It’s a strange thing to say, and most people wouldn’t want it to be said of them, but it was true: Bill Belichick was good at being called idiotic. Experienced, too. It was a claim that even the reality stars and entertainment villains couldn’t honestly make. Everyone knew that they were acting. They were just playing the character who, when confronted with scowls and slings, goes about his normal business, unaffected.
Not Belichick. He wasn’t pretending to be the boss who could give sentimentality a sharp elbow on the way to an unpopular decision. He had done it many times, in multiple cities.
The angry fans outside one of his 1993 press conferences in Cleveland had been real. They pushed, pounded, and tried to tip a trailer that they knew he was in and screamed, “Bill must go.” That was shortly after he had fired local hero Bernie Kosar, the quarterback who smiled with gritty Cleveland when it was fashionable to laugh at it. Kosar wasn’t a good player anymore, and Belichick said it. The fans didn’t like the message, the messenger, or his curt delivery.
The president of the New York Jets had truly been a critic, albeit a passive-aggressive one, when he psychoanalyzed Belichick in front of the New York media in January 2000. His diagnosis was that Belichick was in “personal turmoil.” That was after Belichick had gotten all dressed up in a suit and tie to resign, when everyone thought he was there to accept the job. “The Tuna,” Bill Parcells, learned about the switch at the last minute and went back to his office. The headline writers went into a frenzy: BELICHICKEN, BRING BACK TUNA, and WE NEED TUNA, NOT TUNA HELPER.
Rodney Harrison was appearing as himself in September 2003 when he commented, “This is supposed to be about winning games, and I can’t say we’re better without Lawyer. You’d have to be an idiot to think we’re a better team without Lawyer Milloy.” That was when the release of Milloy had gone public, when Belichick had every reason to feel like the loneliest man in New England. There weren’t many friendly spaces where he could go and have people sympathize with his way of thinking. The opinions about him were everywhere, in his own locker room and beyond, and they were forceful.
Duplicitous. Arrogant. Megalomaniacal. Pond scum. And that was all from one Herald article at breakfast. Elsewhere, one popular thought was that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened to every Patriot. Another was that at least one team leader had lost his sense of devotion to the franchise since, indeed, it was the franchise that had kicked a player like Milloy “to the curb.” A straightforward angle was that Belichick’s move was a major distraction to a team trying to win. And those weren’t the reactionary analyses from the talking heads. They were in-house quotes from Tom Brady, Tedy Bruschi, and Damien Woody.
This was the part of Belichick’s unusual talent, as it were, that frustrated so many people. He’d stand there and get crushed, without the expected or desired wince. He’d get ripped apart on sports-talk radio, in the sports pages, or just down the hall in the locker room, and it didn’t move him into a mode of self-advocacy or correction. Whether that was a personality flaw or a divine gift was for others to decide. Maybe this was one of the reasons he encouraged his assistants and scouts to logically disagree with him. He’d had entire metro areas angry with him, often well past the boundary of logic; having a few employees do the same in a conference room was, by comparison, a massage.
The fear in New England was that he was in a crisis, the kind that would result in an inability to lead this particular team. After all, he had cut one of his captains just five days before the start of the regular season. And as bad luck would have it for the Patriots, not only had that captain joined Drew Bledsoe and divisional opponent Buffalo; the Patriots’ first game of the season was against Buffalo. It was going to be tough to move on from this when they’d have to relive it again in five days.
“I understood the business side. But I think from a respect standpoint and a moral code of ethics, if it was going to go down like that, do it earlier,” Ty Law says now. “Give him an opportunity because he was a good soldier, a Pro Bowl player, and a team captain. The vocal leader of the defense. Plain and simple. No question about it. Do it earlier. He bled Patriots. If you look at the Super Bowl win, Lawyer is the only one who started to look for Belichick afterwards.
“It hurt him. I got more upset because I could see how hurt he was by it. It was all over money. We were pissed. You didn’t do that to a team captain. He always had something to say, motivating the team. He was passionate. He loved the team. The way they did him at that time, that was some disrespectful stuff. It was bad. We tried to go on like normal, but it wasn’t normal.
“Lawyer was the first situation where I was like, ‘They really don’t give a damn. This is a business for real.’ That was the real wake-up call. I thought, ‘Who’s next? That can happen to me.’”
There were several reasons the head coach didn’t see things the same way the crowd did. For one, he saw his players in a way that they hadn’t seen themselves. Many of them, along with members of the media, continued to say that Milloy was the heart and soul of the team. Belichick saw a team that couldn’t be defined that simply. Over the span of his controversies, Belichick had heard “The Arrogant” before his name so often that it became a royal prefix. He was labeled arrogant for a range of things, including his unpredictable approach to team-building. He never paused to point out the irony: He was called arrogant for making uncommon decisions that built up this team in the first place, and now he was being called it for making moves that the masses either didn’t agree with or didn’t understand.
He thought his team was superior to last year’s version, and that clicked into place for him less than two weeks before Milloy’s release. That’s when the trade for nose tackle Ted Washington was made. He was ecstatic to have an anchor like the thirty-five-year-old Washington, who confidently told his teammates that he’d retire if an opposing team didn’t honor him with constant double teams. He had the most predictable and accurate nickname in the league: “Mount Washington.” His listed weight should have been a range, anywhere between 365 and 390.
This was also a quality of Belichick’s that was tough to grasp. While the conversation often focused on the players that the TV cameras follow, either for sound bites or highlights, Belichick spent a lot of brainpower under the hood of the team. A valid criticism was that sometimes he stayed under there too long with the mechanics, at the expense of occasional common courtesies. Many people who saw him daily noticed that he could go to subterranean levels with his thoughts, and he’d be so deep in them that he’d walk by without so much as a hello. Leading up to the opener, that weakness of his was actually a good thing because there wasn’t much that could be said that would reverse what he’d done. They just had to win some games.
On a perfect September afternoon in western New York, it appeared that Belichick’s tinkering had gone too far. Milloy was energized wearing his familiar number 36 uniform, and the Bills’ game operations crew played up the drama by saving the safety’s introduction until the very end.
Not only did he look like the same disruptive player that Patriots fans had seen in 106 consecutive games; he was making a case for another item on his résumé: defensive coordinator. There was absolutely nothing, not a single thing, that the Patriots did that the Bills weren’t ready for. The natural thought was that Milloy had arrived in Buffalo and poured out every detail that he had learned in fifty-one games under Belichick. Of course, that wasn’t the reality. But what difference did that make? This was an afternoon for instant story lines, not the steady rigor of a football season.
The Bills won easily, 31–0. Brady threw four interceptions, one of them caught by a defensive tackle with a patriotic name and Patriot ties: Sam Adams. He wasn’t quite as big as Washington, but it was close. So imagine ol’ Sam Adams, whose father, Sam Sr., played for the Patriots in the 1970s, picking off a ball and running toward the end zone. Just before the goal line, the big man did a dance after which bellies and the stadium shook. It was hysterical. As afternoon turned into evening, Milloy was in the parking lot hanging out with tailgating Bills fans. He’d had a lot to say before he got there, and so did many others in Buffalo and Boston.
“I got some stats now,” Milloy said after the game, referring to his lack of forced fumbles and interceptions the year before. “That was one of their tactics. They made sure I ended up with no stats and then they used it against me. Belichick is so worried about himself and his own stature. There’s more credit that goes to his game plan than goes to his players. He doesn’t play on the field. He had a game plan today, didn’t he? How’d it work out?”
There was a reference to Milloy daily. Usually a new development would come along to knock the previous big story off its perch. Not this time.
On Monday, Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy wrote that the Bills were division favorites and Brady “won’t be eager for a rematch with Takeo Spikes and Friends in Foxboro December 27th.” It was Ron Borges’s turn on Tuesday, and he not only sensed the void of Milloy; he questioned the effectiveness of the Brady–Charlie Weis offense. “Has the NFL caught up with Brady and Weis? Have defensive coordinators who get overpaid to devote their lives to solving these kinds of problems succeeded?” he wrote.
Wednesday was relatively quiet. Oh, except for the rumor that Belichick had banned his players from attending a Milloy fund-raiser in downtown Boston. The team’s public-relations director hurriedly denied the rumor. It was safe to conclude, then, that the appearance of several Patriots at their ex-teammate’s night of bowling, wings, and airing of grievances was either inevitable or normal.
Thursday was for analogies and apologies. Cris Collinsworth, on HBO’s Inside the NFL, compared Belichick to “a great doctor with a bad bedside manner. For him to completely misread the pulse of that team and not understand what Milloy meant to the locker room, I can’t believe he was that far removed from it.” Bruschi apologized for saying his all-out commitment to the team had wavered. He explained that he had been emotional when he made that comment and, now, there wasn’t another team that he ever wanted to play for.
Things started to settle a bit on Friday, with Karen Guregian writing in the Herald that it was time to focus on the players, not Belichick. “Shame on them if they’re still wallowing in the fallout from losing Milloy. Shame on them if they look comatose in another game because of something that amounts to a business decision.” Saturday was for the Buffalo News and an ode to Milloy. In the piece, Milloy admitted that Robert Kraft called him, and that he had hung up on the Patriots owner.
No one in New England was ready for what was said on Sunday, and it’s something that actually unified the locker room after two weeks of anger, insecurity, and mistrust. ESPN had just aired a story headlined HAS BELICHICK LOST HIS TEAM? Analyst Tom Jackson looked at the story, and then turned to look directly at the camera. “I want to say this very clearly,” he said. “They hate their coach. And their season could be over, depending on how quickly they can get over this emotional devastation they suffered because of Lawyer Milloy. Belichick can’t get them back. They’ll have to do it on their own and win in spite of him.”
The Patriots were playing a late-afternoon game in Philadelphia that day, and many of them had seen the bold statement before busing to the stadium. They were surprised by the message and the authority with which it had been delivered. Belichick heard about the report as well. His official response, publicly, was that he didn’t want to dignify the comment with a response. But there was something about this report that penetrated the usual iron wall.
There was evidence in Philly that the Patriots were still alive. They won 31–10, and Bruschi sealed the win by returning an interception for a touchdown. The worst news of the day wasn’t the commentary of Tom Jackson. Rather, it was that linebacker Rosevelt Colvin, playing just his second game as a Patriot, would have to watch the rest of the season from the sideline. He suffered a serious hip injury on what initially looked like a routine play. The Patriots split their games the next two weeks, up against the Jets and down against Washington, although some members of the offense believed that the Washington loss featured an atypical Tom Brady. The Patriots were the more talented and disciplined team, but they were struggling against a team led by made-for-college coach Steve Spurrier. Brady had his all-around most inaccurate day as a pro, throwing four interceptions and, surprisingly, calling the wrong plays in the fourth quarter.
“He’d make the call and I’d look at him like, ‘What the fuck?’” Christian Fauria says. “These were easy plays, too. They were supposed to be to the left and he’d call them to the right. It was the only time I ever questioned him.”
After the game, as Fauria and Brady talked on the bus, the on-field confusion made sense. Brady had been concussed and stayed in the game. The NFL was still years away from enlightening itself and its players on head trauma, and years away from the issue being documented by one of Brady’s teammates.
It was early October in New England, and by using ordinary logic, it was understandable why the focus was not on the 2-2 Patriots. This was when all hopes were brought to the altar of the Red Sox. They seemed different from their teasing, heart-stopping ancestors. The new owners had hired the youngest general manager in baseball history, twenty-eight-year-old Theo Epstein. The team bonded over shaved heads, karaoke, and a catchy slogan, “Cowboy Up.” The region was so fixated on the Sox and their possibility of greatness that many were slow to recognize the football brilliance that was happening in front of them.
When the Patriots beat the Titans for their third win of the season, the game was viewed as a warm-up act. That same evening, Fenway Park was the stage for a wild Red Sox comeback win over the Athletics that extended the season. The next week, after a 17–6 shutdown of the Giants, the Patriots were put on the waiting list again. The attention now was on the Yankees, whom the Sox had played and fought the night before. There had been baseballs thrown high and inside, profane words and gestures, a fight in the bullpen between two Yankees and a Sox groundskeeper, and, an image for the ages, star pitcher Pedro Martinez, thirty-one, being bull-rushed by Yankees coach Don Zimmer, seventy-two.
By the time the Patriots arrived in Miami the next week, no one at home was talking about the players. They were talking about a controversial management decision, and this time Belichick was not the target. Everyone was enraged that Grady Little, the Sox manager, had refused to take a tiring Martinez out of game seven against the Yankees. A 5–2 lead was blown, and for the eighty-fifth consecutive year, there would be no World Series title for Boston.
Belichick had been opposed by cities and regions before, but at least his opponents had all been alive. Little was forced to defend himself against the present and the past. The rage directed at him was for not only what he had done at Yankee Stadium, but what his predecessors had done to frustrate fans in 1986, 1978, 1975, 1967, 1946… all the way back to Babe Ruth being sold away in 1919. Even Belichick would have had a hard time surviving that. And Little didn’t. He was the main character in a modern-day Western, the unwanted visitor given a generous severance package and a one-way ticket out of town.
While this was going on, the Patriots quietly won two more games, against the Dolphins and Browns, good for a 6-2 record.
Every week, though, there seemed to be a major Sox story that hid just how good the Patriots had become. One day, Belichick-like, GM Theo Epstein placed high-maintenance outfielder Manny Ramirez on waivers. He and the remaining $104 million on his contract were there for anyone in the league to pluck and claim as their own. The next day, there was a report that Boston was interested in acquiring Texas Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez. And if they got him, that meant their own previously beloved shortstop, Nomar Garciaparra, would be playing somewhere else. It was all sports theater, and it was the leading discussion topic in town.
The Patriots enjoyed the drama from afar. How things had changed; the Sox were the region’s most public dysfunctional family now and the Patriots were their drama-free, bookish alter egos. Finally, eight weeks after the release of Milloy, they were able to recognize the vision that Belichick had seen for them late in the summer. They possessed style and substance in abundance.
They knew they had a superstar in Brady, who was a young Paul Newman and Joe Montana rolled into one. He had a full celebrity life, from getting the attention of Hollywood actresses, to judging beauty pageants, to posing on magazine covers, to hinting that a career in politics could be possible one day. Through it all, he realized how important it was to be one of the guys. He was just Tommy to them, and sometimes they teased him mercilessly. He competed intensely in practice, and when he got upset his voice would rise to soprano levels. “C’mon guys!” he’d exhort, his voice squeaking. The defensive players would mimic him, and the intensity level would increase for everyone.
Similar competitions would happen in the meeting rooms, where players competed to see who was hydrating the most. Willie McGinest started it by drinking a twelve-ounce bottle of water. Someone else would come in another day with seventeen ounces. McGinest would counter with a gallon and make a production of drinking it slowly in front of the entire team. The practice field was littered with water jugs inscribed with the players’ names. Players would look at one another and tease, “I’m gaining on you.” They competed in their unpredictable fine system, where one could be fined for being late, telling an unfunny joke, or wearing an outfit that represented poor style and judgment. They even had competitions to prevent being a dullard in practice. They’d watch the practice film and blurt out when someone missed an assignment. “That’s one,” a player would say. “Oh, there’s another one…” It went on and on until the end of the film. The number of mental errors would be tallied, and then someone would head to the weight room for the big “prize” that no one wanted: a championship belt, which was really just a weightlifting belt, for the king of mental errors.
The message was drilled in daily. You’ve got to pay attention or risk being called out by your peers, long before Belichick got to you. It was all instructive to the injured Colvin, who had been to the play-offs just once in his first four seasons in the league with the Bears. “Tom had it and a lot of other people did, too. Mike Vrabel, Richard Seymour, Willie, Tedy. It was an attitude of winning,” he says. “It’s a culture. You’ve got to sacrifice. On defense, you can’t just run up the field and get sacks. It takes a lot more than that. And if you did something wrong, you’d get called out. It didn’t matter who you were, even Tom. When you do things wrong there, you get called out.”
Showing that he had learned from raw linebacker Bryan Cox two years earlier, Tedy Bruschi would remind his teammates what he needed on “rush” calls. He’d scream out, “Butch! Butch!” which translated was, Hey, make sure you hit that running back and knock him off his route as you’re on your way to the quarterback. In moments of selfishness, sometimes guys didn’t want to hear “Butch.” It didn’t always provide the glory of a sack. Bruschi would still insist on it, and if there was any problem, he’d give them the same advice that Cox had given: Take it to the coaches.
It rarely came to that. Most players were so well versed in the game plans that they knew what to do before Bruschi, Brady, or anyone else said it. A great example of their player-to-coach alertness happened on Monday Night Football in Denver. They were trailing the Broncos 24–23, backed up to their most extreme position, at the one-yard line. After three incomplete passes and just under three minutes remaining in the game, Belichick decided that it was best to take an intentional safety. That way, the Patriots would still be able to tie it with a field goal, and they could get out of this risky situation by executing a good free kick.
It was a move that worked flawlessly, and it culminated in a late touchdown pass from Brady to receiver David Givens. Ironically, the winning pass in front of a national audience was an illustration of how underrated Brady was. He was so smooth at the line of scrimmage that he didn’t give hints at how quickly he was processing and adjusting before the snap of the ball. He made it look too easy. Even after the snap, on the winning play, Givens had run the wrong route. Brady noticed it when he looked Givens’s way and instantly made the adjustment. The Patriots had won their fifth straight game and were now 7-2.
Belichick was amazed by what Brady routinely saw, and impressed with the intelligent way that he maximized each play. One of the defensive coaches, Rob Ryan, had begun calling Brady “Belichick with a Better Arm,” and the description was as precise as a Brady throw.
While Tom Jackson had said that the players hated Belichick, many of the players were starting to notice the opposite. He was informative in team meetings, with the right dose of self-deprecation, and the mixture always made them feel prepared for anything. “He gave me every aspect of the game. I had never thought of it in such detail from a defensive lineman’s standpoint,” Seymour says. “Bill’s approach was, ‘These are their weaknesses; we’re going to take away their strengths.’ He’d talk about the plays that were run when the tight end or fullback was on your side. He’d have you think about the tendency of an offense out of a one-back set versus two backs. He covered it all. Your awareness level went way up.”
Belichick knew that the big story for the next game, against the Cowboys, would be his relationship with the new Dallas coach. Guy by the name of Parcells. The players smiled when he told them, “Don’t get distracted by irrelevant aspects of this game. Belichick versus Parcells? We’re both assholes.” They roared and shook their heads knowingly when he pointed out that he and Parcells last coached together five years earlier and, “What were you doing five years ago? And what people were you doing it with?”
He had put them at ease during the week. On game day, the Patriots’ league-best defense took care of the rest. They shut out the Cowboys, 12–0, and no one was writing about Tuna Helper anymore. In fact, one of the daring assistant coaches with a sense of humor had ribbed Belichick by leaving a stuffed animal, a tuna, on his desk. Those kinds of things could be done after six consecutive wins. It was seven in a row after an overtime win in Houston. The next stop was Indianapolis, where the Colts had the identical record as the Patriots, 9-2.
The Patriots had led 31–10 in the second half, but Manning never believed that he was in a hopeless situation in the temperature-controlled comfort of his domed stadium. The Colts had come back to tie the score at 31, given up a touchdown to trail 38–31, and then gotten a field goal to draw within four, 38–34.
Now they were in a situation where they seemingly couldn’t lose: They had the ball at the two-yard line, first-and-goal, with forty seconds to play. The only mystery was how they were going to win this. Their first try was on the ground, and that netted a yard. Second-and-goal from the one. They tried a run again, but Mount Washington had positioned himself to cut off any creases between the guard and center, and it was as if the play never happened. No gain. Third-and-goal from the one. Eighteen seconds left. Manning threw a fade route to one of his lesser receivers, thus resulting in a low-percentage play and an incompletion. On fourth down, there were no surprises, and the Patriots blew up a running play to win just before time expired.
There were very few questions with Patriots games now, especially when they played at home. After giving up those 34 points in Indianapolis, they shut out the Dolphins, 12–0. That win gave them the division title for the second time in three years, and it should have been the celebratory topic on sports-talk radio. But there had been much speculation about the Red Sox and popular shortstop Nomar Garciaparra. So as Seymour prepared to do a radio interview on WEEI, he was put on deck by a caller, Nomar from Southern California.
The shortstop, still on his Hawaiian honeymoon, was calling in to the station to say that he didn’t want to leave town. The hosts apologized to Seymour, giving him the Hey, you know we have to take this call treatment. He smiled. Belichick always told his players that regular-season wins don’t get you much in the NFL. He was right. Nine wins in a row and the division title got you put on hold on local radio.
The team was so steady and consistent that one Herald columnist, Michael Gee, even said that they should lose because they were so steady and consistent. “The only motive for suggesting New England might want to finish 13-3 and not 14-2 is one man’s devout belief in arithmetic,” he wrote. “All winning streaks end, and the longer one goes on, the more likely it is to end. For the Pats to run the table to a title, their winning streak must reach 15 games. That’s not just a long run, it’s an historic one.”
Losing games? On purpose? Even the harshest Belichick critics who had said that the coach was doing just that with the release of Milloy didn’t mean it literally. Anyway, if a fifteen-game winning streak is what it would take to get everything they wanted—no more losses and another Lombardi Trophy—that’s what they believed they would do.
They went into their final game of the regular season against the 6-9 Buffalo Bills. The Bills were quieter and less optimistic than they had been in September. Instead of people in Buffalo talking about the Super Bowl, they wondered about rebuilding. Their head coach, Gregg Williams, was likely to be fired. Moving on from Williams would mean that Belichick would be competing against his third different Bills head coach in four seasons. The new coach would likely want a new quarterback, too. Bledsoe had been much worse than he was in 2002. He had thrown more interceptions than touchdowns, and it was hard to believe that those joyful stories in the Buffalo News about the players who had “come from New England wrapped in a bow” were written in the same calendar year. It was a wrong-way dynasty; the Patriots were methodically turning their division into a wasteland.
Milloy had played well for the Bills, but those who knew him well could see it and hear it. He didn’t always see his Buffalo teammates on off days because he was in Boston, seeing the guys from the team that was still in his heart. He missed the city, the Patriots, and even the exacting eye of Belichick.
Brady had been asked to participate in a movie by the Farrelly brothers, the Rhode Island natives behind the outrageous Hollywood comedies Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin, and There’s Something About Mary. The quarterback accepted and got a spot for Milloy as well. The title of the movie, Stuck on You, was perfect for the story on the screen and the one in the Bills’ defensive huddle. But the final game of the regular season just didn’t seem believable, even in the Farrelly brothers’ world. It had nothing to do with the Patriots’ win, their twelfth in a row, completing a home schedule where they allowed an average of 8 points per game. It was that final score, which seemed scripted by someone who had gone too far with the revenge theme. It was 31–0 at the end of the regular season, just as it had been in the beginning.
As the play-offs began to unfold, it was obvious what the biggest sacrifice of being a 2003 Patriot was. Sometimes, when you played for this team, your talent could be hidden, right before thousands of people in the stands and millions watching on TV. A quarterback like Brady, gifted as well as studious, might be overlooked when compared to Peyton Manning. On this team, sometimes the game plan would call for forty-five passes, and sometimes it was half of that. Maybe it’s why the perception of the quarterbacks was so different. Manning and Tennessee’s Steve McNair shared the league’s MVP award, while Brady received no consideration for it.
No one, not even in the White House, questioned Brady’s leadership qualities. He was invited to watch the State of the Union address with First Lady Laura Bush. He looked the part there in the box, in a classic suit, clapping at appropriate moments during the speech. Strangely, he didn’t get as much credit for his leadership and expertise in football as he did outside of it.
On this team, a wide receiver wasn’t guaranteed to get the same amount of targets every week. Here, defensive tackles would sometimes exit a game with a tackle or two, applauded by the coaches and met with indifference by the media. You have to be secure in your talent on teams like these because you’ll be known as a football player’s football player, and sometimes even they would miss what you were doing.
“This is what we started to do: We slowly accumulated winning stat guys as opposed to the high-sack, high-interception guys,” former Patriots linebacker Matt Chatham says. “Willie McGinest, Mike Vrabel. Those guys are way more valuable if they get eight sacks rather than sixteen. Dominating the edge, getting on the tight end, blowing up wide receivers and never letting them get into the pattern. That’s way more valuable than sixteen sacks.
“I think that the world thinks that the sixteen-sack guy is more valuable, but the Patriots don’t think that, and you can get into the economics of this: The sixteen-sack guy costs twice as much as the other guy. And once you get to a certain point, it’s saturation. It’s just sixteen plays and when you play five hundred snaps, it’s not that important. It just isn’t. Who are the best rerouters among outside linebackers? Who are the best edge-setters? Does anyone in the media know that?”
It wasn’t just the media in 2003. The Patriots’ first play-off game was against Tennessee and McNair. On the coldest day of the year, with a game-time temperature of four degrees and a windchill of minus ten, the Patriots got into a frostbitten street fight with the Titans. There were no comfortable moments in the game, whether it was warmth or aesthetics. Consecutive win number thirteen was secured when Tennessee receiver Drew Bennett dropped a ball on fourth down. A catch would have put the Titans in field goal range. Instead they lost, 17–14. And one of their guards, Zach Piller, guaranteed that the Patriots wouldn’t win the Super Bowl.
The next week, the Patriots were visited by the other side of the split MVP award, Peyton Manning.
This was what it meant to be a Patriot; winning had to be satisfactory enough, because the hype and awards weren’t always going to be there. Brady should have known that better than most. He had grown up watching Montana, his generation’s symbol for winning. Montana had won his first Super Bowl at age twenty-five, but he didn’t win his first MVP until he was thirty-three. Sometimes it took a while for people to catch up.
The president of the Colts, Bill Polian, watched the conference championship from the press box. Members of the media could see and hear him pounding the table and cursing. He hated what he was seeing out there. As Chatham mentioned, there were lots of jams and reroutes by linebackers. Lots of instances where receivers were obliterated at the line of scrimmage before they had a chance to give Manning a clean target. The Patriots called it suffocating; Polian called it holding.
“Throw the flag!” he bellowed several times.
He was an influential member in the league when it came to shaping policy, and so was head coach Tony Dungy. The Patriots weren’t going to be able to play like this during the 2004 season. But that season hadn’t arrived yet, and Manning still had to try to pass his way to the Super Bowl. He seemed surprised at just how good Patriots corner Ty Law was. Four interceptions later, three of them to Law, and the Patriots were conference champions.
The fourteen-game winning streak didn’t hover because they hadn’t been coached to think that way. Belichick was all short-term focus and living in the moment. The criticism never distracted him, and he encouraged them to follow his lead. “Ignore the noise,” he’d often say. It needed to be ignored. The Patriots were scheduled to meet the Carolina Panthers in Houston, and some wondered how their offensive line, without the injured Damien Woody, would be able to block the Panthers. Warren Sapp, the Pro Bowl defensive tackle, went on national TV and said that it couldn’t be done, and he singled out Patriots backup Russ Hochstein.
“He couldn’t block either of you two,” Sapp told ESPN’s Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser.
Even on the day of the game, with the Patriots in position to claim their place among the greatest teams in pro football history, there was noise. Some of it came from the Panthers, who wanted the Patriots to know that they weren’t afraid of them or their mystique. Some of it came from Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, who performed at halftime. The nation and the FCC were shocked when America was exposed to Jackson’s breast. The game itself, entertaining as it was, couldn’t compete with the conversations about nudity and multi-million-dollar fines.
Still, Hochstein and his friends on the offensive line found a way to block the Panthers. Brady threw the ball a season-high forty-eight times and wasn’t sacked. He tallied 354 yards and three touchdown passes. He ceded the stage, briefly, to allow Adam Vinatieri to kick another winning field goal, this one from forty-one yards. The 32–29 win, the fifteenth in succession, had been like so many others. Close yet convincing. Dramatic yet locked into the same ending.
That’s what their team was for the season, and that’s what they were going to be as long as they continued to win. In a way, Brady and his teammates had been correct to lament the release of Milloy. Tough decisions would have to be made to ensure more parades, more rings, and more kid-like moments when they’d press their fingers on the shining Lombardi Trophy and see all their fingerprints winking back at them.
It was natural to become emotional in these moments and want to keep everybody. So the players were angry when it was time to say good-bye, because that wasn’t their strength. They weren’t big-picture economists the way their coach was. It was a necessary and basic trait for those who wanted to be dynastic architects. Be clear, be thorough, be decisive, be bold. Be unpopular. And, sure, be a heartbreaker as well. A big parade was certainly awaiting the Patriots again in Boston. So was another tumultuous, controversial offseason.