Ralph Marchant recognizes the look on the face of his college roommate, Scott Pioli. He’s seen them all in the past twenty-five, going on thirty, years, and none of them require an explanation. When you’ve known a guy since you were both teenagers, when you’ve won and lost big games with him, seen him be a knucklehead, seen him be a Friday-night scholar who wanted to study film when everyone else in the college crowd wanted to go drinking, laughed and cried with him, watched him humbly climb to the top of his profession, and celebrated Super Bowl victories with him, it’s easy to know what he’s thinking.
It’s January 9, the morning of the Kansas City Chiefs’ first home play-off game in seven years. Marchant, sitting on a couch in the Piolis’ family room, notices that his friend is unknowingly pacing. Pioli is trying to make sure he has everything he needs before leaving the house and heading to Arrowhead for a game against a team, the Baltimore Ravens, that he knows is better than his.
“You’ve got that look, like you’ve run to the field and forgotten your helmet in the locker room,” Marchant says.
Pioli laughs and agrees with him. It’s the look of game day, along with the anticipation and stomach knots that come with it, and it never leaves as long as you’re a part of competitive sports. At Central Connecticut in the 1980s, when Pioli and Marchant were both on the defensive line, Pioli could have an impact on the game with his play. But now his battered white-and-blue college helmet rests on a shelf in his home office, and he knows he’s done all he can to help the Chiefs win in the postseason for the first time since 1993. No more drafting, trading, waiver wiring, or roster massaging. This is it.
As soon as Pioli gets into his car for the drive to the game, he cycles through his playlist and finds the artist whose words frequently dance in his head. Bruce. “Youngstown” plays, and then “The Promised Land” as Pioli drives through the neighborhoods of Kansas City, a town he has grown to love. He points to grand houses, well-kept parks, and the breathtaking Nelson-Atkins Art Museum. The University of Missouri—Kansas City is nearby, and it’s where Beth Emery, wife of the Chiefs’ college scouting director, is a graduate student in studio art. Scott and Dallas have fallen for Beth’s oil paintings, with one hanging near their family room, and the local art scene in general. Although he would never bring it up in a press conference, Pioli has such dreams of what it would be like to win a championship for this region, and especially for the Hunts, that he sometimes allows himself to think of the perfect place in town to celebrate.
But the Chiefs are a long way from that point. They won ten games and captured the AFC West, yet they were the only division champ in the league to have a losing record, 2–4, within their division. Along with Pioli, many of the current Chiefs assistant coaches were in New England nearly a decade earlier when another dismissed team was able to surge to the Super Bowl. Charlie Weis, Romeo Crennel, Anthony Pleasant, and Otis Smith were all in New Orleans when the Patriot mystique was born in February 2002. Pioli isn’t thinking about that now as a light snow falls and dusts the city roads.
“Some of our players have never played in this,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t freak them out.”
The players will be fine. What’s starting to get to Pioli is that soon he won’t be able to help his team. He’ll just be a guy in a black suit, white shirt, red tie, and Chiefs lapel pin, hoping for the best. As he drives toward the stadium, he stops to speak with a group of tailgating fans.
“No matter what happens,” one of the fans says, “it’s been a great year.”
“We’re not ready to go home yet,” Pioli replies.
A few feet ahead, he speaks with another group and they all agree that it’s really not that cold outside. The temperature won’t crack 30 all day, and the wind chill will make it feel half as “warm.” They wish him luck and send him off into game mode. There’s no question he’s there now. A yellow moving truck is blocking the area where he usually parks, and it seems as if the sun itself is sitting there in front of him with PENSKE printed on it. He’s agitated that this, of all things, is preventing him from going inside and getting into his routine. When the minor traffic jam is untangled, Pioli is able to go into a small locker room that has two side-by-side dressing stalls with Chiefs-themed nameplates above them. One of them reads SCOTT PIOLI. The other one reads MIA PIOLI. Mia, wearing her bejeweled number 7 Matt Cassel jersey, will arrive later. For now, it’s time to see if the Chiefs are ready to play a group of Baltimore veterans who believe they are tough and talented enough to go anywhere and beat anybody.
When both teams take the field, minutes before kickoff, they hear a wall of sound. This is why Arrowhead is called the loudest place in the NFL. It’s a football crowd with rock-concert pipes. It’s seventy-thousand-plus people who are truly from both sides of the tracks, Kansas and Missouri, and they cheer with a hunger that suggests they’re looking for good football and perhaps something life-changing, too. Joe Posnanski found that out when he was a Kansas City Star columnist for thirteen years. During football season, the top ten stories on the paper’s website would be dominated by anything related to football coverage: columns, game stories, sidebars, off-day stories, and notes. While Pioli had his share of “What’s your name again?” episodes in New England, Posnanski says it will never happen in Kansas City.
“If the mayor was speaking one place and Scott was somewhere else doing the same thing, he’d outdraw the mayor a hundred to one,” he says. “I couldn’t possibly overstate how big the Chiefs are in Kansas City. There’s nothing like it. The Chiefs are the one thing that brings people together. Whether it’s the Kansas side and the Missouri side or the inner city and the suburbs, the Chiefs are the one thing that can unite everybody.”
The fans are as loud as usual in the first quarter, but the Ravens still take the ball at their own thirty and drive all the way to the Kansas City one. They try to surprise the Chiefs with a third-down pass to tight end Todd Heap, but rookie safety Eric Berry sees the play develop, gets into position, and the Ravens have to settle for a field goal. It’s a small victory, although Baltimore was able to possess the ball for nearly six minutes. The Chiefs, meanwhile, take just forty seconds to run through their first three plays before it’s time to punt.
Few people in Kansas City are aware of the depths of it, but there’s some tension between offensive coordinator Weis and head coach Todd Haley. They had their share of clashes during the regular season, but with Haley, that’s not necessarily a story. He has fought with some of his best friends while playing pickup basketball and once got into a scrum with his brother-in-law on a basketball court, even though they were playing on the same team at the time. It’s not that intense with Weis, but Haley hasn’t gotten to the total trust/comfort level with him that he has with his new defensive coordinator, Crennel. It wasn’t much of an issue during the regular season, when the Chiefs ran the ball more and better than any team in football. But Weis and Haley had already decided they’d be better off not working together. Before parting ways, they’d eventually have one more thing over which to disagree and debate.
After driving from their own fifteen toward midfield, the Ravens run into a 275-pound problem. Chiefs linebacker Tamba Hali is able to get to Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco, strip-sack him, and recover the ball at the Ravens’ forty-six. Two plays later, Jamaal Charles goes from running back to sprinter and bursts into the end zone for a forty-one-yard touchdown. There’s a what-if moment in every game, and the Chiefs face it early in the second quarter. They have the lead, the ball, and the thought that they are going to do what the Ravens believe most teams can’t against them: run. An offensive Raven doesn’t come to your mind’s eye when you think of the team, and players such as Ray Lewis, Haloti Ngata, Ed Reed, and Terrell Suggs like it that way. In another era, they’d be the kind of guys who’d go into bars and challenge anyone to arm-wrestle. But the Chiefs take the ball at their own fourteen and start to get into a running rhythm on the Ravens.
Charles for eleven.
Charles for eight.
Charles for nine.
As they eat up yards, the red-clad wall of sound with them for every foot, the Chiefs are inspiring everyone to think of the possibilities. If they score a touchdown and have Baltimore down 14–3, it will force the Ravens to play a game they really don’t want to. An eight-yard pass from Cassel to Thomas Jones has the Chiefs at the fifty, and it’s fair to say that they are controlling the game. But they lose control on the very next play, a Charles fumble, and Baltimore is able to hang on to the ball and the pace of the game. Remarkably, the Chiefs have yet another opportunity to take control just five minutes after Charles’s fumble. They were able to hold the Ravens and are once more driving, going from their thirteen to near midfield again. This time, though, the mistake is a mental one: On third and three, in an area of the field where the bold Haley might authorize a fourth-down attempt if necessary, left tackle Branden Albert is called for a false start. It completely changes the game situation, pushes the Chiefs back five yards for a third and eight, and when Kansas City can’t convert, it gives the Ravens life.
Flacco takes his team from its own twenty to the Chiefs’ nine. He’s gotten them here by following a game plan in which the idea is to get tight end Todd Heap in situations where he’s matched up with linebackers. Heap was able to catch three passes for forty-six yards during the middle of the drive. Now it’s nearing the end, with a third and two with fewer than thirty seconds remaining in the first half. Flacco is able to fully complete his work with a nine-yard touchdown pass to Ray Rice for a 10–7 halftime lead.
On all levels of Arrowhead, there are frustrated Chiefs. Pioli watched his old team in New England participate in seventeen of these play-off games. He understands that games in January and February generally are unforgiving when it comes to mistakes. You use the hammer when you have it, otherwise you find yourself locked in an uncomfortable game of chance. Pioli stands near the press-box elevators. His face is red, and he has so many thoughts about the missed opportunities in the first half that he doesn’t have a complete sentence for what he just saw. Downstairs in the locker room, things are more verbal. Haley is upset that the Chiefs’ Pro Bowl receiver, Dwayne Bowe, wasn’t targeted more. He caught seventy-two balls in the regular season, fifteen of them for touchdowns, but he was completely shut out in the first half. Haley thinks some of it was the Ravens’ defense, some of it was Bowe, and some of it was squarely on Weis. But as much as he disagreed with some of the things Weis was calling, Haley knew that there couldn’t be any in-game switching. On offense, at least, this was Weis’s game to call.
One minute into the third, the Chiefs get a break. Cassel had tried to find rookie tight end Tony Moeaki across the middle, but the ball was intercepted by defensive back Haruki Nakamura. Charles stayed with the play, forced Nakamura to fumble, and recovered for the Chiefs. So now they are driving again with a fresh set of downs from their own thirty-two. On a third and nine, Cassel finds Charles for fifteen yards. On the next play, Jones runs for ten. They’ve got something here, this time much deeper than before. They have a third and two at the Ravens’ thirty-four. Jones runs up the middle for a yard, and the rapid headset conversations about the fourth-down play begin.
Haley is a believer in going for it on fourth down. He worked for Bill Parcells for seven years in two cities, and Parcells was as aggressive on fourth as any of his peers. Bill Belichick was an advocate of going for it on fourth down, too, so much so that he once did it from his own twenty-eight. Haley doesn’t need to be sold on going for it, although he doesn’t like the play that Weis is proposing. He’s told that it’s very likely the featured runner, Charles, will not just pick up the first but wind up in the end zone. Haley’s instincts tug at him and tell him to overrule the call. But he doesn’t. For a split second he thinks of calling a time-out, correctly sensing that a play like this can change the game. Still, as important as the play is, they are barely five minutes into the third, and you can’t be so casual with time-outs in a game this close.
It’s fourth and one from the thirty-three. The Chiefs send their jumbo reinforcements to the field, with the six-hundred-plus pounds of Jon Asamoah and Shaun Smith. This is part of the deception. Weis wants the Ravens to think about the plunge up the middle, while the Chiefs’ true plan is to get Charles and his trackstar speed on the edge. If the Ravens don’t sniff out the play, Weis will look like a genius because no one on defense will be able to catch Charles if he gets a head start. Problem is, no one is fooled. Strong safety Dawan Landry sees that Cassel has flicked the ball to Charles, moving outside, and Landry is there instantly to blow it up. He tackles Charles for a four-yard loss. It’s one of the first times all day that there’s been a pause in the wall of sound.
The Ravens take the great field position and turn it into a field goal, for a 13–7 lead. After getting the ball back, the Chiefs look sloppy. Cassel is called for an intentional grounding penalty, he’s then sacked by Suggs, and his eight-yard pass to rookie Dexter McCluster turns into a fumble that Baltimore recovers. The Ravens add another field goal and it’s 16–7. It’s still just the third quarter, but the Chiefs are crumbling. When Cassel gets back on the field, he throws another interception, and this time there are no more defensive stands to minimize the damage. The Ravens find the end zone this time, Flacco to Anquan Boldin, and it’s 23–7.
It’s officially a meltdown.
Dallas Pioli sits outside one of the Arrowhead suites, draped in a stadium blanket. Despite what Scott and the tailgating fans said before the game, it is bitterly cold, and that reality begins to sink in with the increasingly lopsided score. Dallas has been around the NFL her entire life. She has seen dozens of games like this in which her father’s or husband’s team didn’t perform as well as expected, and she has seen the brightest smiles of both men as they’ve cradled the Lombardi Trophy. She’s an expert on the NFL that few people see; she’s seen some of the all-time greats when their guards are down, when they’re sincerely speaking and not giving press-conference spin, when they’re in the family den truly celebrating or sulking over what happened at work. She knows that this is going to be a sulking night. She stays outside longer than most because she wants to be supportive of the team, but she’s also taking a few minutes to gather her thoughts and think of supportive things to say to Scott later.
Inside the suite, Ralph Marchant is talking with his son, Louis, and two of Pioli’s closest friends from high school, Matt Spencer and Paul McHugh. Dallas eventually joins them and says, “Okay, guys. What should I say to my husband?” No one has any good answers for later or for what’s happening on the field. It is now a showcase between two teams playing in the quietest stadium in the league. The place has cleared, save for a few Chiefs loyalists and a couple hundred Ravens fans who have made the trip from Baltimore. The score has ballooned to 30–7. The Chiefs have produced just two first downs and twenty-five yards in the second half. Bowe hasn’t caught a single ball. If anything, this is quite the humbling reminder of what Pioli and his staff have to do in the off-season.
The game is officially over, so Dallas and Mia and their weekend guests make their way to the small locker room where Pioli began his day. He has changed from his suit to jeans and a sweatshirt, preparing for a postgame tradition where he plays catch on the field with Mia. Pioli notices that everyone in the room is feeling sorry for him, and he tries to put them at ease by saying he knew all along just how much work the Chiefs had to do before they could expect to win games like these. It’s clearly a defense mechanism. He’s hurting, but he doesn’t want the pity.
They all move outside and quickly see an emotional Jen Vrabel, who knows her husband better than anyone and is sure that this is the end of the thirty-five-year-old linebacker’s career. Many of the players whom Mike Vrabel won and bonded with in New England have been cut and traded, or they’ve retired and moved on to cushy TV jobs. The Piolis try to reassure Jen of Mike’s important contributions to the Chiefs. There are hugs and good-byes, and just before Scott and Mia head to the field, there is a voice from above. A few fans are leaning on a railing that overlooks the lot where cars and buses are parked. They recognize the general manager of the Chiefs and have something they want to say to him.
“Thank you for the season, Mr. Pioli,” one of the young fans says.
Pioli looks up and gives a respectful wave. He appreciates the support, but this is not how the story unfolds when he thinks of that winning celebration that both Missourians and Kansans can enjoy. He’ll play catch with Mia until she gets too tired and wants to go home. And in the morning, he’ll get back to work.
On a Saturday night in Atlanta, a city that knows how to host a party, the best show in town promises to be at the Georgia Dome. The Falcons are the top seed in the NFC for the first time in thirty years, and they are a few minutes away from playing the Green Bay Packers in a divisional play-off game. As a huge American flag covers the field and sixty-nine thousand people shout their approval, Thomas Dimitroff notices that Stephanie Blank is trying to get his attention.
“Aren’t you proud of this?” she says.
Dimitroff nods to the wife of the Falcons’ owner and smiles at what he sees on the field. He’s proud of the Falcons for putting themselves in this position, and he’s proud of the fans for believing in what they’ve built in just three years. But he wants the same thing for the Falcons that Stephanie’s husband wants for his businesses. Reliability. Consumer trust. Greatness. Dimitroff came to Atlanta with a vision of how to build a winner, and spending time with Arthur Blank, one of the most successful men in the country, has only enhanced it.
The general manager remembers the day when he was playing golf with Arthur at Augusta National. Dimitroff was wearing golf pants from a competitor of the golf retailer, PGA Tour Superstore, in which Blank has an ownership stake. When Dimitroff explained that he went to the PGA store and it didn’t have the size 32 golf pants he needed, Blank was on the phone within seconds. “If our general manager had that experience, how many other people did as well?” he said that day. “Let’s make sure we get more thirty-twos in there.”
Blank wants to win desperately, and he’ll sort through the smallest details to make it happen. So will Dimitroff. Unfortunately for them on this night, so will the quarterback of the Packers.
A few minutes into the second quarter, Aaron Rodgers finds receiver Jordy Nelson for a six-yard scoring play that ties the score at 7. Before anyone in the dome has time to have doubts, returner Eric Weems takes the Green Bay kickoff and returns it for a playoff-record 102 yards and a touchdown. Trailing 14–7 and starting from their own eight, the Packers glide through the Atlanta defense, with Rodgers completing five of six passes, and tie the score again five minutes later.
There are a couple of developing problems. One is that this is not the Falcons’ game. They aren’t a shoot-out team, and if they’re forced to play this style the entire game they’ll be in trouble. There’s also the matter of Rodgers. He appears to be indefensible. He’s running like Michael Vick but throwing with more accuracy. He’s flashing the arm strength of a young Brett Favre but is making better decisions. He’s showing the ability to escape like Fran Tarkenton used to do, but his scrambles are efficient and controlled. He is pitching the football equivalent of a perfect game, and the feeling is that if the Falcons don’t have some type of score each time they touch the ball, they won’t be able to beat him.
The Falcons’ first mistakes are made by Pro Bowl quarterback Matt Ryan. He has helped the team drive to the Packers’ fourteen, but a seven-yard sack takes the Falcons out of the red zone, and a third-and-long attempt to receiver Michael Jenkins ends with a Tramon Williams interception in the end zone. Ninety seconds later, after again completing five of six passes on the drive, Rodgers has the Packers celebrating another touchdown and a 21–14 lead.
Dimitroff shakes his head in his box, a similar reaction to most of the people in the building. They’re witnessing one of the most spellbinding performances in league play-off history. But Ryan, with the help of back-to-back pass-interference calls, still has time to lead a drive that can end with at least a field goal before halftime. On a play from the Packers’ twenty-six, Ryan takes a costly nine-yard sack, which forces Falcons coach Mike Smith to use his last time-out of the half. With ten seconds to play, Smith and offensive coordinator Mike Mularkey want to run something quick that will get the team slightly closer for kicker Matt Bryant. But Williams has help over the top, and he’s waiting for Ryan to throw the out, the one pass Williams is sitting on. Ryan throws to the left sideline and Williams steps in front of it at the thirty, secures the football, and races seventy yards to the end zone. It’s 28–14 at halftime, which is bad news, and it’s going to get even worse: The Packers will begin the third quarter with the ball.
As the third quarter begins, everyone in the dome understands the unofficial rules to the game. If the Packers score on their opening drive, it’s over. It takes six and a half minutes for it to happen, and Rodgers repeats his scoring formula by completing five of six passes on the drive, but after the quarterback runs for a seven-yard score, it’s 35–14. And the best party in Atlanta, which had so much potential at eight o’clock, flops before ten.
When it’s finally over, Dimitroff stands in the interview room waiting to hear what Smith has to say about the embarrassing 48–21 loss. The GM’s wife, Angeline, is sitting in one of the back rows of the room and spots him. “I’m sorry” she mouths from across the room, and leaves her seat to stand next to him. He has several family members in town, from Ohio and Canada, including his mother, Helen. The wife of a longtime coach and the mother of a pro executive, Helen had watched from a dome suite and said, “I don’t know who those guys are out there. They’ve got the uniforms of the Falcons, but those aren’t the Falcons.”
Eventually Arthur Blank enters the room, and after a round of questioning from the media, Smith goes to his office to digest what he saw. He won’t like it, but he’ll appreciate the craftsmanship of Rodgers, who finished the night 31 of 36 for 366 yards, three passing touchdowns, and one rushing. But there was even more to the story. When Smith was an assistant coach, he would watch practice and make notes on his script when something stood out to him that he wanted to watch later. As soon as practice would end, he would hustle ahead of the other coaches so he could get back to the office to see if the film confirmed what he thought he saw. He did the same with Rodgers.
“There were five instances when we had free defenders, unblocked, who had an opportunity to get Rodgers, and all five times he was able to get away,” Smith says. “I mean, five free defenders? That’s a lot for a game. I think there was just one throw of his that traveled more than twenty yards in the air, the entire game. So that tells you how precise he was of moving the ball and directing the team. There were some gains after catches, but as far as twenty-plus-yard throws in the air, he had one.”
Outside of Smith’s office, Les Snead and Nick Polk allow themselves to get into a debate with sportswriter Pete Prisco over number one receivers in the NFL. Snead is the Falcons’ player personnel director and Polk is their director of football administration. One of Prisco’s points is that the Packers truly don’t have one and that Rodgers makes them all look better than they are. They go ’round and ’round before Snead admits why the topic is of any interest to him.
“The only reason I’m having this conversation with you, Peter,” he says, “is that it’s keeping me from stewing over what I just saw.”
It’s close to midnight, and soon Dimitroff will go back to a house full of friends and family members who will want to know what happened but will be too respectful to ask. Finding out what happened, talking about it, and fixing it isn’t just Dimitroff’s job. It’s an obsession. He knows the loss is going to feel even worse on Sunday morning. A top seed loses at home. By Sunday night, the Falcons won’t be the only team with that headline.
When the Patriots and New York Jets played in Foxboro on December 6, it was 27 degrees with a wind-chill factor of 15. Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez stepped on the field for pregame drills and mentally checked out of the game before it started.
“It’s too cold for football,” he said with both of his hands stuffed into the warmer around his waist. The Patriots won that game, 45–3, with Sanchez barely completing half of his thirty-three passes and throwing three interceptions.
As he often does, Bill Belichick sat in his office after that game talking football with his youngest son, Brian. From the moment he was able to pick up a football and throw it, Brian had an interest in playing and dissecting the game, just like his father. Belichick was asked how the Patriots had so much success against the Jets’ defense. They had compiled 405 yards of offense and Tom Brady had thrown four touchdown passes. “You’ve just got to beat man coverage,” Belichick answered. “That’s what they play ninety-five percent of the time.”
It’s six and a half weeks later, January 16, and the Jets have returned to Foxboro for a divisional play-off game. Rex Ryan, the most media-savvy head coach the Jets have had since Bill Parcells a decade earlier, opened his Monday press conference with a bold statement: The game would be won by whichever head coach was better, him or Belichick. Ryan provided a lot of sound bites during that session with the media, but he left out the most significant reason for his confidence. The biggest difference between his December game plan and the one he planned to use for the play-off game?
His identical twin brother, Rob.
Rob Ryan, a former Patriots linebackers coach under Belichick, had coauthored the best game plan of the season against the high-scoring Patriots. He was the Browns’ defensive coordinator on November 7, when they came out of their bye week and surprised the Patriots, 34–14. New England fell to 6–2 after that loss and then won eight consecutive games, scoring thirty-plus points in all of them. Rob Ryan couldn’t help his brother in December because he had his own business to worry about in Cleveland. But when head coach Eric Mangini and his assistants were fired on January 3, it freed up Rob to talk specifics with Rex.
Cleveland had been the anti-Jets against the Patriots in November. The Browns threw a combination of two-, three-, and four-deep blitz zones at the Patriots and even went as far as coming up with completely different plans for the first and second half. Browns players must have heard it fifty times that week in practice from the coaches: “We’re not necessarily trying to come up with the perfect call; we just want to make sure Brady doesn’t know what’s coming. We can’t show a pattern or he’ll kill us.”
Rex Ryan had shown an obvious pattern in December: man coverage. He had a different take after listening to the brother who once took his ACT test for him so he could go fishing instead. The Browns had been able to hold the ball for thirty-eight minutes against the Patriots, and they’d intentionally lingered on defense, too. Their logic was that they didn’t want to make it easy for the perceptive Brady to identify the middle, or Mike, linebacker. Rapid identification of the Mike allowed Brady to set the protection for the offensive line and break down a defense. The obvious advantage the Jets had over the Browns was that they were a much better team, so they could afford to take the essence of Cleveland’s strategy and tweak it to suit their superior personnel.
Early in the play-off game, it doesn’t appear that the Jets’ defense is any more complex than it was in December. The Patriots have taken the ball from their own sixteen and driven to the New York twenty-eight. But Brady overthrows a screen to BenJarvus Green-Ellis—a pass he has made effortlessly hundreds of times, albeit this time it’s to a back not known for catching the football—and it’s intercepted by linebacker David Harris. It’s Brady’s first interception in an NFL-record 335 attempts. The Gillette Stadium crowd gasps at the interception, but even more surprising than the turnover is the fact that Harris is caught from behind by Alge Crumpler. The Patriots tight end is listed at 275 pounds but appears to be just as big as Jets left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson, listed at 307. The Jets miss a short field-goal attempt, and the Patriots begin to drive again.
This time they move from their twenty-one to the New York seven. Brady places the ball perfectly in the hands of Crumpler, a former Falcon who used to be one of Michael Vick’s favorite targets. But Crumpler drops the ball and the Patriots get a field goal out of the possession. It’s the best they can do for a half, and the New York defensive strategy begins to reveal itself. The Jets have effectively created traffic jams in the middle of the field and challenged the Patriots’ receivers to beat man coverage on the perimeter. Often, they can’t. It’s a sluggish game, 7–3 Jets, with just over a minute left in the half. The Patriots have a breakdown so a fake punt is on although it’s not supposed to be. It doesn’t work, and the Jets take over the ball at the New England thirty-seven.
Sanchez was clearly affected by the cold night in December, but a few more degrees and no vicious Northeastern wind has made a huge difference for him in January. He puts the Jets up 14–3 at the half by making a strong fifteen-yard throw to Braylon Edwards for a touchdown.
Late in the third, the Jets still leading 14–3, Brady continues to look unsure. He has been sacked three times and is having trouble finding anyone, other than Deion Branch, who can get open on the perimeter. But the Patriots finally spring a big play over the middle when rookie Rob Gronkowski, whose ten touchdown receptions in the regular season were a team rookie record, catches a pass and gains thirty-seven yards. The play takes them from their twenty to the New York forty-three, and seven plays later Brady hits Crumpler with a ball that the big tight end holds on to for a touchdown. A successful two-point conversion makes it 14–11 going into the fourth quarter.
The Jets, beginning with Ryan, spent the week leading up to the game saying what they were going to do in New England. It started innocently enough, with the made-for-the-tabloids bravado of Ryan. It got edgier later in the week when Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie referred to Brady as “an asshole.” And after Wes Welker held a press conference in which he found creative ways to mention feet, a reference to Ryan’s supposed foot fetish, Jets linebacker Bart Scott warned, “His days in a uniform are numbered.” The constant talk got the attention of NFL executives, who instructed all playoff teams to be mindful of their rhetoric. You don’t have to work very hard to get a New Englander’s opinion on mouthy New Yorkers, so there was more local anticipation and intensity than usual for the game. But the local intensity had nothing to do with local fear. The December game had been all the proof that most fans needed that the Patriots wouldn’t lose this game to the Jets. They’d gotten open at will and Sanchez sounded and looked like he wanted to be next to a fireplace.
In the fourth quarter, history is irrelevant. Sanchez, who threw eight interceptions in his previous two games in Foxboro, finds Jerricho Cotchery for a fifty-eight-yard completion to the New England thirteen. A few plays later, he connects with Santonio Holmes for a seven-yard touchdown pass that puts the Jets up 21–11.
It’s beginning to become real to the sixty-eight thousand fans at the game and millions more watching across six states. A loss to the Jets? In the play-offs? Awful. No matter what happens going forward, whether the Jets win the Super Bowl or even make it there, Patriots fans are going to have to hear about this game, narrated in Jersey, Queens, and Long Island accents. That’s how it is when you’re within two hundred miles of your rivals who share your DNA but not your allegiances. You know how they think and vice versa, and the only consolation for your own letdowns is the knowledge that they’re miserable, too. It’s bad enough when they have joy, but when their joy is linked to your heartbreak, it’s humiliating.
And that’s the way it was on the field and in the stands after the Jets were able to walk away with a 28–21 victory. Branch called the New Yorkers classless and Scott said the New Englanders’ defense couldn’t stop a nosebleed. The words didn’t change anything. For the second year in a row, Belichick had to confront another play-off “first” in New England. The previous January, there was the loss to the Ravens, the first home play-off loss in Belichick’s ten Patriots seasons. In January 2011, it wasn’t just a loss at home, it was a loss as a number one seed in the divisional round, which had never happened to a team that had Belichick as the head or assistant coach.
Belichick was used to 14–2 teams high-fiving and patting each other on the back after these games in January. These games were the reason he and Scott Pioli had talked about being weeks behind in the scouting process, because they couldn’t attend all-star games like the Senior Bowl in Mobile. They couldn’t, past-tense. They were busy preparing for conference championships and Super Bowls. But in January 2011, Pioli, Belichick, and Dimitroff would all be in Mobile, gazing at the play-off lives of other teams, the same way other teams used to gaze at them.
The three of them have vastly different personalities, yet they were all experiencing the same feeling. It was a gnawing that wouldn’t go away, equal parts anger and shame. Not once when they all worked together, not a single time, had they gone to the play-offs and come away with nothing. Hell, even the Cleveland Browns, where Belichick missed the play-offs in four of his five seasons there, were able to win in January the one time they made it to the postseason.
There are no champions of the regular season. It’s the reason people praised Bill Parcells, Mike Holmgren, Jon Gruden, and Chuck Noll, although Marty Schottenheimer has a higher career winning percentage than all of them. Schottenheimer doesn’t have the rings, though, while the quartet he towers over in the regular season has a combined eight.
It’s what Pioli was hinting at when he had his interview in Dallas. How do you call yourself dominant at anything when you don’t win a play-off game in eighteen years and win just three in the last twenty-one? He was a part of that dubious Chiefs streak now, and his challenge was to build a team that could break it. It’s why Dimitroff had been so annoyed in 2009 when his team missed the play-offs. The only thing worse than missing them is losing in them. For all the praise that the counterculture GM had gotten from the mainstream, and he was on the verge of winning his second executive-of-the-year award in three years, his point was never to come to Atlanta and be known as a renaissance man who loves football. The mission was to create a contender, not a team that still had a link to Michael Vick: Despite Dimitroff’s awards and his drafting of a new quarterback, the last time the Falcons won a play-off game, 2004, was the height of the Vick era.
It’s why Belichick undersold everything in the regular season. It’s why he didn’t have or crave the entertainment gene that his Jets counterpart, Ryan, possessed. Twelve wins, thirteen, or sixteen—no one cared if you didn’t close the deal. Belichick and the Patriots found that out in 2007, coming so close to doing what was supposed to be impossible in a league so anchored in parity and balance. But since that night in the desert, when the Patriots were a couple minutes away from perfection, they’d missed the playoffs one year and been bounced from them in the first and divisional round the other two.
These three decision-makers all had something to prove. There wasn’t even a debate about that. They felt the pressure to prove it, and so did everyone around them.