Bill Belichick didn’t wait tables after college. He didn’t pursue a career in music, write the first few chapters of his novel, or backpack through Europe trying to find himself. As soon as he graduated from Connecticut’s Wesleyan University in 1975, when he was twenty-three, he went straight to a job in the NFL. Since that start with the Baltimore Colts, where his $1,300 annual salary was just 15 percent of the national average, he’s spent every day of his working life in the league.
Longevity and experience certainly don’t mean everything, but they do allow you to exhale and think clearly when major decisions need to be made. They’re also reminders that no matter how disappointing a particular year may be, like 2009 was for Belichick, there’s probably something in your thirty-five-season treasure trove labeled HOW TO FIX IT. After all, Belichick is the only active head coach with victories against Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Mike Tomlin, or every coach the Pittsburgh Steelers have had since the NFL/AFL merger in 1970. He’s seen the arrival of six expansion teams and he’s seen six teams move, including one, the Browns, that he was coaching. He’s been around so long that the man who hired him out of college, Ted Marchibroda, was the same man who replaced him as head coach twenty-one years later when the Browns left Cleveland and became the Baltimore Ravens.
Based on what the coach had already seen in his career, his 2009 Patriots weren’t a team in need of an overhaul. What they needed for future improvement was a good rewiring job. Their final game had been in January 2010, when, after fifteen minutes, they found themselves trailing 24–0 in a home play-off game.
The Patriots literally have a “Needs Book” on every team in the league, which includes everything from which fourth corner is likely to be replaced in the off-season to which prospects visited leading up to the draft. One day after the eventual 33–14 loss to the Ravens, Belichick began writing in the most important Needs Book the Patriots had on their Foxboro shelves: their own. Belichick was able to write with conviction and specifically say what needed to change, from new bodies to new soul.
While there wasn’t a single redeeming thing from the play-off loss, the team-building challenge that followed was something that excited and even regenerated the coach. There isn’t a definitive line between Belichick the Coach and Belichick the Builder, because he’s equally passionate about both tasks. He’s a student and admirer of the process, and his love for it all, from the big picture to the minutiae, is probably why he’s never complained of burnout or hinted at taking a break. Noll, for example, was coasting toward the end of a Hall of Fame career in his fifties and was happily retired by fifty-nine. But by the time Belichick celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday, on April 16, he was filled with his usual zeal about the upcoming draft and seemed to have a firm grasp on what would make the Patriots better in 2010.
One of his first moves had been solidified more than a month earlier, in the first week of March, when he re-signed a draft pick he never expected to have. The Patriots had selected University of Miami defensive tackle Vince Wilfork with the twenty-first overall pick in 2004, although that was far from the original plan. On the morning of that draft, Belichick and Scott Pioli had both agreed that Steven Jackson, a running back from Oregon State, would be their pick. But as the draft moved into the early teens and the Bears, expected to take Wilfork at 14, went with Tommie Harris instead, the Patriots were forced to reconsider.
They loved Jackson, but they couldn’t allow someone with Wilfork’s ability to slip by them. They took him at 21 and tried to flip their other first-rounder, number 32, and get themselves back in the midtwenties so they could take Jackson, too. But at least three or four teams had the same thought and the Rams, slotted to pick twenty-sixth, were able to make a deal with Cincinnati and move up two spots to grab Jackson at 24. The Patriots stayed at 32 and selected Georgia tight end Ben Watson.
As the Patriots expected, Wilfork had turned into a star. When they studied film of him at Miami, there wasn’t a single play of his performing the two-gap technique that they were going to ask him to perfect in the pros. Yet he learned to do it quickly, and along the way he came to have a better understanding of Belichick as well.
“When I first got there I’d say, ‘Hey, Coach.’ And sometimes he’d speak and sometimes he wouldn’t,” Wilfork says. “I remember asking one of the guys, ‘What’s up with Coach? He doesn’t always talk.’ And the answer I got was, ‘You’d better be glad. If he starts talking to you, that probably means there’s gonna be a problem.’”
Over the years, as Wilfork developed into one of the best nose tackles in the league, worthy of the March 2010 contract that earned him an $18 million signing bonus, he found that the player’s analysis had been far too cynical.
“Let’s face it,” Wilfork says with a laugh, “there are two Bills: There’s the coach who can be an asshole, and he knows it, and there’s the man I get to see, who’s nothing like what you see in the media. I know I can talk to him about football, but I usually don’t. We talk about personal things, family things. He’s a very smart guy and he gives good advice, but he’s a great listener. I really feel that I can talk to him about anything.”
Belichick knew that Wilfork was one of the essential Patriots, along with players such as Tom Brady, Jerod Mayo, and Kevin Faulk. They were part of a trustworthy veteran core who didn’t need to be hounded into doing extra film study or getting to the weight room early. They did that on their own and encouraged teammates to do the same. To simplify everything Belichick had written in his 2010 Needs Book, the key was to find good players with those same traits. Some of the good players the Patriots wanted were in-house and were re-signed, like Wilfork, Faulk, and cornerback Leigh Bodden. Some of them were veteran free agents without flash, similar to ones the Patriots had signed at the beginning of their run, like Alge Crumpler and Gerard Warren. And others could be found during an event that Belichick had studied for years, so much so that no one in the league was as consistently active during it as he was, nor, in some cases, as willing as he was to wait for his players. It was the draft, probably the single biggest reason he’d had a ten-season stretch in which his teams won at least ten games eight times.
As far back as the 1990s in Cleveland, he and Mike Lombardi had begun talking about ways to build a streamlined system in which college and pro scouts had the same grading scale and were therefore speaking the same language. The building plan was interrupted when Belichick was fired, but the idea began to be resurrected in 1997 when he went to the Jets and had an office next to Pioli’s. When they left New York for New England in 2000, Belichick and Pioli refined and burnished the system until it truly became what Belichick had imagined. Anyone who has ever programmed a system knows that no matter what firewalls and fail-safes are in place, it can still break down. Belichick had been around long enough to see that, too. He had received a fair amount of resistance from at least one of his coaches at the time, Brian Daboll, and a few strong voices on his scouting staff when it came to the 2006 draft. Laurence Maroney was taken in the first round and Chad Jackson was taken in the second. The Patriots moved up for Jackson, and in the spot they vacated, Green Bay took receiver Greg Jennings, who had more catches in his first four NFL games than Jackson did in his career. Chad Jackson: the definition of a system breakdown.
“He was a better athlete than he was a football player,” Belichick says. “He was an exceptional athlete, had some football skills, but the athletic skills didn’t all translate over to the football field. Some of the things that we asked him to do weren’t really his strengths. They were more weaknesses for him, actually. We weren’t able to get to his strengths in our offensive system, so it was a bad fit and it was, to a certain degree, I’d say a misevaluation.
“I don’t think Chad really understood how to use some of the exceptional athletic ability that he had, and in a lot of cases he made it not as difficult for the defenders to cover him as he could have. But over a period of time he still was never really able to do that. He was never able to convert his athleticism to attacking the defense or defender.”
Belichick hadn’t listened to the anti-Jackson chorus in Foxboro before the 2006 draft, and four years later, the new challenge for Belichick was to avoid costly mistakes like Jackson and to do it in an organization with fewer people willing to confront him. Even Pioli, who had known Belichick for more than twenty years, admitted that it’s easy for self-doubt to creep in when you have an opinion that is the opposite of Belichick’s. The respect for his knowledge and his résumé automatically gives you pause when you have a counterpoint to his point. But with that said, Pioli still had his disagreements with Belichick, as did Thomas Dimitroff, Charlie Weis, Eric Mangini, and Romeo Crennel. It was business, rarely personal. The question going forward was whether that checks-and-balances resistance, on the coaching staff and in the personnel department, still existed in Foxboro.
By 2010, Belichick had spent so long thinking in the system, teaching it, tweaking it, communicating in it, practically living in it, that the entire draft process had become an enjoyable obsession for him. He was addicted to the strategy and possibilities of it, the same way some people are hooked on Tetris or Grand Theft Auto. He had already been compulsive about draft homework, diving into it with a tireless rigor and curiosity so he could have a feel for first-and seventh-rounders alike, and then the NFL did him a favor.
For the purpose of increased television ratings, the league decided that the draft would be a three-day, mostly nighttime event starting with Thursday in Eastern Standard prime time. Round one would be on Thursday at seven thirty; rounds two and three would start at six on Friday; and rounds four through seven would be completed by Saturday evening. It was perfect for Belichick: more time to strategize, plot, and scheme; more time to figure out, for the current year and the next, how to accumulate draft picks that other teams would see as attractive trade bait.
“My philosophy is that you’ve got to know the whole draft,” Belichick says. “Now, if you’re picking at thirty-two, do you need to know the top-ten players? Do you need to know Matt Ryan vs. Joe Flacco? Well, you’re not going to draft a quarterback and they’re not going to be there anyway, so no. But you might want to move up in the first to take someone else, so I think you’ve got to know to a point, ‘If one of these three guys happens to be there at, say, twenty-two or twenty-three, then we’ve got to be ready to get on the phone and see if we can make a deal.’ And if you can’t, I think you always have to have the philosophy that you have to pick. You might want to get out of the pick and you can’t, so you always have to have a card to turn in.
“Really, it’s just knowing the draft from A to Z. And not just the top of the draft or the end of the first round. Because if you want to move within the draft, you’ve got to understand where you’re moving to or what you’re moving from.”
Belichick talked about trades so much because, he says, “I think teams know we’re open for business.” He didn’t make trades for the sake of it, although it sometimes appeared that way to fans who were used to counting down with the clock and waiting for the commissioner to announce the newest Patriot. If Belichick could pick up an extra choice and still come away with players he had targeted for a specific section of the draft, he’d almost always do it.
As he left his Gillette Stadium office and climbed one flight of stairs to the draft room for round one on April 22, he knew he was in a strong position. His team held four of the first fifty-three picks: the twenty-second pick in the first round and three second-rounders. When possible, he liked to come out of a draft with extra picks for the following year. Part of his work had already been done in that category with the 2009 trade of Richard Seymour, which brought back a 2011 first-rounder from the Raiders. So, preferably, an extra second-or third-rounder for 2011 would be ideal if someone made the right offer. He also went into that room confident that he knew how the league perceived the player he wanted to pick in the first round.
“It’s such a process, and part of it is knowing what the league thinks,” he says. “We have players on our board and we look up there and say, ‘We’re probably higher on this player than any other team in the league.’ You see mock drafts out there and the player is not mentioned in the first round. In any of them. Scouts talk, and you kind of get a feel that no one else sees the player quite like we do. On the flip side, there are guys that we might take, say, in the third round and we know someone’s going to take him in the first. So, again, it comes back to homework.”
Belichick settled into his chair, in a room where the trading spirit remained but a familiar face was no longer there. It was the second draft in a row without Pioli, which meant it was just the third time in the previous nineteen seasons that Belichick and Pioli weren’t on the same team. The pairing had been so dynamic and slightly taken for granted that when Pioli moved to Kansas City, portions of his duties were split between four employees: Nick Caserio moved from director of college scouting to director of player personnel; Jon Robinson became the new college scouting director; Jason Licht became director of pro personnel; and Floyd Reese, a longtime general manager with the Titans, became a senior adviser primarily in charge of negotiating contracts.
The draft began and the first handful of picks went as expected. Belichick had his mind on defensive backs, and the first one to come off the board was safety Eric Berry, who went to Pioli’s Chiefs at number 5. The Browns took the first corner, Florida’s Joe Haden, at 7. There were just a couple wrinkles in the top fifteen, and none of them affected the Patriots. The Jaguars took a defensive tackle from Cal, Tyson Alualu, at 10, higher than most people projected. And in a draft so thin on true pass rushers that teams were willing to stretch to invent them, the Eagles traded up to 13 to select Brandon Graham, a defensive end from Michigan.
Through nineteen picks, the draft had unfolded the way the Patriots wanted. Tim Tebow, whom Belichick and Caserio had taken to dinner in Boston’s North End just three weeks earlier, was still there. Belichick believed the Florida quarterback was rising in other draft rooms, and he knew there was some mystery about the Patriots’ interest, so that meant there might be a market for Tebow when the Patriots picked at 22. Oklahoma State receiver Dez Bryant was also on the board, and the Patriots knew that Dallas coveted him and that created a trade market as well. Most important, the man Belichick wanted all along, Rutgers cornerback Devin McCourty, was still available.
“I think a lot of people had McCourty in the second round,” Belichick says. “Right or wrong, I think that was kind of the league’s take on him. There weren’t a lot of people willing to step up and take him in the first round. That was my sense of it. So if you don’t feel there’s that big of a market for the player, you can back off a bit if you have the chance and accumulate picks.”
As pick 22 approached, the phone rang and the ID let Belichick know there would be a familiar voice on the other end. The ringing line flashed “Denver.” Josh McDaniels wanted Georgia Tech receiver Demaryius Thomas and was willing to swap pick 24 for 22 with a fourth-rounder, pick 113, to go with it.
Deal.
As pick 24 approached, the phone rang again. It was the Cowboys. They were offering a third, pick 90, for the right to move up from 27. They also wanted the Patriots to give them a fourth, pick 119, which was fine since New England had just acquired a more valuable fourth minutes earlier. It hadn’t been much of a gamble to move down from 22 to 27, and if the Patriots really wanted to test their theory, they could have moved behind the Jets at 29, too. The Needs Book predicted the Jets would take a corner, and Belichick thought New York had Boise’s Kyle Wilson rated higher than McCourty, but why risk it? The Patriots selected McCourty at 27 and walked away from round one with the player they wanted and two extra picks they hadn’t owned at the beginning of the night.
The next day, for rounds two and three, the Patriots made so many deals that a family tree was needed to keep up with the origin of the picks. While tight end Jermaine Gresham had been drafted by the Bengals in the first round, the Patriots believed Arizona’s Rob Gronkowski was better. The problem was that back surgery had caused him to miss the entire season, and if he hadn’t he might have gone in the top fifteen. The Patriots thought that Baltimore might be interested in the tight end, too, so they moved from pick 44 to pick 42. It was one spot ahead of the Ravens and the deal, with the Raiders, cost them a sixth.
“When you move back, it’s always easy to move up again if you need to,” Belichick says. “You should have enough to do it after the trades you’ve made.”
The best deal of the night came with the sandwich pick of the Patriots’ original second-rounders, number 47. They’d already turned the first one, number 44, into 42. And their last one, number 53, was still on the board. So when Belichick saw at least a half dozen players whom he thought were comparable for pick 47, he indeed was open for business when Arizona called and dangled two picks, 58 and 89. He liked the value of the deal, and it gave him tremendous flexibility now in the third, where the Patriots suddenly had back-to-back picks that they didn’t have a couple days earlier. It would put the team in position for a sweetheart of an offer in the next couple hours.
There was no trading, surprisingly, of pick 53 and Florida defensive end Jermaine Cunningham was selected. But the status quo didn’t last long. The recently acquired pick, 58, was on the move again, and it was headed to the Texans in exchange for picks 62 and 150. The Patriots wanted another Florida player, Brandon Spikes, to play inside linebacker for them and he was taken at 62. As for pick 150, it usually didn’t work this way, but they had a plan for it. To them, the pick said Zoltan Mesko.
“Normally when you trade back in the second and pick up a fifth, you’re not thinking about a specific player in the fifth,” Belichick says. “You don’t know who’s going to be there. It’s just value. But we really felt Mesko would be there in the fifth and we said, ‘Okay, we might get him in the sixth, but he’s really the only punter we would draft. So even if it’s a round early, we’re going to take him in the fifth and go with him as our punter.’”
Toward the end of the second day of the draft, with the Patriots and the rest of the league thinking about closing time and resetting for the morning, the black office phones in the draft room rang again. This time it was Carolina. The Panthers had gone 8–8 in 2009 with veteran Jake Delhomme as their starting quarterback. Once upon a time, Delhomme had put a scare into the Patriots in one of the most entertaining Super Bowls ever played, XXXVIII. But the Panthers saw his miserable eight-touchdown, eighteen-interception season and decided it was time to go young. They had twenty-five-year-old Matt Moore as his backup, and they had drafted Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen at pick 48. They had their eyes on pick 89, one of the few remaining picks that could be traded in the third round (the rest were compensatory picks and could not be moved). The Panthers wanted a quarterback. Kind of. They liked Appalachian State’s Armanti Edwards, who was a record-setting quarterback in college, but he was being projected as a receiver in the pros.
Anyway, the Panthers were willing to trade their 2011 second-rounder for 89. It was too good to walk away from, and not just because the Patriots already owned pick 90. Even if all the Panthers’ dreams were realized in 2010 and they won the Super Bowl, the Patriots would still move up twenty-five spots, from 89 to 64, just for being willing to wait. But the Panthers weren’t going to win and they knew it. Head coach John Fox was in a lame-duck situation, and there was an air of desperation to do something.
That’s where longevity and experience paid off for Belichick as well. He didn’t have to worry about the classic GM-vs.–head coach debate, with one man planning for the long term while the other fights for right now, knowing that he’s judged on the present and this year’s wins and losses. For Belichick, with hands in both fields, he was able to have a more balanced view of things. He’d loved New England since he was a teenager, and there was no desire to bolt from the Patriots. He agreed to the deal, satisfied with the players he’d selected and confident that he’d like what was coming to him in the future, whether that future was the next day or the next year.
On the final day of the draft, the Patriots got to cash in on the fourth they’d gotten from Denver. At 113 they took Florida tight end Aaron Hernandez, whose talent alone was first-or second-round quality. But many teams thought he was a character risk and let him slide to day three. The Patriots figured they could get Hernandez straightened out and with multiple picks, they felt they could take a gamble.
Another draft had been completed, with teams from Foxboro to Atlanta to Kansas City excited about what they had done. The day after the draft, the Patriots finally released Adalius Thomas, ending a bitter relationship that had begun with such promise. After all the moves by all the teams, no one would know for sure what it all meant until the players took the field, which, coincidentally, was scheduled to happen during training camp with the Patriots and Falcons. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes teams practiced together to break up the monotony of camp. The Saints were also scheduled to hold practices with the Patriots in Foxboro.
In August, the Patriots headed south to the Falcons’ immaculate facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia. With stately brick buildings and carefully landscaped fields, the complex looked like a small college campus. It was the Falcons’ daily home, and they had built dormitories on site to make it camp-compatible as well.
Both teams appreciated the change in routine, from players to ownership. Arthur Blank had often asked Thomas Dimitroff about Belichick, and Dimitroff told him that the Belichick of press conferences didn’t do him justice. The owner was skeptical until he chatted with Belichick one day and was surprised to be greeted with a hug and a string of one-liners. Dimitroff and head coach Mike Smith shared plenty of laughs with Belichick as well, although both general manager and head coach found themselves inching toward Tom Brady so they could see how he practiced and share some insight with Matt Ryan.
“It was an eye-opening two days for me,” Smith says. “I saw an intense player who was in control of every offensive piece on the field. Everything that was happening on offense, from route adjustments to plays that were called from the coaching staff, he had a hand in it. I could see the trust level between the offensive staff and Brady, and the players and Brady. I thought it was very revealing.”
Dimitroff had made some comparisons to Brady, traits-wise, when he was studying and writing an evaluation of Ryan. It surprised him during one of the practices when Brady headed his way and struck up a brief conversation. He told him he was impressed with what he and Smith had done with the Falcons and he said that he was a Matt Ryan fan as well.
“There are some quarterbacks who have a unique way of ripping the team with an element of positivity to it,” Dimitroff says. “There are guys who try to do that and it flops, and the team just has a disdain for the quarterback. But Tom and Matt, with their seriousness, passion, and competitiveness, they’re special. They’re just people you want to be around.”
Although it was still football practice, the joint Falcons-Patriots work session had felt like a vacation. When it was over and both teams resumed normal business, it seemed that the season opener suddenly hovered. The Falcons would open in Pittsburgh, and the Patriots would be home against Cincinnati.
As Dimitroff prepared for the season, trying to be in a dozen places at once, he missed a call placed to his cell phone. It was Belichick. The coach left a voice mail that surprised and humbled Dimitroff. They had come a long way from a head coach—groundskeeper dynamic, and even a head coach–director of college scouting relationship. It was one team builder to another, showing admiration. Belichick wished the team luck going into the season and, he added, based on how the team was built and conceived, he thought the Falcons’ season would turn out just fine.
On the first Saturday in October, seemingly a lifetime away from spring and the 2011 NFL draft, Dimitroff stood in his office and admired a board. The names and early rankings of the top college players in the country were listed there, and Dimitroff stared at the neatly labeled magnetic strips as if transfixed.
A friend from Boulder, ex-racer and current bike shop owner Doug Emerson, was visiting for the weekend and Dimitroff explained to him how the board came to be ordered, or stacked. He then talked about the athleticism of two of the nation’s most gifted receivers, Julio Jones and A. J. Green, and that’s when it became apparent to Emerson just how riveted Dimitroff was by the players and the process.
“Dude,” Emerson said, beginning to chuckle. “You’re such a nerd!”
And Emerson, who’d had two-hour talks with Dimitroff on the bike paths of Colorado, the subjects ranging from literature to politics, had seen just a glimpse of it. Two months earlier, during a break from practice and the punishing Georgia sun, Dimitroff had called the scouting staff into the draft room for an informal session. He wanted to be sure everyone was clear on what he meant when he said he was looking to add explosive, “urgent athletes” to the Falcons. The staff proceeded to have nerdy arguments about what was and was not athleticism.
The general manager, a wordsmith, was known for coming up with handles that would make his thoughts portable and memorable. When he first got to the Falcons, he said that he and head coach Mike Smith were on a “malcontent inquisition.” When a member of the organization loosely and frequently referred to the Super Bowl in a newspaper interview, Dimitroff’s in-house response was that the organization had to remain “semantically responsible” when publicly talking about winning championships. The new catchphrase, “urgent athleticism,” qualified as a true obsession.
As he paced his office and studied that board, Dimitroff openly wondered what it would take to put the Falcons in position to select one of those receivers. He had focused on offense in his first draft, taking Ryan and left tackle Sam Baker. In his second draft, he went defense by selecting tackle Peria Jerry in the first, although Jerry got hurt and missed most of the season. He added to the defense in round three, taking Missouri linebacker Sean Weatherspoon because of his speed and ability to cover. For his fourth draft, he was thinking about getting into position for one of those alpha receivers. “If there was a way to trade some of the lower-round picks and move up, I’d do it,” he said. “If you’re telling me the cost to significantly move up is lower-to-middle-round picks, then why not? I guess I look at it differently than a lot of people.”
In Dimitroff’s third year as GM, the entire organization was looking to define itself with greater expectations. The team had paid millions of dollars for a soulful marketing campaign, “Rise Up,” with a rousing video of a mass choir singing behind actor and Falcons fan Samuel L. Jackson. For Dimitroff, rising up had to be more than consecutive winning seasons. He already counted on that, and he wanted Atlanta fans to feel the same way, even if that hadn’t been anyone’s reality in the first forty-two years of the franchise. The next step was to win big games and continue to add the right kind of impact players to the roster.
Dimitroff challenged himself and his staff to build a team that was a consistent contender, filled with enough “captain-characteristic” players as mainstays. When he took the job, he brought along a color-coded scouting matrix that would bring even more specificity to the scouting process. It could be read quickly, and a series of numbers, four 7.5s, for example, told a precise story of what kind of player he could expect to see on film. The numerical snapshot also included a dot, with green the mark for a captain and black for someone who would go in a high-risk, skull-and-crossbones column on the team’s board. High-risk didn’t just mean an arrest or an expulsion from school. High-maintenance could equate to high-risk, too. Dimitroff was conscious of the locker-room mix and knew that one too many “me” guys could undermine years of planning. He was a political liberal and he could tolerate a lot of different things, but he wasn’t going to employ players who required so much special management that they’d distract coaches and other players from focusing on their jobs.
The Falcons passed on so many black-dotters in the 2010 draft that team owner Arthur Blank called for further investigation. Blank wanted to be sure the Falcons weren’t being too extreme with their grading standards. Dimitroff did some research and reported that a handful of teams, the Chargers, Chiefs, and Colts among them, had not selected a single player from the Falcons’ skull-and-crossbones list, either. He told Blank that he had no issues being in such a small group since he had immense respect for each of those teams’ GMs.
Besides, a lot of what teams saw as high-risk or not, or even urgently athletic or not, was subjective. When Dimitroff was with the Patriots, he could watch the same film as Scott Pioli and Bill Belichick and sometimes the three of them would walk away seeing different things. He had learned a lot of football and management from them both, but becoming them was never the point; he was an extension of a Belichick Tree, not a Belichick Monolith. So he hadn’t been surprised in April when his high risk became Belichick’s late second-round value and the Patriots selected Florida linebacker Brandon Spikes. It was the same story in the fourth round, when one man’s “character concern” was another’s “this is by far the best player on the board,” and that’s how the Patriots wound up with another Florida player, talented tight end Aaron Hernandez.
It was important for him to have a vision for where he was trying to take the football-operations arm of the franchise and to make sure he wasn’t straying too far from his core while doing it. Before the season began, he typed a few notes in his iPad about general-managing in his third year. Be true to yourself, he wrote. Remember your roots: tough, honest, organic. Keep it real.
After their first game of the season, an overtime loss in Pittsburgh, the Falcons had impressed by winning their next two. They crushed the Cardinals 41–7, and went on the road to division rival New Orleans the next week and beat the Saints in overtime, 27–24. Dimitroff was thrilled that the team was making his job harder with each successful week they had: The more they won, the lower their first-round pick would be in the spring, which would make it more complex to leap from the back of the room to the front.
Dimitroff didn’t mind. He loved to win, and he wasn’t afraid of doing something unconventional to make it happen.
At twelve fifteen Sunday afternoon, about forty-five minutes before game time, Lionel Vital stood on the Georgia Dome field watching players from the 49ers and Falcons go through warm-up drills. Vital, or “L” as Dimitroff sometimes calls him, didn’t miss much, even when someone came over to say hello. His brown eyes instinctively scanned the field, left to right, always noticing something that he could use later.
It was easy to see why Vital, the Falcons’ assistant director of player personnel, initially thought of a career in law enforcement after his NFL playing days were over in the late 1980s. Bald, about five feet nine inches, muscular, and someone who smiles as long as you do it first, Vital had the look of a man who could knock heads and not overtalk while doing it. He was forty-eight and had four daughters and three grandkids, but he was not someone you’d bet against in the weight room. He had to have a title, but it did a poor job of describing who he was to the Falcons’ general manager. Vital grew up in Louisiana and officially had six brothers and sisters, but he considered Dimitroff a seventh sibling. They’d known each other for more than twenty years. Vital worked for Belichick in Cleveland and with Dimitroff’s father on the Browns’ scouting staff in the early 1990s. He twice scouted for the Ravens, as well as the Jets and Patriots. He knows Dimitroff so well that he swore that if you gave him just a brief description of where Dimitroff was, he can tell you what he’s thinking.
“The thing about Thomas is, he could be standing on the other side of the field, and I know what he thinks about certain things,” he says. “I know how he ticks. And he knows me, too. He could be in a room with fifty guys, and I don’t have to be in that room, okay? If I know what they’re talking about, the topic, I can tell you how he came across to them.”
As soon as Dimitroff was hired in Atlanta, Vital didn’t have to wait for the phone call. He knew where his next stop was and that he had to be ready. He was working with the Ravens at the time, recognized as one of the best scouts in the country, but Baltimore GM Ozzie Newsome understood that Vital had to go and work with a friend whom he once roomed with when they were both kids in their twenties. They were in the World League then, doing an unofficial audition for an updated Odd Couple. They wrestled over what was on the TV and how loud it was, jostled for position on the basketball court, and practically memorized each other’s dinner orders: There would be shrimp and rice and vegetables and a huge dessert for one of them, while the other one would go for a salad, no meat, some rice, and maybe a bite of the dessert. In between their brotherly squabbles, they’d talk about moments like the one they were in now, when they’d be on the biggest stage, working together without fear of backstabbing or petty power struggles.
One of the things they never argued about now was Vital’s scouting and evaluation style. Part of his strength was what he was doing before Falcons-49ers. He was watching players in action. He was looking at the San Francisco defensive backs to see how they turn their hips, even in drills. He was paying attention to cornerback Nate Clements and it was clear that he’d have something to say about him before the game began. Dimitroff knew that Vital was not going to be the one who turned in a thesis to describe a player.
“I’m not going to sit here and write a book, okay?” he says. “That’s not my forte and it’s not what’s important, to be honest with you. Because Bill always said, the final three or four lines is what he really wanted. I know guys that can write novels and be wrong. It sounds like Shakespeare and it’s dead wrong. My thing is, can you play or not? Is he going to start or not? If you can pinpoint it like that, I think it makes you exceptional.
“I always got the free pass on the novels. They wanted my opinion more than anything else. And that’s how Thomas uses me here. He knows I’m going to see the player the way I need to see him. It’s going to be unorthodox, but in the end it’s probably going to be pretty … the people I’ve worked with will tell you, it’s probably going to be pretty accurate.”
People he works with now and people he’s worked with in the past approached him when they noticed him on the sideline. Mike Johnson, a former Falcons assistant who worked with Vital in Baltimore, stopped by to give him a hug and say hello. There was also a visit from Falcons tight ends coach Chris Scelfo, a fellow Louisiana native who informed Vital that life should be good for the Falcons later in the afternoon.
“Tony Gonzalez is in the building today,” Scelfo joked, “so I think I’ve done my part as a coach. I got him to the game.”
They both laughed.
As players ran by, undrafted free agents and first-rounders and fifth-round finds among them, Vital broke down the art of scouting. He said he learned to focus on a player’s strengths from former Browns scout Ernie Plank. Dick Haley taught him how to have confidence without overthinking the process. Haley would study a few tapes on a player, watch him practice, and see a few highlights. He would leave it at that, because he didn’t want his scouts talking themselves into or out of a player by watching tape after tape. Belichick taught him to eliminate excess, hone in on what a player could be for the system, and then definitively say what he could or could not do.
“When I was a young scout, my first five years, I was guessing some, because you have no history to gauge,” he says. “When you get in this for ten years or twelve years, now you have twelve drafts to compare it to. But in your first couple of years, you really don’t know. You’ve got to be confident, and you’ve got to act like you know and all that, but you’re guessing your ass off.”
He was asked when he crossed the threshold from guessing to knowing.
“When I stopped talking to other scouts about players,” he says. “A lot of times scouts will bounce it off other scouts when they see them out there. ‘Hey, man, you saw this guy, what do you think?’ They’re cross-checking themselves. I don’t even talk to other scouts about players, unless it’s double-checking background information. I don’t have phone conversations with scouts about players. I give all my extra time on the phone to my girls, my kids. I wouldn’t want another scout to screw me up.”
He looked again at the defensive backs. It was twelve thirty. More people, dressed in red and black, were filling the dome. A couple more people from personnel, Les Snead and Ran Carthon, stopped by to acknowledge him. Vital didn’t lose his train of thought. He could talk players, specifically defensive backs, all day.
“I know how I feel about the guy,” he says. “I have my own feelings on these players when I see them, and I’m confident in that because it’s been right and it’s been good to me. Trust me: If it had not been good to me, you would know and everybody else would know, too. I’d be sitting out somewhere else. So at this point in my career, I’m not worried about missing on the player. I’m going to hit most of them. I hate to say it like that, but it is what it is.”
He remembers all the misses. He had two guys in his home state, Charles Tillman and Ike Taylor, whom he missed in the same year. And they played at the same school. He missed on Tillman because he thought he was too stiff. He missed on Taylor because, well, he didn’t think he was too smart. He was big and fast, a former running back with limited experience at corner, but he couldn’t imagine going back to his team at the time, the Patriots, and trying to sell Taylor to them. In that same draft, 2003, New England took a corner who ran much slower than Taylor, Asante Samuel.
“A lot of guys may miss on a defensive back because he’s athletic. Being a good defensive back is not just about being athletic. The first thing I want to see is if the guy’s natural and instinctive,” he says. “If I was in the backyard picking the team, I’d want that backyard guy. Brent Grimes is that kind of guy we have here who can just play the game. You know, he’s quick twitch, he’s instinctive, he sees the field, he’s natural at it. He doesn’t really have to prepare for it. He gets out of bed, he can play.
“The guy who has to think about it, he’s mechanical. You’ve got to overcoach him to do it, and I’m afraid of him. Because you can’t coach him on that final drive. The natural instincts kick in. I’m looking for natural instincts. And of course you want mental toughness. Mental toughness is the focus. Not losing his confidence. Not getting dumb when things are not good. Having an energy about him and no one can take that away from him. Getting beat and turning around and saying, ‘I couldn’t care less I just got beat, come back again, my man.’ He gets beat, so what? And even if they lose the game, he’s going to say, ‘I’m sorry it happened, man. It just happens. But I’ll be back next week.’”
He stood with his arms folded as he wrapped up the conversation. He stared extra-long at number 22, the 49ers’ Clements. He’d been watching him off and on for a half hour and he finally was able to say what he was thinking. The 49ers gave Clements an eight-year, $80 million contract to play in San Francisco. Clements, a big corner at just over six feet and 210 pounds, played his first six years in Buffalo.
“He’s not a great corner,” Vital says. “Teams aren’t dumb. You just don’t let great corners walk out the door. Buffalo knew he wasn’t great.” He watched Clements turn and chase a receiver in a drill. “See? He’s not a quick-twitch guy. He’s tall, so it’s hard for him to change directions. If you put a double move on him, he can be exposed.”
Whether Clements factored into the game or not, everyone affiliated with the Falcons understood what was at stake. Simply, people were at that point where they expected the Falcons to beat the 49ers, who were 0–3.
As one o’clock approached, Blank and Dimitroff sat side by side in a small room inside the owner’s private suite. If they had opened the door, they would have seen a range of personalities, from Bernie Marcus, one of Blank’s Home Depot cofounders, to the owner’s wife, Stephanie, and the couple’s nine-year-old fraternal twins. But the door remained closed for much of the first half, and that was a good thing.
“Daddy’s not going to be a happy camper tonight,” one of the twins says to Stephanie. The 49ers had taken a quick 14–0 lead.
“It’s a long game, sweetheart,” Stephanie replies.
Inside the small room, which is next to the replay officials’ booth, Blank and Dimitroff gestured and pounded tables. After the GM’s top free-agent acquisition, Dunta Robinson, was called for what appeared to be a bogus thirty-four-yard pass-interference penalty, Dimitroff yelled, “What the hell was that?” and threw his hands in the air. A few times he looked at the men in the booth and shrugged as if to say, “What are you trying to do to us?” He could be critical of his own team during games as well. He and Smith make a point of having a postgame conversation about any frustrations either of them have so issues won’t become overblown later in the week or season.
In the third quarter, Blank decided that he should spend at least a couple minutes with visitors in the box. He had taken off the jacket of his expensive pinstriped suit, yet he still looked dignified in his startling white shirt with French cuffs. He is known as one of the city’s most stylish residents, and although their tastes are different, Blank’s love of fashion has rubbed off on his GM. Sometimes it even goes too far. Once, Blank invited Dimitroff to a weekend Hawks game. Dimitroff asked him what he should wear and the owner replied, “Well, it is a Saturday night. You probably should wear a sports coat.” When he got to the game, surrounded by jeans and casual-shirt wearers, Dimitroff saw a puzzled Stephanie. “Why are you so dressed up?” she asked. All he could do was smile. He’d never thought so much about clothes in his life.
Blank sat next to Marcus for a moment and then stood for a big third-down play for the Falcons’ defense. They didn’t make the stop.
“No! No!” the sixty-nine-year-old owner yelled, jumping up and down in front of his ninety-six-year-old mother, Molly. It was a humorous scene and a bit unusual, but Molly gave a slight smile and continued to focus on the game. Blank left the general box and returned to the small room with Dimitroff.
The Falcons were able to score on San Francisco, but not enough to take the lead, so they trailed 14–13 with two minutes to play. Darryl Orlando Ledbetter of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution once joked that Smith likely doesn’t know who Beyoncé or Kobe Bryant is, but you can’t sneak much football information by him. The team had heard all of Smith’s numbers about close games in the NFL, how 25 percent of games in the league are decided by 3 points or fewer and nearly half are decided by 8 or fewer points. His mission, he liked to explain, was to be the least-penalized team in the league and take care of the football, because the percentages told you that the game would likely be decided by a fourth-quarter drive.
Based on those stats, the Falcons were exactly where they wanted to be against the 49ers. Dimitroff’s first draft pick, quarterback Matt Ryan, was leading the team down the field for a possible winning field goal. But he made a mistake. The man Vital identified before the game, Clements, leapt out of nowhere in zone coverage and intercepted Ryan’s attempt. The stadium groaned. Clements certainly looked great on the play, not at all inhibited by quick-twitch deficiencies.
But the problem was that he kept running. If he’d simply slid to the turf and gave himself up, the 49ers would have had the ability to run out the clock and win the game. Clements seemed unaware of the game situation and ran for the end zone. He didn’t notice Falcons receiver Roddy White running behind him, and he didn’t secure the football, so after racing for thirty-nine yards Clements allowed White to poke the ball out of his hands and to the turf. It was the kind of play, defined by urgent athleticism, Dimitroff had been preaching about since he became GM. While he was college scouting director in New England, Dimitroff saw the Patriots win a play-off game in San Diego when Troy Brown made a play similar to White’s and saved the season.
A play-off game in January is more dramatic than game four in October, but the excitement could be felt in the crowd of more than sixty-six thousand fans. Atlanta recovered the ball, at its own seven, and after some smart passes from Ryan to White and a key third-down conversion from Ryan to Gonzalez, kicker Matt Bryant was in position for the winning field goal. He attempted a forty-three-yarder, and at first it looked like something that Phil Niekro used to throw all those years for the Braves. But then it corrected itself and tumbled through the uprights.
Atlanta 16, San Francisco 14.
“I hate sloppy football,” Dimitroff says three hours after the game. “It irritates me. I know it’s a win, but I struggle with inconsistency. Our job is to limit inconsistency with our coaches, our scouts, and our players.”
Inconsistency may have been a problem during the game, but Dimitroff was confident it wasn’t going to last the entire season. The Falcons, at 3–1, were good and he knew it. Yes, they were going to have to fight off occasional inconsistency. But they weren’t going to have to remake their offense. They weren’t going to have to trade away their number one receiver because he was being a distraction. In a couple days, the whole league would know: That was a story the Patriots would have to deal with.