Once a week, the five of them met in a tiny Foxboro Stadium room and shared their precocious football thoughts. It was Bill Belichick, Charlie Weis, and the three quarterbacks, in order of the depth chart: Tom Brady, Drew Bledsoe, and Damon Huard. Two of the men, Belichick and Bledsoe, rarely spoke directly to each other, but that didn’t seem to matter. The important things were always covered, and that’s one of the reasons they could live with the dysfunction without it becoming destructive.
Well, that and the performance of the team. It was late November and a year that seemed to be lost was now being salvaged. The Patriots were actually winning some games, and there was a chance they could make the play-offs. Because of this, a season wasn’t the only thing being saved; a city’s potential for optimism was. It was hardly news that people in Boston monogrammed their sports teams and consistently made the business of the games personal. That’s the way it was, they were used to it, and no seminar on balance and proper perspective was going to change it.
The sports year hadn’t been all that encouraging, and the bitterness of it could be heard and felt in the city’s casual conversations. Predictably, Rick Pitino quit the Celtics. The surprise was that he did it after a road game in Miami, with no plan to return to Boston for an explanation. He never produced a winning team in Boston, but he did have a read on the city that wasn’t wholly unfair: “All the negativity that’s in this town sucks. I’ve been around when Jim Rice was booed. I’ve been around when Yastrzemski was booed. And it stinks. It makes the greatest town, greatest city in the world, lousy.” Nomar Garciaparra, frustrated with Red Sox personnel decisions, shouted after a loss to the hated Yankees, “That’s why no one wants to fucking play here.” The comment stung, and it just seemed to be destiny that the New Yorkers would go to the World Series, again, while the Sox would mark eighty-three years without a championship. The Bruins had gone through five goaltenders and two head coaches, on their way to missing the postseason for the second consecutive year. Then there was that ferocious hit on Bledsoe that was scary only well after the fact, when the quarterback realized that it could have killed him.
It turns out that Tom Brady had prophesied more than two months earlier without even knowing it. On the day that he officially became the Patriots’ backup, he told reporters that the team would eventually need contributions from all three of its quarterbacks. That’s exactly what was happening: Brady was the starter, Bledsoe was his backup, and Damon Huard was on levity/atmospherics duty. The Brady-Bledsoe debate had consumed the region for weeks, and then it had gone national. There were several teams better than the 5-5 Patriots, but none had a more compelling in-house drama.
“Drew was pissed every day coming into work,” Ty Law says. “I don’t give a damn what he says. He was pissed. He wasn’t the same person, because he wanted to get back on the field. He had a bad injury and he got knocked out. He wasn’t a happy camper.”
The Brady-Bledsoe watch started in earnest with Brady’s debut as a starter, on the last day of September. The Patriots had managed just 3 points the week before, but that number ballooned to 44 with an emphatic win over the Colts. It quickly decelerated the next week with a loss to the Dolphins and a lean eighty-six-yard passing day from Brady. “A week later the question isn’t whether Brady ought to be starting in place of Bledsoe,” George Kimball wrote in the Boston Herald, “but whether or not Bill Belichick will pull the trigger and make Damon Huard his quarterback when the Patriots entertain the Chargers.”
Belichick stayed with Brady, and it picked up again with a victory that would have looked familiar to anyone who saw Brady at Michigan: The team was down 10 points with four minutes to play and, miraculously, Brady led them to an overtime win and threw for 364 yards. Just as impressive was the next week when, for the second time in less than a month, the Patriots blew out the Colts. Belichick was usually understated after games, especially ones so early in the season, but the 38–17 triumph inspired him to reflect.
“When I think about this game and two of the key players, David Patten and Tom Brady, probably the guy that’s most responsible for both those players being here is Dick Rehbein. We tried to sign David as a free agent a year ago, but lost him to Cleveland. When he became available again, Dick said, ‘Look, we can’t lose this guy.’ He vouched for how good a kid he was and what a good playmaker he was.
“The quarterback situation was one where, prior to the 2000 draft, with John Friesz getting up there in age, we felt we wanted to take a quarterback. I sent Dick to see two guys and he liked them both. But when I put his back to the wall he came on strong for Brady and said, ‘This is our guy.’ It’s with a great deal of gratitude that I say thank you to Dick. Even though he’s gone, he’s not forgotten by any of us.”
When Rehbein died in August, Belichick decided not to hire a new quarterbacks coach until after the season. In the meantime, he took on some of Rehbein’s responsibilities and met with the quarterbacks to go over coverages and tendencies, and also listened to their feedback and observations. The arrangement worked just fine then, and when Bledsoe got hurt he happily dispensed advice to Brady. He knew that if the kid kept the Patriots afloat, he could then resume his starting position and lead the team into the postseason.
But it sounded like Belichick believed that he had something special in Brady. The coach was usually a postgame minimalist. He wouldn’t have been that expansive in Indianapolis if the kid was a fluke, would he? The opinions began to stream in from all angles. Bill Parcells, still a respected voice in New England and now doing a national radio show, went on the air and was prescient prior to the next game, at Denver.
“Someday he is going to be in a game where he and his team take a beating, like 31–10 or something, and he throws four interceptions,” Parcells said of Brady. “The other players will be mad at him, the assistant coaches will look sideways at him, and he’ll finish the game with a broken nose.
“Now, what he does the next Wednesday, when he practices with the team for the first time, and what he does the week after that, is where he is going to find out what he is made of. It’s easy when you have a great start, and you haven’t gotten beat up yet. The great ones are the guys that go through the bad times and keep on getting better.”
On cue, Brady threw four interceptions in Denver and the Patriots collapsed in the fourth quarter. His nose wasn’t broken, but Brady’s momentum in the Brady-Bledsoe battle was. It returned the next two weeks with comfortable wins, one on the road against the Falcons and the other at home over the Bills. The team’s next game was its only scheduled national TV appearance, and it was against the Rams. They were the best team in the league by far, had won seven of their eight games, and halfway through the season, remarkably, their average win came via doubling the score of their opponents. They gave teams plenty to think about on their own, so any distraction during Rams week was more than an opponent could handle. The same was true of the Patriots. The week of the game, Bledsoe held a press conference at Massachusetts General Hospital with his doctors. He was cleared to play and, naturally, ready for the starting job. He had been away for seven games, and the team had gone 5-2 in his absence.
“I’ve been the starter on this team for eight years and I want to be the starter again,” Bledsoe said as he was flanked by the doctors. “I have to show I’m the guy for the job and the guy who gives us the best chance to win ball games.” He later added, “The guys still look to me. I still have a presence in the locker room.”
He had been the starter for those eight years, and so it didn’t seem fair that the erasure of the culture he’d known had taken place in mere weeks. He still had a presence in the locker room due to who he was as a man. His teammates could still love and respect him yet want Brady to remain the starter.
Besides, the shift at quarterback wasn’t the only difference on the team. The Patriots were benefitting from, perhaps, the most successful offseason in modern NFL history. The belittled free agency class, full of the rejected, repurposed, and discounted players, had turned up several productive starters. The first two selections in the draft, Richard Seymour and Matt Light, had become starters also. And the young veterans Belichick had re-signed in 2000, Troy Brown and Tedy Bruschi, made an improbable leap from complementary players to essential members of the core.
The Brady-Bledsoe undercard had already played out on defense. At the beginning of the season, the starting middle linebacker was the audacious Bryan Cox. He had been released by the Jets in a salary cap move, and had been scooped up by the Patriots on markdown. He was thirty-three, a veteran who was just a step away from retirement. But he knew all the inside tricks, he could work the officials, and, his shocked teammates quickly realized, he could play and speak the position as crudely as the situation called for.
“When Cox came in, he brought a new dimension to the meeting rooms, the locker room, and even a way to behave in front of the coaches,” Bruschi recalls. “He cracked us all up. He could be disgusting. He could mention sites that you’d never dream of visiting on the Internet. That’s just who he was; he was a hilarious and nasty dude.
“He would have conversations with our positional coaches in ways that were off the wall and aggressive, but still respectful. He would say it in his way if he had a suggestion, and he always found a way to stay within the framework of the team. But that type of communication was so valuable to us. Cox helped us develop that ‘F everybody else’ attitude. He’d have it with the other team, obviously. But sometimes he’d bring it to us. If the defensive line or someone else didn’t like the call from the linebackers, his position was, ‘F you. If you’ve got a problem with it, take it to the coaches.’”
In Brady’s first start, the play of the game was made by Cox, not the young quarterback. He crushed a receiver who had the nerve to cross him in the middle of the field. After the game, firmly in character, he gave a profane analysis of life in the NFL. The public-relations staff blushed, and the surprised TV stations that showed it live had to beg the Federal Communications Commission for forgiveness. But the team, which had lacked sufficient talent and aggression in 2000, loved it.
Brady’s worst game of the season, the four-interception game in Denver, was also a transitional moment for the defense. Cox absorbed a hit that he and his teammates believed was illegal, and the blow broke his leg. The injury provided an opening for Bruschi at inside linebacker. He was much shorter and lighter than Cox, but he used his quickness and instincts to play the position well enough to satisfy the exacting specifications of Belichick and defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel. When Cox neared a return to the field, he understood what was happening. He was a backup to the younger and now more talented Bruschi. Yet he roamed the locker room looking for media members that he could educate on team dynamics and the Brady-Bledsoe debate.
“Half of you guys have never played organized sports at this level or college, and you don’t understand how much damage you can do by just starting a bunch of mess,” Cox lectured. “To get caught up in who’s the guy, that’s taking away from both of those guys. Both of them are very capable, and I won’t get into it and I won’t take sides. Whoever is the starter, I’ll support. Whoever comes off the bench I’ll support. I ain’t feeding into that foolishness.”
Bledsoe prepared to take a good share of practice repetitions before the game against the Rams on November 18. He was disappointed when he didn’t get as much time as he’d envisioned. He sounded angry and looked hurt when Belichick told him the plan for the rest of the season shortly after a 24–17 loss to St. Louis: He was the backup. Brady was the starter.
Bledsoe’s return, in part, served as a reminder that there was nothing proprietary about player positions in the league. They were all tenants at will, the head coach included, and the comfortable slot could be flipped at any time for any reason. Belichick didn’t expect the players to understand it while they were playing; in fact, it was probably better that they didn’t think like he did as they prepared for this sport featuring millionaires masquerading as gladiators. Belichick couldn’t be inhibited by fear of criticism, public sentiment, or the uncomfortable moments that hovered during the weekly quarterback meetings.
Everyone wasn’t going to like him. Bledsoe wasn’t going to like him. But he insisted to Bledsoe, the rest of the team, ownership, and the media that he didn’t make this or any other decision simply for his own enjoyment.
Belichick was definitive, but the debate was an organism unto itself now. Brady or Bledsoe? You couldn’t straddle. You couldn’t take a long time to answer. You had to pick one. The Herald’s TV reporter, Jim Baker, talked with several ex-players and asked them what they thought.
Troy Aikman: “Right now, it’s the right decision to stick with Brady. Is he a better quarterback than Bledsoe? I don’t think so.”
Boomer Esiason: “I have a lot of respect for Drew, but frankly the team was not responding and not playing well under him… in this situation, the way the team has responded to Brady, I’d leave him in.”
Cris Collinsworth: “Maybe I’m crazy, but I think substitute quarterbacks can have a run and then scouting reports develop, teams start to figure them out, and you get game plans against them. In my heart, Bledsoe will be the guy down the stretch.”
The best comment of all, though, came from a general manager whom the newspaper quoted anonymously: “If they’re giving Brady the job because Bledsoe isn’t medically ready to play, it makes sense. If they think that Brady gives them a better chance of winning than a healthy Bledsoe, that’s another story. If that’s the case, they’re in trouble. It will be a while before they’ll see the play-offs.”
Belichick said he sought definition for one position; what he got instead was an entire team growing into its personality. Brady was a fast learner in all quarterbacking matters, and one of the subtle changes he made underlined a message to his teammates. While Bledsoe often drew such a large media crowd that his press conferences were held in a separate room, Brady refused to do it that way. He made a point of standing at his locker, with his peers nearby, to speak with reporters. It wasn’t practical, but it was in line with what the rest of the team was doing. He wanted the other players to always be mindful that he was one of them. That mentality encircled the team.
“It’s the most fun I ever had playing football,” Seymour says now. “We bonded. We joked together, had dinner together, and hung out together. Even the kids of players would hang out together. It was like we were a college team in the NFL. I just felt that on the field or personally, I’d be willing to do anything for those guys.”
Seymour wore number 93, and because the lockers were positioned numerically, his neighbor was number 95, Roman Phifer. They had both looked at New England from afar and hoped to be playing football elsewhere. Seymour was a southerner, from a small town in South Carolina, and the idea of the Northeast and its polar conditions didn’t appeal to him. Phifer was thirty-three, and he still longed to experience what one of his early pro coaches, Chuck Knox, described as an ideal: “The best combination in football is winning and getting paid.”
Phifer was in his eleventh NFL season, so he had gotten paid. His struggle to be a part of a winner, though, had been epic. As the Patriots piled up wins after the Brady announcement, four in a row heading into a late December game with the Dolphins, Phifer teased Seymour about the rookie’s instant success. He told him that the league really wasn’t like this, and that winning seasons should never be taken for granted. He thought of his time with the Rams and Jets and compared it to what he was experiencing with the Patriots. He concluded that he was part of the problem with his first two franchises.
“I wasn’t a good leader with the Rams,” he says. “And when I went to the Jets, I was jumping on the bandwagon. They had lost the year before in the AFC Championship Game, and everyone was saying that they were stacked, that they were a couple of players away from getting to the Super Bowl. But when I got there, I found a lot of guys like me. They weren’t bad guys at all, but it was more about individuals than team. I was the same way. I was that way when I tried to avoid New England, because I wasn’t thinking from the perspective of team. I wound up there by divine intervention.”
Phifer’s father, James, was a minister, and he frequently taught from the book of Proverbs. Specifically, the passage that reads, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Phifer had been talking to his father about football for twenty-five years, and this was the first time that he could see his own career within a sermon. Indeed, he had been the proud one for a decade.
He had become a dutiful note-taker, and his notebook pages were filled with painstaking instructions from Belichick. He thought to himself, This could be an MBA program. It’s like I’m going to grad school for football, and Bill is the professor. He knew that Belichick and the other coaches got to the old stadium long before the players did, and departed who knew when. They had watched more film than the players had, and considered more game possibilities than the players had. Given that, it always amazed Phifer that the professor could stand in front of the group and condense that mass of information into three things. It was always, Do these three things and we should be in position to win.
It was genius, and several layers of it: of football, of efficiency, of leadership. James Phifer sure had been onto something when he preached about humility. His son’s team was 9-5, getting ready to take on the 9-4 Dolphins, with the winner likely to finish first in the division. That was surprising to most people, but it wasn’t even the best part of the story. The stadium, the bland jewel of Route 1 in Foxboro, was coming to a close. A sprawling construction site was next door, preparing the way for a new stadium, opening in 2002, that would bring the organization into the twenty-first century.
The good fortune of the Patriots had extended beyond the drafting and emergence of Brady, the immediate impact of Seymour, and the sparkling success rate of the free agents. The Jets had appeared to be thousands of miles beyond their grasp one year earlier. They had all those draft picks, and they still had Parcells in the front office. But Parcells learned that he wasn’t made for the executive life, and he resigned shortly after his coach, Al Groh, left the Jets for the University of Virginia. The Bills had a new coach and general manager and had replaced the Patriots at the bottom of the division; the Colts, young and talented, were moved out of the AFC East due to league expansion; and the Dolphins, who had won six of their previous seven games against the Patriots, were suddenly at eye level.
Maybe they were temporary, but the headlines and the stories beneath them began to change as well. In two games against the Dolphins, Brady hadn’t totaled two hundred passing yards. But the Brady-Bledsoe election was over, and the focus had long shifted to overall results. The Patriots beat the Dolphins, 20–13, on a day that was all about smiles and storytelling. At the urging of an enthusiastic Belichick, dozens of Patriots players ran to the packed stands and celebrated with their fans. Former Patriots players and coaches paraded through the stadium, waving and high-fiving in all directions, for what they thought was the final game in the stadium’s history. Someone even tracked down Mark Henderson, who in 1982 famously drove a John Deere on the field to clear the snow, making it easier for a Patriots kicker to provide the only points in a 3–0 snowstorm win over the Dolphins.
Even the appearance of Henderson seemed like a Christmas miracle because, for at least ten years, he was reported to be dead. When he was seen driving his John Deere again, he easily qualified as the author of the greatest comeback in stadium history.
It was hard to top Henderson’s narrative, but the Patriots tried over the next several weeks. They finished the regular season with an easy win over the Panthers.
With eleven wins, the Patriots had not only reversed their record from 2000; they had captured the division title. As soon as they found out their play-off opponent and the forecast for the game at Foxboro Stadium, they might have been wishing for Henderson again. The Oakland Raiders were coming to town, and so was a blizzard.
Both Belichick and Brady had connections to the franchise, personal and professional alike. Belichick was drawn to the iconoclastic owner of the Raiders, Al Davis. Slicked-back hair, tinted glasses, all-white track suits, and an accent dripping Brooklyn by way of Brockton, Massachusetts, Davis was begging to be caricatured. But that aside, Belichick respected his football savvy and his history of coaching in the American Football League. He often referred to him as “Coach Davis.” A few years earlier, the two had discussed the head coaching vacancy with the Raiders. They spent the day talking football and had great, lengthy talks about the game they both loved. Belichick, though, finally mentioned an important point that hadn’t been covered.
“Why are you trying to hire me?” the coach asked. “You only hire offensive coaches, because you’re the one who wants to run the defense. You’ve never hired a defensive head coach.”
It was true, and Coach Davis knew it. He wouldn’t be happy letting someone else set the defensive philosophy for the Raiders, and neither would Belichick. They kept their relationship intact, and Davis hired the offensive-minded Jon Gruden as head coach. A few months later, the first draft choice on Gruden’s watch was someone Brady knew very well. His name was Charles Woodson, the superhero from Michigan.
He and Brady were in the same recruiting class in 1995, although Woodson was considered class valedictorian. He never gave anyone time to ponder why. He started as a true freshman, became a defensive standout on a national championship team, and became the first defensive player ever to win the Heisman Trophy. Brady had practiced against him many times, and he knew how lethal Woodson’s combination of length, athleticism, and intelligence could be.
The postseason, then, made way for a new campaign. This one was Brady versus Woodson, and it became the story of the night. A national TV audience got a chance to see a New England storm in progress, with the tufts of snow making it appear as if Foxboro Stadium had been staged by overzealous set designers. The field was essentially a snow-covered slick, with the yard lines visible only occasionally.
“Bear with us on the placement of the ball,” broadcaster Gil Santos warned his radio audience in his authoritative bass, “because it isn’t going to be easy.” The Patriots started the game slowly, so slowly that as they ran off the field trailing 7–0 at the half, they were booed. Tough crowd. Many of the same folks, less than a month earlier, had tried to pull players into the seats for hugs and kisses.
The game became more interesting in the second half with the Patriots trailing 13–10 with two minutes remaining. Brady had smartly avoided Woodson for most of the night, knowing that the cornerback thrived on the baiting game. He liked to appear to be distracted, not seeming to be aware of a small passing window. But as soon as a throw went in that direction, he’d quickly seal the space and intercept the ball.
He had a more traditional move with 1:50 remaining: He blitzed. Brady dropped back to pass, and a sprinting Woodson was on his right arm in two seconds. The ball came loose, the Raiders recovered, and the season of surprises appeared to be over. People in Oakland thought it was clearly a fumble; people in New England saw it differently.
“As we looked at it, Brady’s arm was coming forward,” Santos said as officials reviewed the play.
Santos was making a reference to the Tuck Rule, a phrase that would send the majority of puzzled fans and media scrambling to the NFL rulebook. There, it stated, “When [an offensive] player is holding the ball to pass it forward, any intentional forward movement of his arm starts a forward pass, even if the player loses possession of the ball as he is attempting to tuck it back toward his body.”
The broadcaster, who had begun calling Patriots games thirty-six years earlier, had seen his share of bizarre and arcane football business. His instincts were correct in this case. The official ruling was that Brady had been attempting to throw the ball just as Woodson hit him. The game-ending fumble recovery had simply become an incomplete pass that extended the season.
Coach Davis, a longtime NFL critic, believed that this was some league conspiracy to hurt the Raiders and reward the Patriots. (It would be several years before anyone could see the irony in the suggestion that the league would do anything to benefit the Patriots.) Woodson and his teammates were stunned. The Patriots continued their drive until they got themselves in position for kicker Adam Vinatieri. The confident Vinatieri cleared the snow with his shoe and then powered the ball forty-five yards through the wind and snow to send the game into overtime. Once there, as everyone could see coming, he made the winning kick to vault the Patriots into Pittsburgh and the conference championship game.
Beyond the breaks, though, was an identity. The team loved its reputation of being a bunch of starless rejects, knowing full well that the label was inaccurate. They had stars. They just didn’t have hyped stars. They loved the concept of crashing the parties of the entitled and becoming uninvited dancers on the red carpet. The very thought became real to them as they prepared to play the Steelers.
There was just one week of prep time between the conference championship games and the Super Bowl, so it would take precise planning from all four participants to transition from their home cities to New Orleans, the site of the game. Three teams planned their contingencies in private. The Steelers went the other way, and even allowed their players to devote an entire day to Super Bowl planning.
“They didn’t respect us and we knew it,” Damien Woody, the Patriots’ center, recalls. “That whole team, that whole city, thought there was no way that we could win the game. You could tell by the way they were talking. Even in our hotel, it seemed like the whole city of Pittsburgh was there. It was like the whole city was there to intimidate us.”
The Patriots were convinced that they could expose two things: the Steelers’ overconfidence and their poor special teams. Anyone who played in New England understood how obsessive Belichick was about the kicking game. “It didn’t matter who you were,” Phifer says. “Bill was going to put you on special teams if he thought that you could help. You had no choice.”
In that spirit, the Patriots’ best receiver, Troy Brown, was a core member on teams. If the Belichick ideal could be distilled into a single player, it would be Brown. He thought the game, long before it was played. He was athletic and versatile, a highly capable football handyman. Like Brady, he had been marginalized by the draft and had to listen to 197 names called before it was his turn. The Patriots, under Parcells, had cut him once and brought him back. He made himself indispensable with all of his skills, and he set a tone in the locker room both with his toughness and his usual combo of few words, bold actions.
He was responsible for the first points of the game, taking a punt in the middle of the field and weaving fifty-five yards for a touchdown. It was a good start, but a snag came late in the second quarter. Brady completed a long pass and was hit low by safety Lee Flowers. He immediately grabbed his left ankle, was attended to by doctors and trainers, and limped off the field. That left an opening for the best backup quarterback in the league, Drew Bledsoe.
The preseason words of Brady resonated again. They’re going to need all three of us. The biggest conflict of the season had been Brady versus Bledsoe, but now the only path to the Super Bowl was Brady and Bledsoe. The older quarterback sprung off the bench and quickly completed a pass. Then he did something that made you wonder if the entire Patriots season was just a satirical reality show. He ran toward the sideline, just like he had against the Jets. And he got hit high by a defender, similar to the blow by Mo Lewis. Fortunately for Bledsoe, he was hit by a cornerback this time, and he bounced up shouting and clapping his hands. The next play was a touchdown in the corner of the end zone to David Patten.
The entire day wasn’t perfect for Bledsoe, but it didn’t need to be. There was joy in watching yet another special-teams touchdown, this one in the third quarter, that Brown helped create. There was joy in playing and feeling like a playing contributor and not just a meeting-room intellectual. There was joy in winning, 24–17, and putting his hands on that conference championship trophy.
They did things in the game that often went unnoticed, such as having a role player like Adrian Klemm play left and right tackle and left and right guard. This was the Belichick view of team-building as much as a player’s height, weight, and speed. This game, won this way, was perfect for a Belichick team: game-changing plays on special teams, a starring role for a backup, and multiple players capable of excelling in multiple positions. The Patriots lingered on the field, wave after wave of them going to Bledsoe and squeezing him for several seconds. They didn’t have to say much, and neither did he. They had all added something to this game, from the Rehbein family’s presence as honorary captains, to the 14 points off special teams, to the forgotten quarterback on the bench. They’d all been a part of it.
It didn’t make sense that Patriots-Rams would be the matchup in New Orleans. One team was known for things that seemed to be euphemisms for a lack of beauty. It was industrious and hardworking, gritty and conscientious. The other team had won it all before, two years earlier, and was even better this time. It was stacked with speed and style, two MVP candidates, and a colorful nickname that belonged, in circus font, on the side of a traveling bus: THE GREATEST SHOW ON TURF.
Not surprisingly, there weren’t a variety of perspectives on what the game might become. The Rams had played the Patriots once already, in Foxboro, and won. It was popular and understandable to reason that if the Rams had handled the Patriots in outdoor conditions, which wasn’t their preference, they might annihilate them in the comfort of the Superdome.
The problem with that logic is that it works only if teams remain static. The Rams very well could have been a different team, even a better team, than they had been in November. Time in the NFL doesn’t function in a normal continuum, so a game three months earlier felt like it was from another generation. The Patriots were also changed, in some ways that could be seen on the field and in others that could be measured only in fraternity and brotherhood.
“We were in that space where we knew we had a good football team and no one else knew how good,” Seymour says. “If we were talking boxing, we’d have been the boxer people should have been afraid to fight.”
Several hours before the game, Seymour, who was just twenty-two years old, had a moment with Romeo Crennel. The defensive coordinator hadn’t looked at and spoken to him like this all season. He gave his youngest defensive starter permission to do as he saw fit on the field. The veterans sometimes did that on their own, changing plans and assignments just before the snap, with no time to run it by the coaches for approval. Rookies rarely got that luxury. But what Crennel was telling Seymour, essentially, was that he was in the club now. He was no longer a rookie. He was valuable and they trusted him.
The relationship had deepened between a coach and player, and that was consistent with what was happening all over the team. Willie McGinest had taken giant steps as a leader, more than the coaches realized. He connected with veterans like Phifer and instructed rookies like Seymour. He was a big brother as well as Big Brother.
“Willie was a man among men,” Phifer says. “He got into a couple of scuffles with teammates. They were bigger than him; he got the better of them. But Willie comes in peace. If you wanted to be loud and boisterous, he would let it be known who was in charge. But people had so much respect for Willie that the atmosphere wasn’t one of fear; it was about unity. And he was probably the biggest reason of why it was like that.”
Before the game, one gesture captured the journey from New England to New Orleans. One look, and listen, got to the foundation of the Patriots’ story. “And now, ladies and gentlemen,” the public address announcer began, “choosing to be introduced as a team, the New England Patriots…” And out they ran, a mass of red, white, and blue. It was the first surprise of many more to come.
John Madden, during the Fox telecast, said that he had spoken with Rams coach Mike Martz the day before, and Martz thought the game would be lopsided by halftime. “I think he felt he was going to open up this game the first half and blow the roof off this stadium with this offense,” Madden told the largest football audience of the year. But if national football fans hadn’t been paying attention to the Patriots since the emergence of Brady, they were now.
In fact, the Rams game was an anthology of the Patriots season, neatly packaged into sixty minutes, no overwhelming backstory required. It started with Belichick, who had deconstructed the Rams offense and then, just as Roman Phifer had grown used to, broken the game plan into three key points. Number one was to stop running back Marshall Faulk. It continued with Brady, who, despite speculation that he might not start the Super Bowl, heavily taped his left ankle and prepared to make his decisive calls in the huddle.
From there, really, the formula was the opposite of touristy New Orleans; it was, in a word, unadorned. While Martz was telling Madden that the game shouldn’t be close, Belichick was explaining how the Patriots planned to slow it down. He may have understood complexities, but his appeal to those around him was that he made the complex quite simple.
“He’s the smartest guy in football,” says Lionel Vital, who scouted for Belichick in Cleveland and New England. “Yet he never flexes the mental muscle over anybody. When he’s in Germany, he speaks German. When he’s got an audience of sixth-graders, he can speak to them so they understand exactly what he’s saying. He’s very deep; very discerning.”
His idea was for the Patriots to treat Faulk as if he were the quarterback. He wanted to concede shorter passes because he figured the Rams really wanted the deep ones. He wanted a defensive approach just short of bullying, because the Rams were prone to turnovers.
Martz was right in that the game wasn’t all that close at halftime. The Patriots, on the strength of two turnovers, including an interception that Ty Law returned for a touchdown, led 14–3. “If I had dropped that, I would have been pretty damn clumsy,” Law says. “I would have been a nonathlete because the pass was right in the bread bucket. I mean, it wasn’t hard at all.” The lead inched to 17–3 at the beginning of the final quarter. That’s when the Rams finally played to Martz’s expectations and tied the score.
With eighty-one seconds remaining and no timeouts, Brady calmly took the Patriots from their own seventeen-yard line to the St. Louis thirty. In the Super Bowl dream, the starting quarterback drops back and surgically places one into a receiver’s hands in the end zone. But this way was better. This involved a drive in which the 199th pick in one draft completed passes to the 198th pick in another; this was a drive that a born-and-raised Bostonian, tight end Jermaine Wiggins, was a part of; this drive was going to give the last word to the special teams, which they all were a part of, and give some glory to the kicker.
It was the least dramatic dramatic kick in team history. It was thumped with force, and it was geometrically perfect. Right down the middle.
“I’ve only seen my father cry twice,” Phifer says. “My grandmother’s funeral and this game.”
James Phifer was not alone. There were tears and deep exhales all over the field. Belichick ran to the turf to get a better view of the forty-eight-yard kick, and he was still there when it went through. He was sandwiched in a hug by his daughter, Amanda, and his Pro Bowl safety, Lawyer Milloy. Some players danced, some prayed, some openly wept, and a few of them approached Scott Pioli and simply expressed thank-yous.
“When we won, it really was that feeling of emerging from the dark tunnel and seeing the light,” Damien Woody says. “Playing for Coach Belichick, you were on edge every single week. You got comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s never easy. He demands a lot, all the time. If you can’t get it right, he just gives this cold stare like, ‘Are you shitting me right now? How do you not know this?’ So to win it, and hold that trophy, it was finally relief.”
Brady stood on a podium with both hands on his head, smiling. On the same night, he had become a champion and a victim of his team’s accepted script. Since the story was that the Patriots were the recipients of good luck and magic, those qualities were assigned to him as well. He was the game’s MVP, although most people still considered the Rams’ Kurt Warner the better quarterback.
In fact, the Rams had been so impressive during the regular season that a young woman had bought her boyfriend, a University of Louisville football player, a Rams jersey with his name on the back. The Rams seemed to be in a dynamic offense and a paradise for receivers, so she thought the gift made sense. But Deion Branch’s girlfriend, Shola, had the right idea and the wrong team. They watched the Super Bowl together and imagined his future. He’d be there one day, too, with the Patriots.