passer. He was smart, too, sounding very much like a young man who had been raised by educators. His father, Rosevelt II, was a longtime science teacher in the Indianapolis public schools. His mother, Bessie, was a music teacher whose piano playing could be heard anywhere from school plays to local commercials.
The Patriots saw Colvin as someone who could give them a pass-rushing threat off the edge. Pleasant had done that, for other teams, when he was younger. And although Willie McGinest had the talent to do it, he was thirty-one and the team had left him unprotected in the 2002 expansion draft. If Colvin came to town, he’d likely be taking McGinest’s starting job. But Colvin didn’t appear to be a financial match for the Patriots. They weren’t known for setting the market on a player, and it looked as if that was what it was going to take to land a linebacker who had a gift—getting to the quarterback—coveted by the entire league. When Colvin visited New England, he began to understand why the Patriots were known more as football purists than entertainers. He was picked up from the airport in a dusty 1989 Taurus, and when he got to the stadium he was given a tour in darkness.
“I remember seeing the weight room, the locker room, the meeting rooms, all with the lights off,” Colvin says, laughing. “When I finally sat down with Bill and Scott, they quizzed me on what I was doing in certain situations on the field. And after that, Bill put on some old Giants film and we watched L.T. [Lawrence Taylor] and Pepper Johnson. That impressed me, man. This was about lineage. Bill and Romeo Crennel had coached L.T., who pretty much trademarked the game. These guys knew what they were talking about.”
The unadorned approach to football appealed to him. He signed for seven years and $30 million, a reasonable contract relative to the projections, which were millions of dollars higher. A little more than a month before the draft, the Patriots were starting to carry out the plans that had been shaped by meetings, both cool and tense; scouting; and thorough film study. Rodney Harrison, a former San Diego Chargers safety with the temperament of a middle linebacker, signed a day after Colvin. At the very least, Harrison would be the replacement for Jones and maybe Milloy if the Patriots couldn’t get him to take a pay cut and make his salary more cap-friendly. That was unlikely to happen for the proud Milloy, especially since he would be asked to take less money as the Patriots were spending it on his position. Free-agent cornerback Tyrone Poole signed next, most likely to replace thirty-seven-year-old Otis Smith, and eventually the much-debated Tebucky Jones was traded to New Orleans for draft picks in 2003 and 2004.
The maneuvering continued the night before the draft. In the NFL’s version of easy money, the Patriots traded one of the picks they had gotten from New Orleans, a 2003 third, to Miami for a 2004 second. On the morning of the draft, game day for the scouts, the team’s cafeteria was abuzz over what might happen in a few hours. The Patriots had a minimalist approach when it came to access to the draft room, so the majority of the scouts wouldn’t be in there when decisions were made. They had their own unofficial session over scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, excitedly going over the best players they had interviewed and worked out over the course of the year. Through a combination of instincts, gossip, and knowing the men they worked for, a couple of scouts had correctly predicted who the Patriots would pick with the first of their two first-rounders: Ty Warren, a defensive lineman from Texas A&M. Warren had played in a scheme similar to New England’s, and he had excelled at tackle and end. He also had the profile the team was looking for: mature for his age and serious about football. When the team brought him in for a predraft visit, he wore a jacket and tie. The team had interviewed other players who didn’t seem as prepared for the moment as Warren was.
For Belichick and Pioli, their weekend of drafting was full of shifting and computing. They’d field an offer from one team, quickly weigh its pros and cons, and then take a phone call from someone else and see how that deal matched up. They traded up one spot with Chicago to secure Warren. They traded away their second first-round pick, at number 19, to Baltimore in exchange for a second-round pick in 2003 and a first-rounder in ’04. They then took the second they got from Baltimore and, concerned that corners were coming off the board too quickly, moved up five spots to take Illinois cornerback Eugene Wilson. After selecting Wilson, they moved up again in the second to take receiver Bethel Johnson, Warren’s teammate at A&M.
They were excited to move up in the fourth, too. There was a kid from Central Florida, Asante Samuel, whom defensive assistant Josh McDaniels had loved while working him out. McDaniels said the kid, a cornerback, loved playing against the best competition in the country, a sign that he would perform better than usual in big games. In the fifth, Belichick reacted as if he had been promised crème brûlée and simply got vanilla ice cream instead. Pioli had been high on a center from Boston College, but Belichick sighed when he officially picked Dan Koppen. He’d be more excited in a few months, when he’d see Koppen in training camp and watch him emerge as a first-year starter. Finally, in the seventh, the team got lucky and drafted Tully Banta-Cain, a defensive end from Cal-Berkeley who probably should have gone in the fourth.
It wasn’t just that the draft weekend had been as smooth as they had planned; the previous couple months had been exceptional. Since Belichick and Pioli were hyper-conscious of the budget, they knew they still had some negotiating to do with Lawyer Milloy. He hadn’t been great at safety in 2002, and his cap number for 2003 was well over $4 million. There was no way the Patriots were going to pay that, especially since they had signed Harrison. They knew it, Milloy knew it, and so did the entire team.
“You know Lawyer,” former Patriots receiver Troy Brown says. “He’s going to say what’s on his mind. He was pretty open about his situation. It came up a lot during training camp. We all knew the team wanted him to take a pay cut.”
What no one knew was how far the team was willing to go.
Players who had been part of the 2001 championship team were starting to get that same Super Bowl feeling in the summer of 2003. The defense had been switched to the one Belichick preferred, a 3–4, and a fourth-round pick had been sent to Chicago for one of the best and surliest run stuffers in the game, nose tackle Ted Washington. He was exactly what the defense needed up front, a one-man mountain range who couldn’t be budged and never could be blocked one on one. He was loved by his teammates, but he scowled when approached by reporters, grunting out reluctant answers to questions. He liked to hear jokes as much as anyone, yet he would shush the room when he believed the coaches were saying something that no one should miss.
With the new free agents and draft picks, the Patriots looked as strong as any team in the league at the start of the 2003 season. They just had to be strong without the vocal and emotional Milloy, one of their defensive captains. On the second day of September, a Tuesday morning, Belichick walked into a team meeting and said something that floored and then infuriated the Patriots: Milloy had been released. There was a wave of rustling and mumbling in the auditorium, while some players were too confused to say anything. The emotions ranged from What? to Why now? to What are we doing? to Damn, they’re cold.
“I remember a lot of guys saying, ‘How could they do this?’ or ‘I can’t believe they’d do something like this.’ Emotions were running high that day and that entire week,” Brown says. “I was going into my eleventh season, so I kept saying and thinking, ‘Man, this is the NFL. You just saw what happened to Drew Bledsoe, didn’t you?’ I’d remind guys, ‘Eventually, this is going to happen to all of us.’”
It was an unusual week. There wasn’t a lot of small talk before meetings or practice. For a few days, there was an unofficial line with coaches on one side and players on the other. This one stung, mostly because it was so out of place. For all the conversation about Bledsoe, players could understand that he was traded in the offseason. A couple years earlier, receiver Terry Glenn, a former top-ten pick, had been traded during the off-season. But this was no trade, it was in season, and it couldn’t be viewed as another transaction.
A couple of defensive players organized a meeting in which they lectured the young players on saving their money and understanding exactly what type of short-term business they were in. After venting a bit more, they started to get back to their competitive selves and think about how they were going to make the best of the week and season. Their season opener was against a divisional opponent, Buffalo, which had Drew Bledsoe at quarterback and a safety they had picked up in midweek, Lawyer Milloy.
The game wasn’t an accurate snapshot of what either team was. The Patriots were a wreck, with Brady throwing four interceptions. The Bills danced as much as they played, with Milloy playing air guitar after some of his stellar plays and a defensive tackle bigger than Washington, Sam Adams, actually high-stepping into the end zone with an interception and doing a duck walk after a sack. The final score was 31–0.
On a Sunday afternoon when everyone in western New York was a preacher with “Poetic Justice” as the sermon, no one would have believed what was down the road. Maybe even the Patriots wouldn’t have believed that after their loss to Buffalo, on September 7, and another loss in Washington three weeks later, they wouldn’t lose again.
They wouldn’t lose in the fall, when New Englanders picked apples and pumpkins and saw beautiful red, orange, and brown leaves hover on trees before blanketing the landscape. They wouldn’t lose in winter, when, as usual, local residents would be slammed with ice and snow and be ever so grateful for a high temperature in the 40s. They would be sun-splashed in the spring, wildly benefitting from the first-round pick they had gotten from Baltimore. Summer was for red carpet, live music, and the presentation of breathtaking diamond rings at Kraft’s house in Brookline. There would be yet another September with new faces coming in and familiar ones gone, and it would take nearly an entire October before there was anything other than a “W” next to New England. Actually, the seasons would change more than the Patriots. They became a machine. They wouldn’t lose again for a long, long time.
In corporate America, it’s called “branding.” Musicians and artists and writers call it “having a style” or “finding your voice.” The Patriots didn’t have a name for what they were developing. They just knew they had planted seeds for a system in which draft picks were “picks” in name only and always available to be traded; smart young employees would be schooled in the system and grow into coaches and scouts; players would be athletic and fast, of course, but smart and tough, too; and the unspoken trust, whether it was on the road with the scouts or in the locker room with the players, was that the job would be done at the highest level even when the boss wasn’t looking.
“Man, we had the formula down,” Tedy Bruschi says. “My locker was on the left, Willie McGinest’s locker was on the right, and there was the door in the middle of us. And as early as we got there and as late as we stayed, we saw everyone who walked in and we saw everyone who walked out. And everyone who walked in late got a comment, everyone who walked out early got a comment about what they did that day. We held them accountable as soon as they walked in the door.
“Me and Willie, I mean, we policed that locker room as soon as you walked in. If we smelled you, you know, we wanted to know what was in your hand. ‘What were you eating?’ ‘Did you bring in the McDonald’s bag?’ We wanted to know where you were going once you came in, did we have a meeting in one minute, or are you here to work out? Even if you were some veteran who had come in from another team, we didn’t care where you were from because we were establishing ourselves as world champions, and we felt like, ‘This is the way we do things around here. We’re going to teach you how to do it.’”
The policy didn’t go over well in the beginning for Harrison. Bruschi and McGinest were Patriots when Belichick was in New England the first time, in 1996, as an assistant coach. They remembered how things worked when Bill Parcells was the head coach and players, or anyone, had excuses for being late. Parcells would raise his eyebrows and say, “Oh, you have a response? Interesting.” His point was unmistakable: Don’t say anything.
It was clear that Harrison was going to be one of the Patriots’ elite players in 2003, despite what happened in the Buffalo game, but Bruschi and McGinest felt he still had too much San Diego in him. The team had come a long way since Andy Katzenmoyer casually strolled into a team meeting two minutes late in 2000. By 2003, watching the door was something Belichick didn’t have to do. The players would do it for him and turn it into a raucous yet lighthearted game when someone was even a hair late. Just by watching how Harrison carried himself, Bruschi and McGinest knew they could get under his skin, so they did it. But they did it because they saw something else in him and they planned to use it.
“Rodney was borderline arrogant when he first got to New England,” Bruschi says. “He felt like he was established in the league and had gone to the Super Bowl as a rookie. He was a very confident person, you know. I remember him coming in just about twenty seconds late for a meeting. He came in and we gave it to him, and he had a little bit of an attitude. He used to try to spout off to us, like, ‘You know, you’re not going to do that to me,’ or something like that, and we just kept giving it to him.
“And we had to do it with him over and over again until we said, ‘Listen, man, we’re trying to give you a message about how it’s done. It’s our way of giving you respect as a veteran but still letting you know this isn’t San Diego.’ He ended up falling in line, though, and being the same sort of enforcer that Willie and I were.”
They were all enforcers on the field, especially on defense, even though they weren’t getting the contribution they had expected. In just the second game of the season, Colvin reached down to recover a fumble and felt an awkward pain on his left side. He had a hip dislocation, a major injury that would end his season and threaten his career. The injury to Colvin meant that McGinest would be on the field more than anyone planned. But there wasn’t a drop-off from Colvin to McGinest, just as there wasn’t with the departed Milloy to the rookie second-rounder Wilson, who was drafted as a corner but was thriving at safety.
The theme of the 2003 Patriots seemed to be that someone, somehow, would find a way to win a game. Every other week, an oddity would contribute to the result. They won an October game in Miami, for example, because the Florida Marlins were preparing for the World Series. The Dolphins and Marlins shared the stadium, so the infield dirt was still intact amid the grass. Miami kicker Olindo Mare had two chances to win the game, but in both cases the dirt was a factor. He slipped on one and had the kick blocked by Richard Seymour. In overtime, he slipped again on the dirt and the ball sailed to the right. Brady then took the ball, on the dirt, and heaved a pass to Brown. He wasn’t known for his deep speed, but Brown had managed to get behind the safety and score on an eighty-two-yard play.
The win gave them a record of 5–2. Two weeks later in Denver, they moved to 7–2 when the play of the game was an intentional safety. They were in poor field position and believed that punting would make things worse. So they conceded the 2 points, took advantage of a good free kick and a bad Broncos offensive series, and won on a perfect pass from Brady to David Givens.
They won their tenth game, in Indianapolis, by a single yard. The Patriots led 38–34 in the final minute, and the Colts had driven to the Patriots’ one with twenty-four seconds remaining. On a second-down play, the Colts tried to execute a quick run to Edgerrin James to catch the Patriots out of position. But Mount Washington was occupying the guard-center gap. There was a mistimed fade route from Peyton Manning to Aaron Moorehead on third down. And on fourth down, McGinest bluffed as if he were going to do what he often did, jam a receiver at the line of scrimmage. Instead, he was blitzing and the Colts were running, so he met James in the backfield for a loss.
It was going to be that kind of season. They knew they would be in close, entertaining games. They also knew they would figure out a way to do the right thing. They studied along the way, and no matter where they were in the building, they had a lot of fun doing it.
Players loved to catch the Locker Room Police doing anything out of order so they could grill them for a change. McGinest was an easy target. He would doze off in defensive meetings, and if a player didn’t elbow him, defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel had a method of getting his attention. He would go over coverages in a low, controlled voice and then suddenly shout, “Boom!” to startle the head-nodders and nappers.
Coaches didn’t escape jokes, either. When Steve Belichick was in town from Annapolis, where he and his wife continued to live in the home where they raised Belichick, many of the assistants knew they had to be on their toes. The elder Belichick was a natural storyteller and jokester, so he would tease the staff about their fluctuating weight. He was eighty-four and still physically fit, so when he smirked and said, “I swear, this is the fattest coaching staff in the league. You get fatter every time I see you!” they had no comebacks. He was fun to be around, and the equipment staff liked to give him the latest Patriots gear they could find so he could add to his collection. At home, he had jackets from his son’s stops with the Giants, Browns, Jets, and now Patriots. Jokes aside, he was all football, and he’d talk it with anyone who had a question and was willing to listen.
The Patriots on the second floor of the stadium, in scouting, were as in sync as the players and coaches below them. Belichick had the final say on draft day; Pioli reported to Belichick and had all the responsibilities of a general manager; and the new director of college scouting, Thomas Dimitroff, oversaw the scouts and helped Pioli relax, even though Dimitroff’s primary residence was still two thousand miles away in Boulder.
Pioli and Dimitroff worked perfectly together. They understood each other and the type of scouting system Belichick was looking for. Their system was based on comparatives, Our Guys vs. the Guys in the Draft, so there were quizzical looks for any scout who described a player as a “first-round pick” or “backup safety.” There was a numerical system in place, with alerts built into it so an evaluator could quickly see if a player was height deficient, went to a small school, had an injury history, was a character concern, or had problems picking up schemes. The idea was to find players in the country who had a realistic shot of being better than one of the fifty-three players on the Patriots’ roster.
“I certainly took my lumps in New England, especially as a young scout,” says Jim Nagy, who joined the Patriots’ scouting staff in 2002 when he was twenty-seven. “It’s not an easy system to learn in the beginning. It took me a while to grade players and I really struggled. Was I grading them too high? Was I grading them too low? I’d say it took me about two years before I started to feel comfortable.”
Pioli and Dimitroff clearly had an advantage in professional experience and knowing what Belichick wanted, and so did Lionel Vital. Vital had scouted alongside Tom Dimitroff Sr. in Cleveland and Vital had been Belichick’s coworker in New York with the Jets. By the time he was in New England with Pioli and Dimitroff, communicating in the system was second nature to all three of them. They’d go deep into their shared reservoir to say who a player was or wasn’t, remembering obscure players like Romeo Bandison in Cleveland, how it was good value to get a starting nose tackle like Jason Ferguson in the seventh round in New York, and humbling one another by mentioning that a long-forgotten tight end named Dave Stachelski had been drafted before Tom Brady. It helped them get to that precise place they wanted to be: projecting what a player could be for them, not what he could be for the Colts or Bears. When Pioli and Dimitroff were together, their professional conversations ranged from players to the needs of the team to their different management styles.
Dimitroff was known for advocating on behalf of the scouts, so Pioli teased him and referred to him as the “union foreman.” Pioli had incredibly high standards for the scouts, probably because he was a perfectionist himself. He was so organized that he had developed a habit of keeping detailed notes on everything he did and every conversation he had. He neatly wrote the notes by hand, and when he had time he’d turn them into Word documents. He once joked, “Magic Markers saved my life,” so he always had dozens of them to help him maintain his color-coded system for notes and scouting reports:
• A green highlight is for something good;
• Pink is not good;
• Yellow is simply information;
• Blue is an incompletion or inconsistency that needs to be checked on;
• Red and blue ink pens are for miscellaneous thoughts, not necessarily good or bad.
A sloppy or incomplete report would irritate him to his core and was the quickest path to exasperating him. Dimitroff could approach him like no other, though, and in one of their frank conversations he told him that Pioli was missing an important color in his management stash: gray.
“When you’re managing any level above someone, there are management things that you’re dealing with, and pressure and responsibility, that no one who’s working below you understands,” says Pioli. “But Thomas did talk to me in a different way, and it forced me to change my style in certain situations. He’s the only guy who could come to me and say, ‘Scott, I think you need to back off these guys a little bit. Do you understand?’ I changed my style in certain meetings and how I approached the guys. I think there were times I was too hard-lined, and yes, there was no gray.
“I found that with Thomas as the director, I didn’t have to micromanage. On some things, I didn’t even have to jump in until the tenth hour because it was being taken care of. It was the first time where I could genuinely have a piece of my head and my heart that I could delegate, and it was handled.”
Pioli could call out Dimitroff, too. There were times when he told him that he was being too lenient with the scouts and wanted to see more pressure applied. It was a topic that they didn’t always see the same way. Pioli wanted the reports to follow a certain formula, and if they didn’t follow that script it got to him. One of the scouts who didn’t always do it Pioli’s way was Vital. He knew players as well as anyone, but he didn’t enjoy writing long reports and preferred to get straight to the “Can he play or not?” stage, without all the window dressing. Dimitroff had known both Pioli and Vital for years, so he heard and understood both perspectives. He was able to be an advocate for Vital and his style while also making sure Pioli, his boss, got the essentials of what he wanted from reports. Sometimes, Pioli and Dimitroff were just like brothers, venting in front of each other but never for an audience. Once, Dimitroff tried the calm and thoughtful tack while talking with Pioli, but the boss wasn’t having it.
“I hear you, Thomas, but it’s not happening,” he said. “Enough of your BS West Coast approach! I’m pulling back and doing things the way I know how to do them.”
They were laughing about the West Coast shot a couple days later. And if they couldn’t laugh about that, Jay Muraco usually knew how to get people smiling when he sensed that there was too much tension in the office. Muraco had worked with Pioli and Dimitroff in Cleveland as a volunteer in the scouting department. He was working for the Eagles when Pioli got the New England job, and he joined his old friend shortly after he heard the news that Belichick, Pioli, and familiar faces like Vital were running a franchise again.
Muraco knew how to loosen up both guys. Making fun of Dimitroff’s extensive, multisyllabic vocabulary, Muraco would go to Dictionary.com, find as many big words as he could, and send Dimitroff a lengthy e-mail that could basically be translated to “Please call the office.” For Pioli, he could just peek at him and know if he was near a boiling point. When that happened, he would act out a skit that Pioli loved, a Will Ferrell—Christopher Walken classic from Saturday Night Live. Ferrell, wearing a shirt two sizes too small, was a fictional cowbell player on Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Walken was a legendary producer obsessed with the cowbell.
Muraco would rap on Pioli’s office door as if he had something important to say and then go into the routine.
“Guess what?” Muraco would begin.
Pioli, not catching on yet, would answer, “What?”
“I’ve got a fever! And the only prescription is more cowbell.”
It worked every time, and Pioli would roll.
They all had good reason for nonstop celebrations throughout 2003 and 2004. Anyone who entered the building was somehow feeding the machine, and the machine was producing historic results. The operation seemed glitch-proof. The players would come to work, get into energetic games of dominoes and backgammon in their downtime, and soak up whatever the coaches laid out for them in game plans.
They had a collection of diverse and charismatic personalities, which were usually hidden from the media because they all had been drilled that the agenda of the media was not necessarily the agenda of the Patriots. Brady may have been an idol outside of his office, but he was a one-liner target just like any other player or coach when he was at work. If Bruschi, McGinest, and Harrison were the enforcers, Mike Vrabel and Ty Law were the comedians. Vrabel turned the driest situation into laughing material and Law, as Colvin put it, “was Richard Pryor with a football player’s body.”
“It was just a great group of guys,” Troy Brown says. “A lot of us had a little edge to us because we felt we never got the national credit for being the players we were. But we didn’t make a lot of noise. Some guys would run from the media. We understood the game and we understood our roles. In the receiver meetings, do you know what we talked about? The importance of blocking. Yeah, we liked to make plays and have the ball in our hands, but we had a group of receivers who understood that it wasn’t about who got the most catches and who was being featured in the game plan.”
Brown had to make the distinction between receivers meetings and others because he had become a twenty-first-century rarity in pro football. He played extensively on offense and defense. Two-way players were from the era of grainy black-and-white film and leather helmets, yet when the modern Patriots had injuries at cornerback, Brown played in the secondary. He was coached there by Mangini, who, despite the heated argument with Belichick, still had the coach’s trust and remained on the advancement track. Brown had the surest hands on special teams. And even though he didn’t feel he was ever the same after chipping a bone in his knee in the third game of the 2002 season, he was Brady’s default receiver.
The Patriots zipped through the 2003 regular season with a 14–2 record. After beating Tennessee and Indianapolis in the playoffs, they had a stunning fourteen-game winning streak going into their second Super Bowl in three years, this one in Houston against the Carolina Panthers.
In one of the quirkiest championship games ever played, with no scoring in the first and third quarters and binges in the second and fourth, the Patriots beat the Panthers, 32–29. Brady was the game’s MVP, but he had help all around. Vrabel made plays on defense and offense, scoring a touchdown after lining up at tight end. Brown and a pair of second-year receivers, Deion Branch and David Givens, consistently got open against man coverage. It was a source of pride for them since receivers coach Brian Daboll had reminded them that the Panthers didn’t think anybody could beat them in man.
After the game, there was the expected confetti raining from the top of the stadium, early-edition newspapers with SUPER BOWL CHAMPS in bold letters being displayed on the field, and all-night parties in the team hotel and elsewhere. It was a celebration, but the team-builders in the group were still thinking of what was next. It wasn’t as if the scouts could go to the parade a couple of days later in Boston; they were going to be spread across the country, still trying to find players. And while Belichick and Pioli would go to the parade and wave to millions of happily frigid New Englanders, the vision, the big picture, always tugged.
“For whatever reason, what stood out more than the parties and parades was the reality of how far behind we were,” Pioli says. “[Bill and I] missed the Senior Bowl, we missed the East-West game, the Combine’s around the corner, and there’s no time. And the thing is, it’s just this obsession of wanting to have sustained success. One of the regrets is that we didn’t celebrate enough.”
How do you celebrate and still find time to make unemotional decisions? The Patriots didn’t. The process began immediately, with Antowain Smith being released a week after the win over the Panthers. Smith had timed much slower in 2002 drills than he had in 2001, and he was slower in 2003 than he had been in ’02. His regular-season production slipped so much that by the time he left, he had given the Patriots roughly half of what he had in ’01, when he ran with power and passion. Damien Woody, their best offensive lineman, was a free agent and left to sign a huge deal with Detroit. Big Ted Washington, who was thirty-six, got a four-year contract with $5.5 million in year one from the Raiders. Some coaches left as well. Rob Ryan became the Raiders’ defensive coordinator, and in the subsequent coaching reshuffle in New England, Josh McDaniels was promoted to a plum job. He was the new quarterbacks coach, replacing John Hufnagel, who became the Giants’ offensive coordinator. McDaniels was twenty-seven, twenty-five years younger than Hufnagel and just sixteen months older than two-time Super Bowl MVP Brady.
The Patriots gave their idealistic machine its first major test a week before the 2004 draft by throwing the equivalent of limestone into the gears. They took the freebie second-round pick they had gotten from Miami and sent it to Cincinnati for the lead running back who would replace Smith, Corey Dillon. He was everything they said they weren’t: high-profile, high-maintenance, high-risk. Dillon was one of the most talented backs in football, but he had ended his Bengals career by throwing his jersey and cleats into the stands, signaling to all how he felt about his future in the city. He also had been questioned by police in a domestic violence incident with his wife, but upon investigation, both of them said it had been a misunderstanding.
In New England, it may have been an early sign that the Patriots believed they could bring anyone into their system and have him be transformed. They believed that their structure and their players would keep Dillon in line. Technically, the running back was part of their 2004 draft class. They would indoctrinate him as to how things are supposed to be, just as they would for the two rookies they took in the first round. One of them, Vince Wilfork, was a shock. He had been projected to go in the top fifteen, but some teams were nervous that the University of Miami nose tackle wouldn’t be able to control his weight and that guaranteed millions would relax rather than inspire him. But the Patriots were happy to take him at number 21, the pick they had gotten from Baltimore, and eventually watch him take over the role that Washington had held for a memorable season. Sometimes talk of sustained success is all about philosophy and theory. Sometimes it becomes even easier to understand, and it’s as simple as watching a young star who shouldn’t be available fall into your lap.
The Patriots had experienced mere good fortune during the run to their first championship, winning nine consecutive games to close out the regular season and play-offs. But as impressive as that streak was, it wasn’t as mind-bending as what they had put together during the 2003 and 2004 seasons.
Going into a Halloween game in Pittsburgh in 2004, they had won twenty-one games in a row, an NFL record. They hadn’t lost in 419 days, or since the shutout in Buffalo. They were 6–0 and looking like early favorites to win their third championship in four years. The Steelers temporarily stalled the championship talk with an overwhelming performance. Dillon, who was having a great season, was unavailable for the game, so that allowed the Steelers to hold the Patriots to just five yards rushing. The Steelers were ahead 31–10 in the third quarter and won easily, 34–20. Not only was the streak over for the Patriots, but if both 6–1 teams continued to plow through their schedules, the Patriots would eventually have to return to Pittsburgh for the play-offs.
If the Patriots’ theme for 2003 had been “Find a Way,” 2004 had an undercurrent of “Last Run.” They were like a successful band, producing hit after hit but reaching a creative point where guys felt it might be time to venture out on their own. Really, the coaching staff and front office were full of stars, and it was only a matter of time before Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel would be head coaches. Pioli had already turned down offers from other teams, and more teams would come knocking. Even the relative kid coaches, Mangini and McDaniels, had the skills to be coordinators, either in New England or elsewhere.
There was no question that this would be the last time that the giant and selfless collective, from players to coaches to scouts, would be together for a championship run. Belichick already had begun to think of contingency plans just in case he lost Weis and Crennel at the same time. There were always things you planned for, like coaches taking new jobs, players departing for other places, and fresh-faced rookies coming in to learn the culture. But this was football and it was real life, too. Surprises happen. Minds change. Health fails. The urgency of 2004 was tangible yet unspoken, so through November and December it felt like normal business. After the loss to the Steelers, the Patriots went on another streak, six straight, before having a lapse in Miami. For the second year in a row, they finished the regular season 14–2, meaning they had won thirty-one of their previous thirty-five games.
Playing right into a self-motivating, popular, and hyperbolic Patriots refrain— “Nobody believes in us” —the nation was infatuated with Peyton Manning and the 2004 Colts before they played the Patriots in the divisional play-offs. The Colts had scored at will during the regular season, finishing first in the league, and had scored 49 points in their wild-card game against Denver. Manning was league MVP for the second consecutive year and had thrown a league-record forty-nine touchdown passes. He had a lot working in his favor when he looked at a battered Patriots secondary that was missing his nemesis, the injured Law. Instead he saw players with which he and a country were unfamiliar: second-year corner Asante Samuel; rookie Randall Gay; a wide receiver dressed up as a cornerback, Troy Brown; and a corner whose name was a constant tribute to the artistry and showmanship of 1970s R&B, Earthwind Moreland.
Several minutes before the game started, January in New England took over. Snow began to fall, making the subfreezing atmosphere even more miserable. The Colts were at their best indoors in their domed stadium, where they could set the temperature. But as the wind made the snow swirl in Foxboro, a security guard approached Tedy Bruschi before kickoff and suggested something else was at work.
“Bob Kraft must have a pipeline to the Man Upstairs,” he said, pointing to the heavens.
The Patriots had snow, defense, and Dillon on their side. The Colts were bothered by the weather, and it truly seemed to freeze their offense. It was slower and more robotic than usual. Manning seemed to be thinking constantly about the secondary. It had those no-names and Harrison back there, so it was worth taking a shot. But then again, was it? Their technique was sound and they were protecting the deep part of the field. Why throw into coverage?
Meanwhile, there was Dillon. He may have been limestone in April, but he was January’s locomotive. He punished the Colts when he ran, initiating contact and then lowering his shoulder into the chest of defenders. He was a big man with the ability to make people miss. But on this day, he didn’t seem to want to; crashing into linebackers in the cold was more fun. He rushed for 144 yards, allowing the Patriots to control the clock and increase the pressure on Manning each time he had the ball. But with their three turnovers and the discipline of the Patriots’ defense, the Colts had their lowest offensive output in two years.
The final was 20–3. Bruschi was emotional in a TV interview immediately after the game. “We play,” he said over the din of the postgame crowd. “We don’t talk; we play. You want to change the rules? Change them. We still play. And we win. That’s what we do.”
He was referring to the previous year, in the conference championship game, when the Colts said that the Patriots were holding rather than defending against them. Before the 2004 season began, the league’s competition committee announced that illegal-contact penalties would become more of a “point of emphasis” during the season. It was a warning that the officials would be calling the game more closely to eliminate aggressive defense after receivers were five yards from the line of scrimmage. It didn’t escape the Patriots that Colts president Bill Polian, as smart as he was fiery, was influential in shaping policy. Polian was a brilliant team-builder and an opinionated football man, and could often be heard in press boxes before he was seen. It was hardly a coincidence that his head coach, Tony Dungy, was a member of a subcommittee that endorsed the new focus on and monitoring of defenses.
There was at least a culture clash between the Colts and Patriots and likely a silent disdain, too. They both won a staggering amount of games, but they couldn’t have been more different doing it.
They scouted different players, with the Colts going faster and smaller to the Patriots’ stronger and bigger. They played different defenses. The Colts relied on the consistency of the Tampa 2, a zone that was designed to both stop big passing plays, with the “2” representing the safeties protecting the deep part of the field, and encourage a fleet of players to get to the football at warp speed. The Patriots used multiple defenses, often changing their defensive fronts and going from zone to man. They liked hulking linebackers, ideally in the 255 to 265 range, fast enough to catch you and big enough to wear you down, physically and mentally. The quarterbacks, Manning and Brady, were their generation’s great sports debate, following in the tradition of Mantle-Mays, Wilt-Russell, Bird-Magic, and Marino-Montana. As for the contrasts between their head coaches, Dungy and Belichick, the list could fill a psychologist’s legal pad.
They were different, sure, and they’d be seeing a lot of each other in the next few years. But in January 2005, all that mattered to the Colts was that they were once again going home because of the Patriots, while their biggest rival had yet another chance to win a Super Bowl.
For all the big plays that had happened in the season’s previous eighteen games, from forcing red-zone turnovers against the Colts in game one, to Adam Vinatieri throwing a touchdown pass to Brown in game seven against the Rams, to Harrison, in the conference championship game in Pittsburgh, intercepting a pass and returning it eighty-seven yards for a touchdown during a 41–27 win over the Steelers, big plays were not the definitive, mind’s-eye snapshot from the Super Bowl in Jacksonville. The unforgettable photo was of a thirty-one-year-old father at peace on the field, backpedaling and then falling backward onto the natural grass of Alltel Stadium, letting two of his sons playfully tackle and pin him.
Bruschi’s pregame moment hours before the Patriots played the Philadelphia Eagles was appropriate, for reasons obvious and unseen. In February 2005, the linebacker was similar to several of his coworkers. Many of them had changed since the first Super Bowl. They were still in love with the game, but they loved their young families more. They still got their work in, but when possible, they manipulated their schedules so they could find space to be family men. For others, there was step-back awe and appreciation of what had been accomplished since New Orleans in 2002 and thankfulness for being able to share those moments with people they loved. As expected, some of them would be moving on. Weis had taken a head-coaching job at his alma mater, Notre Dame, and would go into full-time recruiting mode after the Super Bowl. As soon as the game was over, Crennel would be introduced as the new head coach of the Cleveland Browns.
Belichick was there with the man who taught him the fundamentals of the game, his father, Steve, still passionate about football at the age of eighty-six. Pioli was there with his wife, Dallas, and the couple now had a daughter, Mia, who was one and a half years old. Years earlier Dimitroff, true to his character, had been in a Boulder bike shop when a friend of a friend introduced him to a strikingly beautiful young woman named Angeline Bautista. She was smart, too, working for an educational publishing company. Initially, she wasn’t interested in dating him. But now, he was five months away from marrying her.
So much had changed in just three years. Who could know where they’d all be in the next three and if they’d ever get back here again? As easy as it was to do so, you could never take it for granted.
Belichick had grown so comfortable with his team leaders that there wasn’t much on the field he didn’t trust them to do. “He’d listen to our suggestions,” Rosevelt Colvin says. “I can’t imagine that anyone could make adjustments as quickly as Bill, but sometimes he would overthink it. We’d say, ‘Why don’t we just go to our base stuff and beat them that way?’ and sometimes he’d say, ‘Okay.’”
“Belichick taught us a lot,” Bruschi says, “but I also think we taught him some things. He was grateful learning from us, too. I’d share with him how I liked to see things done from a player’s perspective, and he’d listen to us and see the way we worked. I think he developed along with me and with Brady. There are incredible examples of players developing and coaches developing as we got better. I think I’m one, Brady’s one, and Bill’s one as the head coach.”
They knew they had a good plan against the Eagles, and despite how much they protested the role of favorite, they knew they were the better team. A couple days before the game, Belichick went to Bruschi and Vrabel and put in a defensive wrinkle that they hadn’t practiced much all year. The play was called “Dolphin,” and the plan was for Bruschi and Vrabel to alternate shooting the gaps. Belichick gave them the freedom to decide which one would shoot from series to series, with his thought being that the scheme would give Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb a moment of pause. The two linebackers shrugged. That was Bill. Besides, they liked the mental challenge of handling any last-minute twists he threw their way.
Philadelphia scored the game’s first touchdown, but it was clear there was going to be a problem for the Eagles all evening. They were going to need to pass their way to a championship, because like they had done with Faulk, the Patriots identified a running back, Brian Westbrook, as the key to the Eagles’ offense. He was a dynamic receiver as well, but they were determined to take him away as a runner. The Patriots didn’t think McNabb was accurate enough as a passer to be able to dissect their defense enough to win.
The Eagles weren’t as good as the Patriots, but they weren’t pushovers. It was 14 apiece in the third quarter, and the game wasn’t officially in control until the fourth, when Vinatieri made a short field goal for a 24–14 lead with more than eight minutes remaining. Strangely, McNabb and the Eagles seemed to lack what the 2004 Patriots had all season: urgency. They were deliberate as they marched to the line of scrimmage. They huddled rather than run an upbeat, two-minute offense. They seemed to carefully examine and parse each play before they ran it. The crowd of seventy-eight-thousand-plus was decidedly pro-Eagle green, and the curses and catcalls grew louder by the play. When the Eagles finally scored a touchdown, with 1:48 left, it was too late.
For the third time in four years, the Patriots had a 3-point victory in their final game of the year and were champions. Receiver Deion Branch, in just his third season, tied a Super Bowl record with eleven receptions and was the game’s MVP. The win allowed Belichick to capture his ninth consecutive postseason game, tying the great Vince Lombardi’s record.
As Belichick was hugging his father, with Steve proudly wearing his blue Patriots cap, Bruschi doused them with water and embraced them both. Alert photographers caught the moment, and it became one of the priceless photos of the week in Jacksonville. There had also been a small huddle with three men who had crisscrossed the Northeast, working together for both New York teams and New England. Belichick, Weis, and Crennel had grown together as coaches, teaching some of the NFL’s best players and producing flawless game plans when the lights were brightest and they had to be at their best. This was the sixth Super Bowl for Belichick and Crennel, the fifth for Weis.
They locked arms and hugged.
“Hey,” Belichick said to them. “It’s over.”
It would never be as good as this again.