On a gray and drizzly Sunday morning, typical of late April in New England, Randy Moss waited near a curb at Boston’s Logan Airport, looking for his ride. The hood of his sweatshirt was pulled over his head but Moss, who stood six feet four inches, was easy for Josh McDaniels to recognize.
“What up, homie?” Moss said as he jumped into the passenger seat of the offensive coordinator’s SUV.
For most people in America, it was simply April 29, 2007. For Football America, it was the second day of the NFL draft, and Moss was officially a member of the Patriots. He had just been acquired from Oakland for a fourth-round pick, a bargain in itself considering that Moss had recently turned thirty and had talent to burn. The risk for the Patriots was that the wide receiver had burned some of that talent the previous year in Northern California, pouting and going half speed during a season in which the Raiders were the Patriots in reverse, losing nine consecutive games and finishing with two wins.
McDaniels didn’t normally make airport runs to meet his players, but Bill Belichick had made a special request the night before. He and Scott Pioli already had a chance to interview Moss to see what he was thinking, and he wanted McDaniels to be able to do the same thing. He thought the forty-minute drive to the stadium would be a good chance for McDaniels and Moss to set the tone for their relationship. They hadn’t been driving long before Moss did a double take at something McDaniels said.
“You’re the offensive coordinator?” Moss said in disbelief and admiration. All along, he thought he had been riding with one of the Patriots’ college-age interns. “Damn.”
McDaniels was thirty-one and could have passed for much younger. His brown hair was often cut to a buzz and he didn’t have a trace of facial hair. He had a quick and bright smile, a sure candidate for class president. He and Moss talked for a bit longer and then Moss tried to catch a nap. Instead, his cell phone rang and a player from another team was on the line. Moss explained that he had just arrived in Boston and was a Patriot, and the player told him that New England was on their 2007 schedule.
“Dawg,” Moss said in his thick West Virginia accent, “we could play y’all in a parking lot and we’d still tear y’all’s hearts out.”
McDaniels kept his eyes locked on the road, but it was difficult for him to contain his excitement. Moss had just answered several of his questions with that exchange. Now he didn’t need to ask how much fire he had or what his mentality was as he prepared for the season. It was the same as theirs. Moss and the Patriots both had something to prove in 2007. Moss, forever scrutinized over his desire to win, would have to answer the unspoken yet implied Patriots question: Is football important to you? He was known for doing what he wanted, when he wanted, whether it was playing the game, leaving the field, celebrating a touchdown, or giving an interview. He was a notorious freestyler, at times a renegade, and he was always a sound bite away from scorching a franchise’s reputation or, worse, his own. In New England, for the first time in Moss’s nine-season career, an organization was literally going to take the money out of his pocket—he had agreed to waive the final $21 million remaining on his contract and sign a $3 million deal instead—and force him to be his dynamic self within a greater team structure. If not, they’d let him go.
As for the Patriots, they would have to prove that they could bounce back after the latest episode in their play-off trilogy with the Colts. It had been crushing three months earlier and the outcome continued to sting in April. For the first time, the Patriots had to travel to Indianapolis in January for a postseason game. They had dominated the Colts in the first half, holding them to 6 points. It appeared to be over in the second quarter when Asante Samuel read Marvin Harrison’s route better than he did, snatched the Peyton Manning pass out of the air, and returned it thirty-nine yards for a touchdown. Samuel’s score made it 21–3. When Samuel stood in the end zone and pounded his chest twice to celebrate what he’d done, you could hear the thump thump along with the Patriots’ shouts in the quiet building.
The second half was a game-changer, short-and long-term. Not only did the result of it, being outscored 28–13, prevent the Patriots from matching the 1970s Steelers and winning four Super Bowls in six years. Not only did it expose weaknesses they had at receiver and linebacker, weaknesses that couldn’t be disguised by scheme. It altered their outlook on when to strike in free agency, how much money they were willing to spend, and the type of weapons they were going to put around Tom Brady.
They weren’t planning to match their rivals, step by step, in an arms race, but what they were designing on offense wasn’t all that dissimilar from what the Colts had done over the years. It would no longer be accurate to claim that the Patriots didn’t have a number one receiver. By the time the off-season was over, they’d have two contenders for that spot. Maybe January in Indianapolis didn’t change them as much as it brought out a side that few had ever seen. The loss had taken them around the emotional globe. They were hurt and angered and embarrassed by it, and thus the off-season started to take on the feel of a movie trailer from one of those revenge thrillers, including the baritone of an overly dramatic narrator: The Patriots had something taken away from them, and now they’re on a mission to reclaim what’s rightfully theirs… They were bolder, edgier, more uncompromising than usual, and anyone who watched or came across them could feel just how piercing their vision for the 2007 season was. Within a couple weeks of the Colts’ loss, all aspects of business were already in motion.
In late January and early February, receivers coach Brian Daboll tried to persuade Belichick to also make him the quarterbacks coach. Daboll, thirty-one, thought he had a case. He had been Belichick’s first rise-through-the-system coaching assistant in New England. He had worked well with the receivers in his first five years as full-time assistant coach, getting the maximum out of Deion Branch, David Givens, Jabar Gaffney, and even Reche Caldwell, and he had tried to save the team from drafting Chad Jackson, who was already a bust. Yet McDaniels had gained more responsibilities and ultimately earned a higher-profile job. This was one of the drawbacks of putting young, bright, and highly motivated coaches through the system at the same time. Once in a while, one will hold a position that the other one wants, and it could create a superintense environment of job climbers and job cannibals.
The Patriots had been fortunate that they rarely came across those situations. The young coaches and scouts usually got along and were too occupied with satisfying the demands of Belichick to think of anything else. Belichick respected Daboll but he had no intention of making him the quarterbacks coach and taking the job from McDaniels, who was doing double duty as coach and offensive coordinator. There had to be a good enough reason to make a move that would disrupt the trust and chemistry that Brady had with McDaniels. Adding the title would have been good for Daboll and brought him closer to being an offensive coordinator, but it wasn’t best for the Patriots.
They were going to remain as they were, and that realization had sunk in when the entire Patriots’ coaching staff was in Hawaii for the Pro Bowl in February. A couple assistant coaches noticed that Daboll seemed more defiant than usual during meetings, once even putting his feet on the table when no one else was, and one coach pulled him aside and told him that he was being disrespectful. They wouldn’t be able to pull him aside for long: In Foxboro, he’d already had someone clean out his office for him, and when the staff returned from the tropics they learned that Daboll was no longer one of them. He had gotten the quarterbacks job he was looking for. It was in New York, with Eric Mangini and the Jets.
Patriots-Jets stories and The Godfather analogies would be abundant in the fall, but no one was thinking that way in March. Belichick and Pioli were on deal-making sprees. Not even two full days into free agency, they had gone against form and jumped in early for linebacker Adalius Thomas. Usually, the Patriots waited for the market to reveal itself before they went in with an offer. But Thomas was their guy and they hooked him with a proposal that would pay $24 million in the first three years of a seven-year contract. He was their type, from being one of the largest linebackers in the league at 270 pounds, to his ability to play multiple positions on defense, to his 11½-sack, 106-tackle season in 2006. Legend was that he could even play corner and safety if you needed him to, and the Patriots, whose lack of speed at linebacker had been exploited in the loss to the Colts, needed his athleticism. He even sounded like a Patriot when speaking to reporters: “I’m a football player. I don’t play a position. Whatever is needed for me to do here, I’m going to do.” After Thomas, the Patriots picked up two receivers. They signed speedy free agent Donté Stallworth to a creatively structured deal that could be as long as six years or as short as one. Belichick and Pioli both loved the Dolphins’ Wes Welker, so they cajoled, sweet-talked, and seduced their divisional rival to trade their top pass-catcher for second-and seventh-round picks.
It got even better just over a month later during the two days of the draft. On day one, the Patriots entered with two first-round picks and were open to trading whatever they had in any round. They didn’t think the draft was particularly rich, so they were more interested in watching the phones than watching the board. They eventually used their higher first-rounder, number 24, on Miami safety Brandon Meriweather. They rejoiced when they got a phone call about the other one, number 28. San Francisco wanted back in the first round to take tackle Joe Staley, so the 49ers were offering the Patriots their first-round pick for the next season, when the prospects were projected to be much better. It was exactly what Belichick and Pioli wanted. They thought the draft was weak, and they didn’t see many players on the board who could definitively fit into a spot currently held by one of their top fifty-three players. The 49ers, who had won seven games in 2006, believed they were close to being a winning team. But the trade was a gamble for the 49ers, and if they had even a hint of slippage, they risked handing a top-ten selection to one of the best teams in the league.
As much as they wanted to, the Patriots couldn’t trade out of the entire draft. One of the issues was that they had a handful of compensatory picks, which were essentially refund picks from the NFL offices and couldn’t be traded. Compensatory picks are awarded based on what happened in free agency the previous year. If you lose more free agents than you gain, based on the quality of player you lost, a compensatory (or consolation) pick is given somewhere between rounds three and seven. An even bigger issue was that league coaches and general managers saw the same thin talent pool that they did, so it was inevitable: Before the draft was over, the Patriots would be forced to select several players whom they had graded as wholly undraftable.
Late on day one, April 28, Belichick made the phone call to his offensive coordinator.
“What do you have going on tomorrow morning?” he asked. When McDaniels replied that he was available, Belichick confirmed the deal that McDaniels knew he had been working on but wasn’t sure when or if he could close it. “We got Moss. I need you to pick him up from the airport.”
And so it was. Randy Moss, who sometimes made plays that seemed possible only in the world of special effects, was going to be catching passes from Tom Brady, who had won well over 70 percent of his starts with receivers far less skilled than Moss. McDaniels was busy as soon as he dropped Moss off at the stadium on that Sunday morning. He had intense closed-door meetings with his offensive coaches every day for a week, repeatedly telling them, and himself, that it was time to think differently. When McDaniels and his staff finished working, they had conceived an offense that would become the best the league had ever seen.
One of the Patriots’ most basic plays in 2007 was called Zero Out Slot 66 D Prick Snow. It was a play everyone on offense could recite without much thought, and they knew exactly what every letter, number, and word meant. The “Zero Out Slot” represented the formation, which would have its strength to the right and require the slot receiver to always line up away from the tight end. The “66” told everyone about the protection. In this case, six players would be protecting Brady. “D Prick Snow” was the route manual for all the potential receivers on the play: The tight end and slot would both run diagonal routes, the wide receiver would run an outside curl, and the halfback, after satisfying any blitz-pickup responsibilities, would leak out and be available for a short pass.
With the new Patriots being added to the offense, even the basic plays weren’t quite so basic.
“All of a sudden it was, ‘Okay, we’re not dealing with the same menu of people that we were just a few months ago,’” McDaniels says. “I remember thinking about certain concepts when we got Stallworth and then Welker. We started thinking about what Welker could do inside and the flexibility Stallworth gave us on the perimeter. And there was a certain way of thinking about the new toys we had and tinkering with them a bit. Then, wow, Moss gets put into the mix.
“Now we’ve got to figure out what we’re going to do to use him. It’s like you’ve got something wonderful and you’re not going to waste it. And it would have been a waste to just make him conform to things we had planned for other guys who didn’t have his skill set. There were plays we created, and there were plays that we copied and stole from other teams with the thought being, ‘Okay, these are things that this guy has done before. He’s good at them. We haven’t done them before. We need to get good at them.’ So that spring was, I would say, a rather large undertaking in terms of where we were trying to be by the time we rolled the ball out there in June and July.”
One thing everyone seemed comfortable with was the thought of Moss as a teammate. He was a bit of a contradiction, and it was a contradiction that the Patriots could embrace: Although Moss always seemed to be in the spotlight, he didn’t seek it. He felt that he had been burned by reporters in the past, reporters unwilling to be fair and thorough, so he shut most of them down. It was different with his teammates and coaches. They loved his stories, his accent, his hilariously profane outbursts in the locker room, and, of course, his talent.
Even before minicamp in early June, he proved he could fit in with the biggest Patriot of them all. The team had a charity golf tournament a week before minicamp, and it was as much a family reunion as it was a tournament. Players greeted one another excitedly in the relaxed clubhouse atmosphere; proudly carried their modest swag bags; razzed each other during a spirited long-drive contest, which was won by Brady; and finally separated into small groups so they could actually play golf. Belichick had a blast in his group, often listening to and laughing at the tales of Moss, who was his golfing partner for the day.
Not much had changed a week later in Foxboro, nor in the weeks that followed going into training camp. Moss quickly grasped the offense— “One of the most intelligent players I’ve ever coached,” says McDaniels—and proved to the coaches that he understood his role on each play they presented to him. But mastering the offense during drills and practices with your teammates isn’t always the biggest challenge. What about the games? The problem for Moss in late July and all of August was that he had a slight pull in his left hamstring. The Patriots didn’t want to take any chances so they took the most conservative tack possible. They held him out of the entire preseason. So despite all of McDaniels’s work to integrate Moss into the offense, no one knew how it looked on the field against actual competition.
It would remain a mystery until the afternoon of September 9, the Patriots’ first game of the regular season, against Mangini’s Jets. That game in New Jersey would be full of events that would lead to broken records and broken relationships; it would spark yearlong debates about integrity, excess, and authenticity from all directions—Internet posters, current and former NFL players and coaches, TV talking heads, and even a persistent U.S. senator; it would become sporting America’s most passionate numbers game, with forty-four states on the offensive, six New England states playing defense, and fifty-three players believing, correctly, that 90 percent of the country was rooting for them to fail.
But before the NFL’s reality TV show began in Jersey, the Patriots and their fans were dealt a humiliating sucker punch on the last day of August. One of their leaders, safety Rodney Harrison, admitted that he had purchased human growth hormone online. He got the NFL-banned drug by using an illegal prescription from a doctor he’d never met. He had been caught because the district attorney’s office in Albany, New York, had been orchestrating a sting operation, trying to nab manufacturers and suppliers of illegal drugs. Harrison had given his real name and home address to a wellness center from which he placed orders in Florida, and when a doctor from that center was caught in the web, so was the Patriots’ safety. Harrison met with commissioner Roger Goodell in New York and was suspended for the first four games of the season.
The suspension was tough to comprehend in New England. While Harrison was routinely called one of the dirtiest players in the league, the Patriots and their fans often substituted “dirtiest” for “toughest.” Teammates raved about his overall leadership and the way he commandeered young defensive backs. More than that, he had been quietly generous in the community. When a Boston church needed a new floor for its gymnasium, Harrison paid for it and insisted to one of the ministers that he didn’t have to share the news with the media. And when that same minister told Harrison that he was thinking of going back to school for an additional degree, Harrison offered to pay his tuition. But the Samaritan work got lost in the smallest print when the suspension came down.
The sentiment began in September and lasted through the fall and winter: The Patriots, once known as everyone’s cuddly underdogs, were now viewed as frothing pit bulls.
On a couple of awkward occasions since leaving the Patriots for the Jets, Mangini had initiated telephone conversations with Belichick. Mangini lamented how sour the relationship had become and told his former boss, “It doesn’t have to be this way.” Belichick listened but remained skeptical, and the glowing United Nations photo op never happened. The two coaches were in a tough spot. It wasn’t just because of the Patriots’ staffers and players who flat-out told Belichick that Mangini was recruiting them to New York as they all prepared for a play-off game in Denver. Mangini dismissed the charge and pointed to the Patriots’ five turnovers as the reason for the team’s first postseason loss under Belichick. It wasn’t because of New England’s tampering charges against the Jets, either. The dilemma was that their families were close, even after the exit to New York. There were times when Mangini’s wife, Julie, hosted Belichick’s children at the Manginis’ home and had them in her private suite at Giants Stadium. When they were together, the families tried their best to separate AFC East blood sport from the real world. But there was no sidestepping reality: Mangini knew the Patriots, inside and out.
In a sense, even if he hadn’t left on questionable terms, he had to be kept at a distance. He knew too much. He was a divisional competitor who knew how the Patriots schemed, how they scouted, how they thought. Belichick was the one who had given Mangini NFL life when he was in his early twenties. He brought him to the Jets from Baltimore and brought him to New England from the Jets. Four years earlier, they had argued in a coaches’ meeting until they were both red in the face, but that did nothing to stop Mangini’s advancement, and two years after the intense argument, naturally, Mangini became defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel’s replacement when Crennel left for Cleveland.
Mangini was different from most, if not all, of the young people Belichick hired. Most of them were grateful for the opportunity and wouldn’t dream of crossing him, in any circumstance. Mangini was grateful, too, but he seemed to hold an “All is fair…” attitude when it came to debating Belichick in a meeting or competing against him on the field. There didn’t seem to be many boundaries or places he wouldn’t go in a competitive situation with Belichick. He may have been the only Belichick disciple who felt that way.
So it wasn’t a surprise when the men found themselves at an impasse during one of their last clipped conversations. Each of their organizations thought that the other had been guilty of stationing a cameraman in a forbidden area of their stadium, with the purpose of videotaping coaches’ signals. The Jets believed it happened to them in September 2006; the Patriots felt it happened to them during a play-off game between the teams in January 2007. With the constant back-and-forth and mistrust, it didn’t seem that the relationship between Mangini and Belichick could get any worse. But it did.
In the Northeast, one of the best things about the start of the NFL season is that you can simultaneously experience summer and fall. All the sports schedules say that fall is just a few weeks away, with the arrival of play-off baseball and NHL and NBA training camps, yet the weather is still made for T-shirts, flip-flops, and the beach. It was a thought that everyone in the New York metropolitan area could relate to on September 9.
A crowd of nearly eighty thousand filed into Giants Stadium on a day that you wished you could order on demand: plentiful sun, 80 degrees, and just enough wind to keep anyone from complaining that it was too hot. The Patriots and Jets were minutes away from kicking off their season and continuing a rivalry that was rare for pro sports; while some rivalries are made-for-TV only, this one was just as nasty, if not nastier, when no one was looking. As usual, Mangini and Belichick strolled the sidelines without glancing at each other, while their families laughed and talked together in a suite high above the field. The stadium had a familiar first-game hum, a combination of excitement and the nerves of not knowing what to expect. Fans had it, and so did Josh McDaniels.
“I didn’t know if I felt great. I didn’t know if I was scared to death; I wasn’t quite sure,” he says. “I just thought, ‘We’ve got a chance to do some good things. I’m just not sure how this is all going to unfold.’ With Randy missing the entire preseason, we still hadn’t played together.”
It was Patriots-Jets, so most eyes in the stadium were fixed on the field in the first quarter. Tom Brady had already connected with one of his new receivers, Wes Welker, for an eleven-yard scoring play and a quick 7–0 lead. There was no need for anyone to be looking at the sideline, unless it was someone on the lookout for a camera. Early in the game, Jets security had noticed a Patriots videographer, Matt Estrella, on the New England sideline. He was focusing on the New York defensive coaches and their hand signals. Within seconds, Estrella was escorted off the field, his camera was confiscated, and he was held in one of the stadium’s private rooms.
Suddenly there were two events happening at the stadium that would have the nation talking for the rest of the year. The one that could be seen by both live and national audiences was impressive. The Patriots’ Ellis Hobbs returned the third-quarter kickoff an NFL-record 108 yards for a touchdown and a 21–7 lead. Later in the third, Moss ran toward rookie cornerback Darrelle Revis as if he wanted to go down the right sideline. But he noticed the way he was being covered so he made an abrupt left turn; ran across the entire field while being hopelessly pursued by a linebacker, cornerback, and safety; and looked in the sky to find a heave from Brady descending into his arms. The only thing that kept it from being the typical, improvised backyard touchdown play was that most backyards don’t stretch fifty-one yards. It was a dazzling play from a pitch-and-catch standpoint, but more telling was the amount of time Brady had to throw the football. He and the Patriots were almost impossible to beat if there was that much time for decision-making.
“You know what that day was? To me, that day changed football,” McDaniels says. “That changed the way I perceived what we could do offensively in the NFL. I had never been a part of a game that things like that happened, and you’re going, ‘Man, we called a simple play and all of a sudden we scored a touchdown or we gained forty yards.’ It didn’t happen the previous year. We worked harder because we didn’t have those kind of explosive players. And it opened up a whole new world for me.”
Unfortunately for the Patriots, the day wasn’t solely about their 38–14 win and their exciting offensive aesthetics. By the time most Patriots went to work on Monday morning, a new term was pushing its way into pop culture. People were calling it “Spygate.” The news of what happened in the first quarter was initially reported by a Jets website. According to the report, the camera and its contents were turned over to the NFL and the league was investigating the matter. It didn’t take long for the mainstream media to pick up the torch, and what a torch it was. The story went viral at warp speed, and soon it was the hottest topic in America.
The hours between Monday afternoon, when most football fans had heard about the story, and Thursday night, when the commissioner announced his ruling, could best be described as a verbal takedown of everything the Patriots had accomplished. They were officially accused of taping an opponent’s defensive signals, but the Patriots were put on trial for dozens of other claims and slights. The composite national view was, “If they would videotape coaches’ signals, what wouldn’t they do to win? I’ll believe almost anything.”
Breaking news was mixed in with anecdotes and speculation, and it created a torrent of acid rain for the Patriots. There was a report that they had rigged the headsets and phones in their stadium so other teams couldn’t communicate. There were reports that they taped mikes to their defensive players’ jerseys so they could record the quarterback’s verbiage and cadences. There was a story from Pittsburgh receiver Hines Ward, a member of two teams that lost conference championships to the Patriots, who focused on how suspicious it was that New England defenders were able to call out some of their plays. LaDainian Tomlinson, whose San Diego team was scheduled to play the Patriots in week two, said, “I think the Patriots actually live by the saying, ‘If you’re not cheating, you’re not trying.’ They live off that statement. Nothing surprises me, really. You keep hearing the different stories about the stuff that they do.”
And that was just the buildup to the ruling. The commissioner didn’t give credence to any of the wild reports; his focus was the tapes and what to do about them. The bad news for the Patriots came on Thursday night when Goodell announced that he was fining Belichick the maximum allowed, $500,000, as well as fining the organization $250,000, taking away a 2008 first-round pick—or a second and a third in the unlikely event that they didn’t make the play-offs—and seizing all signal-related tapes and notes in the Patriots’ possession. It was an unprecedented punishment. Belichick said in a statement that his misinterpretation of a league bylaw on cameras was a mistake. He was referring to a phrase that stated it was illegal to use electronic equipment “that might aid the team during the playing of a game.” In the statement, Belichick said, “We have never used sideline video to obtain a competitive advantage while a game was in progress.” The assumption, then, was that the Patriots were using the tapes for what former offensive coordinator Charlie Weis would call “research and development.” But Belichick never specified in the statement why the team was taping, and he wouldn’t comment on the matter for the rest of the season.
Seemingly a few seconds after Goodell’s ruling, the talking heads were out with more criticism.
Don Shula, the NFL’s all-time leader in coaching wins, said there should be an asterisk next to Belichick’s record. Fox analyst and four-time Super Bowl champion Terry Bradshaw, in an open letter on TV, told Belichick, “You are now known as a cheater,” and added that he hurt the team and the New England fans “all because of [his] arrogance.” On NBC, former player Cris Collinsworth said the penalty handed down by Goodell wasn’t enough. He said he wanted to see Belichick suspended for the next meeting with the Jets as well as a play-off game.
Belichick was aware of all that was being said, and he had a thought: “We’ve got to be ready to play on Sunday.” He knew he could spend every minute of his time at the office talking about staying focused, but those players were going to be confronted with Spygate, everywhere, as soon as they left the building. On the afternoon of September 15, the day before the Patriots’ second game of the season, Belichick had an idea.
A few years earlier, he had been on a cross-country flight to Los Angeles and was seated next to a man wearing a Patriots golf shirt. “Are you the new coach?” Belichick joked, and the man, a comedian named Lenny Clarke, replied, “Yes, I am.” Clarke had been born and raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and once worked as a janitor in Cambridge’s city hall. He and some colleagues went out to a bar one night and saw a few comedians, and one of Clarke’s janitor friends said, “You’re funnier than he is. You should be up there.” Thus, a comedy and film career was born. As he sat next to Clarke on the flight, Belichick worked on studying draft prospects and Clarke worked on a movie script. When they landed, they exchanged numbers and promised to stay in touch.
By September 2007, they had talked and been to dinner many times. So Clarke wasn’t surprised on the fifteenth when he was sitting in the owners’ box at Fenway Park and a call came in from Belichick. Clarke was enjoying himself, not just because it was a Red Sox—Yankees game, but because he was hanging out with another comedian, Steve Martin.
“Lenny, I need a favor,” Belichick said.
“You name it, Bill. Whatever you need.”
“Lenny, I need you to come speak to the team tonight. It’s been a rough week. Just come in and tell some jokes. You can rip me, whatever you need to do.”
“But I’m at Fenway right now,” Clarke said, realizing that the Patriots were meeting at least a half hour away in suburban Norwood.
“I know,” Belichick said. “There’s a car waiting for you behind home plate.”
Clarke left the park, went over some ideas as he was driven to the hotel where the Patriots were meeting, and eventually walked into a room full of players and coaches. He delivered twenty-five minutes of risqué material. He got ahold of a minirecorder and made fun of Belichick. He made fun of players who even thought of being listed on the injury report. “This poor bastard has a hole in his heart and comes back from a stroke,” he said, pointing to Tedy Bruschi, “and some of you still haven’t recovered from sprained ankles.” He went down the line: Belichick, Bruschi, Brady, Moss. No one was safe. The players were in tears from laughing, and dozens of them came up to him afterward to tell him how great he had been.
The message was clear. There was no need to tiptoe around what happened and have an internal pall over it. It was still football. That was their internal philosophy; they were far less carefree when challenged and questioned by fans, former and current players and coaches, and the media.
In New York, Mangini told his close friends that he never wanted Spygate to go as far as it did. He said he thought the matter could be worked out between the Patriots and Jets, and if it were up to him, he wouldn’t have advised Jets security and upper management to be so aggressive in their handling of the situation. His feeling was that as he was coaching, his own organization was taking things further than he would have been willing to go; for example, he never wanted the league involved. His front office did, though. It was Patriots-Jets. It was always bitter, and the feeling was that the Patriots would have done the same thing if they had caught the Jets red-handed. That was an organizational view, but because of Mangini’s history with Belichick, this became his story and his dime-dropping. By the time he walked off the field on September 9, wearing his charcoal Jets shirt, he really was the villain in black as far as the Patriots were concerned.
It no longer mattered to them how Mangini felt. They didn’t care that he actually saw things the way they did and that he believed the taping in no way undermined what they had accomplished as champions. They didn’t care that it bothered Mangini to see their dynasty, his dynasty, too, questioned and mocked. It didn’t matter. Some Patriots coaches with whom he had remained close stopped taking his calls. Others, for obvious political reasons, were sure to keep him at a public distance. Some players in New England would soon refer to him as Fredo, the resentful Corleone who betrayed his brother Michael in The Godfather. Unlike Mario Puzo’s characters, there was no acting involved between the coaches. The relationship was over.
The Harrison suspension, the Spygate penalties, the wild rumors of what they’d done, and the critics all simplified things for the team. They could have been stars of a new documentary, America Hates the Patriots, and as a result they became protective of their championships and defensive when anyone questioned their achievements. They had to send a message, and winning games wasn’t going to be enough. They played with an attitude and a sneer, and if they didn’t roll teams, especially those who had publicly doubted them, they were disappointed.
“Yeah, man. I was angry as hell,” Bruschi says. “It was a lot of things. First, it had become open season, kind of an onslaught, on Bill Belichick. Then I felt anger that the media or our fans would think that any type of videotaping we did would help us win a football game … sometimes from film work, I’d recognize all the plays before they happened. I’d know formations, techniques, where the ball’s going. But the other team would still get the first down, because their players are good, too. Or I’d get blocked. That’s football.
“But the whole situation made me want to beat everyone by more than we did. I wanted to indirectly respond to the Spygate criticism. I wanted to say, ‘All right, look at the players that we have and what we’re able to do. We’ll beat your team by fifty, forty, thirty, or whatever it takes. We’ll still win. That’s how good we are.’ I used it as motivation. I had been using things that people had said about me ever since I was in high school. And now you’re trying to stomp on the essence of why I play the game, which is to win world championships? You want us to prove that we’re great? Well, all right. Here you go, Jets fans. There’s Moss for fifty yards.”
The mission could be seen in the season’s first five games. The Patriots scored at least 34 points in each game, had at least four hundred total yards of offense in each, and barely allowed Brady to be touched as he was sacked a total of three times. They appeared to be a team constructed in one of John Madden’s video games, a team in real life imitating electronic art. The only difference was that in the video games, there was no button you could push on the controller to give your team a grudge.
Every week, there was a new Spygate quote or column to add to the smoldering logs. If it wasn’t the words of a former coach, it was the words of a current one. Colts coach Tony Dungy, one of the most respected voices in sports and a Patriots adversary, checked in to say that Spygate was sad for the league. He then wondered how Belichick would be perceived historically and made a reference to Barry Bonds. The insinuation was that Belichick and the use of a camera was comparable to Bonds’s alleged performance-enhancing drug use on his way to seven MVPs and the all-time home-run record. Every week there was something the Patriots did on the field that would incite bloggers and talk-show callers.
In weeks six through eight, they were accused of running up the score. They started with a 48–27 win in Dallas, followed by a 49–28 victory in Miami. After what everyone else thought was a cruise over the Dolphins, Belichick tore into his defense and told them they were playing like the worst defense in the league. The whole team responded with a shutdown of Washington, 52–7. The Patriots had scoring drives in that game of sixty-seven, seventy-three, eighty-five, eighty-eight, and ninety yards. They were 8–0 and Brady had already set his career high in touchdown passes with thirty. Eleven of those TD passes had gone to Moss. On the flip side, Mangini’s Jets were 1–7.
Halfway through their season, the Patriots were still tethered to week one in Jersey. Gregg Easterbrook, an intellectual who contributed to the Atlantic Monthly and the New Republic, wrote about the difference between the Patriots and Colts in his weekly column on ESPN.com. While the Colts and Dungy represented all that is good, the Patriots and Belichick were evil and “scoundrels in the service of that which is baleful: Dishonesty, cheating, arrogance, hubris, endless complaining, even in success.” The writer went on to question Tom Brady’s work with charity and compared his “smirk” to vice president Dick Cheney’s. “People who smirk,” Easterbrook wrote, “are fairly broadcasting the message: ‘I’m hiding something.’”
The atmosphere created by Spygate, combined with the all-around force of what was happening on the field, brought out the strongest emotions from the unlikeliest Patriots.
Rosevelt Colvin had suffered a career-threatening hip injury in 2003, was back on the field in 2004, and had fully recovered by 2005. In 2007, he was part of a strong starting linebacker group that included Bruschi, Mike Vrabel, and Adalius Thomas. Colvin was one of the most devout Christians on the team. He didn’t drink alcohol or curse, and as part of his faith, he gave 10 percent of his $4.6 million annual salary to his church. He was a big believer in humility because, as they say in Baptist churches like Colvin’s, he had a testimony.
When he was a senior in high school, he wasn’t just thinking about wearing a big-time school’s hat on national signing day. He also had to think of his parents, who were being evicted from their home. They were forced to live in a place owned by friends of theirs until they regained their financial footing. Several years later, Colvin says he was headed down a bleak financial path himself. He was a young NFL player who wasn’t saving his money and instead wasting it on cars and clothes that he didn’t really want. The turnaround came when he renewed his faith and actually started saving more money than he ever had, even with the tithing to his church.
Colvin wasn’t the type to take things for granted. Yet in 2007 he also thirsted for the Patriots’ big plays and high scores, driven to prove that, unlike in Bonds’s case, records could be broken without artificial help.
“Honestly, I loved it when we scored as much as we did,” he says. “I think it was an ‘F-you’ to the league. What’s funny is that some teams that were commenting about stealing signals, like the Colts, were some of the teams that were stealing signals. I know for a fact that the Colts were stealing; we’d talk about it before we played them. But it never offended me because it’s football. People have to understand that it’s not like a class where you get the answers to the test and do well. You can steal all you want in football, but you still have to play and figure out how to get around that three-hundred-pounder.
“I knew I wasn’t giving my rings back. We played the way we did because we were good. Not because of film.”
The issue Colvin raised was at the heart of dozens of Spygate-inspired conversations around the country. How much was too much? Everyone knew that stealing signs was fairly common in the history of football. One of Belichick’s boyhood memories was going to scout college games with his father, Steve, and watching his dad decipher the hand signals of both teams by the second quarter. That was in the late 1950s and early 1960s. In modern pro football, most teams had someone giving “dummy signals” and someone communicating the real thing. The disagreement was over the act of taping the signals and studying them. The unspoken message, then, seemed to be that it’s okay to steal what all of the public can see, as long as you do it without the use of a camera. Once the camera was introduced, the conversation changed, and most people couldn’t explain why. But the consensus was that stealing and studying with the naked eye was acceptable, but stealing and studying on tape was not.
On November 4, Colvin had a chance to show his hometown just how good his team was. He grew up in Indianapolis and attended Broad Ripple High, fewer than ten miles from where the Patriots and Colts would play the most hyped game of the half season. Both teams were undefeated, with the Patriots at eight wins and the Colts at seven, and even if they hadn’t been, there was always the inimitable Patriots-Colts backdrop. While the game was sloppy at times and didn’t live up to the billing, it was the first real scare the Patriots had gotten all season.
With just under ten minutes to play, Peyton Manning scored on a sneak and the Patriots trailed 20–10. As had been the case the entire season, the biggest play occurred when Brady found Moss. The six-four receiver noticed that he was in a mismatch against five-eleven defensive back Antoine Bethea, and like a basketball player, Moss positioned himself so he could complete his end of a fifty-five-yard pass play. That set up a short touchdown pass from Brady to Wes Welker. The entire series had taken less than two minutes.
When the Colts got the ball back, still ahead 20–17, they didn’t do much with it. Colvin was disruptive on a key third-down play, sacking Manning and forcing a fumble. The Colts recovered but were forced to punt, and when they did Welker put together a twenty-three-yard return. Another big play, this one from Brady to Donté Stallworth for thirty-three yards, set up another touchdown. Brady saw an open Kevin Faulk in the middle of the field and hit him for an easy thirteen-yard score. In about four minutes, Brady had thrown two TD passes. Appropriately, the 24–20 win was secured when Colvin, a graduate of the Indianapolis public schools as well as Purdue University, smothered a Manning fumble and allowed the Patriots to run out the clock.
The win over the Colts allowed the Patriots to go into their bye week a confident 9–0. They came out of it, on November 18, roaring. They were in Buffalo, playing for the first time all season in weather that was going to be similar to that of the play-offs. It was western New York in the fall, so of course it was freezing. Playing as if they heard whispers that they would crack in temperatures below 40, the Patriots offense produced a 35-point first half against the Bills. Brady threw four touchdown passes in the half, all to Moss. After just thirty minutes and a 35–7 lead, it was obvious that the Patriots and Bills were not playing the same game. But everyone associated with New England wanted more, even if the scoreboard showed that it was late and the eyes of their opponents were closed. More. Everyone wanted more. Not just on a cold November Sunday in Buffalo, where they’d go on to win 56–10, but every week.
“I remember every game that I watched, hoping, even though it was not the right way to think, that we’d win by at least twenty-something points,” says Thomas Dimitroff. “I wanted sixty points or forty-five points, just as a member of that organization, to show: This is utter dominance. And I remember every game that came along, there was such a drive, it was this fueled desire to do something. And I didn’t care if people thought, ‘Oh, they’re a bunch of bullies.’ I wanted to be a bully one time in my life, where it was like, ‘Let’s just do something outrageous and be a part of history that way as well.’ It was amazing, because that’s not normally my makeup.”
It was tough to define what normal was for Dimitroff, because things were beginning to change in his personal and professional life. He and wife, Angeline, had recently welcomed a son, Mason, to the world. Raising a child is challenging enough, and even more so when one of the parents is on the road for 225 days a year. That was Dimitroff’s schedule as he hotel-hopped around the country, scouting, interviewing, and watching film at dozens of colleges. Even when he was in familiar Foxboro he was on the road, staying in a nearby Sheraton that acted as the team’s Saturday-night headquarters before home games. He and other Patriot scouts had a job tougher than most of their peers since their college reports were directly tied to their knowledge of pro players. Dimitroff didn’t complain about the schedule and the constant mint on the pillow and neither did Angeline, but the frenzy was going to change if he was able to take the next step for which he and Pioli had been planning.
No one in the organization was aware of it, but after Dimitroff and Pioli had completed their necessary work, they often had long talks about what Dimitroff needed to do to become a general manager. Pioli gave him a taste for what the job was like by making sure he was in the loop on contract talks and free-agent conversations, allowing him to speak at certain marketing functions in which Pioli would normally be the keynote speaker and giving him some media experience by permitting him to speak, off the record, with a handful of local and national beat writers and football columnists.
The depth of their relationship was apparent on several levels, including an ironic one: Pioli was preparing Dimitroff for a job that he technically didn’t have himself. Everyone knew that Pioli was the Patriots’ GM in action and responsibilities, but he was officially the team’s vice president of player personnel. He didn’t have the GM title because the Patriots liked how there was already an understanding of the team’s hierarchy and believed naming Pioli as a GM would have confused things. By helping a friend, Pioli was also potentially weakening his department, but he couldn’t deny that Dimitroff was ready to lead his own personnel group. While Dimitroff’s scouting was greatly influenced by his father, who marveled over tough players, his area of focus was different. He was most intrigued by athleticism and movement, along with the ability to compete and be tough. He also had the benefit of his father’s hindsight.
“My dad always said that if he had gone back to coaching, he would have evaluated more and coached less. He said he would have backed off and let the athleticism of some of his players take over.”
Tom Dimitroff also had words about being a GM. He told his son that if he ever secured one of those jobs, he hoped he’d stay true to who he is. “Don’t become one of those big shots,” his father had said, “who thinks they’re better than everybody else.”
In 2007, Pioli had such trust in Dimitroff’s judgment and intelligence that he realized that he could ease up a bit, which allowed his staff to see the boss’s other dimensions. Once a week, his wife and four-and-a-half-year-old daughter would come to the office and his demeanor would change instantly. His daughter, Mia, could get him to do things that no one else could.
“He started wearing nail polish on his toes,” says a laughing Jay Muraco, who became the Patriots’ college coordinator in 2000. “Mia would paint his toes and he wouldn’t dare remove the paint. Everything started to revolve around his family. When he could, he was spending time with her. And if that meant something as simple as driving her to school, or getting out of the building a little earlier on Fridays than he had in the past, he was going to do it.”
Now that they were both fathers, Pioli and Dimitroff could relate to the pursuit of excellence at work and at home. Their appetite for scouting and winning football games, as the 10–0 Patriots were doing in historic fashion, didn’t change; what changed was a bigger appetite for things away from football. What they both hoped for was success in the business they loved, along with a sliver of stability, although stability was not what the NFL was known for.
Pioli knew what it had been like for his wife, Dallas, growing up as Bill Parcells’s daughter. Before Parcells was a popular and witty pro head coach, he moved between several jobs in the college game, and his family moved with him. Dallas attended three different high schools, in three states, over four years. Pioli hoped that Mia wouldn’t have to go through the same thing, but if the job did force him to relocate, he was certain that a couple things would never be affected by new cities and new friends.
Number one, of course, was the relationship with Mia. He had listened to enough family advice from people in his profession, and heard too many tales of regret, not to learn his lesson. He’d heard from men who were away so much, and so distracted by the game, that their kids became young adults in a flash, and they truly didn’t know the people who held their last name. Pioli didn’t need to be convinced. His daughter, with her deep blue eyes, seemed to see his thoughts before he said them, so sometimes as the two of them sat together quietly, driving on a father-daughter date, they’d glance at each other and just giggle.
The second thing went back fifteen years, to Cleveland. As a single and low-paid employee of the Browns, Pioli was told by Belichick to make sure there was always someplace in the country that the family could call home. One day you’re a Cleveland Brown, for example, and with the stroke of a pen you become a Baltimore Raven. As the job changes, the family needs an anchor. It wasn’t relevant news to Pioli’s life at the time, but as he advanced in the league, married, became a father, and commanded a generous salary, the advice resonated. Like Belichick, Pioli also found that permanent family place on Nantucket. Many people on the island followed an unofficial tradition and put quarterboards on their homes, displaying a name. The Piolis did as well. Their quarterboard reads CASA MIA.
As the Patriots moved toward the 2007 holidays, they were scheduled to take on two mediocre teams, the Eagles and Ravens. They were drawing record TV numbers each time they played, with the audience still having a distaste for who they were yet not wanting to miss what they might do from game to game or series to series. In terms of the offensive standard they’d set in the first ten games, weeks eleven and twelve were a disappointment.
Three days after Thanksgiving, they couldn’t shake the Eagles, playing without injured quarterback Donovan McNabb, at home. They were able to escape with a 31–28 win when Asante Samuel came up with an interception, his second of the game, with four minutes to play. They came out of the game with two news items, one each for the present and near future. The item that needed to be responded to immediately was the health of Colvin. He’d broken a bone in the middle of his right foot and would be out for the rest of the year. The other news involved the Eagles and their defensive approach.
Belichick had a lot of respect for Eagles coordinator Jim Johnson, and the men talked strategy several times during the season. He had been with the Eagles for nine seasons and was given complete control of their defense. He was one of the best coaches in the league at disguising his blitzes, and it’s why the Eagles had accumulated more sacks than most teams in football over an eight-year period. Belichick enjoyed talking with Johnson because when Johnson was looking at football, he had a knack for seeing beyond the obvious.
Johnson had the right idea in the game against the Patriots, but he didn’t have the right team with which to pull off the plan. If the Patriots ran into a play-off team with a Jim Johnson disciple leading the defense, it might be a problem. Johnson’s defenses blitzed more than they brawled. The defensive ends and outside linebackers were built like ripped sprinters and small forwards, zipping past you before you could line them up and knock them down. They ran you to exhaustion when they were going well and then, when you were unsteady in the fourth quarter, they’d finally throw a jab. And knock you out.
After the 3-point win over the Eagles, the Patriots did the same thing against the Ravens on the road, although the win had twice as many theatrical moments as the Philadelphia game. It started with ESPN’s Monday Night Football booth, which included Don Shula for a quarter and a half as a guest commentator. As the last coach of an undefeated team in the NFL, his presence made a lot of sense. At times, the legendary coach could be heard celebrating with analyst Tony Kornheiser when it appeared that the Patriots were going to lose.
That was a strong possibility with the Patriots trailing 24–20 with 1:48 to play and facing a fourth-and-one. Brady went for a sneak and appeared to be stopped. The Ravens, led by emotional players such as Bart Scott, Ray Lewis, Ed Reed, and Terrell Suggs, briefly danced on the field. But the players became angry when they learned that the play was dead because Rex Ryan, their defensive coordinator, had called a time-out. When the Patriots eventually scored to win, 27–24, the Ravens went crazy.
Penalty flags were picked up and fired into the crowd. Helmets were thrown. Accusations of special treatment, as well as demeaning treatment, were tossed in all directions. Before all that happened, there was a bizarre sideline exchange between Rodney Harrison and Ravens head coach Brian Billick. After a Patriots interception, Harrison ran by Billick and made a comment about Baltimore quarterback Kyle Boller. Billick responded by blowing two kisses at Harrison. After the game, Ravens cornerback Samari Rolle claimed that an official dismissively called him “boy” because he was upset with Rolle’s questioning of his calls. All of the Ravens seemed to suggest that America had more love than hate toward the Patriots, because the Patriots, in their eyes, were the people’s choice. “It’s hard to go out there and play the Patriots and the refs at the same time,” Baltimore cornerback Chris McAlister told reporters afterward. “They put the crown on top and they want them to win.”
Whatever the reason, the Patriots had a nation’s full attention as they stood four games away from an undefeated regular season. They smashed Pittsburgh, 34–13, after a young Steelers safety, Anthony Smith, guaranteed that the Steelers would win. In a nondescript rematch of the season’s first game, where the story of the year originated, the Jets became the first team to hold the Patriots to fewer than three hundred yards of total offense. Mangini knew what it took to slow down players he had practiced against and coaches with whom he had practically lived for six years. But New England and its 265 yards still moved to 14–0, and pushed the Jets to 3–11, with a 20–10 victory. The Patriots weren’t sharp against the Dolphins and had four turnovers, but their record bulged to 15–0 in a runaway, 28–7.
One regular-season game remained, in Giants Stadium, and it was accessorized with two controversies. The NFL Network was supposed to have exclusive broadcasting rights to the Saturday-night matchup between the Patriots and New York Giants. That had been the plan for the entire season, although as the Patriots piled up wins the broadcast schedule drew more attention.
The problem was that the network reached just forty-three million TV households, fewer than half of what was available in the country. There was a chance that the biggest season finale since 1972 would be missed by the majority of the nation, including fans in Boston and New York. The issue was becoming heated and political, until Roger Goodell made a political move: The commissioner announced that the game would be seen on three networks, NBC, CBS, and the NFL Network. That usually happened for breaking news and presidential debates, but the commissioner understood what was at stake.
As for the game itself, the debate around New York was whether the coach everyone wanted to fire the year before, Tom Coughlin, should go all-out in the final game of the year. The 10–5 Giants already knew they would be in the play-offs, win or lose, and would be going to Tampa to play the Buccaneers. Should they go for the knockout punch against the perfect Patriots and risk injury? What if they got into a competitive game against the Patriots and showed too much of what they could do to the Bucs, who had already started scouting them?
Coughlin weighed all the possibilities and decided to go for it. New York may have wanted him out after the Giants’ average 2006 season, in which they finished 8–8 and lost in the first round of the play-offs, but the call he made against the Patriots was a sound one. And in the third quarter, it looked like a brilliant one. The Giants were ahead 28–16, and Eli Manning had already thrown three touchdown passes. Before the game, Eli had talked with his big brother, Peyton, who built him up by demythologizing the Patriots and explaining just how beatable he thought they were. Eli looked comfortable for most of the game, but the Patriots owned the final nineteen minutes. Laurence Maroney scored on a short run with four minutes left in the third quarter. It was a big moment for Maroney, but it was deceptive for what was happening in the game. The Giants were shutting the Patriots down on the ground but getting sliced by the pass. It was 28–23 after Maroney’s score, and 31–28 after Tom Brady and Randy Moss had cosigned a piece of history with eleven minutes to play.
Brady entered the game with forty-nine touchdown passes and Moss had twenty-two touchdown receptions, both tied for the best marks in history. They set individual records on the same play, when Moss perfected the most universal pickup play of all time, Go long! and caught a Brady spiral that resulted in a sixty-five-yard scoring play. For the flourish, Moss caught the 2-point conversion from Brady as well. It was close to over about seven minutes later when Maroney scored again, on another short run, to make it 38–28. The final was 38–35.
Sixteen wins without a loss was never the goal, and as the Patriots liked to say, sixteen wins in the regular season doesn’t buy you anything. But the Buckingham Palace guards of the NFL, usually stoic and quick to underplay their achievements in a game, had to celebrate this one. They hugged each other and laughed on the sideline, and they celebrated even more in the locker room and on the short plane ride back to New England. On December 29 in metropolitan New York, they had gotten a forty-eight-hour head start on Dick Clark and the revelers in Times Square. That’s when a ball would drop and millions of people would resolve to be perfect at something. The Patriots had already done it. They had scored 589 points, entered the end zone seventy-five times, and converted 74 extra points, all league records. There had been warts, but they played the schedule presented to them perfectly.
Their final game was one the entire nation had seen, on three TV networks. It was the first time in forty years an NFL game had been shown by three distinct broadcasting companies. Which meant, on the Patriots’ second trip of the season to Giants Stadium, cameras were a part of the story. But this time, the more cameras they saw the better they felt.
While parts of the Patriots’ 2007 regular season had been described as controversial, with Spygate, all it took was a glimpse to the south to see just how minuscule their problems were. Sure, the Patriots had been fined and scrutinized and had even lost a first-round pick. But they weren’t part of an organization in which the star player had been charged with and convicted of dogfighting and interstate gambling, resulting in a twenty-three-month prison sentence. Nor did they have to worry about a head coach, hired in January 2007, spending exactly eleven months on the job before deciding he had to get the hell out of there, even if there were three games left on the 2007 schedule.
The Atlanta Falcons were one of the few NFL teams that didn’t give a damn about Spygate. With Michael Vick’s imprisonment and Bobby Petrino’s in-season departure for the University of Arkansas, they had their version of hell on earth to worry about. When the 16–0 Patriots were enjoying their bye week prior to the divisional play-offs in January 2008, the Falcons were looking for an identity. General manager Rich McKay was going to become the team’s president, meaning that the Falcons were absent a head coach and GM. They were interested in, teased by, and down the aisle with some of the biggest names in the NFL. They thought they had an agreement with Bill Parcells, but he went to Miami instead. Bill Cowher was rumored to be a target, but he chose to stay with his lucrative, once-a-week TV gig. Pete Carroll had established a dominant program at Southern Cal, where McKay’s dad, John, had won four national titles in the 1960s and ’70s. Carroll was said to be interested if he could coach and pick the players, but that plan never materialized.
On and on the search went for the large Falcons search committee, with name after name being thrown into the mix. Finally, the Falcons decided that they’d go with an up-and-coming GM. The name most mentioned was Tom Heckert, a highly regarded GM in Philadelphia. Thomas Dimitroff was also a candidate, but he had a few things working against him. The perception in the scouting world was that he would never make it as a guy who had to go to the office every week. He was too Boulder, too snowboard and mountain bike, too free-spirited and work-at-your-own-pace. But that was perception. The bigger issue was reality: The Falcons were having a hard time getting permission to interview Dimitroff.
There was a small window in which the Falcons could interview candidates involved with play-off teams. They were making little progress with the Patriots, mostly because Bill Belichick was not convinced that a legitimate GM’s job was available. He wondered if Dimitroff would have final say over personnel, or would he be working under McKay? Plus, he didn’t want to lose one of his top personnel employees only to see him go to the Falcons and be swallowed up in office politics. After nearly a week of being blocked by Belichick, there was a conversation between the owners, the Falcons’ Arthur Blank and the Patriots’ Robert Kraft, and permission was finally granted. It was clear that the job was one where the GM would pick the players, but when that had been established, there wasn’t much time for the Falcons to interview Dimitroff face-to-face.
On January 4, a Friday, Dimitroff got some bad news from Nick Polk, one of the Falcons’ search committee members. They had simply run out of time. An interview, logistically, was impossible because members of the organization were spread across the country. Dimitroff got off the phone, told Angeline the latest, and said, “That’s too bad.” He then thought about it longer and called Polk back. “I really want to interview for this job,” he said. “How about a webcam interview? Can you ask Mr. Blank if he’d be open to that?”
Blank, one of the most successful businessmen in the country and a cofounder of the Home Depot, loved the idea. He admired the stability and success that teams like the Eagles, Colts, Steelers, and Patriots had, so he was especially interested in speaking with candidates from those teams. He had also heard a lot about Dimitroff’s smarts and his “look.”
“I guess at that time Thomas’s hair was even longer than it is now. And I’m not sure he had a blue streak in his hair, but I think it was described to me as kind of like a blue streak,” Blank says with a smile. “If you drew up a picture of what a guy from Boulder, Colorado, would look like, in a stereotypical way, it would be what was described to me about Thomas. In the case of Home Depot, we prided ourselves on building a company based on unique personalities and overachievers. So the fact that he apparently looked a little different and thought a little different about the world didn’t bother me. He had a lateral view of things and I liked that.”
Dimitroff knew about Blank, too. He knew Blank and Bernie Marcus’s Home Depot story, how they had been fired from their jobs in 1978, come up with a concept for giant stores that would span at least sixty thousand square feet, and watched those stores become overwhelmingly popular in just a couple years. He also knew about Blank’s fashion sense, which was known to be supreme even when Blank was a New England college student at Babson. So as he prepared for his noon web interview on Sunday the sixth, Dimitroff staged his wardrobe and his house.
He owned a few ties, but they were from Jerry Garcia’s line. He just didn’t see his Grateful Dead meshing with Blank’s Gucci. He asked Angeline to buy him some appropriate ties and a dress shirt. He owned one suit, so he could go with that. As his wife shopped, he rearranged some furniture and made sure that the view behind him included a map and looked professional. Just before noon, Angeline returned with a pressed shirt and a tie that would fit in Blank’s collection. Of course, when the interview began, Dimitroff was overdressed and the dapper Blank could be seen on camera in a sweat suit.
It didn’t matter. The day before, the Falcons had received a hard copy of Dimitroff’s PowerPoint presentation, so they were quickly engaged in conversation. Dimitroff and Blank clicked. They talked football, children, nutrition, leadership, work-family balance, and even snowboarding. They were disconnected a few times via webcam and they reconnected to talk some more. When the webcam became a pain they talked on the phone. Noon became two o’clock and two o’clock became four.
When the interview ended, the Falcons huddled with one another and Dimitroff called Scott Pioli.
“How did it go?” Pioli asked.
“I think it went well,” Dimitroff answered. “We talked for four hours.”
“Four hours, Thomas?” Pioli said. “You must have done great.”
He found out just how great it was less than a week later, a day before the Patriots would try to continue their perfect season against Jacksonville. It was Friday the eleventh, and he and Angeline were going to dinner that night. The timing was impeccable, because shortly before they left the house Dimitroff received a phone call from Blank. “You’ll be going to dinner tonight with the new GM of the Atlanta Falcons,” he told his wife, and they shared a long embrace. He had a medley of quick thoughts, from how he’d have to move from his beloved Boulder, to how his salary had just more than tripled, to what his father would have thought of all this. He imagined Tom Dimitroff looking down on him and saying, “Well done, son. Well done.”
In a truly perfect world, Dimitroff thought, the Falcons would have given him the job after the Super Bowl so he could enjoy his final weeks as a Patriot in a memorable season. But there was too much work to be done, from hiring a head coach to figuring out how he was going to find a quarterback to replace Vick. In just a couple days, he had gone from being a Patriot and having Tom Brady and his fifty touchdown passes to being a Falcon whose two quarterbacks, Joey Harrington and Chris Redman, had seventeen combined TD passes in 2007. The job switch happened so quickly that he didn’t have time to say good-bye, face-to-face, to all the scouts he supervised. It’s not like another job where you stay and give your two-week notice. He was gone. He talked with Pioli, of course, and responded to a congratulatory e-mail from Belichick.
The good news for Dimitroff was that his suddenly old team, the Patriots, would make quick work of Jacksonville in the playoffs, 31–20. It was good because it allowed the Patriots to advance to their fifth conference championship game of the decade, and it freed up one of his coaching candidates, Mike Smith, who was Jacksonville’s defensive coordinator.
Unlike the previous year, when everyone anticipated another Colts-Patriots classic, the AFC Championship Game didn’t generate national excitement. The more dramatic story line would have included Indianapolis making yet another wintry play-off trip to New England, with a chance of ruining a perfect season. But the Colts had their own problems and were upset at home by San Diego in the divisional round, an upset that sent the Chargers to Foxboro.
The Chargers and Patriots had a bit of a history from the previous year. After a play-off loss to the Patriots, when the Chargers were the conference’s top seed, LaDainian Tomlinson had said the Patriots “showed no class” in victory and added, “Maybe it comes from the head coach.” In the same game, Mike Vrabel had taunted Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers, telling him that he and his teammates knew that he “would never be Drew Brees,” and Rivers had called the Patriots’ Ellis Hobbs “the sorriest corner in the league.”
Any Tomlinson-vs.-the-Patriots-defense theme ended in the first quarter. The running back had a sprained medial collateral ligament, but the team didn’t announce the injury to the media. So when he carried the ball just twice before spending the rest of the day on the sideline, he became a natural split-screen subject with his quarterback. Rivers had hurt his right knee against the Colts and had actually torn his ACL. He had arthroscopic surgery six days before the conference championship, just to give himself a chance to play on Sunday. He dragged his right leg up and down the field against the Patriots, clearly affected, and he earned his opponents’ respect.
No one in New England knew it, but their quarterback was hurt, too. Brady’s throws were as inaccurate as they had been all season, and he threw three interceptions. His worst throw, in judgment and location, was at the San Diego two. A decent throw, or run for that matter, would have allowed the Patriots to exhale in a closer-than-expected game. But he lobbed the ball right into the middle of the defense, and it was intercepted easily by cornerback Antonio Cromartie. New England eventually won, 21–12, but consecutive win number eighteen hid some problems that would be exposed two weeks later.
In the middle of celebrating, no one was going to question two play-off defenses, the Jaguars and Chargers, adjusting to Moss and limiting him to just a single catch in both games. It would be far too negative to suggest, after a 122-yard rushing effort in the conference championship, that the Patriots couldn’t expect to get that from Laurence Maroney in the Super Bowl. And it would have spoiled the party if someone had pointed out that all the mismatches seemed to be over, with the games becoming much more competitive and the points tougher to come by. It may have had something to do with Brady hurting his right foot, which was affecting his ability to move and throw with his usual accuracy. It would become a big story a couple days later when he’d be spotted by a SoHo photographer, on his way to see supermodel girlfriend Gisele Bündchen, wearing a protective boot and limping.
All of that could be dissected later. The Patriots were once again AFC champions, which was an answered prayer for many red-cheeked and frostbitten New Englanders. The forty-second Super Bowl, to be played on February 3, wasn’t just at a site that was somewhere a lot warmer than Boston and Providence and Nashua, New Hampshire. It wasn’t just somewhere out west where the Patriots and Giants would play for the NFL title. The game would be held at the University of Phoenix Stadium, right in the middle of the desert.
Over the years, people in New England have come to understand the differences between newspapers and magazines during Super Bowl week. It was the magazines that threw the great parties, teeming with movie stars, pop singers, pro athletes, and people whose names were on the tip of your tongue. It’s the Maxim and Playboy and Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine parties that Super Bowl fans want to crash, just for a chance to brush shoulders with the celebrities who might be there.
As Patriots fans knew, newspapers were different altogether. Serious newspapers were too serious to sponsor parties that anyone wanted to attend. What papers did, in the eyes of the fans, was screw up Super Bowl week. That was still the prevailing view from 1997, when the Boston Globe ran a breaking-news story that head coach Bill Parcells wouldn’t coach the Patriots after the Super Bowl. Indeed, it was a true story and Parcells was headed to the Jets, but fans didn’t want to hear it until after the game.
Eleven years later, on February 1 and 2, the newspaper industry struck again at Patriots fans, in the form of a light jab from the New York Times on Friday and then an uppercut from the Boston Herald on Saturday.
The Friday Times story quoted Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter extensively. He said he was considering bringing the Spygate issue before the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which he was a ranking member, to explain why the NFL destroyed evidence that was on the tapes. Also quoted in the story was an ex-Patriots employee, Matt Walsh, who was fired in 2002. He hinted that he was in possession of something that could change the Spygate discussion, but he wanted legal protection before going forward. The story couldn’t be taken completely seriously, though, after Specter’s suggestion that, for the first time in the history of the country, America might need to see tapes of NFL defensive coordinators giving signals: “What if there was something on the tapes we might want to be subpoenaed, for example? You can’t destroy it. That would be obstruction of justice.”
The Saturday Herald had the more explosive piece. The paper had a source who claimed that the Patriots had taped the Saint Louis Rams’ final walk-through before New England’s upset win in Super Bowl XXXVI. It had been an underground rumor, similar to many others the Patriots had heard in September, but now it was in print on the day before the most significant game in team history. The story quickly made its way around the country and into a meeting with Belichick and his seven team captains.
“We had done all our preparations already,” Tedy Bruschi remembers. “And he said, ‘A story is out there saying that we filmed the Rams’ Super Bowl walk-through, which is absolute bullshit. It’s not true. But the story’s out. Do you think I should address the team?’ And we looked at each other as captains and said no. Because we had been through the fire already all year about Spygate and all the accusations people were putting on us. And we were supposed to double up the fire at that point? He never really addressed it during the year, either, because we just kept going and focusing on what was next. So why now?”
No matter what happened in the game, the season was going to end just as it had begun. There would be conversations about their greatness, mixed with commentary about mysterious cameras and tapes. The commissioner was on their side and believed them when they said the story was not true, but still, one day before the game was played, there was a five-hour meeting between Patriots executives and representatives of the commissioner’s office. Five hours. It was an exhausting process. All they would have to do is get through one more full day, and if they did their jobs, they could be standing next to the commissioner and, finally, talking about something good.
On Sunday evening, when the Patriots’ offense entered a silver-paneled domed stadium in suburban Phoenix, they could have looked across the field and noticed a man who was paid to slow them down. His name was Steve Spagnuolo, and he was New England through and through. He had an accent that could have been his dad’s north Cambridge, his mom’s Dorchester, or his neighbors’ Grafton. He remembered the days when watching the Patriots play in a Super Bowl was a dream, especially if you had season tickets like he did in the early 1970s. The Patriots didn’t win much, but he still sat in end-zone seats and yelled for his guys, Mack Herron and Steve Grogan.
Now, as defensive coordinator of the Giants, he was about to find out if his plan was going to work. He was one of the people who had disagreed with Tom Coughlin back in December: He didn’t want the head coach to play all of his starters in the regular-season finale against the Patriots. He worried about injuries, and he didn’t want to show too much that their first-round opponent, Tampa, could plan for. The best part about playing that game was that he had called for a number of vanilla defenses, so if the Patriots thought the same thing was coming, New York would have a slight advantage.
“To be honest with you, I thought if we could keep them under thirty, maybe in the midtwenties, then we’d have a chance of beating them,” he says. “I thought that was just being realistic. The offensive line was unbelievable. The system was great. And the weapons…”
Spagnuolo told his defensive players to think about two things: Hit Tom Brady, and be extra attentive to yards after the catch. The Patriots were certainly going to catch the ball, but they didn’t have to run free afterward. He knew his defenders were loose and confident. They were the last team to get in the play-offs, yet they went on the road and took out Tampa, Dallas, and Green Bay. Their easy smiles were not forced. What pressure did they have to worry about as 12-point underdogs in the eyes of Las Vegas? The Patriots were the ones wearing jewelry, real and imaginary. There were the three Super Bowl rings many of them had, and there was the gradual necklace that now included eighteen “W’s” that all of them had first worn in September. They weren’t sneaking up on anybody.
Like most Super Bowls, you didn’t have to scan the crowd long to notice the cross-section of celebrities, but what made this different was the historic nature of it. Nobody among Alicia Keys, Jesse Jackson, Peter Farrelly, Amare Stoudemire, and Pamela Anderson had ever seen a team go 19–0. Thomas Dimitroff had helped build the team, but now he was a spectator like the people around him, in great seats overlooking the forty-yard line. He sat there with Angeline, along with a couple they’d be seeing a lot of in Atlanta: new head coach Mike Smith and his wife, Julie. His new life had begun, but he couldn’t help but feel that pregame belly knot for the Patriots. Scott Pioli got it, too, and there were times he’d be watching the game and unconsciously squeezing a plastic water bottle he was holding.
Even Bruschi, who was playing in his fifth Super Bowl, could feel the weight of the season descending.
“I think that we would have been considered the biggest joke in regular-season history if we would have lost in the divisional round or in the conference championship. So that was pressure. But I really felt it leading up to the game. It’s supposed to be just about playing the game and executing your assignment and doing those things. But I mean, you’re in the midst of a year where everyone is questioning your head coach, you know, and the validity of your world championships are questioned. It’s the most pressure I’ve ever felt in my entire career.”
Anyone watching the Super Bowl, unaware of either the Vegas line or the undefeated stakes, would have seen two equals early in the second quarter. The Patriots led 7–3 at that point, although careful observers of the team should have followed the clues that this wasn’t New England’s typical 2007 game. Eli Manning threw a knuckleball down the left sideline, which Ellis Hobbs picked off at the ten and returned to the Patriots’ thirty-three. But strangely, an offensive line that protected and pushed better than any in the league twice couldn’t generate a surge on short-yardage plays. So with an opportunity to cash in on a turnover, the Patriots couldn’t pick up a first down.
A few seconds later there was another chance: Manning fumbled at his own thirty-two, and Patriots linebacker Pierre Woods landed directly on top of it. He had it. But running back Ahmad Bradshaw went to the grass, fighting and wrestling Woods for the football. He got it. The Giants didn’t score when they got the ball back, but they had prevented what could have been an easy scoring chance for the Patriots.
Meanwhile Spagnuolo, who spent eight years on Philadelphia blitz master Jim Johnson’s staff as a defensive backs and linebackers coach, was forcing Belichick and offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels to come up with a strong counter-move. On back-to-back plays, Brady was sacked for seven-yard losses. He hadn’t been hit that hard in the previous eighteen games. The Patriots would take their 7–3 halftime lead, but there would have to be a switch.
“When they went to their nickel-and-dime packages, they had Osi Umenyiora, Michael Strahan, and Justin Tuck all on the field,” McDaniels says. “So we went to a package that would have them go with their base defense and keep an extra pass rusher from coming in.”
It worked for a while, but then Spagnuolo saw what was happening.
“They’d have two tight ends, two wide receivers on second and eight, second and long,” he says. “Usually they’d do that to run, but we figured they wanted to pass out of it. So we put our pass rushers in against that personnel.”
Halfway through the third, with the score still 7–3, Brady dropped back to pass at the New York twenty-five. He may have had something, but he didn’t have time to react to it. Strahan dropped him for a six-yard loss. It was New York’s fourth sack of the day. The Patriots were in field goal range in a game that looked like it would be decided late. Maybe they would have tried it if they had Adam Vinatieri, a hero of previous New England Super Bowl wins. Vinatieri was in Indianapolis, and the Patriots had replaced him with a fourth-round pick in 2006, Stephen Gostkowski, who had missed just three kicks all year. The Patriots had a fourth-and-thirteen from the New York thirty-one, and if they had elected to kick, the attempt would have been for an ever-familiar forty-eight yards.
But instead, they were going for it.
Both coordinators were excited with what they had called. McDaniels acknowledged that it’s never a high-percentage play on fourth-and-thirteen, although the Patriots had played with an offensive fury the entire season. McDaniels thought Jabar Gaffney would be open in the seam. Spagnuolo had a new play for this situation called Tahoe Spin. Since the Giants usually blitzed on third-and fourth-and-long, he wanted it to appear that the weak corner was coming on a blitz. But the corner would fake the blitz and wind up playing a two-deep zone.
“Great call on Spags’s part,” McDaniels says.
Incomplete pass.
The third quarter was scoreless, but a few seconds into the fourth, Manning found the least-likely man in the stadium for the biggest play of the day. Tight end Kevin Boss, a six-foot-seven rookie who had caught nine passes all season, chugged for forty-five yards. That led to a short touchdown catch from David Tyree, a player whom New Englanders would never forget.
It was 10–7 Giants, with eleven minutes to play. The crowd started to sense an upset might happen when the Patriots responded to the Giants’ score with just four plays, but the Giants went three and out themselves and gave the ball right back. Spagnuolo had said he’d be pleased by keeping the Patriots in the twenties, yet they hadn’t even reached double digits. They had the ball at their twenty with eight minutes to play. With the way the defense had played, not allowing a play over nineteen yards all day, he could reasonably think about allowing a field goal at worst. But just as the same thought was circulating through the crowd, Brady went to work with a short passing game. Five minutes later Moss was in the end zone with a six-yard reception.
With the score 14–10 with 2:40 to play, the ball at the Giants’ seventeen, did Spygate matter? Did senators and commissioners and newspaper columnists? Did ex-players and ex-coaches? What mattered was that a defense had eighty-three yards to defend, and if it could do that, the Patriots would have their fourth championship of the decade.
Their first chance to end the game came with just over ninety seconds left. The Giants had a fourth-and-one at their own thirty-seven. If they didn’t pick that up, the Patriots could easily run out the clock. The Giants were going to give the ball to 265-pound Brandon Jacobs, who had an even bigger back, 270-pound Madison Hedgecock, blocking for him.
“That was my play,” Bruschi says. “I went in, took on Hedgecock, and slowed him up a little bit, and Hedgecock and Jacobs, they ended up falling forward. I think about that play, just, man, maybe, should I have taken that block on different? Could I have gone over the top, which I’ve done many times? But I’ve seen that play over and over, and I did what I could to squeeze in between those offensive linemen in the B gap and get down on Hedgecock and hope that the cavalry came. And they came, it was just six inches to a foot too late.”
The real just-too-late play came with seventy-five seconds left. This time it was third and five, Manning setting up from his own forty-four. He seemed to be caught between defensive ends Richard Seymour and Jarvis Green. “I look at that and say he’s so in the grasp,” Dimitroff says. The officials didn’t agree. Manning escaped and threw a pass to the middle of the field, and Tyree was there, covered by Rodney Harrison. Tyree was supposed to be covered by Asante Samuel in the Cover 2 man scheme, but Samuel’s greatest strength was his weakness, too. He was a freestyler, which had allowed him to make several big plays in his career, but this was his second Super Bowl in which he had been caught playing the wrong coverage at the worst time. In the Super Bowl win over the Eagles, he had been playing zone when he should have been playing man, and it led to a touchdown. Against the Giants, Samuel had gotten lost in the coverage, so Tyree became Harrison’s problem.
Tyree reached for the ball and grabbed it with two hands stretched above his head, as if reaching for something on the top shelf. Before he could bring the ball to his body, he held it against his midnight-blue helmet. Harrison fought him for the ball the entire time, trying to dislodge it from his hands or his body. No luck. It was a huge, thirty-two-yard completion.
The Patriots were in trouble.
Sixty seconds remained.
After converting yet another third-down play, to Steve Smith, Manning had his team at the Patriots’ thirteen with thirty-nine seconds left. The Patriots’ defense appeared to have the percentages in their favor two minutes earlier, forcing the Giants to look out at eighty-three long yards for a touchdown. But the Giants had gained seventy of the necessary eighty-three, the end zone close enough to smell and touch. New England defenders looked to the sideline and got the defensive call from Belichick, not defensive coordinator Dean Pees. Belichick’s call was not complicated. New England needed to be aggressive, so the call was for a blitz, with Hobbs playing Plaxico Burress inside for the skinny post. Hobbs had played half of the season with a labrum tear that often forced him, or a trainer, to pop his shoulder back into place to stay on the field. He also played with a persistent groin injury that led to “the trainers stretching me out on a table, with my legs spread, and giving me a shot in the balls.”
He played hurt the last half of the season and through the postseason, which earned him a lot of unspoken respect in the locker room. There were times his shoulder hurt so much that he would feel stabbing pain even if he picked up a flimsy remote control and tried to hold it above his head. But on Super Bowl Sunday, no one cared about his injury. He was the target Manning chose, and when the blitz didn’t arrive, he and his pain were alone on an island. “I tried to protect that slim post,” he says. “Basically, it was an all-or-nothing play. When Plaxico went to the outside, I had no chance to recover.” Manning had an easy touchdown pass to Burress, who was open after Hobbs bit on a route that Burress never ran.
The Patriots had a chance, maybe, at the end to get in position for a tying field goal. But for the fifth time of the evening, Brady was sacked. He tried to find what had worked in so many weeks, plays from the backyard from him to Moss, plays that had made record-holders of them both. But this was the Giants’ night. They won, 17–14.
“I saw a guy walking around with hats and T-shirts that said ‘Undefeated’ and then he disappeared,” Rosevelt Colvin says. “I had a broken foot and was supposed to be using crutches, but I was so mad that I walked back to the bus, limping the whole time.”
As the Giants celebrated the greatest upset in Super Bowl history, the stadium truly rocked. Walking away from it, the crowd could be heard taunting the bunch that couldn’t quite complete the historical run. “Eighteen and one,” they shouted, more delirious than drunk. “Eighteen and one…”
“It was the closest I had come to tears since my dad passed away two years earlier,” Jay Muraco says. “I hate to say that, because it’s just a game. I went to the postgame party afterward, and I don’t even remember who was there. I was there, but I wasn’t. I didn’t want to be at that party, but I also didn’t want to be in my room thinking about what happened.”
Bruschi was at that party, too, and the only reason he went was to give people who had come to see him permission to have a good time. He knew they would be studying him to see if it was all right for them to smile. He had short conversations with them all, told them to eat and dance, and then he left the party so he could assess what had just happened.
After the previous January in Indianapolis, when they’d blown a 21–6 halftime lead against the Colts, the Patriots didn’t think things could get worse. This was worse. They had lost, and therefore the country could be satisfied with the ending of the America Hates the Patriots documentary. America’s prize was the ability to look at the Patriots, who had raced and raged their way through eighteen games, and smirk. The Patriots would go down in history, all right, but it would be as the most famous Super Bowl runner-up the game had ever seen.
Dimitroff left the stadium, sent a sympathy text to Pioli, and rode back to his hotel on a bus full of Patriots haters. Some were fans of the Falcons, and he wasn’t sure who the others were. They said things about New England that he had heard before, from fans and colleagues alike.
“We’d always hear, ‘Ah, look at the Patriots scouts, you know, they think they’re above everyone else; they have all the freakin’ answers.’ And I remember being irritated, like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ We never carried ourselves like that. Because of Scott and Bill, we had very definitive guidelines as far as what we were doing to help build the team, at least from our perspective as personnel guys.
“But let’s call it the way it is: When you’re competing with people in the NFL, you have to understand that no one in the league is truly happy for you if you win three Super Bowls.”
In Atlanta, a city and franchise would be happy with one.