The scenes of victory were tough to take, and therefore it was time to get out of Gillette Stadium quickly on January 16, 2011. A lot of Patriots felt that way, and it had everything to do with expectation. This was all their fault. They had helped raise a generation of New England sports fans who had a hard time accepting that some team could actually enter the building for a play-off game and exit with a win. The fans and players didn’t think they’d ever watch a Jets linebacker, Bart Scott, actually pretend to be a jet plane after a win: arms extended, gliding in for an interview landing, and then touching down on the ground.
Once Scott got there, he addressed a message “to all the nonbelievers.” He was critical of ESPN analysts and former players Tom Jackson and Keyshawn Johnson, who had both picked the Patriots to win convincingly. He pointed out that the Jets were the third-best defense in football and the Patriots “can’t stop a nosebleed.”
That wasn’t supposed to happen here in the postseason. This was the place where opposing players, even the MVPs, seemed to get stage fright. Peyton Manning came here in back-to-back years and totaled one touchdown and five interceptions in two losses. LaDainian Tomlinson came here with the Chargers, carried the ball twice in the cold, and then called it a day. The Jacksonville Jaguars, a twelve-win team, came here and suddenly couldn’t block. They gave up four and a half sacks… to one player, Willie McGinest.
But last year, the Ravens had visited in January and left with an easy play-off win. Now the Jets, the chirpy little brother, had finally won a fight that mattered. They were going to the conference championship game after their 28–21 win and the Patriots had another game to debate during meals in the cafeteria. That really was a part of the culture that they had created, and most of the NFL would have thought them crazy if they’d been able to listen to some of their breakfast and lunch conversations. They had multiple rings, yet they’d sometimes wonder about the ones that got away.
Richard Seymour was on the other side of the country, in Oakland, and he still did it. He thought about the Mannings, how the Patriots had Peyton down by fifteen in the conference title one year and how he had Eli in the grasp in a devastating Super Bowl loss the next. “I feel like we could have won six,” he says. Team president Jonathan Kraft did it. The veteran tight end, Alge Crumpler, was amazed when he sat with Kraft eating breakfast and heard him mention the “four or five” Super Bowls that they could have won. Imagine hearing that when you’ve never won a Super Bowl or even played in one. Deion Branch had gone away for four years, and when he got back he slid right back into the habitat that he’d left. He knew it was going to be a tough game against the physical and talkative Jets, but it took a while for reality to settle in.
“Not to be a spoiled brat,” he says now, “but I couldn’t have been happier the next week when they went to Pittsburgh and got their butts beat.”
It was appropriate that a startling loss to the Jets happened at the beginning of the year. It was a reminder of the suddenness of things. The Patriots were used to the traditional interruptions of their football culture: trades, holdouts, free agent departures, coaching changes, retirements. But no player in the league knew what to expect from a lockout, not even the ten- and fifteen-year veterans. The last time the NFL had a strike, in 1987, Tom Brady was ten years old. Since then, whether the commissioner was Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, or Roger Goodell, the league had figured out a way to at least give the appearance that everyone was satisfied with a robust revenue pool.
That wasn’t the case this time. Goodell became the commissioner in 2006, and he and the owners quickly made it obvious that they wanted to renegotiate a deal that they had just agreed to with the players. They had been preparing for this fight for five years, which most coaches and players didn’t have the luxury of doing. The lockout was happening as scheduled, and it meant that everything would be frozen except for the draft. There would be no contact between players and coaches; players would not be allowed to work out at team facilities; there would be no signings, of free agents or draft picks; franchises would not pay for their players’ health insurance; and, the ultimate leverage of ownership, players would miss sizable game checks if the lockout extended into the season.
Any player who considered himself naïve was about to get a baptism. This was going to be a slog. Really, from a player’s perspective, it was going to be a fight against giants, seen and unseen. The players knew that the owners were wealthy because common sense and public information told them so. But when they asked owners to provide years’ worth of detailed financial information, the owners refused. Yet as early as 2009, the small-market and publicly owned Green Bay Packers provided a glance of what the players were up against.
The Packers reported that their revenues were just over $20 million, which was a loss from the previous season. But their annual report also showed a “Preservation Fund” of $128 million, to be used in case of a lockout. In everyday terms, it was a piggy bank. Green Bay, the smallest market in the league, had $128 million plus the split revenue of a $1 billion DirecTV deal. If the Packers had that much, what was being stored away in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and New England?
Tom Brady’s celebrity had earned him many things in his dozen-year career, but this was new. Along with fellow quarterbacks Drew Brees and Peyton Manning, he was the lead plaintiff in the players’ fight to stop the lockout. The antitrust suit was called Tom Brady, et al. v. National Football League, et al. It was good for the players to have Brady as the face of their cause. He was the reigning MVP and the most successful winner in the league. He wasn’t likely to speak much with the media during the dispute, if at all, but if he did, he certainly wouldn’t say anything that would be interpreted as a gaffe. Even if his name happened to be in the lead for symbolic purposes, it was proof of his evolution in the past three years.
He had returned from his knee injury in 2009 with greater purpose. That was the positive part. His receivers, backs, and tight ends also learned how impatient he could be if they weren’t doing what was expected. He had urgency. The game had been taken away from him for a year, and for the first time since his early days as a Patriot, he was a watcher. When it was time to come back and play, he wasn’t tolerant of silly mistakes. Careers are short. Take advantage of what you can, when you can.
Maybe it was just a coincidence, but 2009 was also when he became more involved in the Players Association. Winning the Comeback Player of the Year award that season wasn’t his biggest accomplishment. It was managing to be close to Kraft while planning to oppose him in court; it was being a passionate and informed union guy, but also being perfectly aligned with Belichick in team policy; it was being adored by millions, being paid millions, and sometimes getting special treatment by the coaching staff (he rarely practiced on Wednesdays during the entire 2010 season), and yet remaining grounded, tremendously respected by the rank and file.
He may have held his own and looked the part when he was plotting against the league’s suits, but that really wasn’t his game. A month and a half into the lockout, he wanted motion. The real kind, on the field, not the legal kind, to be filed.
Brady and his coach were identical in that way. They could be physically thousands of miles away from the stadium and football, but it was always in them. They weren’t the folks who would say, “This is what I do; it’s not who I am…” Yes, it was precisely who they were. Brady was a perpetually curious A-plus student. Belichick was a tireless teacher, always thinking ahead of a lesson or an illustration that would keep the star student, and others, engaged.
Belichick and Brady craved action. The lockout was a slow death for both of them. And, per NFL rules, they weren’t allowed to talk with each other about it. One thing Belichick could do was get ready for a favorite event that was still happening—the draft. The coach’s birthday was officially April 16, but it should have been the first day of the draft. He looked more at ease in the war room than he did on a golf course.
“It’s a team-builder’s league,” says Louis Riddick, an ESPN analyst who played for Belichick in Cleveland. “Bill understands the profiles that he wants each player to have. He’s got a specific profile of how he wants everything done, and there aren’t many guys like that. He knows how he wants film corrected. How treatment, rehab, and weight training should go. How he’s going to run practices and the practice squad. The profile of players by position, physical build, and mental makeup.”
On his unofficial fifty-ninth birthday, April 28, it was once again time to see what he had learned from his draft homework. It was also time to get the payoff from that 2009 trade of Richard Seymour to the Raiders. Oakland finished 8-8 in 2010, so that middle-of-the-pack record left the Patriots with a corresponding first-round pick, number seventeen overall in the spring. They also had their own pick, number twenty-eight, but they were willing to trade it.
Belichick had no idea when he’d be able to coach a new left tackle, but he knew he needed one. Matt Light had been protecting Brady for a decade, and Light was getting close to retirement. There were two tackles the Patriots loved, Tyron Smith of Southern Cal and Nate Solder of Colorado, and they knew they wouldn’t get Smith. He went ninth overall to Dallas, and Solder was scooped by the Patriots at seventeen. After that, it was the type of waiting that Belichick could appreciate: waiting for the phone to ring. The Patriots got what they were looking for shortly after, when New Orleans asked about twenty-eight. The Saints were willing to give up next year’s first as well as this year’s second. The extra second-round pick became running back Shane Vereen. An extra second for next year was created when the Patriots called Al Davis and got him to accept a 2011 third-rounder for a 2012 second.
But as much fun as it was for Belichick to make deals, the joy came from seeing those players and coaching them. Technically, the league’s entire draft pool was pending. No one could do a thing until the lockout was settled.
In June, there was something familiar for New Englanders to celebrate. It was another championship, the seventh in ten years for a Boston sports team. The Bruins, who hadn’t won a Stanley Cup since 1972, finally captured one. This time the rolling rally was in the summer, and fans were encouraged to take public transportation to avoid the hassle of closed streets. It sounded reasonable enough, but local officials weren’t prepared for the number of people willing to take their advice: A crowd of 1.2 million, twice as much as the normal commute, filled inbound train stations to Boston. It was too many people and not enough trains, so many of the fans were stranded and missed the parade. Scathing blogs and letters to the editor followed, understandably so. But it was fascinating to compare the source of local anger in 2000 (no parades to plan) to the source of it in 2011 (no ride to the parade).
The celebration was in contrast to what Robert Kraft was experiencing in his professional and personal life. If he could have, he would have accepted every professional setback possible if it meant receiving a miracle at home. The business stuff, the lockout, was predictable enough. It had reached the one-hundred-day mark, and the public was far angrier than those T riders without a train to catch. Pro football was their favorite sport, and they didn’t have the temperament nor the resources to understand the impasse. Why couldn’t smart people figure out a way to divide over $9 billion? Even if they were smart and greedy, they still should have been able to solve that one.
What wasn’t so easy was real, authentic life. Myra Kraft was in a fight for hers. By day, her husband would make phone calls and try to figure out a way to save the game. By night, he would rub his wife’s feet and try to give her comfort against the ravages of cancer.
She was a brilliant woman, perhaps the smartest Kraft, and that was saying something with all the accomplishments and credentials in the family. It was her intellect that allowed her to make smart decisions as she either chaired or sat on several boards. Their range told part of the story of her personality: Combined Jewish Philanthropies of Greater Boston, the Boys & Girls Clubs of Boston, American Repertory Theater, Facing History and Ourselves. Another part of the story was her conscience, her demands for herself and those around her. This was her core, and since the Patriots were part of the family business, she pushed to make it a part of their core, too.
She got resistance on that sometimes, but she kept pushing. She had reservations about being involved in the NFL at all in 1994, and not because she thought it was bad business. She just wanted to be assured that the family’s mission—calling, really—to be charitable wouldn’t slow down. It didn’t. Two years later, she called out Bill Parcells, on the record, when he thought he was being funny by calling a slow-recovering receiver “she” in 1996. “Disgraceful,” Myra said, when describing the slight. “I hope he’s chastised for that. It was the wrong thing for anyone to say.”
A sense of social justice had been ingrained, as far back as kindergarten. Her father had escaped the Holocaust in the 1930s, but his parents and siblings had died in concentration camps. She was not one to stand by and wait for change. Jonathan Kraft recalled a time in apartheid South Africa where she saw black men being arrested by police. She asked the police what they had done wrong and was told that they didn’t have the proper documents to be in the city at that hour. She told them that she didn’t, either. “So arrest me, too!” Jonathan had to pick her up and carry her away from the scene.
She learned to love football, thanks to her husband and four sons. She loved the cerebral aspects of the game, so she not only watched it; she read about it as well. Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side became one of her favorite books. Maybe it just wasn’t possible to bring the world of pro football closer to some of the many philanthropic causes that she supported, but she was going to try. It probably never crossed her mind, nor those of the football operations staff, but she read people so well in interview situations that she probably could have picked up things about players, nonfootball things of course, that they couldn’t.
A lot of people didn’t know that she was as sick as she was in the summer of 2011. She still cooked, still checked in on her eight grandchildren, and still told Robert to go off and end that lockout. She was among the first to know when the lockout was ending, in the third week of July. That was also the time she died. She was sixty-eight.
On July 22, one of the hottest days in the history of Newton, Massachusetts, the NFL came to Temple Emanuel to honor and celebrate the life of Myra Kraft. Roger Goodell sat close to DeMaurice Smith, the executive director of the Players Association. Tom Brady and Drew Bledsoe shared a hug. Richard Seymour returned to the area for the first time since being traded, and sat near Belichick, the man who traded him. Conservatives such as Donald Trump and Rush Limbaugh were there, along with many liberal Massachusetts politicians such as Senator John Kerry and Governor Deval Patrick.
“Who else but Myra could bring such an eclectic bunch together?” Rabbi Wes Gardenswartz said. “Only one person on the planet. Only Myra could.”
Elton John’s version of Henry Mancini’s “Moon River,” the Krafts’ favorite song, played softly in the temple. Three of Kraft’s sons gave eulogies, but he did not speak. There would be football this year, and it was going to be incongruous to look above the field, in the owners’ seats, and see Jonathan on Kraft’s right but no Myra on his left.
Three days after the funeral service, Kraft and his sons were sitting shiva at the family estate. The prayers were over, and there were still visitors in the home. Robert asked his four sons and two of the visitors, Kerry and Patrick, if he should attend the press conference announcing the good football news. The vote was unanimous, 6–0, and that’s how an unforgettable image became possible: Kraft and Colts center Jeff Saturday sharing a hug. The lineman said he wanted to thank Kraft for helping to “save football.” The owners had preserved the power of the commissioner, given the players a less physically demanding workweek, but taken a bigger share of the revenue cut, 53 percent to 47 percent.
It was one of the strongest national moments for Kraft, and it allowed the rest of the country to see what New Englanders had experienced for decades. Kraft was a relatable and clever deal-maker. His strength was going to the essence of what the issue was and then figuratively getting the lawyers away from it. That was his way of emphasizing that common ground could be reached as long as both sides could unemotionally focus on their similarities and minimize their differences. That’s how the NFL and Players Association closed a deal that would carry the sides until 2020.
“You can’t solve a problem until you understand what the problem is,” Kraft told the Boston Globe. “There were some very difficult, complicated issues, but there was a give and take. I hope the same happens in Washington. The NFL is not Washington, but culturally it is very important that we bridge our differences.”
As the league opened its doors for a late start to free agency and training camp, the question of conscience tugged for the Patriots. They signed plenty of solid individuals, such as Shaun Ellis, Andre Carter, and Nate Solder, their first-round pick. But in a stunner, the team traded a fifth-round pick for a player who seemed to be the antithesis of every written rule of their organizational manual. Football was not Albert Haynesworth’s top priority and everyone in the league knew it. He had the potential to be dominant, but he wasn’t often enough, and the worst of his inconsistency had a birth date. It was February 2009, when he signed a seven-year $100 million contract with Washington, including $41 million guaranteed.
Worse than his being in it strictly for the money, though, were a myriad of character questions. He was arriving in New England with a misdemeanor sexual assault charge pending. A waitress at a Washington hotel said that she was fondled by the athlete as he paid the bill. While in camp with the Patriots, Haynesworth agreed to an exchange with prosecutors, who allowed him to enter a no-contest plea to one count of simple assault. Belichick and the Patriots often had foresight when they made a deal, but this was a bad fit.
Proving to be ever unpredictable, Belichick also traded late-round picks for a wide receiver who was a buddy of his but didn’t seem to be his kind of player. Chad Ochocinco, who’d legally changed his name from Chad Johnson to match his uniform number—85—was brought in from Cincinnati. He had been a talented receiver, but his current skill seemed to be in self-promotion. He was a social media sensation, often regaling his millions of Twitter followers with homespun wisdom, humor, and his adventures with reality TV star Evelyn Lozada.
For those who were trying to articulate what was different about the league in general and these Patriots in particular, Tedy Bruschi beat them to it. The Patriots began their season in Miami, where Tom Brady somehow looked better than he had in 2010. He was able to help four different receivers accumulate at least six catches and 85 yards: Wes Welker, Deion Branch, Aaron Hernandez, and Rob Gronkowski. Welker’s performance, eight catches for 160 yards and two touchdowns, topped them all. Brady finished with 517 yards and four touchdowns; Ochocinco caught one ball for 14 yards.
The next day, Bruschi was a guest on a radio show in Boston. He was happily talking about football until a producer put a tweet from Ochocinco in front of him. “Just waking up after a late arrival, I’ve never seen a machine operate like that n person, to see video game numbers put up n person was WOW.” Maybe it was the fact that it was already past three o’clock in the afternoon and Ochocinco said he was just waking up. It could have been the awe, or just Twitter itself. Whatever the cause, Bruschi went on the air and told the receiver to snap out of it.
“Stop tweeting and get in your playbook,” he said with passion. It was almost as if fans in drive time got to briefly feel what it was like for a wandering newcomer to be pulled back into shape by legendary Patriots like Bruschi, Rodney Harrison, and Willie McGinest. Bruschi’s media instincts were as impressive as his football ones, so he was onto something. Ochocinco came from a numbering system with the Bengals, which meant that he didn’t have to do any sight adjustments. He just ran a play. He wasn’t going to be able to do that with the Patriots, and it was going to be a season-long problem.
But with so many of their former players in the media, the Patriots had to play the game: defend the current teammate and wave off the ex one, who can now be painted with a media brush. Tom Brady confidently did that when he commented on Bruschi’s criticism of Ochocinco.
“I will say this about all those guys, whether it’s Tedy making a comment—and I love Tedy, he’s one of my great friends—and all those guys that have played for us, but honestly, none of those guys have any clue what they’re talking about. They’re outside of the locker room. They don’t know what we’re trying to accomplish. So, with all due respect to all of them and what they’ve accomplished… they don’t know.”
It was a good sentiment, especially since the media couldn’t see practice. There, it was obvious just how lost Ochocinco was. He had played his entire career with the Bengals and it seemed that he couldn’t get that offense out of his system. Near the midway point of the season, with the Patriots 5-2, Ochocinco had nine catches. He hadn’t scored. But if he wanted to revisit that WOW tweet, he had good subjects with the second-year tight ends, Gronkowski and Hernandez. Individually, they were at Pro Bowl levels. As a duo, they were unstoppable. Through seven games, they had combined for a good tight end’s season: sixty-five catches, 793 yards, nine touchdowns.
Going into the season’s eighth game, against the Giants, the scouting report on the Patriots was set. They were wonderful to watch on offense, but they gave up generous chunks of yardage defensively.
No one imagined that this defensive bunch had the ability to come up with a goal-line stand to win a game, or to even carry the offense on a low-scoring day. For the Patriots to get where they wanted, the offense had to take them there.
That was never more obvious than on November 6, Albert Haynesworth’s last game as a Patriot. It was bad enough that the Patriots had lost the game in the final minute, when they seemed to have it under control. Haynesworth made it tough for anyone to excuse the way he played against New York, especially in the third quarter. He was pushed aside by Giants guard David Diehl, and he made no effort to recover. It allowed Giants running back Brandon Jacobs to run ten yards into the end zone. Twenty-four minutes were left in the game at that point, and Haynesworth sat out all of them.
On Monday, Belichick was asked about the benching of Haynesworth and he said the team was trying to utilize all of its defensive linemen. Not exactly. On Tuesday, Haynesworth was cut. With the release of Haynesworth, who finished his New England career with just three tackles, and the relative shelving of Ochocinco, the team seemed to be freer.
It started with the thirty-four-year-old Brady. He’d had more to worry about than anyone during the lockout, with his face and his name attached to it. The dispute had lasted more than one-third of a calendar year, 138 days, so it wasn’t like he’d had much casual time to consider quarterbacking or vacations for that matter. Still, he was on pace to set a career high in passing yardage. He and offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien had a good relationship. They’d yell at each other, clear the air, and then proceed as if nothing had happened. They did that on national TV, during a game in Washington, and the exchange became a social media vine.
The wins and yards kept coming. They beat Washington on that screaming day, 34–27. That was their fifth consecutive win, a game in which Gronk had six catches for 160 yards and two touchdowns. The next week they were in Denver, and Hernandez got a chance to see his college quarterback. Tim Tebow had become one of the most popular players of the season because of his unusual quarterbacking. Brady had Hernandez on his team now, and it was his turn to dominate in a 41–23 win. He had nine catches, 129 yards, and a score.
The regular season closed with wins over the Dolphins and Bills, good for a 13-3 record and the ninth division title in the past eleven years. In their season-ending eight-game winning streak, the Patriots averaged 36 points per game. Brady had indeed finished with the most passing yards of his career, 5,235. His leading receiver, technically, was Wes Welker. But Gronk and Hernandez had tilted the field in such a way that the Patriots always had an advantage when they sent their tight ends into a route. Gronk caught ninety balls and scored a record seventeen receiving touchdowns, and added another rushing. Hernandez had seventy-nine catches and seven scores. Just like Brady and Seymour had previously, Gronk and Hernandez far exceeded the best-case standard, physically, for their positions.
As they entered the play-offs, even the potential disappointments worked out in the Patriots’ favor. O’Brien wanted to be a head coach, and that opportunity was realized one week before the divisional play-off game against the Broncos.
Penn State had come off the worst year in its history with revelations about former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky and numerous allegations of sexual molestation of young boys. There was national outrage that officials at Penn State were aware of the accusations and didn’t do more to help with the prosecution of Sandusky. The school’s president resigned and legendary coach Joe Paterno was fired in November. On January 7, 2012, the school announced the hiring of O’Brien. He was going to stay with the Patriots until the postseason was over. Fortunately, he was going to have a postseason assistant to help him. Josh McDaniels, after being fired the previous year as head coach of the Broncos, had landed in St. Louis as offensive coordinator with the Rams. When their season ended with no play-offs, he was free to go anywhere he wanted. He went “home” to New England. Once O’Brien left, it was no secret that McDaniels would replace him.
In the play-offs, against McDaniels’s old team, Patriots fans could see the effects of Hernandez’s versatility. McDaniels floated the idea of featuring him as a runner and receiver, which is what he had always been. This would be like being back at Bristol Central High. He gained sixty-one yards on the ground, and another fifty-five in the air with a touchdown. The struggle to locate him further cleared the field for Gronk, who scored three times. It was on to the conference championship against the Ravens, the first team to win in the play-offs at Gillette.
On the surface, it looked like a game that would be decided by a field goal, which it was. But that wasn’t the most significant development of the day. Nor was it receiver–kick returner Julian Edelman spending time at cornerback, getting two tackles and forcing a fumble; nor Brady, knee brace and all, diving above the pile on fourth-and-goal for the winning touchdown; nor, as dramatic as it was, a rookie free agent named Sterling Moore batting away a ball from Lee Evans that should have been the winning catch.
The topic that kept the Super Bowl preparation party tempered was Gronk. He caught a pass late in the third quarter and the defender, Bernard Pollard, held on any way he could. He started to wrap up around Gronk’s waist, but that wasn’t working for the safety, four inches shorter than Gronk. He slid down to his left ankle and hung on there. When Gronk fell to the ground, his ankle buckled under the 225 pounds of Pollard. He limped off the field. He was seen after the game in a walking boot.
Gronk was definitely going to play in the Super Bowl against, once again, the New York Giants. The only question was health and effectiveness. That was something they could worry about later. After a 23–20 win, Brady could look at the team’s lowest scoring total in two and a half months and say, happily, to CBS’s Jim Nantz: “Well, I sucked pretty bad today. But our defense saved us.”
For the Patriots, traveling to Indianapolis for the Super Bowl made sense. While the best Super Bowl scenery was in New Orleans and San Diego and Pasadena, the game’s AFC participants were frequently Patriots or Colts. It was the fifth appearance for Brady and Belichick since 2001, and the host city’s team, the Colts, had been there twice in that span.
Belichick was usually understated with Brady, publicly and privately. There was tremendous mutual respect between the two, but there were no long dinners and old stories over beers. They were partners at the office, recognizing each other as the best there is. Just before the Super Bowl began, they talked briefly on the field and there was a knowing wink of what was at stake. They slapped five, sideways, and Brady said, “Good luck. Let’s go get this thing, huh?”
Brady and the rest of the team had “MHK” patches on their jerseys for Myra Hiatt Kraft. They all talked about how special it would be to win it in such a difficult year for the owner. But the game started poorly, with Brady getting a grounding penalty that led to a safety. The Giants added a touchdown to make it 9–0.
This was where championship experience helped. Defensive tackle Vince Wilfork, playing in his third Super Bowl, stood on the sideline smiling. “It ain’t nothing but a football game,” he said. “That’s all it is: a football game.”
It was 10–9 Patriots at the half, and they were getting the ball at the start of the third quarter. They had settled into their normal game, with one exception: Gronk. His left ankle was heavily taped, from the bottom of his shoe to high on the leg. He had to be out there because of the stakes, but this wasn’t the player the league saw all year. Giants linebacker Michael Boley told his teammates that in the third quarter. “Eighty-seven is a fucking decoy,” he told them. “He a decoy. You see how he tried to run that route? He’s gonna be outta here soon.”
Yes and no. He wasn’t the same. But decoy or not, he was the best tight end in football and he’d help. Even on one leg. Four minutes into the third, it was Hernandez who put the Patriots in control. He scored on a twelve-yard pass from Brady, and the Patriots had reeled off 17 points for a 17–9 lead.
But Giants coach Tom Coughlin’s teams always played Belichick’s tough. The two of them had been on Bill Parcells’s staff with the Giants in the late 1980s, and they were too wise to the other’s thinking to allow things to get out of hand. Neither of them was going to be outsmarted. And since they were partial to mentally tough grinders on their rosters, their players weren’t going to be overwhelmed by deficits.
Sure enough, the Giants chipped away with two third-quarter field goals to make it 17–15 at the beginning of the fourth quarter. What happened next will long be debated in the Gillette Stadium cafeteria, on planes, in the locker room, or on vacation. It was another one that got away, another championship that was almost won.
With just over four minutes to play and the Patriots still clinging to that 17–15 lead, they had the ball at the Giants’ forty-four-yard line. This was why all the talk about Brady and his receivers seeing the same things was so important. Wes Welker was in the slot, and the Giants were so confused on defense that they weren’t prepared to defend a huge passing window, right down the seam. If Welker saw it like Brady did, he’d have at least a huge first down that would help bleed the clock. He’d also have the Patriots in field goal range, for a 5-point lead, or a touchdown to put it away.
Welker did see it. He ran down that seam and Brady lofted the ball to the five-foot-nine receiver. The ball wasn’t perfect, but it was soft and catchable. Besides, it was the Super Bowl. It’s not just great receivers who make those plays in the final game of the year; all receivers, with their hands on it, are expected to bring it down. Welker got two hands on it, the pigskin right on his gloves, and then he dropped it. Wilfork and several defensive linemen had their heads up in anticipation when the ball was thrown. They dropped their heads when the ball was dropped. It ain’t nothing but a football game… and the game could deliver one hell of a punch to the gut.
“Whoa, that was the game,” referee John Parry said as he eyed the almost-winning catch.
No kidding.
The Patriots got no points out of their drive. When Eli Manning and the Giants got the ball, they were backed up at their own twelve-yard line. Welker’s play was one that he could routinely make. Manning, though, had a low-percentage opening to guide a ball to receiver Mario Manningham. It was a pass through a narrow slot, and you got the sense that the area was so tight that the only way Manning could have gotten the ball there more securely is by a machine. Perfect throw, perfect catch, with a toe tap on the sideline. It was good for thirty-eight yards, and Bill Belichick threw his challenge flag because he had to. But he knew. It was a catch.
And a sick feeling. It was happening again, just as it had in November in the regular season against the Giants. Just as it had four years ago, in the desert, against the Giants. With one minute to play, it became official: The Giants had the lead, on a touchdown run by Ahmad Bradshaw, and they weren’t giving it back.
They were Super Bowl champions again, over the Patriots.
When Gisele Bündchen walked out of the stadium, she was taunted by fans. Not one for holding her tongue, she responded, “My husband cannot fucking throw the ball and catch it at the same time!” This loss was going to sting forever. At least the Patriots still had championship talent, and with a healthy Gronk and Hernandez, their future was bright. Or so it seemed.