When Alge Crumpler got the phone call in March 2010, he was sitting on a couch in his suburban Atlanta home. He’d spent the previous season in Tennessee, primarily as a blocking tight end. As he told the caller, Bill Belichick, he considered himself “damn near retired” at thirty-two years old. He’d sat on that couch a lot lately, so his listed playing weight of 262 was no longer accurate.
Belichick told Crumpler that he wanted him in New England because he didn’t have a tight end on his roster; Crumpler told Belichick that he was 320 pounds and that he’d love to give it a shot in New England. He needed to stop first in New Orleans, the home of Mackie Shilstone, trainer for tennis star Serena Williams and many others.
“Coach,” Crumpler said, “I can’t walk into that building until I’m in shape.”
Belichick thanked him for being honest, welcomed him to the Patriots, and hung up the phone assured that at the very least he’d added a conscientious professional to his 2010 team. The 2009 Patriots won the division, the seventh time in nine years that New England could say that. But it was a counterfeit Belichick team. It wasn’t good on the road, it wasn’t infused with a passion for self-correction, and it became the first Belichick squad to lose a play-off game at home.
“We have no mental toughness,” the coach said to Tom Brady as the two of them stood on the sideline during that embarrassing November defeat in New Orleans. It was an immense admission, not only because it was early in the fourth quarter of a game, but also because he said it to a player. There was no mind trick involved here. He said what he said to his quarterback because he trusted him and knew he could relate. “We can’t play the way we need to play it… I just can’t get this team to play the way we need to play.”
There had to be major changes to the Patriots, aesthetically and spiritually, and part of it entailed signing dependable players. Belichick also offered a key to what he was thinking with that phone call to Crumpler. He had long been fascinated with the tight end position, and the upcoming draft was one of the best ever for tight end depth. He was at a critical turn in his coaching career, a turn that most coaches don’t have the luxury of getting to. He was entering his eleventh season with the same franchise, which meant that he had held his plot of land while the world around him changed. In 2000, the league was full of Mikes (Riley and Sherman), Jims (Haslett and Fassel), and Daves (Campo and McGinnis). Now Belichick was just one of three coaches—Andy Reid and Jeff Fisher were the others—who remained in the same place they were at the beginning of the century. That was twenty-nine different head coaching names and places from when he first started rebuilding the Patriots—90 percent of the profession had turned over.
There was an advantage to the continuity, obviously, but it also carried the trap of complacency. The league didn’t pause for anyone, not even coaches on their way to the Hall of Fame. Belichick had suggested to his staff that the Patriots were predictable and thus easy to defend offensively. It took him less than thirty seconds, with no film necessary, to explain how to stop them: Take away Moss over the top, bracket slot receiver Wes Welker underneath, and they were done. In Belichick’s view of things, a real offense was one that could prominently feature a hybrid tight end. Big. Fast. Intimidating. The problem was that he didn’t have one.
It had been his football mission for years, the ideal that kept wriggling away. He thought he had it in 1995, when he was prepared to take Penn State’s Kyle Brady, six feet seven inches and 280 pounds, with Cleveland’s first-round pick, number ten overall. But the tight end went off the board, unexpectedly, one pick ahead of them to the Jets, and Belichick was upset enough to indignantly trade out of the top ten in exchange for a future first. There wasn’t anyone in that spot that he’d wanted more than Kyle Brady. That draft became even more miserable when he saw a player he liked in the third round, Curtis Martin, but Bill Parcells got to him first—ironically when the Tuna coached New England.
Seven years later, he came back to the concept. He moved up in the 2002 draft for six-foot-four-inch, 260-pound Daniel Graham. He thought he was getting a multifaceted catching and blocking weapon who could be utilized in several formations. But Graham wasn’t as effective with all the formation roaming, preferring instead to occupy a traditional tight end’s spot. And although Graham was an otherworldly blocker, one who quietly dominated during the Patriots’ Super Bowl win over the Panthers, Belichick didn’t move up eleven spots in the first round for superior blocking to be the primary payoff.
Two years later, in 2004, it was Benjamin Watson’s turn. He was fast, strong, and exceptionally bright. He was six foot three, 255 pounds, and he could be paired with Graham to create middle-of-the-field mismatches with linebackers and safeties. He was good and the idea was good, but that’s all it was. Good, whispered. He was looking for that guy, someone who could walk into the franchise description of what a tight end should be and perhaps redefine the position.
Fifteen years after Kyle Brady was taken away from him, he was still seeking the hybrid difference-maker. It became such a fixation that when Kyle Brady was a thirty-five-year-old free agent in 2007, Belichick leapt at the opportunity to sign him. Graham was in Denver now, Watson was off to join Eric Mangini with the Browns, and Chris Baker, who had been on the team in 2009, wasn’t asked to return. That left a hole that Belichick was going to begin to fill with someone like Crumpler, a blocker who wouldn’t demand the ball and someone who could mentor the rookies.
“A tight end for the New England Patriots must have good functional Football Intelligence,” Belichick’s writing team stated in 2000. “He must learn the run offense like a lineman and he must learn the pass offense like a receiver. He must have the toughness to block a DE 1 on 1 (this is a common matchup). He must have good quickness. Most of his game is played against LBs in a short area. He must play with suddenness, getting off the line—getting in and out of cuts—getting open quickly and getting into blocks to secure the edge.”
One month away from the draft, with the Patriots holding the twenty-second pick in the first round, the consensus top tight end in the draft was Jermaine Gresham from Oklahoma. In one season as a starter, the six-foot-five-inch Gresham set a school record with fourteen touchdown receptions. He was told at the scouting combine in Indianapolis that he was the best tight end in the draft, to which he replied, “I don’t think I’m the best. I’ve got room for improvement.”
Gresham sounded nothing like the number two tight end, a six-foot-six, 265-pound entertainer from Arizona named Rob Gronkowski. He had become known as a touchdown-maker in his brief college career, accumulating sixteen in eighteen games. He missed his entire junior year with surgery to repair a herniated disc and nerve damage. That did nothing to quell his energy, confidence, and humor. He had been draped with nicknames since high school, where he used to be called “Dangerous” due to his tendency to accept all dares, including riding his bicycle off ramps. In Tucson, he was “Drago,” “Robby,” “Big Rob,” and finally “Gronk.” He was forced to run laps once in practice when, after he and a teammate talked trash the entire time, Gronk ended it with a big catch and a spike… off his teammate’s helmet.
“I believe I have great hands,” Gronk said at the combine. “I’ll catch anything in my path. I would say I’m the top tight end in the draft because I bring the whole package. I’m ready to take on the big D-ends. I’m ready to go out there and catch some passes.”
This appeared to be Belichick’s year. Besides Gresham and Gronk, there were a half-dozen tight ends worthy of being drafted in the early rounds, including Jimmy Graham, a basketball player who was new to football; Dennis Pitta; Ed Dickson; Clay Harbor; Tony Moeaki; and Aaron Hernandez, a University of Florida junior who grew up in Connecticut wearing Drew Bledsoe jerseys and rooting for the Patriots.
Belichick was a draft junkie, probably because it combined so many of his skills into a singular event. The draft rewarded you for homework, strategy, bargain shopping, interviewing techniques, and player evaluation. The hard work began months before the actual event with the scouts and their all-day, cross-checking shifts in conference rooms. There were also the trial balloons that many teams sent out, trying to throw the rest of the league off the scent of the players they truly wanted.
The selling for Belichick began at the owners’ meetings in late March when he raved about Hernandez’s quarterback, Tim Tebow. He said the quarterback was probably capable of doing anything asked of him, such as “playing nose tackle if you asked him to play nose.” Belichick already had a quarterback and, for that matter, a newly signed nose tackle. That didn’t stop the speculation of how he could possibly use Tebow on the Patriots. He had commented on the quarterback’s overhauled throwing motion, and how improved that motion appeared to be when Tebow and his teammates worked out for scouts at the Florida campus in Gainesville.
Selling became trolling the next week when the notoriously private Belichick ventured to the North End, one of the busiest neighborhoods in Boston, to have dinner with Tebow and Nick Caserio. For those who weren’t certain it was Tebow, the quarterback took away all the mystery when he stood outside the restaurant on Hanover Street, the main drag in the North End, holding a football. Belichick could sense that there was rising interest in two players, Tebow and Oklahoma State receiver Dez Bryant, and the Patriots met with both of them.
The truth was that the Patriots were interested in a few Florida players who were not named Tebow, and Hernandez was among them. At twenty, he was one of the youngest players in the draft. His 4.6-second forty-yard dash, on a soggy field at Florida’s pro day, made him intriguing as well. He had been the nation’s top-rated tight end in high school in Bristol, Connecticut.
It was four years later, but people in Connecticut still excitedly talked about the incredible game in which Aaron had 376 receiving yards on just nine catches. He ran beautifully, a former running back who moved to tight end because he could, not because he had to. He was good enough to play anywhere, and when he had the ball in the open field, trying to tackle him was like chasing down a blur.
It was the same story at Florida, particularly his final season, when he won the John Mackey Award as the nation’s top tight end. Question was, if he was that good, if he ran that well, if he was the top tight end in high school and college, why was no one mentioning him as a first-rounder? Or even a second?
There were some euphemisms used, such as “immature,” “character issue,” and “something’s not quite right,” but for most teams the character issue was the private information that they had: He had been suspended one game for marijuana use and, early in his college career, he had been the aggressor in a bar fight. For roughly one-quarter of the league, Hernandez was enough of a concern that he was taken off their draft boards. Everyone else looked at the talent and age, remained hopeful that sliding in the draft would humble him, and weighed whether a team with strong leadership could redirect an undeniably skilled pass-catcher.
He didn’t seem to be a match for the Patriots, and it wasn’t just because collective immaturity had been a problem for them in 2009. The bigger obstacle was their scouting manual, under the category of Major Factors. Most Patriots fans had bachelor’s degrees in Team-Building By Belichick after studying the team for a decade, so the region was trained to cringe when it heard about a talented player with behavioral concerns. There were always exceptions, such as Corey Dillon and Randy Moss, but they were rare.
“Major Factors are behavioral, physical and mental aspects of a player that we, the New England Patriots, put at a premium. These factors will be included in every report, at every position and remain static regardless of position.”
The first item under Major Factors was “Personal/Behavior.” According to the description, scouts were to consider, “What is the player’s core character, work habits, and level of integrity? We must press hard for the answers to these questions. We cannot let up easily on this line of questioning. We need accuracy and truthfulness.” What followed were nine questions:
• Has he been in any trouble on the field or off the field?
• Is he ready to act like an adult?
• Are we going to need to keep an eye on this player?
• Would you let this player spend time with your family (children)?
• Can he handle tough coaching?
• How does he respond to pressure situations?
• Does he love football?
• How important is football to him?
• Can he handle coming to football as a job every day?
The Patriots had spent a lot of time at Florida over the years, and Belichick had become friendly with Gators coach Urban Meyer. If there were questions about a player’s game and/or character, the Patriots believed they could get valuable insight from the Florida staff. Hernandez and his agents were tipped that New England had questions about him, so his agents drafted a letter that he signed. Typical of pre-draft savvy and spin, Hernandez began his letter to Caserio acknowledging an issue while never admitting to having it:
Dear Mr. Caserio,
I am writing in regards to some of the feedback I am receiving from my agents, Florida coaches, and other personnel. These sources have indicated that NFL teams have questions about my alleged use of marijuana. I personally answered these questions during the pre-draft process, but understand that NFL teams want to conduct thorough due diligence before making the significant financial investment inherent in a high draft pick. I have no issue with these questions being asked, but thought that it made the most sense to communicate with you directly regarding this issue so you would not have to rely upon second-hand information.
While not admitting to marijuana use, Hernandez went on to mention a solution:
I thought that the best way to answer your questions and your concerns was to make a very simple proposition. If you draft me as a member of the New England Patriots, I will willfully submit to a bi-weekly drug test throughout my rookie season (8 drug tests during the 2010 regular season). In addition, I will tie any guaranteed portion of my 2010 compensation to these drug tests and reimburse the team a pro-rata amount for any failed drug test… My point is simple—if I fail a drug test, I do not deserve that portion of the money.
I realize that this offer is somewhat unorthodox, but it is also the only way I could think of to let you know how serious I am about reaching my potential in the NFL. My coaches have told you that nobody on our Florida team worked harder than me in terms of workouts, practices or games. You have your own evaluation as to the type of impact I can have on your offense. The only X-factor, according to the reports I have heard, is concerns about my use of recreational drugs. To address that concern, I am literally putting my money where my mouth is and taking the financial risk away from the team and putting it directly on my back where it belongs.
In closing, I ask you to trust me when I say you have absolutely nothing to worry about when it comes to me and the use of recreational drugs. I have set very high goals for myself in the NFL and am focused 100% on achieving those goals.
On the first day of the draft, Belichick and Caserio had things set up perfectly at number twenty-two. Tebow and Bryant were mystery players, and if some team was inclined to make a move on them, it was likely going to happen in the early twenties where the Patriots were positioned. The player Belichick and Caserio wanted in the first round was Devin McCourty of Rutgers, whom some teams had graded as a second-rounder. The Patriots had not, which was explained six weeks earlier by Belichick friend and draft expert Mike Mayock: “He might be the best special-teams player in the whole draft. From a return perspective, gunner, jammer, making tackles. You get quite a package if you draft Devin McCourty.”
There was no doubt the Patriots were going to draft him. The way they interpreted the board, he’d be available to them anywhere in round one. So when their pick approached, they received a phone call from Josh McDaniels and Denver. The Broncos wanted to come up two spots to select wide receiver Demaryius Thomas. The Patriots were happy to move back and acquire a fourth-round pick for their shuffle. And just as they settled into number twenty-four, the Cowboys called for the pick. They wanted Bryant and were offering the Patriots a third-rounder to move down three slots. Not a problem. Two trades, a third- and fourth-rounder acquired, five draft slots lost, and still in position to draft the player they had wanted all along.
The first round had just a couple of surprises. Gresham went in the first round, slightly higher than projected, to Cincinnati at twenty-one. McDaniels drafted Tebow at twenty-five, a controversial choice for a player whom some viewed as a sufficiently hyped college quarterback and nothing else.
Gronkowski and Hernandez were available on day two, and the Patriots wanted both of them. They owned overall pick number forty-four, and no tight end had been selected since Gresham at twenty-one. As the selections got into the high thirties, the Patriots had a bit of a draft panic attack. They feared that the Ravens, holding the pick in front of them and in need of a tight end, would swoop in and take Gronk. Belichick and Caserio made a deal with the Raiders, forty-four for forty-two, so they could block Baltimore. It was a case of overanalysis because Baltimore wasn’t planning to draft its tight end in the second round. Belichick and Caserio had gone two for two in targeted players.
“I think the kid’s a first-round tight end that the New England Patriots just stole at pick number forty-two,” Mayock told his NFL Network audience.
As Mayock spoke, the big kid in the gray pin-striped suit hugged his friends and family and bounded toward the stage and enveloped commissioner Roger Goodell in a hug. He wore a white Patriots baseball cap and curiously had the team’s helmet in his hand. After he had shaken hands and posed with Goodell, Gronkowski huddled with his family and everyone chanted, “Gronk, Gronk, Gronk…” He put the helmet on then and started doing a dance. He took the helmet off. He high-fived, half hugged, and mussed up hair. He said it was the happiest day of his life, even though anyone could see that without any words or explanation.
Two rounds later, the Patriots were in position for more stealing with the fourth-rounder they had acquired from the Broncos. Graham, the power-forward-turned-tight-end, had gone at number ninety-five to New Orleans. Eighteen picks later, the Patriots had the choice of either bringing Hernandez back to New England or going with combine warrior Dennis Pitta of Brigham Young University. Pitta had bench-pressed 225 pounds more times, twenty-seven, than any other tight end in Indianapolis. He’d also aced shuttle runs and cone drills. The ceiling for Hernandez was considerably higher, because if he could just settle down, he and Gronk would be one of the best tight end duos in the league.
The Patriots went with Hernandez, believing that his issues were not dissimilar to other wayward young men in their late teens and early twenties. It was an ambitious projection, colored by Hernandez’s supreme talent. He was fully capable of charming them in draft interviews, especially if they weren’t diligent about their reminder to press hard for questions. There was something much deeper than the familiar college-kid-just-experimenting tale. But on the Saturday afternoon that Hernandez was drafted, those issues weren’t top of mind for anyone. The Patriots had acquired a first-team All-American and prestigious award winner in the fourth round.
Shortly after the completion of the draft, Boston Globe reporter Albert Breer broke a story that didn’t win him many friends in the Patriots offices or among New England fans. Yet the story began to get closer to the problem, and it was truer than anyone, especially Hernandez, wanted to admit.
“According to sources with three NFL teams,” Breer wrote, “the Florida product’s precipitous fall was because of multiple failed drug tests for marijuana as a collegian.” Breer quoted a team executive who said of Hernandez, “He had multiple positive tests, so he either had issues or he’s dumb. One or two tests? Fine. But four, five, six? Come on, now you’ve got an addiction. He’s not a bad kid. He just has an issue.”
Based on Hernandez’s adaptation to the Patriots’ offense in training camp, the executive’s either/or was answered. He was not dumb. He picked up the offense quickly, and he refused to be pushed around.
“Both he and Gronk had an incredible work ethic,” says Crumpler, who had kept his word from March 2010 and dropped forty pounds. “Aaron Hernandez understood the offense as well as anyone in that room. And he never turned down a rep in practice. I remember one time Aaron tried to block down on [330-pound] Vince Wilfork. He liked a challenge.”
Crumpler had been around too long to confuse ease on the field with ease in life. He was a dozen years older than Hernandez, so the two didn’t have much in common besides knowing how to get open as tight ends. Crumpler was at the end of his career, and Hernandez was at the beginning of his, one where he hoped to match and exceed the four Pro Bowls that Crumpler had.
While the veteran didn’t sense that anything illegal was going on with the rookie, he constantly went up to him and offered, “If you need help with anything, and I mean anything, just let me know.”
But there was nothing. Hernandez would be the silly face in the background waving and smiling to Crumpler’s three daughters, whom he saw daily because their father Skyped from the locker room. Crumpler’s oldest daughter called Hernandez “Mister Aaron.” He became angry with Crumpler just once in camp and the preseason, and it had to do with hair. Crumpler was the barber for the rookie haircut tradition, and Hernandez didn’t like the thought of being buzzed. He became amenable to it when Crumpler decided to shave cornrows into his hair; he loved that look.
These rookies appeared to be the jolt that the offense needed. Gronk was all business in practice and backed up his remarks from the combine: He really did look like the best tight end from his draft class. Brady found that if a pass was in the area of Gronk, it was a ball that would be vacuumed by the tight end and his reliable hands. He was a force in the running game as well. With Gronk and Hernandez added to an offense with Wes Welker and Randy Moss, the days of being easily disassembled were over.
The abilities of the top two draft choices, McCourty and Gronk, were a reminder of how far the Patriots had come in their drafts of the past four years. The 2006 first-rounder, Laurence Maroney, had spent several one-on-one sessions in Belichick’s office the previous year, watching film and being tutored on the art of hard, inside running. Actually, that was the way a less-talented runner, BenJarvus Green-Ellis, naturally attacked opponents. Green-Ellis was undrafted and worked his way up from the practice squad. Each time he carried the ball it was as if he were fighting for his job. He pushed Maroney so much that it eventually made him expendable.
It’s how a former first-rounder, number twenty-one overall, was traded to the Broncos for a fourth-round pick. Add that to the release of Maroney’s draft classmate, Chad Jackson, and the Patriots’ ability to accurately gauge their own Personal/Behavior questions had become a concern over a two-year period. Maroney and Jackson, class of 2006, didn’t succeed in part due to immaturity and less-than-strong work ethic. And although Brandon Meriweather, class of 2007, had been selected to the 2009 Pro Bowl, the Patriots were already planning to replace him after 2010. Belichick and his staff weren’t risk-averse overall, but they usually didn’t tread there in the first round.
With Maroney traded, it seemed likely that another deal was on the way. Mankins, the pickup-driving, straight-talking, lineman-crushing guard, was upset and said he wanted to leave. He had skipped minicamp and training camp, and none of his public comments sounded conciliatory. As the Patriots were a few days away from their first game of the season, September 12 against the Bengals, Mankins wasn’t there like usual to protect Brady.
The quarterback did seem to have a protector, the heavenly kind, close to his home on September 9. It was 6:34 a.m. and he was driving his Audi S8 near the intersection of Commonwealth and Gloucester in the Back Bay section of Boston. Brady had a green light and was starting to drive through it when his sedan was struck by a Mercury Villager minivan. The driver, twenty-one, had failed to stop for a red light. There were several witnesses on the scene, and many of them called 911 because of the severity of the crash. No one knew then that the most famous athlete in the city was involved.
“There was just a huge crash!” a frantic 911 caller reported. She was asked if anyone was hurt. “I think so,” she replied. “There’s someone in the back of the car screaming and crying.”
She was right. It was the minivan driver’s father, forty-nine, who was in the passenger seat and had been on his way to a doctor’s appointment. The collision caused fractures to his nose and ribs and had cracked some teeth. He was also feeling sharp pain in his back. Boston firefighters needed to use the Jaws of Life to remove the man from the minivan. Brady was not injured. He declined medical attention, went to practice a few hours later, and, as fate would have it, signed a new four-year $72 million contract that temporarily made him the highest paid player in football. What a day.
He was thirty-three, and the terms of the contract ensured that he would be a Patriot until he was thirty-seven. It certainly seemed that he would play his entire career with the Patriots. That fact, along with the events at the corner of Commonwealth and Gloucester, made him appreciative of what he had.
“I was looking in the other car to make sure they were okay,” Brady said as he recapped that day on WEEI radio in Boston. “I was kind of sitting there in the car, looking around, trying to get my bearings. I was just thinking, ‘How am I going to—I’ve got to call Coach Belichick. I’m going to be late for practice.’ And then once I got home, then it really hits you.”
Helicopters and serious reporters had flocked to the stadium to see how Brady moved and practiced after the crash, but he and the rest of the team waved off all the attention.
He was more excited about the game against the Bengals, eager to see the debut of his new offense. It couldn’t have begun better, with the rookie Hernandez catching a pass, getting into the open field, and cleverly weaving for a forty-five-yard pass play. The kid was an artist with the ball, and he wasn’t the only one. Brady threw for three touchdowns, two to Welker and one, of course, to a six-foot-six tight end who was playing his first football game in two years. It was Gronk, for the score. That’s all he did in college, and apparently that was going to continue in the pros.
There was nothing to complain about after the game, a 38–24 win over a good Bengals team. Welker was scheduled to talk with the media about his quick return from a January ACL injury and his two touchdowns against Cincinnati. Unfortunately for him, Moss got to the podium before he did. What followed was a season-altering press conference.
Moss had begun talking about his contract in February at a softball game hosted by former teammate Heath Evans. He tried to get clarity on his status in June. In August, agitated and offended now, he isolated himself at the team’s Kickoff Gala, a charity event in which donors sit and interact with players. Not Moss. He put on his headphones and wouldn’t talk with anyone. After game one, he sounded like the Moss that his teammates had only read about but had never seen in person.
“I love being here, but from a business standpoint, this will probably be my last year as a Patriot and I’m not retiring. I’m still gonna play some football. I just wanted to get that off my chest and let you all understand that this is business.”
He had a lot more on his mind.
“I think in the New England area, I don’t want to say here in the organization, but a lot of people don’t want to see me do good,” he said. “And the reason why, I don’t know and I really don’t care.”
What his teammates in New England had come to love and understand about him is that he really did care. He had been portrayed as many things, but rarely the one that stood out to them: sensitive. In a good way. “He’s one of the best, most caring human beings I’ve ever met in my life,” Evans says now. Although Moss said he wasn’t talking about people in the organization, he couldn’t shake what he perceived as dismissiveness. Brady, Vince Wilfork, and even kicker Stephen Gostkowski had new contracts that gave them security. He wanted what they had.
“Sometimes, you want your boss to tell you that you are doing a good job,” he said. “If you do a good job and think you are doing a good job, you want to be appreciated. I really don’t think that, me personally, that I’m appreciated.”
He talked for nearly twenty minutes, with Welker going in and out of the room, checking to see if he was finished yet. The first win of the season wasn’t even an hour old, and this was already the story. This wasn’t going to be sustainable. Belichick was going to have to make an in-season assessment of what to do with Moss, and it wasn’t going to be a simple fix. Telling some players to forget about the contract until after the season worked. For Moss, he had locked in on the contractual issue at the beginning of the year and, nine months in, he was still with it. Telling him to move on from it at this point didn’t seem realistic. Besides, this year was different; a player couldn’t think, I’ll wait until 2011 free agency because, players had been warned, a lockout was coming.
With the contract on his mind, he might even start to misinterpret what offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien was doing with the offense. On orders from the boss, O’Brien had diversified the scheme, and now there would be significant involvement from the rookie tight ends in addition to Moss and Welker. There was also the fledgling talent of Julian Edelman and Green-Ellis’s ability to provide a power running game when necessary. This was not going to be like 2009, when Moss was targeted roughly nine times per game.
Things got worse the next week on the road against the Jets. Moss did get those targets, ten of them in fact. He even caught one of the most memorable touchdowns of his career, a one-handed grab over New York’s Darrelle Revis. But the Patriots lost the game by two touchdowns, and Brady’s focus on Moss was not the spirit of the offense that Belichick and O’Brien had in mind. It seemed as if catering to Moss came at the expense of every other offensive resource that they had. The team got a win the next week in Buffalo, with three targets and two scores from Moss. And then, at the one-quarter mark of the season, it was time for a change.
The Patriots had scored 40-plus points seventeen times since Belichick became their head coach, so seeing routs like those were not unique. But the eighteenth 40-plus game of his Patriots career, on October 4 in Miami, would qualify as his favorite. No head coach in the league loved special teams as much as Belichick, and he backed it up with capital. His top draft choices in 2009 and 2010, Patrick Chung and Devin McCourty, rose on New England’s draft boards because of their value on teams. That was on display in south Florida when the Patriots turned a 7–6 halftime deficit into a 41–14 win over the Dolphins on Monday Night Football. The obvious game standout was Chung, who blocked a punt, blocked a field goal, and had a fifty-one-yard interception return for a touchdown.
There were other notables as well. It was the one hundredth regular-season win of Brady’s career, and one hundred fourteenth overall. He won those hundred games faster than any quarterback in league history, getting there eight games faster than Joe Montana had. Brady’s career winning percentage stood at .760. It was a statistical head trip: Since Brady had been in the NFL, the rest of the league was successful against him less than 25 percent of the time.
“I’ve played on a great team for my entire career, the same organization that’s committed to winning,” he said after the game. “I’m privileged to be a quarterback for this team. I hope I’m here forever.”
The contrast to that was Moss. Even with the big win, he’d had a tough night. He’d screamed at O’Brien at halftime, pushing him to make offensive adjustments. There were wrinkles in the second half, but they didn’t include Moss. He left the game with one target and no receptions, the first time in four years that he’d left a game without catching a ball. He didn’t say much after the game, but he was angry. He had done everything he could to get their attention, to let them know that while he wanted to be in New England, he wanted them to want him here. And to prove it with that contract. It wasn’t going to happen, now or ever. After his press conference in week one, he’d talked with his agent and asked him to explore a trade. The agent was dutiful and so were the Patriots. When Belichick approached Moss on the plane ride home from Miami and found an unresponsive player, he knew it was time to put the plan in motion.
The Patriots landed in Providence early Tuesday morning, October 5. Less than forty-eight hours later, on October 7, Moss’s career in New England was over. He was traded, along with a seventh-round pick, to Minnesota, the franchise that drafted him in 1998. The Patriots received a third-round pick in return. It closed off a fascinating room in Brady’s career, a forty-game exhibit that would forever answer the question, “What do you think Brady could do with a truly elite number one receiver?” In their forty games together, Brady and Moss combined for thirty-nine touchdowns. It really was iron sharpening iron, an unspoken athletic-mental understanding that was reserved for the greats. If it were strictly about football, Brady and Moss would have been teammates for a lifetime. They got each other. But pro football is a game of hyperevolution and cap slots, so it was time for Moss to leave.
“Randy really knows how I feel about him,” Brady said. “I love him as a guy, as a person, as a player. He did a lot of great things for this team.”
While Moss was going back to where his career began, so was his replacement.
As tough as the Patriots’ offense was for some to learn, there weren’t many players capable of joining their season in progress and actually contributing. One of them, probably the perfect one, was Deion Branch. He had been traded to Seattle as a twenty-six-year-old rising star. A few knee, groin, and foot injuries later, he was now viewed as a thirty-one-year-old solid professional. The Seahawks had a completely different offense than the Patriots’, yet he had mastered both of them. In Seattle, the quarterback was throwing to a spot in the West Coast offense; in New England, Brady was throwing to the actual receiver. The Seattle offensive verbiage was all numbers and words; New England’s was strictly words.
Branch retained everything he had learned his first time in New England. When the Patriots gave up one of their extra fourth-round picks to bring him back, he was thrilled. The faces had changed, no question, as he had played with just eleven of the players on the fifty-three-man roster, but the offense was in him. Everything was positive about his return, even the potential negative: Two months before the trade, he had finally sold the condo that he’d had the first time around with the Patriots.
As soon as he played his first game, Branch made an impact. He got the most targets, twelve, of anyone on the team, scored a touchdown, and made two big catches in overtime for a 23–20 win over the Ravens.
The points, and wins, without Moss continued to rapidly stack:
Thirty-nine points in Pittsburgh, with the rookie touchdown-maker, Gronk, scoring three times.
Thirty-one points at home against the Colts, with solid performances from rookie costars: a touchdown reception from Hernandez and an interception from McCourty.
Forty-five points on the road in Detroit, featuring a trio of twos: two more interceptions for McCourty, two touchdowns for Branch, and two for Welker.
They were 9-2 after their Thanksgiving win over the Lions. Nine wins by Thanksgiving usually means it’s time to wrap up the division. This year was different. They were tied for the divisional lead with the Jets, and the teams were scheduled for an early December matchup in Foxboro on Monday Night Football. Rex Ryan’s style was working in New York. He had a Let’s go for beers persona, a guy who could have the headset on one second and be calling in to WFAN, Rex from East Rutherford, the next. He was more of a friend than a boss with his players, and they loved him for it. He also had an outstanding defense, led by cornerback Darrelle Revis.
In week two, Revis had to leave the Jets’ 28–14 win early because he pulled his hamstring. He missed a couple of games after that, but he was healthy and willing to meet any challenge. He usually trailed a team’s number one receiver and silenced him for an entire afternoon and/or evening. The Patriots’ offense was completely different from that first meeting, when they were lukewarmly buying into having a traditional number one like Moss. It was hard to say who that was now, as the Patriots were spreading teams out and generally doing whatever they wanted.
It was more of the same on that December night. The windchill was fifteen degrees, although fifteen seemed to be a misreading; that number was too high. Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez, a second-year player from Southern Cal, trotted to the field for some practice throws and sprinted back to the locker room a short time later. “It’s too cold for football,” he said as he left the field. Maybe he was joking. His play indicated that he wasn’t.
It was 17–0, Patriots, after the first quarter, with a short touchdown run from Green-Ellis and a twenty-five-yard scoring pass from Brady to Branch. At halftime, when it was 24–3, Tedy Bruschi was honored. He engaged the crowd with a call-and-response technique: He called out the names of his Super Bowl–winning teammates and they responded with delirium.
Everyone had the same idea after three quarters, when it was 31–3: This team is going to hang yet another of those banners that Bruschi referred to. Who was going to beat them? No one in the entire conference appeared to be capable.
Brady, as he had been all season, was dazzling. He saw mismatches all over the field, negating the brilliance of Revis. He threw four touchdown passes in a 45–3 wipeout, and the productive evening helped him bring his season totals to twenty-seven touchdown passes and four interceptions. He hadn’t thrown an interception since the Baltimore game, in week four, or 228 passes ago.
The Jets, with a three-interception night from Sanchez, filled hearts and notebooks with doubt. THE FOXBORO FLOP declared a headline in the Bergen County Record. More than twenty-two thousand fans responded to a New York Post poll asking, “Does this loss convince you that the Jets are pretenders?” Nearly 68 percent of the respondents said yes.
“I came here to kick Belichick’s ass,” Ryan said after the game, “and he kicked mine.”
That wasn’t unusual for the Patriots. They reached the thirties in points per game for the remainder of the regular season, pausing at the end of it for some intimidating totals:
Brady was certainly going to be the league MVP with thirty-six touchdowns and, still, those four interceptions. His streak of passes without an interception had reached 335; Gronkowski and Hernandez combined for sixteen touchdowns, which doubled the production of last year’s duo, Ben Watson and Chris Baker; Green-Ellis rushed for thirteen touchdowns, many of them behind Logan Mankins, who settled his differences with Kraft. Mankins played just half a season, yet that was still good enough to make him one of six Patriots Pro Bowlers; one of the rookies, McCourty, also made the Pro Bowl; the Patriots led the league in scoring, averaging 32 points per game. And with a league-best 14-2 record, they didn’t have to leave the comfort of home during the postseason.
The Jets began to struggle after their loss to the Patriots, with the 9-2 start turning into a 2-3 finish. Ryan had talked about winning the Super Bowl at the beginning of the season, but for that to happen the Jets had to begin the play-offs on the road against Peyton Manning and the Colts.
In getting his team prepared for the wild-card game in Indianapolis, Ryan was deftly able to compliment Manning while also sneaking in an uppercut on Brady and the Patriots. He said nobody in the league studies like Manning and added, “I know Brady thinks he does. I think there’s a little more help from Belichick with Brady than there is with Peyton Manning.”
He knew what he was doing.
If there was a team the Patriots and their fans hated more than the Jets, it was the Colts. And if there was anything that annoyed a Patriots fan as much as a reference to Spygate, it was the notion that Manning was better than Brady. Ryan wasn’t concerned about that. He was already revealing part of his New England game plan, if the Jets made it that far: Hit them in an area where they are trained not to hit back… in the public, pregame arena.
It turned out that Ryan was onto something. Jets-Colts turned into a bruising, low-scoring game, and that’s not the way the Colts were built. Trailing 16–14 with a few seconds left in the game, the Jets lined up for a thirty-two-yard field goal.
“You watching this, bruh?” Deion Branch said to teammate Vince Wilfork.
“Yes sir,” Wilfork replied. “If the Jets win this, we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
And they did. The Jets, 17–16 winners over the Colts, were headed to Foxboro for a divisional play-off game.
“This is about Bill Belichick versus Rex Ryan,” Ryan said at the beginning of the play-off week. “There’s no question. It’s personal. It’s about him against myself, and that’s what it’s going to come down to. I recognize that he’s the best and all that, but I’m just trying to be the best on Sunday, and I plan on being the best coach on Sunday. That’s what it is. I recognize that my level has to come up, and he’s going to get my best shot. He’s going to get everything I have on Sunday, and if he slips at all, we’re going to beat him.”
Ryan got the first step in the Talking Game, and he and his players continued with the comments daily. The Patriots were strongly encouraged, and flat-out instructed at times, to do their talking on the field. Over the years, they had dealt with a pregame talker or two, but not a chat room. Some of the comments were personal, yet the Patriots were told to keep their mouths closed. Someone told Ryan that Brady had been at a Broadway show, Lombardi, instead of watching Jets-Colts and he cracked, “Peyton Manning would have been watching our game.” Cornerback Antonio Cromartie gave an interview in which he profanely said he hated Brady. Ryan returned again, saying that Brady had taken a shot at him by pointing to the Jets’ sideline. The talking had become so commonplace that three days before the game, one of the brashest and most outrageous talkers ever, Reggie Jackson, went on a New York radio show and told the Jets to “shut up and play football.”
That wasn’t going to happen. Since the Patriots were barred from speaking directly, Welker had a subtly subversive idea. He was friendly with Ryan, and he frequently included the Jets coach on a group text with Mike Smith, Welker’s college roommate. Smith was interested in coaching and was in his first year as a Jets intern. The trio teased one another throughout the season, sending playful texts about defenders who were going to cover Welker (Ryan wrote that he’d use a nose tackle) and how unstoppable the Patriots’ offense was. There had been an online video circulating about Ryan, apparently role-playing with his wife and focusing on her feet. The usually talkative Ryan didn’t offer much when he was asked about it by New York media members.
Welker, though, used the incident to talk about the play-off game. He never smiled, winked, or changed his tone of voice when he answered several questions with increasingly out-of-place foot references.
Reporter: What is Tom Brady’s postseason value?
Welker: It goes without saying, the guy is who he is and he does a great job of making sure everyone is on the same page and putting their best foot forward…
Reporter: How do you convey a sense of urgency to younger players for the postseason?
Welker: It’s a play-off atmosphere and you can’t just stick your toe in the water…
Reporter: What makes Revis so good?
Welker: I think he is very patient. He has good feet…
It went on for nine minutes, and Welker didn’t break character once. Not even when he gave the biggest clue that he was just going to find any way possible to mention feet.
Reporter: How is the team handling the play-off atmosphere at practice?
Welker: We’re really moving forward and we’re going out there being good little foot soldiers…
Many of Welker’s teammates loved it. But it didn’t matter what the players thought of it. One man, Belichick, wasn’t even slightly amused. On Twitter, Jets center Nick Mangold answered Welker by using the receiver’s rhetorical device:
“Wes Welker is a great player. He’s really taken advantage of watching film. If we don’t keep a Spy on him, he could really open the Gate.”
On game day, the humor was gone from everyone. The league had notified both teams to stop talking, probably spurred by Bart Scott’s statement that Welker’s “days are numbered.” It was a play-off game trapped in the middle of a cultural war. No matter what happened after this game, the winning team here, on January 16, 2011, was going to refer to the result constantly. It’s just what happened between Boston and New York.
Minutes before game time, a rumor started to circulate on the field: Welker was going to miss the first series as a disciplinary move for his comments about Ryan. Crumpler was among those who didn’t agree with the move.
“I still can’t figure out the Wes Welker not starting thing,” he says. “I felt that when Wes made his comments, it was kind of the icebreaker that we needed. The first play of the game I was always next to Wes. A lot of people were trying to figure it out.”
The Patriots were trying to figure out the Jets. New York was holding down the number one offense in the league, and Brady’s interception streak was snapped in the first quarter. The Patriots looked bad. It didn’t help that Crumpler dropped a touchdown pass in the first quarter. “Still can’t believe I didn’t catch it,” he says. They didn’t get the touchdown, but they got a field goal, and those were their only points of the half. They trailed 14–3.
Crumpler got a touchdown in the third quarter, and the Patriots were successful on the 2-point conversion to make it 14–11. It was becoming that kind of day, though, and New Englanders knew the feeling. The devastating upset. The opponent who was thought to be overmatched but refused to play the part. The young quarterback, Mark Sanchez, who is supposed to be overwhelmed by Belichick. Instead, he was beating man coverage with poised and precise throws. They answered everything the Patriots did, and 14–11 suddenly became 21–11. After a Patriots field goal made it 21–14, it quickly became 28–14.
They were running out of time. The Patriots, 14-2 and dominant, were at home and staying there.
“That was a weird game, man,” Branch says. “Clearly, this was a team that shouldn’t have been able to hold our jocks. We lost that game. We had so many mental errors throughout the course of it. And then there was the stuff with Wes… who knows what we could have done if we had won it?”
They lost it. And losses to New York teams in the postseason are always scarring, always some New Yorker’s retort to settle an argument.
“This was not your garden variety postseason elimination. Losing to the Jets is worse than losing to the Lakers,” Dan Shaughnessy wrote in the Boston Globe. “It might even be worse than losing to the Yankees and that is because of the lack of class demonstrated by the Jets in the days and months leading up to yesterday’s epic showdown. The Jets are all about smack talk. They hurled insults at New England for a week. Then they came to Foxboro and backed it up.”
All the awards didn’t matter now. Brady was going to be the unanimous MVP and Belichick the Coach of the Year. It was a better team than last year’s. More talented. More professional. Less needy. And the same play-off result: one game and out.
Who knew what next year was going to bring? The commissioner, Roger Goodell, had sent out warnings for years now concerning the lockout. It was finally time for it in 2011. As disheartening as that was, more pressing matters of the heart were around the corner.