They all sensed it as soon as they piled into trucks and rolled through the narrow streets of downtown Boston. It was twenty-eight degrees, and the windchill made it feel like zero. And yet there were two sixteen-year-old boys, bare-chested, with one rib cage painted GO and the other PATS. They should have had shirts and coats on. They should have been in school. There were a lot of should-haves that were being overlooked and, as the Patriots were witnessing, all of it was taking place in the biggest crowd anyone had ever seen.
It was just after noon, and some people had come as early as six a.m. to stake their positions at City Hall Plaza. That’s where the trucks were going to stop and spill the Patriots onto a performance stage. But the people swarmed everywhere. On Boylston and Tremont Streets. In Boston Common. On top of buildings, where another shirtless man ran across a roof in boxer shorts and sneakers. On Court and Congress Streets. On shoulders. On trees. Out of windows. City officials knew it would be the party of the year, or more precisely, the after-party of the year. State employees were given the day off, and although most schools were open, thousands of students happened to be missing with mysterious colds and coughs. Ten bus routes were diverted, the subway service on the T was increased, and parking bans were in effect until the celebration ended.
A police spokesman was asked when, exactly, the party would stop. He answered, half-jokingly, March. For the players, most of them born and raised outside of New England, it was shocking that 1.2 million people showed up in the early February cold to celebrate the win over the Rams. But this outpouring is exactly what many of the fans had been trying to express over the years as they discussed their local teams. Yes, they were tougher on their pro teams than most American cities were on theirs. The rationale, though, was often parental: We scold because we love. At the root of the hysteria and overwrought calls to sports-talk radio stations was hunger for a champion who could accurately reflect them. Now they had it.
They had always related to the passionate Lawyer Milloy, and the connection became even deeper when the Patriots safety, snug in a black fur coat, held the Lombardi Trophy to the sky and shouted from the stage, “City of Boston! It’s been a long time coming, huh?”
Everyone could sense that Milloy was the perfect personality for the region. He heard everything that was said about his team, and he took it personally. Two days before the Patriots played the Steelers for the conference title, Milloy heard a line of questioning that he felt was insulting to the Patriots. He was in a Pittsburgh hotel ballroom when he heard it, and he frowned and paced. “I feel like Mike Tyson right now,” he said with fists clenched. After the win over the Rams, he sat on Fox’s on-field studio set and told the nation what the win symbolized.
“Look, we shocked the world. This is not for anybody else but us and our fans, the greatest fans in America. This is what it’s all about. Can’t nobody take this from us, for life!” He was asked, truly, if he thought the Patriots were capable of shutting down one of the best offenses in NFL history the way that they had. “We believed,” he replied before the question was fully complete. “People die for their beliefs, and we believe in our team.”
He was that guy. And he was speaking to thousands of people who felt and thought the same way he did. There were several dignitaries on the City Hall stage. The mayor of Boston and governor of Massachusetts both were there, and so was Senator John Kerry. The Patriots were bigger than all of them on this day. Milloy used the stage as a club floor and danced with teammate Ty Law, who reenacted his end zone celebration in New Orleans. Law then made Tom Brady and Bill Belichick dance for the excited crowd. Then the cornerback said, “Hey, Mr. Kraft. Can I get an ownership, I own the team, I pay all y’all fools’ money… Can I get a little dance?” So Robert Kraft from Brookline, who understood the psychology of the crowd as much as anyone there, danced.
But despite all the smiles, painted faces, pennants, amplified music, a Jumbotron at City Hall Plaza, and, of course, chants of “Yankees suck,” all of it was going to end in a few hours. The kids would be back in school and the adults would be back to work. That included the Patriots.
The freezing parade had been fun, and it distracted some people from the notable absences on that stage. Willie McGinest, who cried bittersweet tears after the Super Bowl, was missing. His salary cap number for the upcoming season was a bulging $8.3 million, and he and many of his teammates thought that his last game as a Patriot had taken place in New Orleans. It was also a smart bet because the Patriots had already submitted their names for the expansion draft. McGinest’s was on the list. If the Houston Texans wanted him, they could have him.
Also missing from the parade was Drew Bledsoe. Many in the crowd called for him, cheering wildly each time they did it, but Bledsoe was thousands of miles away at his ranch in Montana. He hadn’t even returned to Boston after the Super Bowl. He had flown in a different direction, symbolic of what was going to inevitably happen.
The campaign was long over. Brady-Bledsoe buttons, bumper stickers, and arguments were artifacts. The kid had dramatically taken the job, and it was amazing how quickly the majority of people in the region, fans and media alike, had moved on. No one had expected the Patriots to win the Super Bowl, but if that prediction had been made months earlier, the thought would have been that Bledsoe would be the quarterback dancing near Milloy and Law. Instead it was the twenty-four-year-old Super Bowl MVP, wearing a black trench coat, standing in the background, and listening to squeals from the crowd.
Never again, absolutely never, would he be the anonymous friend when hanging out with his buddies Chris Eitzmann, Matt Chatham, and Dave Nugent. No more wry smiles as they were asked for autographs while he was ignored. No more background duty. His address was going to change; no more neighbors trying to remember the name of the tall, skinny young man in the Chestnut Ridge condos. He got a Cadillac Escalade for being the game’s MVP, and he said on national TV that it now belonged to the team. He hadn’t allowed himself to think like this, because you never outperform your heroes, but he had become the youngest quarterback to ever win a Super Bowl. Before him, it had been twenty-five-year-old Joe Montana.
It was crazy. Exactly one year earlier, the team had been finalizing Bledsoe’s record $103 million deal and providing quarterback insurance by signing Damon Huard as a backup. Now, everyone was familiar with a clause in Bledsoe’s contract that had initially been skipped over due to it being so unlikely and insignificant. It stated that trading Bledsoe would result in limited salary cap damage to the Patriots, less than $1 million. In other words, there was no reason not to make a trade. The next few months would be devoted to trading Bledsoe, signing free agents, and figuring out the best way to approach the college draft.
It was hard to describe where the franchise was. It was cool and weird. Belichick would never forget the night they won the Super Bowl. He didn’t sleep at all, and around two or three a.m., he had been talked out of walking to the French Quarter and Pat O’Brien’s for their legendary hurricanes; he settled for conversation and drinks in the team’s hotel bar. It had been yet another strategic win for the coach. All of the celebrating and memories didn’t stop him from thinking that his winning team now needed to be rebuilt. It was exceptional in some areas, but others were not at a championship standard. People weren’t just being rude when they had favored the Steelers and Rams over the Patriots. There was a noticeable talent gap in the overall rosters, and Belichick felt it had to be fixed.
As for fixing it with the right people, that was the weird part. Two years earlier, the coach didn’t feel that he’d had sufficient time to do his draft homework because the Patriots’ job wasn’t officially his until late January. He’d be playing catch-up this time because of winning. Imagine that. Winning on the field automatically meant scrambling to keep up in scouting. There was no way around it. Both things couldn’t be done simultaneously, so the field took priority.
The difference between February 2000 and February 2002 was striking in terms of scouting personnel. The room was now populated with a good cross section of smart guys who were trained to find exactly what Belichick was looking for. There were scouts in their twenties like Nick Caserio, Bob Quinn, and Kyle O’Brien; men in their thirties with more responsibilities like Scott Pioli, Jason Licht, Jon Robinson, Thomas Dimitroff, and Lionel Vital; there was even a consultant in his eighties, Bucko Kilroy, who had either played against or scouted every type of player imaginable over the years. All, with the exception of Kilroy, were on a rising general manager track.
As spring approached, everyone in the organization knew that they were scouting for Brady’s offense now. Everyone in the NFL knew it, too. No one wanted to meet the Patriots’ hefty price for Bledsoe, a first-round pick, if they didn’t have to. It was a harsh business, so teams wanted to see if they could make the Patriots trade from a position of duress. It wasn’t possible to keep Brady and Bledsoe on the same roster again. Even the teams who most needed quarterbacks refused to give in and create a bidding war for Bledsoe. But one team, the division rival Bills, seemed to inquire too often in the name of due diligence. The Bills tried to be coy, but Belichick and Pioli knew they had their buyer.
There were weeks of haggling between the franchises, and things got so bizarre that Buffalo general manager Tom Donahoe attempted to “tattle” on Belichick and Pioli by going over their heads to Kraft. Donahoe’s strategy seemed to be: They won’t make a reasonable deal with me; maybe you can talk some sense into these two. The Super Bowl after just two years on the job had given Belichick and Pioli tremendous freedom in the building, so Kraft ignored Donahoe and let his football guys sort things out. Besides, the problem was that Donahoe was insisting on a second-round pick for Bledsoe, and the Patriots were adamant that it had to be a first. They went back and forth, agitated at times, before there was a breakthrough. Finally, in April, the deal was complete. Drew Bledsoe to Buffalo for the Bills’ 2003 first-round pick. The initial reviews were that the Bills were big winners.
Locally, in the Boston Globe, frequent Belichick critic Ron Borges warned that the glare of the Lombardi Trophy was blinding fans, and team personnel, to the risks in the trade. Specifically, Borges pointed out, Brady’s numbers began to decline as the games became more important and teams familiarized themselves with his weaknesses. The team scored just three offensive touchdowns in the postseason “and one of them was thrown by Bledsoe.”
“The moment Belichick nodded his head in the direction of Scott Pioli and OK’d trading Drew Bledsoe to Buffalo for the Bills’ number one draft choice in 2003, he said ‘I do’ to Tom Brady,” Borges wrote. “They’re wedded now, the coach from Wesleyan and the quarterback from Michigan. Either they go on to a future of unbridled success in the National Football League or they go together into this good night.”
If the Patriots had lost to the Rams in the final seconds, the trade might have unsettled the majority of New Englanders. A loss in that game, after leading by two touchdowns in the fourth quarter, would have strengthened the fear that every big game, and transaction, was somehow going to lead to humiliation. But the win provided an alternative to the shared wall of misery that some Boston fans automatically went to.
There was a change afoot in town, and it was tangible. There was the trophy, of course, which would be the first thing moved into the new home, Gillette Stadium. There was also a new vocabulary for a generation that wasn’t used to talking about clutch plays and smart decisions that led to parades in their city. In the spring of 2001, they had been the ones asking for a wide receiver in the first round and looking for something beyond the low-priced free agents that had been signed. In 2002, people took pride in not having to rely on high-maintenance receivers, and they wondered, Belichick-like, if the newest Patriots would submit to the team-first ethic that had been established.
So on his way out of town, Bledsoe was generally applauded for his dignified run with the Patriots. He gained even more respect throughout the region when he paid for local newspaper ads and thanked fans for their support during his career as a Patriot. He was sent off to western New York with blessings and bouquets.
It was a remarkable transition. Bledsoe’s job had been taken by Brady, and his stardom had been eclipsed by Belichick. The championship had turned Belichick into the region’s biggest nonplaying star since Red Auerbach, the coach and craftsman of the dynastic Celtics. The new era story line from the Super Bowl had naturally focused on Brady because of his age and the position he played. But Belichick had entered a new realm as well, although that point was lost in the rush to compare him to Bill Parcells. It had nothing to do with winning without Parcells. For Belichick, now fifty years old, the title was validation of all the ways he saw himself fitting into a franchise. Public perception had always locked Belichick into one of two circles, neither of which captured him or his passions.
One was a circle of success, ironically, perfectly illustrated on the front page of the New York Times fifteen years earlier. There he was at Giants Stadium, moments after winning the conference championship, being carried off the field by his Giants players. He was called a defensive genius, over and over, which in a way is not a bad thing. Who has a problem with being known as a genius? The picture was there, but it was incomplete. He was the genius of defense because that was his assigned area. Before that, he had been the Giants’ special-teams coach and had excelled there as well. He was just thirty-four, and he had been in the pros for a dozen years. His was still a young, evolving football mind. He had his own ideas about the business, ideas that went beyond defense, the head coaching methods of Bill Parcells, and the general managing of George Young. He loved everything about football: watching and teaching it, reading about it, thinking of ways to improve it and what he’d like to do if he were given resources and tools in a football organization and told to build it.
The second circle, then, was more complicated. He had become that builder in Cleveland when he was thirty-eight. One of his football gods was Paul Brown, who was also thirty-eight when he began coaching in Cleveland. This seemed destined to work. When the results weren’t good enough, one play-off appearance in five seasons, he was dismissed as someone who couldn’t shape an entire franchise. He was well rounded only within the dimensions of that first circle. He was trapped in those confines from the day he drove out of Cleveland, in 1996, until the moment the first strand of confetti fell on him in New Orleans.
In April 2002, like Brady, Belichick was just getting started in this new phase of his career. He, too, had been underestimated, and had invested more time in remaking himself than anyone had considered. The remake did not always include smooth public relations with the media or sometimes with his players. He was a good listener and weighed all information before making a decision, but when it was time to declare a direction, he was forceful and left no wiggle room. He asked his scouts to be the same way. Be thorough, be clear, and be decisive. That was his approach to in-house communication; for outsiders, it wasn’t as satisfying. Sometimes he played the media game, smiled, and gave them the anecdotal and expansive responses that they craved. At times, mostly on Fridays, he even engaged reporters with playful trivia questions. Usually, though, his comments to them were stick-figure sketches of his true thoughts.
That approach was a virtual guarantee of critical coverage, regardless of the decisions he made as a coach. There was an implied reciprocity that the sports media sought. Full cooperation didn’t give a subject full immunity, but it at least ensured a degree of humanity within the reporting. One of Belichick’s first hires in New England had been Berj Najarian, who had been an assistant in the Jets’ public-relations department. Najarian, from Long Island, was a Boston University graduate and had initially planned to be a sportswriter. He wound up in PR, with the Knicks and Jets on his résumé. Belichick trusted his scouting reports on the media, his intelligence, and his organizational skills, which at least rivaled Belichick’s and sometimes exceeded them. Najarian was going to need to stay close by, because there was plenty of controversy on the way.
Some of Belichick’s decisions were made by other teams. The new franchise, the Texans, decided not to select linebackers McGinest and Ted Johnson in the expansion draft. The Patriots sliced their salaries and brought them both back. The status of two other linebackers, Bryan Cox and Roman Phifer, was pending. Cox, the fearless mouth of the defense, got tired of waiting and signed with the Saints. He wasn’t happy about it, telling the Globe’s Will McDonough, “I talked with them after the year to find out my future, and they said they would get back to me. Never did. Never even gave me a phone call… Roman Phifer was the MVP of our defense last year, in my opinion, and they haven’t called him either. He doesn’t know what is going on.”
Phifer did hear back, and he was returning. Jermaine Wiggins, the tight end from East Boston who caught Brady’s final pass in the Super Bowl, was not. The collegial atmosphere of the parade had given way to economics. The chief economist planned to upgrade the tight end position through free agency and the draft. He began by targeting thirty-year-old Christian Fauria, who wanted to be anywhere but New England.
Fauria had remembered the intense Belichick from years earlier, when the coach was still in Cleveland and the player was a draft prospect from Colorado. They were at the Shrine Bowl in San Francisco, and Fauria had watched film in Belichick’s hotel suite.
“He had a bunch of tapes in his room, all of my tapes from college,” Fauria recalls. “It was like Roy Hobbs in The Natural: dark room, one light. He said, ‘Pick out your best game and your worst game.’ I thought it was some type of trick. My worst game, I thought, was Nebraska. We put it on and I was kicking somebody’s ass. He said, ‘That’s your worst game?’ He was going over every game, and he knew about everybody on the field. I was thinking, ‘Please don’t draft me.’ He had a reputation as a taskmaster, and I just didn’t want to deal with it.”
In the spring of 2002, Belichick was asking about Fauria again. Once again, Fauria didn’t want to go. He loved football and had gone through some excruciating medical procedures so he could stay on the field. Once, there was pain like he’d never experienced, when he tore every ligament in his right ankle. It had taken a plate, eight screws, and a stabilizing bolt to put him back together again. He’d had three microfracture surgeries. Shattered and dislocated fingers. An old back injury from college that would flare up every now and then. Pulled hamstrings. He played through many of the injuries, convincing himself that he could start caring about his body at the end of the season. His brother, a foot specialist, was one of the many people who told him he was nuts. It didn’t matter. He played, with frequent help from Tylenol and Vicodin.
Despite all that, Fauria wanted to play six more years. There’s no way he could pull that off with daily gladiator practices. He expressed his concerns to Belichick, and to his surprise, the coach listened and said, “Once training camp starts, we’ll take care of you.”
Belichick didn’t always do what was expected, whether it was a conversation with a player, a signing, a release, or a draft pick. That, combined with his poker player style with the media, made it impossible to predict what he would do next.
He surprised many in April, including Fauria, when he traded up eleven spots in the first round, from thirty-two to twenty-one, to select Colorado tight end Daniel Graham. At the end of round two, he went for a five-foot-nine-inch receiver from Louisville named Deion Branch. The surprise there had actually happened weeks earlier, when Belichick had gone to the team’s war room and stared for a long time at the draft board. He looked at the magnetic strip containing Branch’s name and draft grade, and then weighed it versus what he had seen on film and the player’s production. In the Patriots’ 1 to 9.99 grading system, a system that did not acknowledge perfect 10s, Branch’s number fell below the 5.50 minimum to be considered a “Make It,” or backup player. He thought Branch was out of position, so he moved the strip from the “back board,” where “Free Agents” and “Pats Rejects” reside, to the front board, with the best prospects.
It was clear, in rookie minicamp, that Branch wasn’t going to have a problem learning the offense of coordinator Charlie Weis. His understanding of the concepts seemed natural and, physically, he almost always caught what was thrown his way. When the entire team was together, the new additions blended with the holdovers, and it was as if this were the postscript to 2001. Fauria, for example, had no idea what to expect from his new quarterback, the Super Bowl MVP. He was immediately taken by Brady’s confidence and his odd sense of humor.
When Fauria introduced himself as “Christian,” Brady smiled and started calling him “Motoring.” He noticed Fauria’s bewildered look and began singing “Sister Christian” by the early 1980s band Night Ranger to explain himself. A lyric about motoring was tucked in there. Random. An instant friendship was born with Fauria. It was much the same with Branch, who was struck by how grounded and competitive his quarterback was. The season hadn’t started yet, and already Ping-Pong paddles had been broken after Brady challenged Branch and lost to him.
Weis watched it all and was pleased. He was looking forward to the season where, theoretically, this team would have more offensive talent than the Super Bowl winners. That was his professional outlook. Personally, he planned to have routine gastric bypass surgery before the season opener in September.
In the summer, he entered Massachusetts General Hospital for what was known casually as “stomach-stapling” surgery. There was nothing routine about the procedure. The surgery had turned out disastrously, and a supposedly simple operation had become life-threatening for Weis. He had internal bleeding for two days and required a blood transfusion of seven pints. He faded in and out of consciousness, at times being alert enough to recognize his wife, Maura, and sometimes looking near his bed and seeing Brady. It was dire. He was given last rites by a Catholic priest.
Fortunately, his condition began to improve and, after a month in rehab, he was sent home. It was time for training camp now, and Weis wasn’t well enough to rejoin the coaching staff full-time. He watched film from his Rhode Island home and constantly checked in with Belichick and the quarterbacks. He still had a burning sensation in his legs and feet, from nerve damage, and he knew when he got back to the team he’d have to use a golf cart to get around. It was still good news that he could coach again, and doctors were encouraged by his progress.
In fact, September in New England was brimming with the positivity that was there during the run through the play-offs. The Patriots had won their final nine games, and the entire region had responded in kind to the success. Now it seemed that many of the stale and ineffectual things in the city were shifting, too. The Red Sox, who had been either owned or controlled by one family since 1933, were sold to a group led by a man named John Henry. Henry was a risk-taker, and he promised changes to the team that had flattened more dreams over the years than any franchise in the region. Rumors were that the Celtics were for sale as well, and two lifelong fans, Wyc Grousbeck and Steve Pagliuca, were prepared to present a $360 million offer.
There was a lot to celebrate and the venerable Rolling Stones were up for it. They planned to go on a fortieth-anniversary tour, with Boston as the kickoff city. One day while the Patriots were in meetings preparing for their game with the Steelers, they heard start-and-stop pulsing through the Gillette Stadium walls; the Stones had to practice, too. They were still the hard-living Stones, though, so it wasn’t a shock when the Herald reported that during one of their nights out in Boston, Mick, Keith, and some of their friends got a private room in a restaurant and drank $13,000 worth of booze in two hours. The drinking was left to others on the night of the show, and after going through all the hits, including a “Satisfaction” encore with fireworks, it felt like the perfect time to start the season.
Two weeks before the first game, there was some contractual business to handle. Brady was up for a huge raise. He had been the league’s lowest-paid starting quarterback in 2001, making $375,000. In 2002, he signed a four-year extension worth $30 million. There were still a few people who said that he was a fluke and a “system quarterback,” but the feelings about him in New England were now in print. He was being paid like the top quarterbacks in the game.
If there was any doubt about the legitimacy of Brady in his first full season as a starter, it went away after an easy 30–14 win. Brady threw three touchdown passes, all to new guys: Fauria, Branch, and Donald Hayes. After the Hayes score, a forty-yarder that was made possible by a beautiful Branch block, assistant coach Jeff Davidson yelled to receivers coach Brian Daboll through the coaching headsets, “Make sure you congratulate his ass! That was a GREAT block.” Weis and his staff loved receivers who had the ability to block, so this kid was going to be all right.
The early part of the season, three wins in three games, was a test against human nature. And the Patriots were human. There was no way they could avoid connecting the seasons. Those of them who had been on the championship team knew that they had won twelve games in a row since November of 2001. Brady and receiver David Patten, chatting on the field before the fourth game in San Diego, even talked about going undefeated.
And that’s where the slide began, with the Patriots afflicted by a different plague each week. They were gashed on the ground by the Chargers; denied the ball for two-thirds of the game in Miami; mentally slow at home against Green Bay (Belichick was aghast that the offense stood unaware as a live ball rested on the turf and was recovered by a Packer who had been thirty yards away); and unable to move the ball against Denver.
This was what previous champions talked about, in retrospect. They talked about the difficulty of the next season, in which the ability to sneak up on people goes away. The first-place schedule guarantees a stiffer challenge, as does the adrenaline from the opposition, eager to prove itself against the best. But even after blasting Bledsoe and the Bills by 31 points, the Patriots’ excellence was in what they had done in New Orleans, not who they were in the present.
Sometimes after games at home, Belichick would retreat to his office and educate his football-loving sons, fifteen-year-old Stephen (named after Belichick’s father) and ten-year-old Brian, on the basics of the game. They were all happy in there, totally satisfied by a whiteboard, a couple of Sharpies, and some formations. It was a side of Belichick rarely seen, and what made it even more touching was his ability to compartmentalize. Because whatever his considerable happiness was with his boys, the inverse was true of the team. He didn’t like how it played or practiced. He questioned his own coaching, as well as the instruction of the assistants. It wasn’t unusual for him to criticize himself and his staff during team meetings. Even the players who gave him everything they had, the true professionals, a few of them were too close to the end to make a difference on the field.
Defensive end Anthony Pleasant, thirty-four, a respected locker room evangelist and counselor, was one of those guys. So was cornerback Otis Smith, thirty-seven, who was a master of defensive positioning in the secondary. Even a couple of new additions, thirty-two-year-old Victor Green and thirty-one-year-old Rick Lyle, proved that they had the high football aptitude that would easily translate to coaching one day. But this was a young man’s game, and those ages told part of the story about the defense: not fast enough, not youthful enough. It was mid-December now, and the Patriots were technically in contention for the division title and the play-offs. Technicalities are tricky. These Patriots were average, and if they were fortunate enough to slip into the postseason, they’d be pushed aside humbly.
As for the Bills and Bledsoe, they were the only team in the division less happy than the Patriots. Bledsoe had a good season. He passed for 4,359 yards, roughly 600 more than Brady, and twenty-four touchdowns, which was four fewer than Brady’s league-leading total. He went 0-2 against his old team, though, and the Bills finished last in the division. The Patriots, just one game better at 9-7, found no consolation in that. They learned that they had missed the play-offs late on a Sunday evening. There was a team meeting the next morning at nine. Later that afternoon, Belichick was joined in his office by Pioli and Ernie Adams, the coach’s multifaceted adviser. Each man had a legal notepad, filled with team needs. The short-term focus that the players saw was on display here, too. On to the offseason.
Belichick thought about his defense constantly. One day in late January, while he was driving from Foxboro to Annapolis to visit his parents, he was haunted by bad routes to the ball, missed tackles, and a lack of speed. And that was just on the field. The economics of his secondary were also impractical: He had large cap numbers for Lawyer Milloy and Ty Law, and an upcoming contract for Tebucky Jones, who was going to demand a salary much greater than his performance warranted.
Normally, a 400-mile drive is perfect for untangling and problem-solving issues. But in this case, it was probably about 350 miles more than necessary. No question, there was going to be a makeover with the defensive backs. The options, through free agency and the draft, could be franchise-altering.
There was one safety from Southern Cal that the scouts couldn’t stop talking about. His name was Troy Polamalu and, if it were possible, his play seemed to reflect both joy and fury. He was excitable and aggressive. More than that, the scouts gave him the highest possible special-teams grade, too. He was a Belichick guy if they ever saw one. But the Patriots had two first-rounders, numbers fourteen and nineteen, and the first pick was going to be used on a defensive lineman. It was unlikely that Polamalu would be available for the selection at nineteen.
Things started to become clearer at the end of February. One of the best and most hated safeties in the league, Rodney Harrison, was released by the Chargers. He had once lost over $100,000 on a single hit, a helmet-to-helmet shot on Jerry Rice. He was big and aggressive, an underdog spirit housed in a linebacker’s body. Belichick wanted him. He’d figure out the secondary shuffle later, but he knew Harrison would fit as a Patriot.
The team also got lucky with what became, inexplicably, a slow market for Rosevelt Colvin. In the language of Patriots scouts, he was a “projection” player, meaning that he had played one position in college and was expected to do something else in the pros. Tedy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel had done that, going from collegiate defensive end to pro linebacker. So had Colvin. He could rush and cover, he was twenty-five, and he was surprisingly affordable. The Patriots signed both Harrison and Colvin in March. They also added another cornerback, Tyrone Poole, who was released by the Colts.
Milloy was watching closely. He knew his agents and the Patriots had talked about restructuring several times, and those conversations hadn’t gone well. Harrison had said he looked forward to playing with Milloy, but he was a player. That’s how players talked. The decision-makers saw players in terms of production and dollar signs. Besides, Milloy had been in Boston long enough to have an edge. He was often defensive and suspicious, especially now. Anticipating a fight, he changed agents and hired Carl and Kevin Poston, brothers known for their fierce, pro-player negotiating style. They also represented Ty Law, had gotten him that $50 million contract, and were opposed to any type of contract restructuring that even mildly resulted in a loss for a client. Milloy had no problems letting his teammates know each progression, or lack thereof, in negotiations.
With that said, the new players were made for the Patriots’ competitive culture. Colvin was doing some work at the team facility one day when he saw Brady and the other quarterbacks going through some passing drills. They would take three or five steps back and zip footballs into a square that was surrounded by netting.
“Ah, that’s nothing,” Colvin shouted when he saw the drill. “You’re supposed to be able to make that throw. You’re quarterbacks!”
“Let’s see what you’ve got, then,” Brady challenged.
“What are the stakes?” Colvin replied.
They agreed on $1,000. The linebacker admitted that it was a fluke, but he had been able to hit the square from a farther distance than Brady. Pure luck. The next day, Colvin went to his locker and found a thousand one-dollar bills stacked neatly in the stall.
In a way, Belichick and Pioli got the equivalent of a cash shower on draft day. It was their best overall work since their arrival in New England three years earlier. They played chess with their draft picks, and they played it so often and so quickly that they usually made their partners do something regrettable. It started before the draft, when they traded Tebucky Jones to New Orleans for three draft picks, the highest one being a third-rounder. They then took that third from New Orleans, number seventy-eight, and traded it to Miami for a 2004 second-rounder. In other words, they moved up at least fourteen draft slots simply by waiting a year for the pick.
As the scouts had said for months, the Bledsoe first-rounder became a defensive lineman, Ty Warren, a three-hundred-pounder who was difficult to run against. The other first-rounder was sent to Baltimore in exchange for a 2003 second and a 2004 first. Already, then, the Patriots had two firsts and two seconds for the following season. They added potential starters in the later rounds with cornerbacks Asante Samuel and Eugene Wilson, as well as center Dan Koppen.
It was a brilliant day of trading, but it was too dizzying to be seen that way by the local football columnists.
“If the non-NFL draftniks are to be believed, and they have developed a deep reservoir of credibility over the years, the Pats didn’t come close to getting the best bang for their buck,” Kevin Mannix wrote in the Herald. At the Globe, Ron Borges continued his trend of healthy Patriots skepticism. “To paraphrase a statement once used by Ronald Reagan to defeat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election: ‘Is your team better off today than it was four months ago?’” he wrote. “How you answer that should tell you how you feel about what went on in Foxboro yesterday.”
What went unnoticed was how the Patriots were beginning to affect their division. Before the draft, they made no effort to quell rumors that they were looking to move from the middle of the first round into the top five. They never considered it. Belichick didn’t think it made financial sense. But they didn’t mind the unfounded rumors; misinformation at draft time was good for the Patriots poker game. The Jets did move up, however, selecting a defensive tackle named Dewayne Robertson. They vacated the spot that Pittsburgh used on the dynamic Polamalu. The last-place Bills had already conceded their first to the Patriots. And Miami, in its desperation, had made the foolish your-third-for-our-second trade, a deal that would be vetoed in most fantasy football leagues.
Not only was the team better off than it had been four months earlier; the division was worse. Belichick still believed that he needed a nose tackle, though, and he eventually traded for the most massive one available in comic-book character Ted Washington. He was six feet five inches, at least 375 pounds, and hilarious. He loathed the media, but he’d often recite one-liners for his teammates and try to convince them what a fashion model he was.
The Patriots were feeling good about their direction, but that nagging piece of business remained. The Milloy situation still hadn’t been resolved. Anyone listening to the conversations between the respective sides, player’s and team’s, knew what was coming. It always begins under the guise of a business conversation. Then there is a stalemate. Then there is one insult, followed by a misunderstanding, followed by true conviction that a fair contract can’t be reached.
Then there is the good-bye.
So on September 1, five days before the beginning of the regular season, Belichick walked into a team meeting and broke the news. Milloy had been released. He said it plainly. There was no dramatic pausing, and the players didn’t sense that he was wrestling with this transaction. In fact, that was the problem for many of them. This was all business. Cold. Economical. But no one was willing to let it pass that easily.