In retrospect, Bill Belichick and Tom Brady’s first play-off game together was easy. The opponent that night, the Oakland Raiders, had been tough, along with the weather. It had taken a painstaking film review, slow frame by slow frame of Brady’s right arm, to reverse a game-ending fumble. After all that, a man who wasn’t wearing winter boots in a nor’easter was expected to keep his footing and kick a football forty-five yards.
And that was only good enough to force overtime.
At least it was just about football then, and nothing else. At least they didn’t have to put on armor before facing the local and national media because, for the most part, the media came in peace. They had learned to appreciate the coach, sometimes brainy and boorish, who was prep school classmates with Jeb Bush and Buzz Bissinger. They were smitten by the charismatic quarterback who always did and always would refer to Belichick as “Coach Belichick.” Their story had sold dozens of times in American history, and it would sell again. Overcoming the odds. Redemption after mockery. The power of teamwork. The rejection of groupthink.
That Raiders game had been just five years ago, but it truly was from a different era. There was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter or TMZ then, and even if there had been, Belichick and Brady would have been too square for the format. But the years and a dozen additional play-off games had made them national celebrities. It was great for name recognition and the bottom line, although it also required profound self-awareness; if you’re a celebrity who doesn’t care about creating a public image, the public will scrutinize every piece of information about you and take over your self-portrait.
January 21, 2007, wasn’t purely about football for Belichick and Brady, but it was one of the last times they’d take the field without having the legitimacy of their play-off wins and Super Bowl titles questioned. More pointedly, it was one of the last times they’d appear in public without having their characters probed and debated. The previous year had been accented by conflict at every turn, so much so that the default response of focusing on football was no longer valid. Their football world had been laced with conflict as well, and 2007 was going to be much worse.
For the moment, in an overheated domed stadium in downtown Indianapolis, there was still respect for both men. While it was going to be Brady’s ninth career start against the Colts, it was only his third game in Indianapolis. According to the statistics, this was far from Brady’s best season, but the fact that Brady could draw twenty-four touchdown passes and 3,529 yards from this leaden receiving corps was a tribute to his talent. Belichick, meanwhile, had not only fought with Eric Mangini, the exiled disciple; he had improved the defense with his replacement. New defensive coordinator Dean Pees relied heavily on a concept that was known as a Cover 4. It was a conservative, big-play-prevention defense, but when his players complained about it he would give them a simple response: “Win on first and second down, and we can get exotic on third down.” They answered by winning a lot on the early downs, and they had finished with the fewest points allowed average, 14.8, in team history.
Pees couldn’t have been happier in the first half, with the Patriots leading 14–3. That’s when Asante Samuel, an elastic corner who was proficient at anticipating routes, made eye contact with Peyton Manning before his receiver, Marvin Harrison, did. Samuel intercepted the ball and ran thirty-nine yards for an easy touchdown and a 21–3 lead.
Adam Vinatieri had given the Colts five field goals the week before in Baltimore, and that was enough to get by the unimaginative Ravens offense. History suggested that the Colts wouldn’t be able to do that while facing Belichick and Brady. What the New England head coach and quarterback understood was that this team wasn’t like the others that had tormented Manning. Belichick had been nervous about the Colts’ speed, so he had inserted a young linebacker, Eric Alexander, to match up with Dallas Clark, the quick Indianapolis tight end. It was a reach, and Manning was smart enough to recognize it and exploit it.
On offense, the problem for the Patriots was not complicated. They had a lone star, Brady. Two years earlier, Corey Dillon had run at the Colts, daring anyone to challenge his mix of fury, muscle, and speed. He was now in steep decline and not a consistent threat. Neither was his soon-to-be replacement, rookie Laurence Maroney. Troy Brown was the smartest player on the field, but this was going to be the last meaningful game of his career. Jabar Gaffney was fearless and athletic, a third option for a great offense, a primary option for this one.
As for Reche Caldwell, he was the first exhibit for the prosecution that argued against the Patriot Way and its good-value principles. Indeed, he had come up with a season-saving fumble recovery in San Diego. It was telling, though, that his most memorable play had not come as a receiver. In this game, the most important one of the year, Caldwell had twice dropped passes with no one covering him. The costlier one, with just under nine minutes to play, was maddening. The score was tied at 28, and Manning was on the sideline nervously chewing on a Gatorade towel. Brady and the offense were set up at the Colts’ eighteen-yard line, and in a shocking defensive lapse, no one was lined up across from Caldwell. He waved his arms to alert Brady, and Brady saw him with his peripheral vision. He lofted a perfectly catchable pass to the receiver, who briefly touched the ball with both hands and then watched it fall to the turf. Nineteen-year-old Steve Belichick, the older of the coach’s two sons, put his hands on his head in disbelief.
“It’s hard to explain,” Jim Nantz said to his TV audience on CBS.
They settled for a field goal on that drive, which everyone in the building knew wasn’t going to be enough. Predictably, the Colts scored with a Vinatieri field goal, and the new kicker in Foxboro, rookie Stephen Gostkowski, responded with a forty-three-yarder for a 34–31 lead with 3:53 left. Unfortunately for the Patriots, they couldn’t take advantage of another gift, a three-and-out by the Colts. They had the ball with 3:22 remaining, and all they had to do was sweat out the clock and force Indianapolis coach Tony Dungy to use his timeouts.
The strategy didn’t work, and sixty-five seconds later, the ball was in Manning’s hands again. This was where sweat came into play. The dome, with its arid heat and the relentlessness of Manning, was wearing down the defense. It didn’t look like a historic unit at all. One of Tedy Bruschi’s former coaches, Bo Pelini, used to have a meeting room saying when he was critiquing film with his players. The saying stuck with the linebacker during tough times. “The longest play in football is eight seconds,” Pelini would begin, “and if you can’t go hard for eight seconds, get the fuck out of my room!” They were going hard for those eight seconds, but they’d walk to the line of scrimmage with their hands on their hips.
Manning was aggressive now, scanning a defense that didn’t have the loping Willie McGinest, who would practically pick up Manning’s receivers and change their routes. There was no Rodney Harrison, injured at the end of the regular season. Harrison was a thinker and a hitter, so every play in his direction was a surprise. There was no Roman Phifer, who could stick with Manning’s tight ends and punish them, too. There was no audacious Ty Law, who was now in Kansas City.
Eleven yards here to Reggie Wayne. Thirty-two yards there to Bryan Fletcher, who ran past Alexander, the so-called speed option. Fourteen more yards to Wayne, who bobbled and nearly lost the ball on the catch. It wouldn’t have mattered if he had, because there was also a Patriots’ penalty on the play.
The Patriots were wheezing. There were just under two minutes to play, with the ball at the New England eleven and the Patriots close to expiration. This was going to end their hopes of going to their fourth Super Bowl. Their run was not going to end, but their story was. This was their fourteenth play-off game since 2002 and, even if you didn’t root for them, there was no reason to view their accomplishments with disdain. That would soon change. This was the end of a no-snark, no-scandal era for them.
So in the fourteenth and final act of the play, a production featuring the brilliant, cost-efficient, and authentic Patriots, they lost. Colts running back Joseph Addai ran up the middle, untouched, for a touchdown, and with twenty-four seconds to play Brady threw an interception.
All sorts of things had shifted now. Dungy and Manning, who had been the foil to Belichick and Brady, were finally getting a chance to go to the Super Bowl. Manning could figure out a way to beat Brady and the Patriots when it was important after all. The next time the Patriots played a game here, the Colts would be defending Super Bowl champions while the Belichick-Brady public-relations stock would have fallen from hero worship to Hades.
The first hit of the offseason arrived courtesy of the New York Times and Boston Globe, with both newspapers publishing stories containing biting quotes from Ted Johnson. The former Patriots linebacker, a member of all three Super Bowl teams, claimed that Belichick made him practice in 2002, knowing that he was concussed. Johnson, thirty-four, said that his postfootball life was in shambles and added, “There’s something wrong with me. There’s something wrong with my brain. And I know when it started.”
He said that he was anxious and forgetful, full of disappointment and shame. In his view, Belichick had “played God” with his health. Johnson’s comments were a follow-up to a Times piece one month earlier, in which the paper reported that the 2006 suicide of former Philadelphia Eagle Andre Waters was caused by brain damage from football injuries. Belichick told the Globe that he would never ask an injured player to participate in anything physical. “If Ted felt so strongly that he didn’t feel he was ready to practice with us, he should have told me,” the coach said.
Within a week, in an interview with ESPN’s Wendi Nix, Johnson backed off his story and said that he didn’t want to blame Belichick or anyone else for his struggles.
It was never a good time to be accused of ignoring concussions, but PR-wise, this was the worst stretch of Belichick’s career. The resignation from the Jets, outside of New York, had a Saturday Night Live feel to it and wasn’t seen as egregious in all corners. The press conferences, as awkward as they could be, weren’t always criticized by the public due to the public’s contempt for the media. Some fans found it fascinating watching the watchdogs squirm as they were given long pauses and minimalist answers. The controversial moves with Drew Bledsoe, Lawyer Milloy, and Adam Vinatieri could be interpreted as doing good business. There were even some who defended Belichick’s hearty push of Globe photographer Jim Davis following the play-off win over the Mangini-led Jets.
But the testimony, under oath, from Morristown Family Court in New Jersey was hard to fathom. This was a multilayered nightmare for the coach: It was a story that he couldn’t control or even counter; its contents were explosive; and it gave the public a gateway into aspects of his personal life, of which he was fiercely protective.
A New Jersey construction worker went to the court to request an amendment to his alimony payments. He said that he shouldn’t have to pay $350 per week because his wife was already receiving lavish payments, gifts, and services, and that they could only be coming from someone wealthy. And that’s when Belichick’s name became a part of what was supposed to be a routine no-fault divorce case. The woman, a former New York Giants receptionist named Sharon Shenocca, testified that she was the beneficiary of numerous gifts from Belichick, including a $25,000 rental for the summer on the Jersey Shore; help with an $11,000 retainer for her attorney; $3,000 per month; trips to Disney, Puerto Rico, and Jamaica; furniture; chartered flights; a personal trainer; a health-club membership; Giants season tickets; a trip to the Super Bowl; and use of a $2.2 million Belichick-owned brownstone in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, a historic neighborhood adjacent to Brooklyn’s version of Central Park, filled with trees, kids, dogs, and strollers.
The records for Belichick’s own divorce were sealed and impounded, but the Morristown case was antithetical to everything he envisioned, media-wise. New information about the case was trickling out weekly, in New York and Boston, and the only way to stop it was for Shenocca to settle with her ex-husband, which she eventually did.
In early February, Brady put the $14.5 million Time Warner Center condo that he had purchased five months earlier on the market. He bumped the price to $16.5 million. It was thought that he purchased the space to be closer to Bridget Moynahan, but the couple’s relationship ended late in 2006. Through a mutual friend, the quarterback had been introduced to one of the savviest and most successful supermodels in the world, Gisele Bündchen, who had her own palatial space in Tribeca. Rolling Stone once referred to her as the most beautiful girl in the world, and perhaps she showed the magazine’s phrasing to some of her classmates in her Brazilian hometown; back then, in the small city of Horizontina, she was nicknamed “Olive Oyl.”
As a five-foot-eleven-inch international symbol, her modeling nicknames were a little different and much more suggestive, such as “The Body” and “The Boobs from Brazil.” She was discovered when she was fourteen. By nineteen, she was considered a star. At twenty-six, when she and Brady quickly fell for each other, she was known for making any cover she graced or clothing she modeled fly off the shelves.
She and Brady also had a lot in common, beyond their Hollywood exes (actor Leonardo DiCaprio once went so far as presenting Bündchen with a $500,000 engagement ring). They were both physically attractive people whose smarts were overshadowed by their looks. They also had similar views of celebrity, which Bündchen summarized one year into her superstardom: “I know that if I had a normal job, I wouldn’t make as much money, but if you have a normal job, you can go home and be normal. I love my job, but I don’t love all of it. And I don’t love being famous.”
The rich and famous were forced to live differently, such as releasing good news via publicists. That’s what happened on February 20, when Moynahan announced that she was three months pregnant and the father was her ex-boyfriend, Brady. It wasn’t long before Brady’s agent, Don Yee, was announcing that Brady “and his family are excited about the pregnancy.”
This was one of the downsides of fame that Bündchen mentioned, the speculation of what might have happened and then the subsequent judgment based on the speculation. One thing quickly became clear, through publicists and sources: Bündchen and Brady were staying together and Moynahan, with cooperation from Brady, was going to raise the child alone. It was mind-bending news in Boston because the reputation of Brady was nothing short of angelic.
“Brady never has ripped a coach, turned on a teammate, shoved a cameraman, whined about money or forgotten to send a card on Mother’s Day,” Gerry Callahan wrote in the Herald. He continued, “Bottom line: The guy has been virtually perfect since the day he stepped in for a severely wounded Drew Bledsoe more than five years ago. It is hard to believe the first bump in the road turns out to be a baby.”
Dan Shaughnessy took a similar tack in the Globe: “Brady was going to be the Boston superstar athlete who’d get in and out of town without being touched by scandal or controversy. No police blotters… No diva demonstrations. No steroids. No suspensions. No palimony suits. No taking money under the table while at Michigan… Now he has taken a hit—something far more bone-rattling than any blind-side tackle delivered by Dwight Freeney or Shawne Merriman.”
Brady was used to having his quarterbacking scrutinized, and even his appearances at expensive dinners and galas. Now his potential to parent from another household was a debate point, along with some sleuthing to find out when exactly he ended things with Moynahan and started things with Bündchen. He was a cover boy, often described as a sex symbol, although it was clear from TV and radio shows, blogs, and conversations locally and nationally that few people believed that he would actually have unprotected sex.
There was some harsh criticism of Brady, but it was mostly national voyeurism of how three wealthy people planned to handle an issue that affects more than one-third of the country.
Belichick had coached the AFC in the Pro Bowl in February, and he’d hit it off with a couple of players. One of them was free agent linebacker Adalius Thomas, a man who claimed to have no position. He wanted to be called, simply, “a football player.” In Baltimore, Thomas’s bombastic defensive coordinator, Rex Ryan, had called him a cross between Lawrence Taylor and Carl Banks. He had played corner, safety, linebacker, and defensive end.
Belichick had coached Taylor and Banks, so he knew Ryan was exaggerating, but he lived for players with the 270-pound Thomas’s skills and mentality. He returned to Foxboro excited about the big football player’s intelligence, speed, and character.
With their first chance to get the twenty-nine-year-old Thomas, the Patriots overwhelmed him. They gave him $18 million in guarantees and $24 million in the first three years of his contract. They also bought their receivers in bulk: They agreed to deals with former Saints first-rounder Donté Stallworth; Wes Welker, a twenty-five-year-old slot receiver that they were getting in yet another heist from the Dolphins; and Kelley Washington, a receiver whom they also projected as a special-teams ace.
The Patriots were in the middle of a shift, and so was the league. The new commissioner, Roger Goodell, was getting stellar reviews just seven months into the position. It didn’t seem to concern anyone that Goodell, with an economics background and an economic platform to get the job, seemed to be magnetized to discipline and legal matters.
The tough-talking sheriff played well in Football America, and when he took the stage on draft day he was well received by the Radio City Music Hall crowd. The Patriots held two first-rounders, with the extra one coming from Seattle in the Branch trade. Far ahead of the Patriots’ first pick at number twenty-four, Eric Mangini had pulled off a Belichick-like maneuver for a player he craved. It was University of Pittsburgh cornerback Darrelle Revis, whom Mangini had personally worked out and given the highest possible grades in several categories. He felt that Revis was one of the best prospects he’d ever seen and was ecstatic to get him at number fourteen.
The Patriots, meanwhile, approached this draft tepidly. They drafted Miami safety Brandon Meriweather with their lead first-round pick.
They traded their second first, number twenty-eight, to San Francisco for the 49ers’ top pick in 2008. It was a patented Belichick move, exchanging a current asset for a future one that had the potential to be much greater. Overnight, the Patriots also had conversations with one of the most exciting receivers in NFL history. Randy Moss, thirty, was desperate to play on a winning team, and he expressed that to Belichick and Scott Pioli in a candid and emotional conversation. He was introspective and tearful, and he even agreed to rip up the deal he’d signed with the Oakland Raiders, reduce his cap number from over $9 million to $3 million, and prove his worthiness on a one-year contract.
The next morning, the slender six-foot-four-inch receiver was riding in Josh McDaniels’s SUV, headed from Logan Airport to Gillette Stadium. The Patriots traded a fourth-round pick, number 110 overall, for the right to gamble on the resurrection of Moss. Moss was a prodigy at the position when he was in the right space, and when that happened the field was wide open for everyone. Belichick and McDaniels were pinning their hopes on that version of Moss, and it was part of the reason the offensive coordinator had picked him up from the airport. They were going to need to talk about the possibilities of the new offense.
“You’re going to really see some things that you’ve never seen before,” Moss boasted to the local media in his first conference call with them. “And when it does happen, don’t say I didn’t tell you.”
Briefly, there was no controversy with the Patriots, or any other local team. Belichick, not known for his outward displays of affection, was seen in Boston and on Nantucket with his new girlfriend, Linda Holliday. They’d gone to Celtics, Red Sox, and college basketball games together. They’d held hands on Nantucket, drinking wine and listening to romantic piano ballads. The coach looked happy. When he went to those games around town, there was a lot to be cheerful about. The Sox had been in first place all season, and at the start of training camp on July 27, they led the Yankees by eight games. A few days later, the Celtics, coached by Belichick’s friend Doc Rivers, announced that they had acquired future Hall of Fame forward Kevin Garnett from Minnesota. The addition of Garnett to a team that already included All-Stars Paul Pierce and Ray Allen meant that there could be another year of multiple rolling rallies in downtown Boston.
Belichick taught on-field restraint and media understatement, but it was hard to keep the 2007 Patriots in the box. McDaniels was quickly seeing how a routine play and the mere whiteboard theory of it could explode into artistic greatness when players such as Moss and Welker were executing the assignments. They were going to be hard to stop, and there weren’t going to be many opponents, on the field, capable of doing it. This was quite the offensive wake-up call from last year’s camp.
“Randy was the type of guy who would light up a room,” Richard Seymour says. “He was such an amazing talent. Everyone else was pros, but he was like a Greek god. He had the ability to do whatever he said he was going to do.”
On August 22, a Wednesday, Brady wasn’t there to answer a question about Moss, the possibilities of the new offense, or anything else. He wasn’t spotted during the fifteen-minute period when the media could view practice, and the Patriots were offering no clues about where he was. But it was obvious. Moynahan had announced her pregnancy, at three months, in February. It was just over six months later. Brady was on his way to Los Angeles to see his newborn son. The healthy baby was given a good Catholic name: John Edward Thomas Moynahan. Tongue in cheek, the critics astutely noted that the baby’s initials spelled “JET.”
Brady and the Patriots were now focused on the beginning of the season, which was two and a half weeks away. They’d be opening against the other Jets, certainly not the cuddly kind, and there was plenty of work to do on them. They didn’t have time to study news trends and the opinions of American sports fans. But if they had, they would have found an angry sporting public, disappointed by a year that had already represented fraudulence and broken trust.
The summer pushed many people over the threshold, which in part explained the early popularity of Goodell. The public wanted someone to be firm in the face of unethical and criminal behavior. Michael Vick had been accused of bankrolling and gambling on dogfighting, and equipment for the crude sport was found on his Virginia property. Investigators found whips, injectable drugs, chains, and treadmills. Sixty pit bulls were found, many with scarring and broken limbs. Vick was likely going to prison and his Atlanta Falcons and NFL career was in jeopardy. An NBA official, Tim Donaghy, had been found guilty of betting on league games. There was already suspicion about the league’s officials, who had to fight the perception that they looked the other way when superstars fouled, traveled, carried, complained, or did anything negative that might interfere with the predestined result of the game. It wasn’t that simplistic, but that was the perception, and the criminal actions of Donaghy fueled the urban legends and conspiracies.
And then there was Major League Baseball, with the saddest and most legalistic record-breaking chase ever. Barry Bonds, who unconvincingly claimed he never knowingly took performance-enhancing drugs, was in pursuit of Hank Aaron’s all-time home run record, and no one wanted to see or hear him break it. Literally. The year before, when Bonds passed Babe Ruth’s 714th home run for second on the list, the microphone of play-by-play man Dave Flemming went dead just as he was saying, “A drive deep to cen—” That was number 715, and no one on San Francisco’s KNBR radio heard it. This year, commissioner Bud Selig sent someone else to witness historic number 756 and Aaron sent a video tribute. Except even that wasn’t really a tribute. A Giants executive had asked Aaron to do it a month earlier in New York, and the slugger agreed only after he was able to have his statement carefully written and vetted. That was sports in 2007; even the heartfelt moments needed copywriters and lawyers.
Which explains how the Patriots stepped right into the spirit of the cheating times, twice in the span of two weeks, and found themselves on a rotary with no exit. They had always been seen as contrary to the age, in every way. Players behaved badly elsewhere and their crooked paths became straight in Foxboro. Commentators measured talent individually through Pro Bowls; the Patriots countered by speaking collectively about Super Bowls. In a culture of shortcuts, they went the long hard way, and you could see it with receivers playing cornerback, linebackers playing tight end, and everyone chipping in on special teams. Isn’t that why they were celebrated as the model organization? Isn’t that why the clever coach and analytical quarterback were celebrities? But then Rodney Harrison, one of the captains, admitted that he purchased human growth hormone online. He had been injured the year before, and he said he took the NFL-banned drug not because he wanted a competitive advantage, but because he wanted to get back on the field.
It sounded hollow. It sounded like a rationalization for cheating. It was easy for Goodell to make the call. He suspended Harrison for the first four games of the regular season.
The Harrison news created a buzz, but it didn’t invalidate the accomplishments of the entire team. That would happen just over a week later, after the Patriots displayed their new look to the NFL in New York. The game itself was fine, with Moss gliding past Jets rookie cornerback Darrelle Revis and a fleet of others on his way to a fifty-one-yard touchdown reception from Brady. The whole defense chased Moss, and it was a reminder of how fragile schemes can be when they try to contain a virtuoso. You’re going to really see some things that you’ve never seen before… Moss had been right; this was supernatural. The Patriots won 38–14, and that was a footnote within hours.
There had been a report after the game that Patriots employee Matt Estrella had ventured to the sideline, with a camera, and begun filming Jets coaches. The teams had argued about this for more than a year, and the league had sent a memo explicitly detailing the restrictions on camerawork. The Jets had expected the videographer, Estrella, to try this. They took him and his camera off the field and alerted the league.
As more information was gathered in the days after the game, an undeniable picture was starting to take shape. Belichick had broken the league’s rules on the use of cameras. This was no borderline cruise through the caution light; he had blown through the red, undoubtedly. It was tough for many in New England to accept, and there was a segment of media and fans who claimed that the violation was strictly about location of the taping and not the offense itself. It wasn’t true.
The league didn’t want teams to videotape the signals of other teams, no matter where they were. A friend of Belichick’s, Jimmy Johnson, suggested that the practice was commonplace when he was coaching. That defense didn’t resonate with the league, the public, or even thousands of embarrassed Patriots fans. The seemingly contradictory nature of what was happening in front of eighty thousand people—coaches giving signals!—and the restrictions on taping those signal-giving coaches was not lost on members of the competition committee.
“See, not everybody does it,” Jeff Fisher, Titans coach and chair of the competition committee, said. “That’s the misunderstanding. When you say everybody does it, not everybody is recording. There’s not a bylaw against sitting up in a press box and taking notes with binoculars as fast as you can. But there is a bylaw as far as videotaping signals, and that is the issue. We just have to be very careful when we say everyone does it. To my knowledge, this is the only team that videotaped coaches’ signals.”
Belichick and his players tried to use their Ignore the Noise template to deal with the story, and it worked for them in the cocoon of football operations. But there was a national avalanche outside those doors, and it wasn’t going to slow down all year. It was hard to go anywhere without hearing voices. Current and ex-players. Current and ex-coaches. Players in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh saying they deserved to have rings because the Patriots were cheaters. Aha moments from the Rams and Panthers, who now had an explanation for how the Patriots beat them in Super Bowls. Suggestions that the Patriots taped practices. And taped walk-throughs. And even taped microphones to their jerseys to pick up the audio of quarterbacks. There were whispers about equipment always failing at critical times in Foxboro. There were those who wondered if three titles, won by a total of 9 points, would have been achieved without those cameras. Was Brady truly a smart quarterback or someone who was clandestinely told everything an opponent was doing? Were those original Belichick game plans? Or was he just a gifted spy, trying to gadget his way to the Hall of Fame?
It was an onslaught, unforgiving and unstoppable. It even had its own catchy moniker: Spygate.
The Patriots had to reconcile this and live with it, perhaps forever: They might be able to defeat an opponent on the field, but they would never defeat Spygate. Never. It was impossible. It was fueled by valid criticism as well as irrationality. It got air in its lungs both from the disobedience of Belichick and the discontent of silver, bronze, and non-medalists. It got its muscle from justice and jealousy. There were so many obvious truths, such as the sledgehammer language the league used when it sent its memo about the purpose of cameras. The tone was just short of all-caps: “Videotaping of any type, including but not limited to taping of an opponent’s offensive or defensive signals, is prohibited on the sidelines, in the coaches’ booth, in the locker room, or at any other locations accessible to club staff members during the game.” There were half-truths as well. There were only so many seconds to diagnose an offense or defense and call a play; Spygate was many things, but it was no open-book test.
But what was it? Why did Belichick put so much at risk for something with such a minimal payoff? Only time would tell if it was his secret weapon, but the reasonable voices in the symphony knew that he didn’t have to do it, which made his decision to do it so infuriating. He had created a raging, complex, multidimensional beast.
When Goodell sorted out the information, he slammed Belichick with a league-record $500,000 fine. He fined the organization $250,000. He took away a 2008 first-round pick. He ordered all tapes and notes in the Patriots’ library to be handed over to him. Some critics complained that Goodell hadn’t been harsh enough, arguing that a suspension should have replaced the draft pick. But the commissioner, an economist himself, knew how to hit at the knees. Belichick’s understanding and manipulation of draft picks had helped him suffocate the AFC East and set the Patriots’ foundation. The penalty was crushing.
When asked for specifics about the incident, both Mangini and Belichick offered no insight. Belichick released a statement that suggested he’d had a different interpretation of the league’s memo. His position was that he was never taping for use in that particular game. Even so, the league found the practice of taping coaches objectionable.
The rules for the 2007 season needed no special interpretation: It was Football America versus the Patriots. Last one standing wins.
The Patriots, talented and extra temperamental now, got a sprinter’s start. The first game after Spygate, against the Chargers at Gillette Stadium, Belichick was shown on the video board and received rousing applause from most of the sixty-eight thousand fans. They cheered all night in another 38–14 win. It got silly the next week with another 38 against Buffalo, and then back-to-back 34s against the Ohioans, the Bengals and Browns. It was Patriots lotto. Call out a number higher than 30 and see if it’s reached. How about 48 against the Cowboys? Raise that to a 49 in Miami. You really want to show off? Try accepting the worst field position possible, force yourself to have three scoring drives of eighty-five yards or longer, and score 52 at home against Washington.
That was good for 8-0 at intermission, and America needed some halftime adjustments. Honestly, the Boston thing was becoming burdensome. The football team wins in a blowout by day and the baseball team sweeps through the World Series at night. The Sox were champions again, winners of eight consecutive Series games between 2004 and 2007.
Brady’s numbers were more absurd than those. He was completing 74 percent of his passes, and he’d already set his career high with thirty touchdown passes. His sack and interception numbers were nearly identical, three and two respectively. Moss had unveiled a modest touchdown celebration, in which he parted his hands, signifying that he could still split and get behind a defense. He had done that dance, to the delight of his teammates and fans, eleven times.
The return trip to Indianapolis ended with another Spygate swipe and Patriots win, the usual daily double. Colts coach Tony Dungy had used an analogy linking Belichick to Bonds, so there was no surprise postgame when Dungy got the Mangini treatment from the Patriots coach. The final score there was actually football-like, 24–20.
Not many people nationally had to like what the Patriots were doing, but they couldn’t resist watching and talking about it. Not all of their critics believed that they were cheating, yet it was still shorthand for all of the things they detested about the team. They were as villainous now as they had been embraceable in 2001.
“Bill Belichick sickens me,” Rick Telander wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times. “And, no, it’s not because his New England Patriots have won three Super Bowls in the last six years or that he’s widely saluted as a sports ‘genius.’ This is not about jealousy, envy or anything that has to do with his ratty sweatshirts or suspect personal skills or coldheartedness (ask longtime Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson, currently brain-damaged, about Belichick’s empathy)… This video-camera sideline recording of the New York Jets’ defensive signals was no ‘mistake’… It was a conscious, overt act of deception and a blatant middle finger to the essence of fair play.”
That was going to be the story for many, no matter what the dizzying results on the field.
A four-touchdown half for Moss in Buffalo; a clinched division title in November; a good-fortune win in Baltimore, where former Dolphins coach Don Shula openly rooted against the Patriots in the Monday Night Football booth. Ravens defensive coordinator Rex Ryan called a timeout a split second before his team had made a game-ending stop on fourth down. After that, three easy wins over the Steelers, Jets, and Dolphins.
They were 15-0 returning to Giants Stadium for the first time since this lopsided race began. America, yes, the whole country, had decided to take them on and they hadn’t backed down from the challenge. So who was the underdog here, a nation of millions or one team called the Patriots? A superficial reading had the United States losing on all cards. After all, everyone was watching this game because Goodell had declared it worthy of three networks. He didn’t want there to be a chance that anyone would miss it. For a team that was so disgraceful, America found the Patriots irresistible.
The former Patriots were watching, too, and were rooting for the team to do something that was realistic in high school and college but certainly not the pros. “Nobody ever sets out to go sixteen and oh,” Deion Branch, who was watching from Seattle, says. “Sixteen and oh is crazy. I can’t imagine what those guys were thinking week to week. I was proud of them.” Branch, in a different offense with the Seahawks, could still identify what the Patriots were doing. The principles of the system were the same, but instead of David Patten as the “X” or downfield receiver, it was Moss. A younger version of Troy Brown, Wes Welker, was now in the slot. Fast receivers who could alternate between the slot and perimeter, where Branch used to be, were now named Donté Stallworth and Jabar Gaffney.
Roman Phifer, two years into retirement, was able to sit back and hear some of the conversations about the team that was marching through the league. It didn’t take long to take the national temperature. “People just do not like the Patriots outside of New England,” he says. “Usually it’s people who don’t understand what it takes to get to that level. They look for excuses for why you were so good. They always try to tarnish it.”
That was the theme for many former Patriots, either on other teams or out of the league. It wasn’t just the current team being questioned. They felt an attack on their careers and their rings. They were insulted.
“I’ve never once seen a tape of somebody else’s walk-through or practices. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about,” Ty Law, who was in Kansas City at the time, says now. “I was really oblivious to the situation. You’re not going to take away my Super Bowl interception. I was thinking, ‘You all are full of shit.’ I thought it was just a thing because it was the Patriots and Bill Belichick. They wanted to stick it to us somehow or some way.”
The other numbers, not just the ratings, said that the Patriots were winning. They had won all fifteen of their games, and with flair. Brady had thrown forty-eight touchdown passes, and Moss had caught twenty-one of them. There were over one hundred catches and one thousand yards from Welker, whose new team in New England had as many wins as his old team in Miami had losses.
So what was the problem? There was nothing discernible against the Giants, who played well in a 38–35 loss. Brady finished the regular season with fifty touchdown passes, one for each state in the country. He was thirty years old and was finally going to get an award, the MVP, that he’d deserved years earlier. Moss’s twenty-third touchdown reception, a league record, came on Brady’s fiftieth touchdown pass.
There was nothing wrong with 16-0, a miraculous achievement in any year, and especially one in which there were open calls for authentication. The problem wouldn’t be obvious until after there were two play-off wins over the Jaguars and Chargers, setting up a rematch against the Giants in the Super Bowl.
The Patriots, as sublime as they were, should have known the rules better than anyone. Never let your opponent define what the game is about. Throughout the season, as the games got tighter, the Patriots put more pressure on themselves to be perfect. They had always been able to use different media reports for an Us versus Them straw man, but it wasn’t a straw man this time. It was real, and as much as they tried to reflect the steel and indifference of their head coach, it got to them; it turns out that more than a few of them wanted to be liked.
As the game got closer, Spygate, the insatiable dragon, started breathing again. Senator Arlen Specter told the New York Times that he wanted a congressional investigation, and the Boston Herald reported that it had a source who claimed that the Patriots taped the St. Louis Rams walk-through before Super Bowl XXXVI. At a time when they should have been focused on the history they were going to make in Arizona and the game they were going to play against the Giants, they were thinking about their critics. Belichick met with his captains the day before the game and asked them if he should mention the Herald report to the entire team. The captains told him no, although they could acknowledge that going through the entire season with their hands up was exhausting.
This was not their style, their fight, or their game. All of those regular-season numbers were gaudy, but the old Patriots were never concerned with the numbers. They were the first ones who would point out that the definition of success was championships, not sending three offensive linemen to the Pro Bowl, or league records from the quarterback and one of his wide receivers.
They should have known, early, that something was amiss. The Giants defensive coordinator, Steve Spagnuolo, had hoped to keep the Patriots’ offense in the twenties for the entire game. He wanted to be realistic, and that number was just about right. But at halftime it was 7–3, Patriots, and the Giants were dominating the line of scrimmage. There was no need to concede the twenties. Playing like this, the Giants might be able to keep the game in the teens and win it.
It was a scoreless third quarter, and the Giants went ahead, 10–7, early in the fourth on a touchdown reception by receiver David Tyree. A touchdown catch in the Super Bowl is a highlight for most players, but it would be far from Tyree’s most significant play of the night. With just under three minutes to play, finally, the most feared duo in the league connected. It was Brady to Moss, on a short touchdown pass, for a 14–10 lead. On the sideline, Tedy Bruschi hugged teammate Junior Seau, thirty-nine, who had never been this close to a championship. In his previous Super Bowl appearance, a dozen years earlier, his team never had a chance. That night, against the 49ers, it was due to Seau’s Chargers’ lack of talent. On this night, his team was the favorite but didn’t have a chance, either, with some of the things that were happening in the final minutes.
The definitive play was a third-and-five with seventy-five seconds to play. New York quarterback Eli Manning appeared to be lost in the arms of Richard Seymour and Jarvis Green. He escaped, though, and threw a long pass downfield. In one of the most extraordinary plays in Super Bowl history, Tyree reached above his head, trapped the football against his helmet, and brought the ball to his body for a thirty-two-yard reception. All the while, Rodney Harrison tried to swat and wrestle the ball away from him.
America was rallying.
“I haven’t watched the game to this day,” Seymour says. “If you think about all the things that happened, from almost getting Eli in the grasp, to Asante [Samuel] almost getting a pick, to Tyree catching the ball on top of his head. If you think about all that, you have to say that they deserved it. I played in four Super Bowls and we won three of them. But it’s the one that you don’t get that you agonize over.”
With Tyree’s catch, the Giants had great field position but not a lot of time. With forty-five seconds remaining, they converted a third-and-eleven that gave them the ball at the Patriots’ thirteen-yard line. The Patriots’ best cornerback was Samuel, and this was his last game in New England. He had agreed to sign the franchise tag in 2007, but he had been assured it wouldn’t be applied in 2008. The Patriots liked his ability to cover, although they questioned his versatility due to his discomfort with playing left and right cornerback. He was more at home on the left side, which is why five-foot-nine corner Ellis Hobbs, who was playing with shoulder and groin injuries, was matched up with six-foot-five-inch receiver Plaxico Burress.
“I thought that for who he was on the team, The Guy, The Cover Corner, Franchise Tag Corner, Asante should have been on Plaxico,” Law says. “And I’d tell him that. He was my young pup. I was a mentor to him when he was there in his young days, playing behind me.
“Everybody in the stadium, everybody at home, knew where the ball was going. You’ve got a six-foot-five receiver down in the red zone. You knew it was going to be a fade. Everybody knew that. Hobbs bit on the worst move I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s no need to bite on something like that because you know it’s a jump ball situation to Plaxico Burress. Asante should have went over there and said, ‘Ellis, I got this. Take the other guy. We gonna win or lose the ball game on me. I’m getting the big bucks, I’m gonna show everybody that I’m the best.’ You didn’t have to ask that with Deion Sanders. You didn’t have to ask that with me. You don’t have to ask that with Darrelle Revis.”
It wasn’t just Samuel. Everyone had a moment or two from the game that would be mentally played and replayed, over and over, for weeks, months, and years. As Law said, Burress put a move inside on Hobbs and then ran to the corner of the end zone. It was an easy completion for the winning touchdown.
The Patriots had their first loss of the season, 17–14. They were 18-1, ridiculed for that loss, and suspect-in-perpetuity until they could win another Super Bowl, something that 40 percent of the league had never done.
The early days had been easier. America had caught up to them, finally, and won.