Scott Pioli had been in Kansas City for less than a month, and he already knew that his instincts in his job interview had been correct. On that long day in Dallas, when all subjects seemed to be fair game, Pioli had asked his interviewers if some of the problems with the Chiefs extended beyond the football field and into other areas of the organization. He had been too polite to answer the question himself that day, but now that he was one of them he could say it with authority.
Yes.
The Chiefs were officially a mess, and what happened on the field was just a representation of what was happening in parts of the office. He noticed things, big and small, that irritated him. He was no obsessive accounting guy, but he was practical and didn’t believe in wasting money. His conservative estimate was that he could save the Chiefs at least $10,000, easily, just by informing employees not to print everything in color. As for the majority of the team’s scouts, they either hadn’t asked some of their peers in New England what it was like to work for Pioli or the job wasn’t that important to them. Pioli had spent most of his career working for Bill Belichick and Bill Parcells, and he was just as organized as they were, if not more. The scouts had to know that their reports would be scrutinized, that they would be required to give opinions and should be prepared to defend them, and that there would be very few moments to sit and do nothing.
As Pioli began talking at his first gathering with the Chiefs’ scouts, he heard a bright chime from a laptop computer. It was hard for any of the scouts to hide in that situation. They were seated at a conference table, and everyone could see what everyone else was doing. Seconds after the laptop alert, one of the scouts began tapping away at his keyboard.
“What are you doing?” Pioli asked.
“I got an e-mail,” the scout replied, furrowing his brow. The only thing missing from the response was, “Duh!” He seemed annoyed that the boss even asked, and the other scouts reacted as if this type of behavior was normal in this setting. Pioli was too surprised to erupt. This group was going to need a strong talking-to, sooner rather than later.
Shortly after, Pioli was watching film with the scouts in a darkened room. From his seat in front, he could hear giggling behind him. He turned around once, certain that a quick glare would send the message to knock off the nonsense. It didn’t. There was more laughter. He turned again and stared a couple seconds longer. Still, it was clear that a couple guys were distracted and amused by something else. Finally, he stopped the film and turned on the lights.
“What’s on the computer? Turn it around so I can see it,” he said.
A couple of sheepish scouts showed him the computer screen, which revealed a silly picture that had been making the rounds online. Pioli knew then that he had a couple of options: He could either ban laptops from scouting meetings, or he could find a bunch of new college scouts.
There was too much work to be done in Kansas City for anyone to be feeling comfortable. Pioli had noticed that two scouts on his staff, Terry Delp and former Chiefs receiver Willie Davis, appeared to be curious and conscientious as they took notes and asked questions. Eventually, the scouting staff would be reshaped as radically as the team on the field, and Delp and Davis would be the only holdovers on the college side while Ray Farmer would stay as director of pro personnel. As for that team that had won two games the previous year, Pioli had mentioned something to Clark Hunt during the initial interview that got the owner’s attention.
“He told me he could tell just from watching tape how out of shape the team was,” Hunt says. “No one had made the observation before. It’s always easy to look at the big guys and say they’re out of shape, but he pointed to all aspects of the team and identified conditioning as one of the problems. One thing about Scott is that he’ll always tell you the truth, whether you want to hear it or not, so I appreciated that.”
It was one of the reasons he had to find a new head coach. Pioli kept his word to Hunt and considered retaining Herm Edwards, whom he liked personally. Everyone in the league had a good story to tell about the affable Edwards, who could probably win anyone’s Make a Fast Friend contest. But there needed to be a new voice and new direction with the players. Pioli took a week and a half to meet with Edwards and watch film, and then he made the decision to replace him. In early February 2009, two weeks after the dismissal of Edwards, Pioli hired Arizona Cardinals offensive coordinator Todd Haley, a coach who was equally talented and brash.
Haley grew up in Pittsburgh and was a preteen when Bradshaw-to-Swann was a staple of 1970s Super Bowls. He was in Pittsburgh because his father, Dick, was the ace personnel man of the Steeler dynasty. Todd lived for scouting trips with his dad. Dick Haley would take a mini tape recorder, wrap a game program around it, and sit in the stands as he uttered fragmented observations about players into the recorder. Todd would do whatever he could to help, whether it was writing things down or, a couple times during long scouting trips in Florida, driving the car so his father could take catnaps (Dick never told his wife, Carolyn, about that; Haley wasn’t legally able to drive when his father put him behind the wheel).
Todd Haley’s football education resulted in a double major: He learned scouting from his father and was a young coach on Parcells’s all-star coaching staff with the Jets in the late 1990s. The coaches there included Belichick, Charlie Weis, and Romeo Crennel. Haley had an exceptional eye for detail, and he had a difficult time holding his tongue if he didn’t believe things were being done properly. As a thirty-one-year-old assistant who should have known better, he questioned one of Parcells’s motivational tactics. The Jets were 2–3, had an upcoming Monday-night game against the Patriots, and were practicing with a focus that underwhelmed their head coach. So Parcells instructed all coaches to follow him and left the players on the field to coach themselves. After a while, Haley, not understanding the classic Parcells mind game, piped up: “So we’re quitting? We’re giving up?” To which the quick-witted Parcells, referencing Haley’s love for and background in golf, sarcastically replied, “Yeah, we’re fucking quitting … just like you quit when you couldn’t golf.”
The Jets beat the Patriots, won ten of their final eleven games, and went all the way to the conference championship game before losing to the Broncos. Lesson learned for the young Haley. Parcells liked him, though, and so did Pioli, who was the Jets’ player personnel director when Haley was there. Pioli believed that the young Chiefs could benefit from the knowledge and discipline that he expected Haley to bring.
On Haley’s birthday, February 28, his boss had already put the bow on a thoughtful present. No one understood the Patriots’ salary cap, Belichick, and the art of making a deal with the coach better than Pioli. February 27 was the first day of free agency and the new league year, so Pioli knew that if he wanted to pry Matt Cassel from the Patriots, he’d have to move fast and present a specific compensation package that Belichick would find attractive. Everyone knew Cassel had to be traded. Tom Brady’s rehab had gone well, and the Patriots were expecting him to return to health and his starting job in 2009. Thus Cassel was the only backup player in the league designated as his team’s franchise player. The Patriots had done that in early February to protect themselves from Cassel slipping away as an unrestricted free agent, but it meant the team had to commit $14 million to its backup quarterback.
Pioli’s knowledge and hustle worked to his advantage. He’d heard rumors that his old colleague and new divisional rival, Josh McDaniels, was trying to construct a three-team deal that would net the Patriots a first-round pick and land Cassel in Denver. McDaniels was just thirty-two, but he already had tremendous power in Denver. There was a general manager, Brian Xanders, in place, but McDaniels had final say over the roster. Pioli was ready with a deal before McDaniels was and offered the Chiefs’ second-round pick, the third choice in the round, for Cassel and thirty-three-year-old linebacker Mike Vrabel. It was the first and smartest offer the Patriots received. Pioli understood that the Patriots were going to have to act quickly with Cassel so they could be players in free agency; he was aware that Belichick viewed the second round as the sweet spot in the upcoming draft; he knew how skeptical Belichick was of three-team trades; and he was one of the few people who realized that Vrabel, adored in New England, was most likely going to be cut due to his age and cap number.
The deal went through and, officially, the Chiefs gained a starting quarterback while the Patriots traded one. But anyone who had been around the Patriots the previous eight seasons knew better. Vrabel was a quarterback, too, a leader in every way imaginable. He was advanced enough to know game plans as well as the coaches, yet he had enough jokester in him to interrupt tense team meetings with mock questions that would have Belichick laughing out loud. He was the only person on the team who could get away with that. He was a movie junkie with an encyclopedic memory, so he’d entertain his teammates by reciting one-liners that applied to whatever conversation they were having. He was the symbol of who the Patriots were, the godfather of the seemingly unremarkable free-agent class that helped engineer the upset of the Rams in Super Bowl XXXVI. Pro football is defined by seasonal job changes, but fans and teammates alike allowed themselves to believe that Vrabel would be an exception.
“I’ve seen a lot of good football players leave here, but the Vrabel trade is the one that really got up underneath my skin,” says Vince Wilfork, a teammate for five seasons. “That trade ticks me off. Right now. Still. When I heard about it I said, ‘What the fuck is going on?’ If you want to talk about the Patriot Way, you start with Vrabel. He’s smart. He’s great off the field. He knows what he’s doing on the field.
“Let me tell you, if the play clock was running down and we didn’t have a play on defense, he gave us one. He didn’t look to the coaches for reassurances. He did it himself. He always knew what defense we could and couldn’t be in.”
All those traits are why Pioli wanted him in Kansas City, even though Vrabel would be thirty-four by the first game of the regular season. Vrabel didn’t run as well as he used to, and his brain sometimes processed plays that his body could no longer make. But the Patriots were going to miss him and players like him. Even the Patriots’ system, perceived as diva-proof, would be challenged by its share of whiny and self-absorbed athletes who would carry some influence in the locker room. It was inevitable, and it’s exactly what Vrabel saw unfolding at times during the 2008 season. While the Patriots would spend 2009 in transition, searching to define their new identity, the Chiefs were going to be trying to learn the fundamentals of winning. Vrabel was going to help in the locker room with a style that wasn’t too heavy-handed or preachy. He was going to be able to show a young team how to think and act while also retaining an ability to be seen as one of the guys.
Unfortunately for Pioli, he wasn’t going to be able to have Vrabel and Chiefs legend Tony Gonzalez in the same locker room. It wasn’t personal, but Gonzalez wanted out of town. He had been selected to nine Pro Bowls and was regarded as one of the best tight ends of all time, but he’d never won a play-off game in his career. He was the same age as Vrabel, and he wanted to switch places with him. Vrabel had come from a team that had won eleven games in 2008; the Chiefs hadn’t won eleven games the previous two seasons combined.
Gonzalez had nearly done it all in his NFL career. He got open as well as anyone in the league. He supported his teammates, even when they said silly things, like the time former Chiefs quarterback Elvis Grbac criticized him during a postgame press conference and said he and others needed to start making some plays. Maybe Gonzalez let it slide because he saw the comedy in a quarterback who was personally responsible for three turnovers in that game calling someone else out. He was charitable. He was so concerned about connecting with the Latino community in Kansas City that he spent a month of vacation time in Mexico, taking Spanish classes and living with a family that didn’t speak English. When Carl Peterson was the leading man in football operations, Gonzalez’s dissatisfaction with the deal Peterson offered him went public, which is usually a PR nightmare for an athlete. But in the first-name game, people liked Tony much more than they liked Carl, so it was okay. Once, while having dinner in California, he even saved a choking Chargers fan’s life by giving him the Heimlich, even if he had only seen it done before on TV.
The Chiefs obviously weren’t eager to trade him, and Pioli even met with him to sell him on the turnaround that was coming in Kansas City. Gonzalez determined that it was time to go, so eight weeks after acquiring Cassel and Vrabel, Pioli had to find a team that was willing to handsomely pay the tight end and the Chiefs. It wasn’t difficult. All he had to do was contact a friend of his, who was coming off a season in which he was named the league’s executive of the year. In voting among forty coaches, general managers, and personnel types, Thomas Dimitroff was recognized as the best in the league. Dimitroff didn’t see it as validation. He was looking for more than an eleven-win regular season and a first-round loss in the play-offs. But the award meant that the league had recognized the difficulty of what he had inherited and appreciated how he had turned a bad situation into a respectable one. Dimitroff was looking to add more unpredictability to the Falcons’ offense. He offered Pioli a second-round pick in 2010 and was prepared to hand Gonzalez the last big contract of his career. It was a deal. Gonzalez was off to a winner, and the new Chiefs were going to have to find their way without him.
Meanwhile, Pioli was going to have to find a scouting staff that could be trained to converse in the same system he had known the previous nine seasons. He needed a staff that would be able to identify stars like Gonzalez, of course, but also players like Vrabel. While in New England, the linebacker was selected to just one Pro Bowl, but he was as important to the team’s success and psyche as anyone in the organization. Those types of players, talented and uncelebrated, fantasy football draft leftovers, could help win championships. Pioli was going to need a new director of college scouting to help him, someone with a knack for digging beneath the surface and seeing talent even when it’s not always obvious to everyone else. The perfect man for the job was out there, and he was someone his best friend in the business, Dimitroff, could vouch for.
Dimitroff had worked with Phil Emery for a year and had been awed by him. Emery handled his demotion from college director to national scout gracefully, so much so that Dimitroff told him, “I think you deserve another chance. If anything comes up, I’ll help you get it.” When Dimitroff said it, Pioli was still working in New England. But when Pioli moved to Kansas City and began making changes in the organization, it made sense for Dimitroff: Pioli and Emery were a match.
Pioli and Emery had met just once, briefly, about ten years earlier in Syracuse. But it was as if Emery possessed every quality that the Chiefs needed. He spent seven years as the head strength and conditioning coach at the Naval Academy, so structure and attention to detail were a part of his repertoire. Since he had worked the previous season in Atlanta, he already had some familiarity with the system that Pioli was going to ask him to teach the scouts. But beyond the technique of scouting, Emery was able to negotiate the nearly invisible line between evaluating and being overly judgmental.
“It’s funny; scouts are very judgmental people by nature,” Dimitroff says. “We evaluate players, we evaluate their character, we evaluate their decisions. After a while, we end up thinking that we have everything figured out, from the grocery store clerk to our wives.”
Both Dimitroff and Pioli had enough experience with a wide variety of people to not fall into some easy scouting traps. One of Pioli’s red flags is when a scout questions a player’s intelligence. From experience, Pioli has seen intelligent young men labeled as something else simply because of the way they speak or perhaps due to a learning disability. It was a description that bothered him and if you were a scout who was going to throw it out there, you’d better have a stack of evidence to support the charge. Dimitroff laughs at a time, not so long ago, when some NFL scouts and evaluators would mark a player down on character because of multiple tattoos. He remembers presumptuous conversations about gang activity, based primarily on tattoos and where a player grew up.
There were many reasons Emery wasn’t going to be lured into surface judgments. He had too many stories, humorous and humbling, that proved that what you see isn’t always what you get. He never thought, for example, that he would find the love of his life in a small town where Billy the Kid once roamed. Emery was a graduate assistant at Western New Mexico University, located in the mining town of Silver City, in the early 1980s. There were barely ten thousand people in town and not a whole lot of single women. That’s why it was such a surprise to Emery when he was introduced to an attractive young woman who was working as a speech-language therapist in a local school district. She was from New York City, the daughter of a Wall Street broker and a school nurse. She may have been a New Yorker, but she had a Silver City connection: She was dating the son of the biggest cattle rancher in town. Until she met Emery. They were married in Silver City just three months after they began dating.
Phil and Beth Emery loved each other and football, and they had to because the game took them across the country. They lived in the Southwest, Southeast, Mid-South, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic. Phil was coaching at the time, but he always thought of scouting. When he was at Navy, he developed a friendship with Andy Dengler, a scout for the Jaguars. He’d ask Dengler dozens of questions about the business, and it became clear that Emery’s true passion and future were in scouting. A mutual friend of Emery and Dengler’s, Tim Mincey, mentioned that there were some openings in Chicago, and in 1998, Emery got his NFL break as a Southeast area scout for the Bears.
He brought depth, patience, and open-mindedness to the job, and it wasn’t just because he loved football. He learned a lot about subtlety and nuance from Beth, who was a skilled expressionist oil painter. Beth already had a degree from Northern Arizona University in the speech-language field, and she was such an accomplished artist that she got a second degree, in studio art, from Florida State. Like most parents, Phil and Beth saw life differently after the birth of their daughter, April. Throughout her early development, April was as active and bright as most kids her age. When she was six, she started having infrequent seizures, usually when she was going into or coming out of sleep.
It wasn’t long before the seizures occurred more frequently and at odd times. Clearly, there was a neurological disorder, although doctors couldn’t immediately say what it was. When they determined that Phil and Beth’s six-year-old girl had epilepsy, they attempted to control it with medication. They tried a half-dozen medications over the next several years, and none could combat the severity of the seizures. Phil and Beth’s prayers, initially, were to get back to what they considered normal. They had been to the best hospitals, from Thomas Jefferson in Philadelphia to Shands in Gainesville. They had authorized different surgeries and procedures, from the corpus callostomy to the vagus nerve stimulation. They had seen a lot of medications, and they were going to see more, as many as fifteen. Eventually they got to the point where they embraced the life that they had as their normal family life.
“Once we reached the point of true realization that some of the special-needs issues my daughter has were permanent, and after we worked through the sense of loss that realization brings for her and to us, we were forced to look at life and all people in a different light,” Emery says.
They learned many new things, and some things they already knew they had reconfirmed, such as their love for one another. You learn the depth of your relationship when something unexpected happens to the family. There was enough growth and acceptance that they were able to offer advice and wisdom to other couples who were first experiencing what the Emerys had years earlier. Even that became an opportunity to learn, because while some families listen, as Emery puts it, some aren’t able “because they don’t think they’re going there. There’s some denial because they don’t believe they’re like you; they don’t believe their kid is that kid.”
Phil and Beth both got past the stage where they were overwhelmed with feelings of loss and what used to be. The emphasis was on living and enjoying what they had. They understood that there would be around-the-clock monitoring of April and that their knowledge, and helpers’ knowledge, of her medications and patterns could be the difference between spending the night at home and spending it in the emergency room. That was their new life. But there would still be Phil’s scouting and Beth’s painting. There would still be family dinners and family vacations. There would still be father-daughter drives where they’d listen to music on the radio, stop for lunch, go bargain shopping, and talk football.
It didn’t matter if the job was in Atlanta or Kansas City and if the man in charge was named Dimitroff or Pioli. Phil Emery was not only going to manage your scouts and help you efficiently evaluate the best players for your team, he was someone you could trust. “He dots the i’s and crosses the t’s,” Dimitroff says, “and then goes back to dot and cross again.” He appeared to be all business with his deliberate speech and purposeful walk that could be heard long before he was seen. But what made him so good at what he did was that he realized that an appearance was just the beginning of the story. It’s one of the many lessons he and Beth have learned over the twenty-one years April has been battling epilepsy.
“More than a learning process, it’s been a maturing process,” he says. “We matured in patience. We matured in seeing the grace and perfection in people, no matter what their perceived imperfections may be. I think we both learned to reach out and help others in a way that we may not have before.
“Although my daughter has been through numerous surgeries and has several physical limitations, when she awakes in the morning and I look down at her, I see what any parent does when they see their child: an example of God’s grace and what His picture of beauty is.”
In a sense, the old guys with Patriots rings should have seen where things were headed toward the end of the 2008 season. They were the players in the locker room who were born in the 1970s, which meant they were operating with an entirely different set of winning and pop-culture references than most of their teammates. Of the seventeen players on the roster who had won at least one title in New England, thirteen of them were born in the seventies, and eight of them had played at the now-demolished Foxboro Stadium.
They were like those wise heads at the park who still do newspaper crosswords, play chess, and talk about some of the greats they’ve seen while youths with iPads and iPhones tweet and text around them. The elite eight, which included the likes of Vrabel, Kevin Faulk, Richard Seymour, and Tedy Bruschi, could remember when Gillette Stadium was just a hole in the ground. They remembered when there was no such thing as an outdoor mall called Patriot Place, with high-priced restaurants, two theaters, and a four-star hotel with spa services. Back in the day, the team’s hall of fame was not housed in a modern, well-designed building with memorabilia and exhibits. No, the hall was actually just a wall with framed jerseys hanging there.
All of the old guys were close to that symbolic wall, closer to being plaques than future Patriots. In September 2008, one of the best they’d ever seen, Troy Brown, went to the wall. He had spent his entire fifteen-year career as a Patriot and defied the age of specialization by specializing in everything. In January 2009, Rodney Harrison was attending events in Tampa prior to Super Bowl XLIII and unintentionally hinted about his future when he referred to the Patriots as “they.” In February, Vrabel was traded. Rosevelt Colvin had literally come in off the couch late in the 2008 season, but by 2009 he knew his future was as a UPS franchisee, running a store in Indianapolis, his hometown. Bruschi had been about two minutes and eighty-three yards from retiring in February 2008, but when the New York Giants pulled off the biggest upset in Super Bowl history, Bruschi knew he had to return. You can’t always choose your endings, but sometimes you can, and he decided that game, with all of its near misses, was not the taste he wanted to be left with going into retirement.
There was a bit of a twist developing in Foxboro when Bruschi came back to play in 2008, and it’s one of the most difficult things to explain in sports. Who knows why the power shifts in a locker room from one season to the next? Was it based on popularity, common interests, performance, contract status, or who talked the loudest? Or was it a little of all of them? The power in the room was changing in 2008 and it had officially changed by training camp in 2009, and that fact alone was fine. There were times as young players when Bruschi, Faulk, and Seymour followed policy rather than set it, so a new power group was to be expected. The problem was that it wasn’t always clear what the agenda of some of the leaders was.
Some of them were seventies players, too, but they had never won with the Patriots. One of them was Adalius Thomas, a 270-pound linebacker with the speed and smarts to play anywhere on defense. Thomas, who turned thirty-two during ’09 training camp, had arrived in New England in 2007 as a highly regarded and highly paid free agent from the Ravens. Free agency in itself is a gamble, but the Patriots had reeled off a string of hits there, in all shapes and sizes, since 2000. Even in cases where the signees were unproductive or not on board with Patriot business, none had the ability to make a dent in team culture. It was too strong. But late in 2008 and during camp of ’09, Thomas proved that he and the culture were different from what had been seen in the past.
“I remember that he just started to question a lot of things in meetings. ‘Why are we doing that?… Why don’t we just do this?… What is that, man?’ He stopped buying in on what the coaches thought,” Bruschi says. “He really did think he had all the answers, you know? And that’s what he turned into: the answer man. That’s when I was on my way out, and I was glad to get out at that point. It just so happens that he was one of the most demonstrative guys that I had ever been around. Loud voice. Very strong opinions, on football and otherwise.
“A lot of guys would gravitate to him, actually. I don’t know how he got to the point of helping us almost go 19–0 to, all of a sudden, he was being a distraction. And being very critical of what was going on in the organization in a bad way. He was outspoken to a lot of guys, trying to rally them. I think he really resented the way he ended up being used in the defense.”
That’s how Thomas was long before his issues with Belichick became public. In late August 2009, Bruschi was starting to see and feel that he wasn’t going to be around Thomas or any other Patriot for much longer. He was a thirty-six-year-old linebacker, something his body reminded him of daily. He had hurt his left knee at the end of the ’08 season and thought that getting it “scoped” in the off-season would help him. But when he ran early in camp, the knee throbbed and swelled and it forced him to take three weeks off to rest it.
And then there was something he couldn’t escape. Film. He liked to watch it as intensely as the coaches did, and he took great pride in his careful viewing as it led him to insights that some players missed. One day in camp, the coaches were trying to show the team how a particular defense was supposed to be run. The coaches would show 2009 film of the defense and compare it to film from 2001, when the defense was executed the way they wanted. Bruschi was uncomfortable as he sat there and thought, “Damn, I’m slow.” The film said it all. If he saw it and said it, he knew the coaches were seeing and saying the same thing.
As for the locker room, it was so different that it was hard to articulate. Bruschi loved some of the new guys, like Jerod Mayo, a young man with an old soul. Mayo had been a top-ten pick who didn’t act like one. On draft day, when the best of the best are invited to New York, often wearing made-for-the-occasion tailored suits, Mayo had been home in Virginia with his family raking leaves. He was a worker there and a worker in Foxboro. In the offseason, he’d come to the stadium and watch film, even when there were no coaches to be found. He loved the game, and it could be seen by the way he played middle linebacker, never turning down an opportunity to plug a hole or run sideline to sideline. There weren’t a lot of Mayos, though.
Some of the new-era Patriots didn’t know what they didn’t know, and they weren’t always eager to learn. If Thomas was the free-agent definition of that mentality, Laurence Maroney was the representative for the draft picks. Maroney coasted on his natural talent, which was considerable, and it didn’t seem to affect him that he was a better player his first year in the pros than he was in his fourth. He wasn’t improving. That was probably the biggest division between the generations. Guys like Brown, Faulk, Bruschi, and Vrabel had improved during their careers. Mistakes bothered them. They’d fight to find and correct the errors before the coaches did. Between them they had appeared in three Pro Bowls, but they had a dozen Super Bowl rings, and that’s what they practiced and played for. It’s something they thought about when they were at the office and at home. It was just a different ethic, a different outlook, a different time.
Four and a half years after he first told Belichick and team owner Robert Kraft that he was retiring, following his stroke, Bruschi officially did it two weeks before the first game of the 2009 season. There was something inspiring and unsettling about his standing at a lectern saying good-bye. The day before the news broke, he was an old linebacker trying to contribute to the team. But on the morning of his retirement he looked young and energetic. He didn’t have a hair out of place, a contrast to his postgame on-field interviews when he still breathed out the rage of the game, even after wins, and his hair was tussled from his helmet. He wore a stylish tan jacket and a light-blue shirt and he didn’t look down once at notes as he eloquently explained that he had accomplished all that he had wanted in his thirteen-season career. The only thing missing was a producer whispering in his ear to wrap up his point and move on to the next one; a career in television wasn’t far away.
It was an unusual day, as thousands of New Englanders watched the retirement on live TV. Those viewers sat on the edge of their seats as they saw Belichick come as close to crying as anyone had seen publicly in his entire Patriots career. He spoke softly. His voice shook and cracked. He gave Bruschi the ultimate compliment: “If you ask me to sum up how I feel about Tedy Bruschi in five seconds… He’s the perfect player … he’s the perfect player. He has helped create a tradition here that we’re all proud of. The torch has been passed, and we’ll try to carry it on.”
Bruschi had improved over his career, through coaching and practice, but he did certain things that couldn’t be taught. No one told him that he needed to be the locker-room enforcer. He just did it, and it was a continuation of what he had done in high school and college. In high school, he had blasted a kid who was half-stepping through a drill that the coach wanted them all to do. That was just him. In the near-perfect season, Bruschi had called Belichick off the team bus and told him that he didn’t like his postgame message to the team. He wanted to be coached harder, and Belichick obliged the next day by tearing into the team and using Bruschi as a frequent target.
You can’t teach a player to be that. And since Bruschi was one of the first players people thought of when they mentioned the Patriots and their championship, maybe it was true that you could no longer teach a player to be a Patriot. You either were or you weren’t. Clearly Bruschi was at peace with his decision, but the organization was losing yet another employee who knew how to do championship-level things that couldn’t always be explained.
A week after Bruschi retired, it was time for another farewell. Seymour, who was a month away from his thirtieth birthday, was traded to the Raiders for a first-round pick in 2011. Seymour was Belichick’s first number one draft pick with the Patriots, a rare three-hundred-plus-pound lineman who could actually be described as svelte. He had been a great player for the Patriots and going into 2009 he was still expected to be very good. But he was hoping to negotiate a new contract with the team, and talks hadn’t gone all that well. He fully expected 2009 to be his last season in New England, but the preseason trade surprised and hurt him. While Bruschi’s final press conference was cordial and featured an emotional Belichick, Seymour’s departure was more businesslike. He received the news during a short Sunday-morning phone call from Belichick, and the Patriots released a statement thanking him for all he’d done over his eight seasons in New England.
Belichick had achieved some historic things in his career, and now there was a new mountain facing him. He still had Tom Brady, who played the most important position on the field and had won 77 percent of his regular-season starts. But Bruschi and Seymour, teammates since 2001, had a record of 111–34 in their Patriots careers. They’d played eight home play-off games without losing, won two conference titles on the road, and been to four Super Bowls. There sure seemed to be a lot of wins, and brains, leaving Foxboro. The head coach would likely be able to replace the production of the players he lost, and no one doubted that he could get his team in position to win even more rings. But he’d have to deal with other rings, the circus kind, first.
On a Wednesday morning, December 9, there were a few certainties in New England that no Patriot could ignore. One was their record, 7–5, which had them on a play-off pace but as a team playing without a first-round bye. They couldn’t catch the top-seeded Colts, who were 12–0, and the number two seed, the Chargers, were 9–3 and on a seven-game winning streak. There was also the matter of their record on the road, 1–5, with the single win coming in London against Tampa. The Patriots were not a good road team but they were a memorable one.
They’d lost in overtime to the Broncos and Josh McDaniels, allowing the first-year coach to begin his career 5–0; they’d lost by three touchdowns in New Orleans, a night of high artistry for Drew Brees, who missed on just five throws and threw five touchdown passes; and they’d lost in Indianapolis after leading by 17 early in the fourth quarter. The Colts loss had its own shorthand: fourth and two. With the Patriots leading by six with two minutes to play and the ball at their own twenty-eight, Belichick called for the offense to go for it on fourth and two. They came up short, gave Peyton Manning a short field, and lost by a point.
In football terms, the road was a tricky place for the Patriots. In everyday New England life, the same was true: You never knew what wintry hand you’d be dealt in the Northeast, even if it wasn’t technically winter, so you had to prepare for everything. That’s what Belichick reminded his players of when he saw them on December 7. They had the next day off, but if they were in town they probably heard about the storm that was supposed to arrive the next morning. On the Wednesday when they were expected back at the office, the Patriots saw a New England that was slammed with an exotic bad-weather mix. Depending on where you lived, you experienced a foot of snow, a half foot of snow, a sleet special, or high winds with rain. Making things worse, some early-morning drivers in the snowbound areas went to the roads and saw no plows in sight. “What a cluster,” they thought. “Typical.”
The Foxboro streets were a mess and the standstill traffic planted the seeds for road rage, yet every Patriot made it to work on time except for four guys: Gary Guyton, Derrick Burgess, Randy Moss, and Adalius Thomas. They would soon be known in the media as the Tardy Boys. When they checked in late at the office, they were sent home. Guyton, Burgess, and Moss didn’t have much to say about the punishment, but Thomas did. He had long been at odds with the coaching staff, going back to the previous season. It got worse in October when he was a healthy scratch for a game against the Titans. When asked about being inactive and his role going forward he replied, “Ask Bill. He has all the answers.”
In early 2007, Belichick had returned from the Pro Bowl excited about Thomas’s intelligence and versatility. Later that season, Thomas handed out T-shirts with HUMBLE PIE emblazoned on them, a tribute to Belichick’s style of keeping players grounded and focused on the next game. But the joking had ended a year later, and by December 2009 no one was getting what was expected. Thomas was not the playmaker the Patriots thought he was, and they didn’t use him all over the field like he thought they would. Being sent home for lateness due to a snowstorm seemed to insult his pride and intelligence. His next-door neighbor Ty Warren had taken the same route to work from nearby North Attleborough and gotten there in plenty of time. But Thomas didn’t want to focus on the stories of the forty-nine teammates who made it. He complained about the weather and the gridlocked traffic and quipped, “What do you do? It’s not The Jetsons. I can’t jump up and just fly.”
His strongest comment came when he seemed to address Belichick directly: “Motivation is for kindergartners. I’m not a kindergartner. Sending somebody home, that’s like, ‘You’re expelled until you come back and make good grades.’ Get that shit out of here. That’s ridiculous.”
There were four games left in the season and in Thomas’s Patriots career. The Patriots were headed to the play-offs, unlike the Falcons and Chiefs, but like those teams, they were going to look back at the 2009 season and be inspired to remodel.
While the Chiefs were just a bad and slow defense in the middle of December, giving up at least 34 points in five of their twelve games, and the Patriots were good but not great with an 8–5 record, the Atlanta Falcons were stuck in a place that mortified their general manager. They were average.
Thomas Dimitroff was more competitive than anyone realized, and it’s part of the reason you really had to know him before he allowed you to watch a game with him. The Falcons’ owner, Arthur Blank, was similar in that way, so they often watched games together and even commiserated over them, win or lose, on Sunday nights. Sometimes they’d talk on the phone and Blank would say, “Why don’t you come over?” Dimitroff would make the two-mile drive to Blank’s house and they’d relive the afternoon again.
The Falcons were 6–7 after losing at home to the Saints on December 13. The week before, in a game that was part homecoming, part purging, and part plain-old gawking, the Eagles had come to town with Michael Vick as their backup quarterback. Vick had been released from a federal prison in Kansas in May and had a brief, respectful conversation with Dimitroff in June.
“Hello, Michael. This is Thomas Dimitroff, general manager of the Falcons.”
“I know who you are,” Vick had replied.
“I wanted to call and tell you that we’re relinquishing your contractual rights.”
Vick, still suspended by the NFL at the time for his dogfighting and gambling activity, thanked him for the personal call and they both hung up. Even with a player who was clearly out of the Falcons’ plans, Dimitroff wanted to stick to his policy of being direct and honest with every player who was part of a team transaction. The move to release Vick was not a surprise, and after being reinstated by the commissioner, the quarterback landed in Philadelphia.
His return to Atlanta, nearly three full seasons after he had last played there, proved what a provocative figure he was in the city. Dean Stamoulis, the Russell Reynolds consultant whom the Falcons hired to help them move forward after Vick, was amazed at how Blank and team president Rich McKay continued to refer to the quarterback. “Even in the darkest days of the franchise, Arthur and Rich clearly felt that Michael was still a good kid who did something wrong,” Stamoulis says. They had company, in the stands and in the organization. When Vick walked on the field before the game, he saw Reggie Roberts, the Falcons’ director of football communication.
“I know you’re pissed at me,” Vick said, putting an arm around the man who’d written several press releases on Vick’s behalf, trying his best to clean up issues the former franchise star had created.
“No, Michael, I’m not,” Roberts said. “I believe in forgiveness. I love you.”
The Atlanta crowd was undecided when the game started, some cheering and some booing, but when Vick ran for a touchdown and threw for another in a 34–7 victory, all he heard was applause. As much of a showman as he was during his years with the Falcons, Vick had never been able to lead them to back-to-back winning seasons. In fact, no one in team history had. That would have to be the modest goal for the rest of the regular season, and it’s something that bothered the GM much more than he was willing to admit publicly.
In his two seasons as an Atlanta executive, Dimitroff had already done many things that were the opposite of his Patriots teachings. He scouted and built for a 4–3 defense, and he had actually tried building a bridge between football operations and marketing and promotions. There were times in New England where the football operations people were often skeptical of anything the marketers suggested. The way Dimitroff felt about a winning record with no play-offs was purely New England. It was a reason to yell and challenge and demand more from everyone.
The Patriots didn’t make the play-offs in Dimitroff’s first year working there, 2002, and he noticed how angry and tense people were well after they had been eliminated from play-off contention. A day after the final team meeting of the year that season, Belichick had a legal pad with his top team priorities circled. He’d also given special projects to the assistant coaches, challenging them to see things that would prevent them from the hell of being play-off observers.
Dimitroff’s obsession was equal to that in January 2010. The Patriots had been embarrassed in a wild-card game by the Ravens, the first home play-off loss for Belichick and Tom Brady in New England. The Chiefs had won their final game of the year to go 4–12. Dimitroff’s Falcons, meanwhile, had gone 9–7 with a late three-game winning streak. Although he appreciated the phone call from Pioli in which his friend told him he should be proud of how the team finished, Dimitroff longed for the days when the play-offs were just the beginning of the journey, not the destination.
All three teams were going to have to do fairly dramatic things for the 2010 season to be different from what they’d watched in 2009. For the Chiefs, it was going to be the continued strengthening of their staff, which would extend to a stronger roster. For the Patriots, it would be reclaiming a locker room that heard a lot of talking from Adalius Thomas during the season and was going to hear more talk from Randy Moss in the future regarding his contract. For the Falcons, it was going to be a combination of tweaking and spending a lot of cash. There would also be a constant reminder from the GM, something he’d written to himself in a list of notes on his iPad: Be true to yourself; be bold.