It ended just before midnight on the East Coast, and the New Englanders who watched it finally understood what they had been envied over and warned about for years. It’s one thing to comprehend that your team can lose in the postseason, but when it doesn’t happen in ten consecutive games, do you truly believe it?
If there is a problem with winning (imagine that), this is it: The ability to earnestly listen becomes difficult. You go over all the clichéd checklists, recite all the things you’ve been programmed to say. How it’s hard to win games in a league where the difference in talent is as faint as a whisper. How it’s challenging to just drop into someone’s city, mute their stadium, and erase their football season. And, best of all, from the wise ones: how the current run of success should be appreciated now, because the future most certainly will have troubled paths.
It would have all made sense, if not for the results in that ten-game stretch. The first win had come in 2002, one month before the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The tenth win had come in 2006, one month before the Winter Olympics in Turin. In between, there had been anomalies, too many of them to be called anomalies anymore. The Steelers were a combined 17-3 at Heinz Field during two dominant seasons, and two of those three home losses were delivered by the Patriots. Peyton Manning had thrown fifty-three touchdown passes in seventeen games, an average of three per, and in game eighteen, against the Patriots, he led his team to just a field goal. A fumble recovery by the Raiders had become a Tom Brady incompletion. A kicker, Adam Vinatieri, had become a rock star. A guy who was once on the 2002 expansion list, Willie McGinest, set a league record with four and a half sacks in a play-off game in 2006.
A ten-game winning streak in the worst conditions, against the best competition; it’s not supposed to happen. So even though the 2005 regular season had not been great, and the odds of winning a January game in Denver were low, the winning memories were powerful. Humility usually comes from experiencing the bitterness of failure, not being lectured about it. You hear the words, clear and thoughtful, about what you can’t do and still expect to win. But the tug of memory says, It won’t happen to us. It never has.
Late in the game, when they had often worn out opponents by wit and will, the Patriots finally felt it. They trailed 17–6 in the fourth quarter, and Vinatieri missed an easy field-goal attempt. Still trailing by the same score, with ten minutes remaining, the Patriots were about to get the ball and would no doubt cut into the lead. Then Troy Brown muffed a punt and lost the ball. Three plays and two minutes later, it was 24–6.
This was that bogeyman, all dressed up in Broncos orange. Bill Belichick didn’t have a special move in his game of football chess, Brady didn’t coolly position the offense for an improbable win at the end, and there was no fit of nerves from the opposition, melting down on its own before the Patriots even approached. No, this was consistent with what the rest of America knew about play-off frustration. These kind of games got into your head and made you replay each of the five turnovers, including one forced by, of all people, their punter. These losses took away your graciousness and eloquence, leaving you with a vocabulary of excuses. If the refs hadn’t called that pass interference on Asante Samuel; if Brady had run the ball in near the goal line instead of forcing a pass that was intercepted; if the league had cameras near the goal line, they’d have had a better look at a legendary hustle play by Ben Watson, and the Patriots would have gotten the ball back…
Excuses.
It was over now, the first postseason loss in Brady’s career. He had thrown a seventy-three-yard pass to Deion Branch, proving again just how natural their chemistry was. But late in the game and well after it, Branch cried hard because he knew that the business of football was going to prevent this group from being maintained. Brady had thrown a touchdown pass to David Givens, a rugged receiver who had been drafted in the same class as Branch. Givens had worked hard, done the dirty work on special teams, and pushed his way up from a marginal seventh-round draft choice to a number two receiver who had earned Brady’s trust. He was a free agent, though, and he and his teammates had already seen this economic snapshot, over and over. He was going to be a rich man, but it wasn’t going to happen in Foxboro.
McGinest, thirty-four, would be perceived in the open market as an old veteran who could teach a young team; Eric Mangini, thirty-five, would be coveted as a young coach who could refresh a veteran team.
In a way, the loss was a good thing for Belichick and Brady. They would never say it like that, but if they thought about the way the region had deified them, maybe they would see that losing a game would remind people that they were just men. The 10-0 story line never gave them space for that, though. The streak emboldened people, and it elevated Belichick and Brady beyond elite performers, which they were, into something that they weren’t and no one ever could be. The qualities that they were given started on the field, but they didn’t end there. And that was the problem. They didn’t end anywhere. There were no boundaries, no ceiling, for either of them, and as a result there was no cap to any expectations.
A Globe editorial, figuratively one million miles away from the good humor and hyperbole of the sports pages, had compared the Patriots to Microsoft and Michelangelo’s work at the Sistine Chapel… all in five paragraphs. The prolific and titanic David Halberstam, who had authored fourteen consecutive bestsellers, announced that he was turning his eyes to the Patriots and Belichick. So the author of The Best and the Brightest focused on the NFL’s version of that title, Belichick, and penned The Education of a Coach.
Brady had not only spent time at the State of the Union address, clapping knowingly and compassionately; he had knelt before and presumably been blessed by the pope at the Vatican. His dating life, with actress Bridget Moynahan, had led him to red carpets and galas. He seemed to fit in perfectly at these black-tie affairs, moving about confidently in his velvet jacket among famous designers, actresses, musicians, and comedians.
The feeling was that Belichick and Brady could do just about anything, in their field or otherwise. Turn average players into good ones; reset the games and mores of wayward personalities; teach knuckleheads the Patriot Way; defeat superior talent with brains and hard work; stare down and defy the media in spite of withering criticism; give seminars on composure under pressure, business restoration, and, in general, overall success. They displayed aspects of those elements on TV, weekly, during football season. They became part of the long-running, highly rated local drama, and just like in the world of plots and scripts, sometimes it was hard to distinguish the real person from the character he was portraying. Belichick and Brady were winning, so the descriptions of them as winners at everything weren’t necessarily dangerous, just unrealistic.
One of the people who didn’t treat Belichick like a celebrity was Eric Mangini. He was an independent thinker who didn’t automatically do things the way his boss did.
He was never disrespectful of the head coach, but he had a way of pushing back, with an edge, that other coaches rarely did. In 2005, his first season as a coordinator, sometimes the resistance could be felt in the defenses he asked his players to execute.
“The complexity level kicked up a bit,” Tedy Bruschi recalls. “Sometimes it got too complex and we’d tell him to scale it down, and he would. I didn’t feel that he was trying to do his best Belichick impression; he did the best job of pushing his stuff on Bill. He had a lot of ideas. He had new stuff that he wanted to do, new adjustments that he wanted to do.
“We’d have double calls, sometimes even triple calls in the huddle, based on certain formations. ‘If it’s two by two, it’s one defense. But three by one is something else, and if they motion to three by two we gotta switch…’ We got it down the best that we could. We liked being pushed intellectually.”
Immediately after the loss in Denver, the rumors began: Mangini was a leading candidate to be the next head coach of the Jets. From Belichick’s perspective, a Mangini departure for another team in the division was going to be a problem, particularly that team. He despised the Jets. The situation got worse with office gossip. Some people said that Mangini was trying to recruit and build his staff even before the postseason game. He denied it passionately, but it was out there, just like the opportunity to triple his salary was out there. Mangini took the Jets job, with its $2 million annual salary, and the line was drawn. He was officially cut off by Belichick. It was going to be hard, if not impossible, to ever reenter the inner circle.
In mid-January 2006, the tone was already set for the rest of the year. Mistrust. Deception. Betrayal. Heartbreak. The “complexity level” was there on the field, and in several relationships, too. The timing was incredible. It had all begun with just one play-off loss, the first one in four years, and now the filter was gone from everything. Before that loss, the Patriots appeared to be different from everyone else, not just immune to the play-off follies that chased other teams, but immune to organizational dysfunction. They had spent four years in that protective bubble, and now it was time to truly feel the heat.
It was time to say good-bye to McGinest, who got a $12 million contract to join Romeo Crennel with the Browns. Givens had managed to turn a fifty-nine-catch, two-touchdown season into a $24 million offer from the Titans, including an $8 million signing bonus. Neither move was a surprise. And even though there were reports that Vinatieri was visiting Green Bay, no one thought there was any chance that he’d leave the Patriots for the Packers.
It turned out to be worse than that. The Patriots didn’t want to set the market on any player, even a kicker. It didn’t matter to them that the dollars it would take to sign Vinatieri were scant compared to the numbers being discussed at other positions. They believed in financial discipline, and there was a level they weren’t willing to go to sign Vinatieri. That was fine with the Colts, who had struggled to beat the Patriots in the postseason. They were excited to extend a $3.5 million signing bonus to the kicker, and that did it. The rare kicker, one who got autograph requests and commercials, the main object of framed photos in which he was punctuating big play-off wins, the man to see at closing time, was now a Colt.
The parade watchers heard the news and went straight to the polls. According to Boston.com, more than half of the region’s residents claimed that they no longer subscribed to the “In Bill We Trust” mantra. Vinatieri was one of the most popular players in team history, and he had been the symbol of something that had eluded the region in the fifteen-year gap between Larry Bird’s last championship and Brady’s first. He was reliable. He was dependable. When big moments arose and he was asked to perform, there was nothing to dread.
On the day the Vinatieri news broke, NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue announced his retirement. He had just presided over a new collective bargaining agreement, one that the owners ultimately deemed too generous to the players, and said it was the right time to turn the job over to someone else. He was viewed with warmth in most markets, including New England, and he had faith in a handful of owners, such as Robert Kraft, to find a strong successor.
“It’s a very complicated job,” Kraft told writer Judy Battista. “The skill set required to do this job is unbelievable: legal, media, sponsorships. And really, you have thirty-two members of the board of directors.”
The emphasis for the new commissioner was youth (under fifty), the ability to balance the concerns of thirty-two owners, and a strong financial plan that would help the league take advantage of international opportunities and new media. Most people agreed that the league’s chief operating officer, forty-seven-year-old Roger Goodell, might be the perfect candidate.
While the league was trying to maintain its run of success, the Patriots had the same mentality. It was becoming more difficult to counter the talent drain, on the field, on the coaching staff, and in the front office. Belichick’s system of promoting from within was a tribute to his eye for talent, but it was also an indication to the rest of the league that anyone chosen by Belichick was worthy of attention. In the past two seasons, three coordinators had left for head coaching jobs. He had installed Josh McDaniels as offensive coordinator; Dean Pees to replace the enemy, Mangini, as defensive coordinator; and the rocket scientist, Matt Patricia, to take over for Pees coaching the linebackers. How much longer would he be able to keep a cadre of talented personnel evaluators in scouting? Many teams had expressed an interest in Scott Pioli, and if he didn’t answer their calls, then one day Thomas Dimitroff, Jon Robinson, and Bob Quinn would.
Preparing for the 2006 season was a struggle, for multiple reasons. There were intense contract negotiations with Richard Seymour. Going into his sixth season, Seymour was recognized as one of the best defensive linemen in the game. He had already made four Pro Bowls and had been an impact defender on three championship teams. The Patriots couldn’t treat him like other players and move on in the name of value. He was too young, just twenty-six, and too good; he needed to be paid. They agreed to a three-year extension, for $10 million per season.
The talks with Deion Branch weren’t nearly as smooth. The sides were millions upon millions of dollars apart. The Patriots wanted the receiver to accept an $18 million contract; he wanted more than twice as much, $39 million. He was prepared to hold out, which would mean that Brady would start training camp without his two favorite receivers from the previous season.
Ty Law had left the Jets as a free agent coming off a ten-interception season, best in the NFL, and he had the power to pick the team of his choice. He was still young enough, at thirty-two, to play corner effectively. He went to visit Kansas City, and when he was on his way to meet with Chiefs coach Herm Edwards, he got a call. It was Belichick. He wanted Law to return to the Patriots, too, but New England wasn’t offering what Kansas City was: five years and $30 million.
Even drafting high-end players, a Patriots strength, was contentious. The benefits of a gifted and opinionated scouting staff are obvious. The underside of it is that as young scouts grow into veteran ones, as inexperienced evaluators become seasoned ones with their own team-building principles, reaching a consensus can be messy. That was the case in the Patriots’ draft room, when some were very high on University of Minnesota running back Laurence Maroney, while others questioned his maturity. Those contrasts were normal in the scouting process, and, eventually, aggressive debate would lead to a clearer understanding of who the player was. But that didn’t happen here. There were factions on Maroney and University of Florida receiver Chad Jackson, also a player who left school after his junior year.
Belichick preached that the past was no predictor of things to come. He gave that message to the team and to the media. It was also true of his personal life. He had been married in 1977 to a girl, Debby Clarke, whom he knew from high school. They had been separated for three years and now, in the summer of 2006, they divorced. It was hard enough for anyone, in any profession, to manage the emotional weight of it all. There were the three kids, who were actually either young adults or in their late teens now, and their feelings about it. There were friends and family and colleagues, lawyers and accountants and documents. All of that was bad enough, and that was without the scrutiny of the public. But stardom like this, in a year like this, made any hope for a quiet divorce a fantasy.
The year was barely half over, and it was already heavy. The Branch talks were regressing, to the point where the sides began making their arguments to the media. Branch was being fined $14,000 for each day of camp that he missed, and his agent said that it didn’t matter. He had been paid a base salary of $500,000 the year before, and the number had doubled only because he had reached a performance incentive. He was a former Super Bowl MVP, his quarterback’s favorite receiver, and one of the best route runners in the business. He wanted out of a contract that he had outperformed; the Patriots didn’t see his value the way he did.
Brady and Branch had once showed off to Steve Kroft in a feature for 60 Minutes. They wanted to prove to him that they could know exactly what to do without saying a word, and they went to the practice field and did it. That’s how connected they had been. But they were both raised as Patriots, and they knew that this was not the land for sentimentalists. It wasn’t going to last that long for them, or anyone else. Branch was traded to the Seattle Seahawks in exchange for a 2007 first-round pick.
“We never let business get in the way of our personal relationship,” Branch says now. “I told him that I loved him and to keep doing what he was doing. I said, ‘I hope to be playing against you in the Super Bowl.’”
Seattle gave Branch the $39 million contract that he was looking for, beating out the other team that was willing to do the same thing: Mangini’s Jets. In fact, the Year of Disruption couldn’t head into September without Belichick and Mangini continuing their feud. The Patriots filed tampering charges with the league because they felt that the Jets had weakened their bargaining position with Branch. Long before any other team had been granted permission to speak with Branch, the Patriots argued, the Jets had illegally done it. The league didn’t agree with the Patriots’ position, but it wouldn’t be the last time the new commissioner in New York would have to mediate conflicts between the Patriots and Jets.
As expected, the new guy was Goodell, a former Jets intern and longtime league employee. He wasn’t a lawyer like his predecessor, opting for economics during his undergraduate days. He was from Jamestown, New York, less than an hour from Buffalo, but that didn’t please Bills owner Ralph Wilson. The owner, who believed that the league rigged the process to usher Goodell into the job, claimed that the new commissioner had forgotten his roots and hadn’t been to Jamestown in years. Most owners weren’t as personal as Wilson, and instead were excited by Goodell’s business acumen. Before the commissioner was selected, Kraft couldn’t have spoken more piercing and prophetic words.
“If we choose the wrong person as commissioner, it will be two or three years before we find out,” he told the Globe. “A lot of damage can be done in that time.”
As the season began, Brady was facing the biggest test of his career. He’d become used to the gradual change in Foxboro, with age, new opportunities, and phaseouts affecting some of his offensive teammates. He’d never before faced losing his two top weapons, both in their twenties. He’d have to figure it out with a new receiver, Reche Caldwell, who was solid but nothing like Branch and Givens. The tight end that he renamed “Motoring” Christian Fauria was in Washington and miserable. “As soon as I got there, I knew: They don’t get it,” he says. “Their style was antiquated. [Head coach] Joe Gibbs would be in team meetings listening to Clinton Portis bitch about wearing white shoes versus black shoes. I knew I was on borrowed time.” Fauria’s old teammate in New England, Troy Brown, was expecting to play a reduced role. But the lack of gumption from the rookie Chad Jackson meant that the veteran Brown would be needed to give more than expected.
The people Brady was handing the ball to were also changing. Corey Dillon had been record-setting in his first season with the team. In his second season, starting in November, things weren’t quite right. Before a game in Miami he told new running back Heath Evans, “Hey, my calf feels funny. You better get ready.” Evans did and ran for eighty-four yards in a spot start. Dillon’s production was off all that year, and that’s what led to the drafting of Maroney in Dillon’s third and probably final year with the team.
One thing that wasn’t changing in 2006, despite the personnel changes, was the expectation level of Belichick.
“When Bill would deliver tough messages to the team, they were all delivered with a purpose,” Evans says. “They were very rarely pleasant messages from Bill, but they were purposeful. There’s nobody like him in mastering the whole operation. It can be uncomfortable when you first witness it, and it was for me. I was paranoid. I was writing down every critique, every coaching point. But the nervousness calms down when you realize that he’s giving you the answers to the test. You’re getting prepared so you can play free in the games.”
Brady had just turned twenty-nine, and he was at the point in his career where organizations would be adding to their quarterback’s repertoire, not taking away pieces from it. He was in a different place in his life as an athlete and as a man. Moynahan was part of a TV show called Six Degrees that she filmed in New York. Speculation was that he had her in mind when he made a stunning $14.5 million purchase. His new three-bedroom condo was on the seventieth floor of the Time Warner Center at Columbus Circle. Moynahan, seven years older than Brady, often mentioned in interviews that she had a strong desire to start a family. Given all the circumstantial evidence, everything seemed to be aligned.
Even though the new characters around him were different, and often insufficient, Brady didn’t suffer much. He clearly was manufacturing everything he could from the offense, and he was helped by a defense that was on its way to the best season in team history. By early December, the Patriots were positioned atop the division with a 9-3 record. The season, on the field, had been drama-free, except for another Belichick versus Mangini episode in November. In that one, leading up to the Patriots-Jets game, Belichick refused to refer to Mangini by name. There would be “he” or “him” or “they’re well coached,” but no “Eric” or “Mangini.”
What the audience didn’t know at the time was that the organizations were fighting over cameras. Mangini knew that as part of their research to detect signaling trends, the Patriots liked to film coordinators giving signs, and he didn’t want it done to him. He interpreted it as a power move by Belichick, maybe even a test to see what he would do. Belichick didn’t see it that way, and so the taping continued. Mangini, in turn, planned to tape the Patriots. This, along with the Branch tampering charges, as well as the gossip about how he took the job, and just the fact that it was the Jets, accelerated the relationship to irreconcilable status.
The Jets were 7-5, a huge improvement from where they had been after week twelve in 2005, so Mangini was doing something right. He was mentioned as a Coach of the Year candidate, and some writers had begun calling him “Mangenius.” He may not have been talking to Belichick, but he was acting like him as a team-builder. He went heavy on the offensive line in his first draft, selecting tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson and center Nick Mangold. In free agency, he was interested in some familiar ex-Patriot names: Matt Chatham, Bobby Hamilton, Hank Poteat. With the way the division was unfolding, the Jets had a chance to make the play-offs and see the Patriots as their first opponent.
Brady didn’t seem to have the postseason on his mind when he and the team went to Miami for their thirteenth game. The only good thing about the day, for the Patriots, was the plentiful sun. Brady kept dropping back and looking for the players he trusted. It wasn’t accidental that he targeted Brown and Kevin Faulk, his guys, more than anyone else. He was desperate and frustrated. The Dolphins limited him to twelve completions and seventy-eight yards all day, winning 21–0.
Maybe the offense just didn’t get it, or maybe he was simply out of it. Moynahan was in Miami, too, but she didn’t visit him, nor did he visit her. It was surprising for the couple that had been spotted at NBA play-off games, galas, and random spots around New York and Boston. But there was a reason Brady didn’t see Moynahan at her art show event and she didn’t see him against the Dolphins. The relationship was over. Brady was the only quarterback in the league who could be the subject of the sports pages and Us Weekly. According to the magazine, and to Moynahan’s publicist, “They amicably ended their three-year relationship several weeks ago. We ask for your respect and consideration of their privacy.”
But this wasn’t 2001 anymore. Privacy was no longer an option for Belichick or Brady. That would be fine with both of them if the public had just been gripped by the games and the cerebral matchups on the field. They had been too successful for that narrow gaze. Too handsome and too smart as well. Halberstam’s book on Belichick had become the writer’s fifteenth consecutive bestseller, and corporations and magazine photographers had reported no lack of interest in Brady’s brand, his body, or his face. Belichick and Brady were going to have to learn what some celebrities meant by the paradoxical statement that, sometimes, there’s deep loneliness in being famous.
For a brief window, it seemed that the worst public relations were over for the coach and the quarterback. There wasn’t anything written about Belichick’s divorce, and the society columns didn’t share anything out of the ordinary about Brady. The first play-off opponent, the Jets, and the circus that they brought to Foxboro was refreshing compared to the pop-culture curiosity that the public craved.
Mangini hadn’t spent all those years with Belichick in vain. He knew that the Patriots had greater talent, greater intangibles, and a greater quarterback. He would be able to junk up the game, defensively, for a while. Then talent was going to take over, which is exactly what happened. The Patriots won 37–16. With extra attention on the handshake between Belichick and Mangini at midfield, camera operators and photographers swarmed the would-be meeting point between professor and former student.
One of the photographers there was a perennial award-winner named Jim Davis. He knew sports as well as he knew photography, which gave him a skill for capturing some of the most provocative images in the city. But as he stood there trying to line up the shot, he was the one who was provoked. By Belichick. The coach pushed him out of the way and wrapped Mangini in a bear hug.
There was no coaching animosity between Belichick and Marty Schottenheimer, head coach of the Chargers. The only issue, beforehand, was the Chargers’ 14-2 record. But when the Patriots upset San Diego, and subsequently danced on the Chargers’ field, running back LaDainian Tomlinson attributed it to a lack of “class” and posited that it began “with the head coach.”
There was so much accusing, name-calling, and finger-pointing after the game that not many people observed Brady’s visitor. She was tall and thin, striking actually, and was much more comfortable talking about fútbol than the American version of it. It was Gisele Bündchen, the Brazilian supermodel, and perhaps for the first time in her adult life, most people didn’t immediately notice her.
The calm of the moment, the sliver of privacy, was temporary. That would all change later in the year, when everything about the Patriots was public and wrong. That would all change next week, in Indianapolis. It was hard to believe: Despite the hellish year, the Patriots still had a chance to return to the Super Bowl.