A tanned Bill Belichick, familiar pencil tucked behind his right ear, stepped to the podium for the most difficult press conference of his career. It was hot outside, with the late July temperatures in the upper eighties, and the activity inside the room at Gillette Stadium made it even hotter. There were more reporters than normal, more cameras, more bright lights. All the Boston television stations went to live coverage, as did ESPN.
Everyone was looking for the football coach to go beyond football. Everyone was looking for him to at least partially answer a question that tugged at millions of NFL fans and observers, but one that very few knew the answers to.
How did we get here?
How did it get to the point where, on July 24, 2013, the head coach of the New England Patriots was describing how an accused murderer was in this same building just over a month ago? According to the timeline put forth by prosecutors and investigators, Aaron Hernandez had killed two people and then gone to training camp a week and a half later. He had donated in the name of giving back to the community a month after that when, if the allegations were true, he had actually been a menace to the community. He had spent an entire season meeting and practicing, playing and traveling with men who had no idea how much of a danger he might have been to all of them. Was there any hint, any small detail about Hernandez that didn’t connect at the time, but now, with the benefit of hindsight, provided a clue of the types of things he did when he left the stadium?
All around this room, people wondered. They wondered about Belichick, who drafted him, coached him, texted with him, and was even hugged by him a few times. Had he ever met Alexander Bradley, the godfather of Hernandez’s eight-month-old daughter? It was Bradley who said he could get Hernandez marijuana on demand; Bradley who, these days, considered himself a former Hernandez friend because, he alleged, Hernandez shot him in the face in February and then left him on the side of the road bleeding. There were many instances like that, when you put up a split screen and watched on one side the made-for-TV league fulfill the football calendar, preparing for the scouting combine, free agency, and the draft, while on the other side Hernandez allegedly orchestrated sociopathic actions in private.
Did anyone in Foxboro recognize the faces that were now frequent images online and on the news? Did Belichick, Robert Kraft, or even a teammate recall seeing or meeting Ernest Wallace or Carlos Ortiz? The last time Belichick spoke to the media here, on June 13, he was announcing a day off for the players so they could start their summer vacations early. Aaron Hernandez’s mind wasn’t at rest, though. He texted Wallace that same morning, June 13, and said things were getting crazy. He was frantic, telling him that he needed clips, perhaps for ammunition, and CDs from a car, as soon as possible. He was restricted in minicamp because he was recovering from shoulder surgery. But it turned out football wasn’t preoccupying his life. There were no texts about the shoulder and taking it easy in his real life. He was on the go, to Boston clubs and Providence restaurants, to a Dorchester neighborhood to pick up Odin Lloyd and then to an industrial park in his own neighborhood to allegedly kill him.
How in God’s name did we get here?
Belichick stood in front of the room, occasionally shifting to the side as he read from a prepared statement he had written himself. It was a lot different from the internal writings he had done for football players. Now he was writing for and speaking to a national audience that was hanging on and parsing every word and intonation. He and the organization were on trial in a sense, because there had been lengthy blogs and debates around the region and country about what the Patriots should have known and could have done.
“It’s a sad day,” he began. “It really is a sad day, on so many levels. Our thoughts and prayers are with the family of the victim, and I extend my sympathy to everyone who has been impacted. A young man lost his life, and his family has suffered a tragic loss. There’s no way to understate that.”
He looked down and sighed. It was quiet in the room.
“When I was out of the country, I learned about the ongoing criminal investigation that involved one of our players, and I and other members of the organization were shocked and disappointed at what we had learned. Having someone in your organization that’s involved in a murder investigation is a terrible thing. After consultation with ownership, we acted swiftly and decisively.”
He was referencing the release of Hernandez on June 27. He had certainly seen the footage by now, of Hernandez being led out of his house wearing black sneakers, red-and-black gym shorts, and a white T-shirt draped over his torso and his hands in cuffs. That morning, similar to others in the past week, there had been media members camped near Hernandez’s house. His teammate Deion Branch lived across the street and there was such a scene that Branch was advised not to come home. Just before nine a.m. on the twenty-seventh, two black sedans and a North Attleboro police car parked in Hernandez’s driveway. The cars emptied, and seven men went to the front of the house: one knocking on the door, one ringing the doorbell, two standing on the stairs, two standing on the sidewalk, and one near the driveway. When the door opened, all of them went in. They returned minutes later with Hernandez and escorted him purposefully past the hydrangea and into the backseat of the police car.
Hours later, Hernandez was a former Patriot. One month after that, his former coach was in a room trying to explain, as appropriately as he could, that this was not normal for him, either. The Patriots had taken plenty of so-called character risks over the years in the draft and free agency, but no one ever thought they’d lose a gamble so spectacularly.
“Robert and his family and I, since I got here in 2000, have always emphasized the need for our team and our players and our organization to represent the community the right way, on and off the field. We’ve worked very hard together over the past fourteen years to put together a winning team that is a pillar in the community, and I agree one hundred percent with that… Our players are generally highly motivated and gifted athletes. They come from very different backgrounds. They’ve met many challenges along the way and have done things to get here. Sometimes they’ve made bad or immature decisions but we try to look at every single situation on a case-by-case basis and try to do what’s best for the football team and what’s best for the franchise.
“Most of those decisions have worked out, but some don’t. Overall, I’m proud of the hundreds of players that have come through this program but I’m personally disappointed and hurt in a situation like this.”
Belichick spoke for a while, trying to explain scouting, evaluation, and determining a player’s football readiness. Not including Hernandez, he had drafted 123 players between the ages of twenty and twenty-three since taking over the Patriots, more choices with one team than any coach in the league. He thought he had a feel for them all, from the super high achievers to the fifty-fifty borderline types. Aaron Hernandez wasn’t the first kid he’d drafted who smoked marijuana and messed around with guns. Some at-risk young men he’d come across had responded to his direct messaging: “You can’t come here and do all that shit anymore, understand?” Others never got it and therefore didn’t make it.
There were scores of others, he wanted the crowd to realize, who didn’t need a push. He had drafted a cancer survivor one year; an author in another season; the son of a Hall of Fame offensive lineman (who became a Pro Bowler himself) in yet another; a player who passed up a $250,000 workout bonus so he could study in the summer and get his college degree; a rugby player who wanted to try football; a cowboy who was tougher than the ones in Westerns—a guy who had played an entire season on a torn ACL. Not to mention the players acquired via trades, free agency, and waivers.
But this room of media members was reflective of the viewing audience, which was representative of the society at large. There were many with a thirst for something else. They wanted to know why he didn’t know. Why no private eyes? Why wasn’t there more aggressive vetting of the buddies? Why didn’t he see all the red flags in the blue body ink?
The real answer made everyone uncomfortable: Sometimes you never know. If it hadn’t been for the death of Odin Lloyd, police officials may have never made the link between Hernandez and the double homicide in Boston’s South End. Robert Kraft said the entire Patriots organization was duped by Hernandez; a lot of people were. In a football sense, getting rid of his history was easy. The Patriots cut him and they offered to buy back Hernandez jerseys from all fans who had them. That was simply transactional. But there was another side to it, from all the people who interacted with him and never suspected a thing, even after the death of Lloyd.
The day after the murder, Lloyd’s girlfriend, Shaneah Jenkins, got a phone call in the middle of the night. It was a Massachusetts state trooper, informing her of the tragedy. She immediately left Connecticut for Massachusetts, where she first visited Lloyd’s family in Dorchester. She then traveled to North Attleboro to see her sister, Shayanna. As she was grieving the loss, she began to pace from the living room to the dining room, where she saw Hernandez. He put his hand on her shoulder, rubbed it, and told her that he’d been through losing a loved one, too, and it gets better with time.
Nothing was as simple as it looked. There were emotional and psychological aspects that were going to take years, if not a lifetime, to untangle and grasp.
“My comments are certainly not in proportion to the unfortunate and sad situation that we have here,” Belichick said as he attempted to conclude his press conference. “But I’ve been advised to address the situation once, and it’s time for the New England Patriots to move forward. Moving forward consists of what it’s always been here: to build a winning football team, be a strong pillar in the community, be a team that our fans can be proud of. That’s what we’re here for.”
Belichick mentioned having a winning football team that the fans could be proud of. The fans had been proud, but now they were embarrassed and effectively speechless. And that was a bad place to be, because the performance of the Patriots did not speak for itself. Too often lately, the actions of the Patriots, or former Patriots, cried out for context and explanations.
When it came to actual football, Bill Walsh, the architect of the 49ers teams that Brady grew up watching, had been prophetic in many ways when describing the labor and even the psychology of winning. But he didn’t have any writings that began to explain the mentality of the New England fan base. Simply, the Patriots had dominated their division so much that a hat and T-shirt that read AFC EAST CHAMPIONS elicited smirks around the stadium. What they had done going into the 2013 season, win ten of the previous twelve division titles, was hard. The feat was often brushed aside locally because the competition wasn’t viewed as high quality. The irony is that the state of the division was part of the accomplishment; Belichick had helped create the badlands in the AFC East.
Not many people recalled the deficit that Belichick inherited in 2000. They didn’t remember that the Jets had four first-rounders to the Patriots’ zero, and that the Jets still had Bill Parcells as their team-builder while the Patriots had his frequently browbeaten assistant of twelve years. They also had the first quarterback selected in that draft, Chad Pennington. But in the summer of 2013, Pennington and the other three first-round picks in his Jets draft class were long gone from New York, and all but one, John Abraham, were retired. Belichick had competed against fifteen different full-time coaches in the division since 2000, and they had collectively entrusted their fortunes to twenty-three primary starting quarterbacks.
In August, the University of Michigan’s football players weren’t interested in the quarterbacks Belichick had competed against. They wanted to hear from the one he had drafted and stood by since 2000. Before a preseason game against the Lions, Tom Brady returned to his alma mater to speak with the current Wolverines. It was refreshing to be on the Ann Arbor campus without a struggle, to know that he wasn’t sharing the stage with Drew Henson. Brady was the headliner at Schembechler Hall, and that was more than sufficient. He had stayed at Michigan and become a champion, and he had returned as one as well. He was the only NFL player who had come back to Schembechler Hall with an equal winning percentage to the man himself, Bo Schembechler, whose Michigan percentage was .796.
Brady stood in the front of the room, looking out at teenagers and young men in their early twenties. Eighteen years earlier he was one of them, just trying to prove himself and get his coach’s attention. Now, at thirty-six, he was speaking as the best Wolverine the school had ever sent to the pros. He wore sneakers, jeans, and a blue short-sleeved polo with a maize “M” on the collar. He paced the room, often clasping his hands together for emphasis.
“Do you know what the greatest honor I’ve ever received as a player is?” he said. “In my fourth year and in my fifth year, I was named team captain. That, to this day, is the single greatest achievement I’ve had as a football player. Because the men in this room chose me to lead their team. And these were my best friends. These were the guys that knew that I liked to work, that knew that I loved football, that knew that I loved to play, that knew that I wanted to be the quarterback for Michigan.
“And all the lessons that I learned here on State Street and in the Big House, that’s still what I bring to practice today. And after fourteen years, I love the game more than I’ve ever loved it. But where did I learn the love for the game? Where did I learn to practice? Where did I learn to compete? It was sitting in the same chairs that you guys are sitting in today.”
The upcoming season was going to test him. He was going to have to love practice even when his top target, Gronk, was there but not available to play in the games. He would have to love the games even after a You gotta be kidding me season opener in Buffalo. The Patriots beat the Bills, 23–21, and the replacement for Wes Welker, Danny Amendola, had ten catches. He also sustained a groin injury that was going to sideline him for a month.
What made the situation worse was that Gronk was having trust issues. He’d had back surgery in June, and it felt fine in September. The problem was the left forearm, still, ten months after it was originally broken. Some of the people advising Gronk questioned the quality of the original surgery. Doctors had to repair it for breaks and rebreaks, and they’d had to clean it out a couple of times due to infections. It was too much, and it caused hesitancy in a player who was desperate to be on the field. Every week, reporters would see him in practice and then speculate that he was close to being on the field. But he wasn’t. He was taking his time, wanting to be confident that he was healed.
He wasn’t there for a 13–10 win over the Jets, when a frustrated Brady yelled at receivers for not seeing what he did. There were eighteen opportunities to convert third downs into firsts, and the Patriots did it just four times. They were 2-0, but it was shaky.
Two weeks later, the Globe reported that Gronk was taking the trip with the team to Atlanta. But he stayed at home as the Patriots won, 30–23, to move to 4-0. It wasn’t the same offense without Gronk, and it wasn’t going to be the same defense, either. Vince Wilfork, a defensive captain, tore his Achilles against the Falcons and was out for the season.
Reports were that Gronk looked great in practice the next week, before a game against the Bengals. But he didn’t play in the game, the Patriots lost 13–6, and the defense lost Tommy Kelly, the defensive tackle who was going to help minimize the pressure put on Wilfork. This was the cruelest 4-1 season yet, and it was going to get worse after week six. Brady was at his late-game best against the Saints. The game had two familiar things: a winning touchdown pass from Brady with five seconds to play and a season-ending injury on defense, this one to captain Jerod Mayo.
Gronk was finally ready to return, but it wasn’t even to the same team. It had been suggested a week earlier that he might not be the same Gronk. No matter what the personnel or obstacles, the Patriots were expected to be competing for the Super Bowl. It was an ethos that had been introduced by the Patriots and infused into other sports teams in the city. Fans and media were so used to seeing seemingly impossible things come to life that it was sometimes difficult to recognize a hardship. Belichick and Brady were great at football, not healing the sick.
When Gronk did return, in a 30–27 loss to the Jets, Brady couldn’t hide how excited he was. He targeted the big tight end seventeen times in his first game of the season. For all the talk about Belichick’s secrecy, there was nothing mysterious about what he and Brady wanted to do on Sundays. They wanted to utilize Gronk. It was okay if other teams knew it. The beauty of Gronk, an available and healthy Gronk, was that no one could stop him.
The region felt the same way about the surprising Red Sox on October 30. They had finished last in the division in 2012, but they had ridden a Belichickian shopping spree (short contracts, midrange dollars) to yet another World Series title in 2013. It was the eighth Boston championship since 2000, but this one truly did belong to the region. The marathon bombing in April had pierced the soul of the city, and the healing had been symbolized by the words and actions of the Sox. David Ortiz had inspired millions when he held a microphone at Fenway Park a day after the city had been told to “shelter in place” as there was a manhunt for a terrorist. “This is our fucking city,” he said to applause, “and nobody is going to dictate our freedom. Stay strong!”
On the day of the parade, November 2, everyone stopped on Boylston Street, at the marathon finish line, and sang “God Bless America” with Irish tenor Ronan Tynan. It was a powerful moment, and a reminder of just how connected the region is to all of its professional sports teams. As a further tribute, there were no fights nor arrests among the million-plus gathered downtown.
The next day, at Gillette, there was an enjoyable Patriots party. Brady and the offense had their best day of the year, as they totaled 610 yards and 55 points against Pittsburgh. They had entered the game in the bottom half of the league in total offense, eighteenth, but on a 432-yard passing day, Brady managed to spring Gronk for 143 yards and a touchdown, as well as get 100-yard passing days for rookie Aaron Dobson and Danny Amendola.
Brady had his team positioned at 6-2, and he didn’t complain when he looked to Denver and saw what Broncos management had given Peyton Manning. They had signed Welker and added him to an offense that already had Demaryius Thomas, Eric Decker, and Julius Thomas. They were 7-1 and averaging 43 points per game. Manning already had twenty-nine touchdown passes. Pro football was not easy, but it was easier with that personnel.
Brady seemed to accept the challenge, both from the Broncos and the limitations of his roster. In week eleven, the Patriots beat the Broncos at Gillette in the biggest outlier game of the season. It was Brady-Manning, version fourteen, and it began with twenty-four consecutive Denver points. But the Broncos were having their success via the run and the strength of their defense; Manning had nothing to do with it. In the second half, the Broncos continued to run while the Patriots were passed along by Brady. He threw for 344 yards and three touchdowns; Manning threw for 150 yards and two scores. The Patriots won, 34–31.
With Houston and Cleveland on the schedule the next two weeks, a 10-3 record in December had them well positioned for the play-offs. The AFC East was theirs again, for the eleventh time in thirteen seasons, but as always the goal was much greater than the divisional attaboy. However, there was a problem against the Browns, and it wasn’t that the game was harder than it should have been. The problem was that the season unofficially ended on a play at the Cleveland thirty-four-yard line.
Brady had dropped back to pass and found Gronk, open as usual, down the seam. A linebacker had struggled to cover him, and now Gronk had the ball in the middle of the field. A safety named T. J. Ward went low to tackle him and put his helmet directly on Gronk’s right knee. Gronk fell to the turf, and it was obvious that it was bad. He didn’t even grab the knee. Instead he lay there, his left forearm already heavily covered by a pad and brace, and now the same thing was going to happen with his right knee. He looked up through his red face mask and saw the guy he seemingly spent more time with than Brady, Dr. Gill.
What a year. The Year of the Tight End, New England style, was a show no one wanted to see. For the second year in a row, Brady was without Gronk and Hernandez together for the most important stretch of the year. It was going to be tough to win with a healthy Gronk. Now, with his ACL torn, the burden was on another area of the team to deliver. But guys on defense had the same issues. They had lost their ability to push the line of scrimmage with no Wilfork, Kelly, and Mayo.
In January, in a divisional play-off game against the Colts, it looked like the Patriots found the answer. Run. They believed they could always run on the Colts, who didn’t have the size or toughness to stop them. Running back LeGarrette Blount had success on short runs, intermediate ones, and those that required a three-quarter sprint of the field. He scored four times and ran for 166 yards. It couldn’t be this easy, could it? Could the Patriots possibly have another play-off game like this one, where they won 43–22 and Brady didn’t throw a single touchdown pass?
The questions were going to be answered the next week in Denver, Tom versus Peyton, fifteenth round. It was the third consecutive conference championship game appearance for the Patriots, so theoretically they had a shot to win it. But they didn’t have enough anywhere to compete like they needed to, and the win over the Broncos in November was largely irrelevant now. That first game had been played in the wind, as high as twenty-five miles per hour, and it made an already cold night feel like it was six degrees. Typical New England chill. On the afternoon of the conference title, though, the sun kissed those bright orange Broncos jerseys, and people in the stands stood comfortably in the low-sixties warmth.
It was all good news for Manning, who was going to thrive in these conditions against the competition. He was efficient and patient, and he wasn’t touched once. Not a single time. The white 18 on the back of his jersey was immaculate. He wasn’t pressured, sacked, or even breathed on heavily. He made it look easy as he threw for exactly four hundred yards. The Broncos led 13–3 at halftime, 20–3 after three quarters, and 26–16 at the end. Welker, the trickster, had stuck it to Bill again. This time he had collided with Aqib Talib, and the cornerback couldn’t finish the game (Belichick thought it was a dirty hit and called it “one of the worst plays” he’d seen in four decades of coaching). And after a contract dispute with the Patriots, Welker was going to the Super Bowl with a team that had broken all of New England’s offensive records from 2007.
The NFL was going to get all that it wanted from this postseason. There had already been another Brady-Manning game, and next up was a matchup of number ones. The Broncos had scored a league-record 606 points, and their opponent, the Seahawks, had given up the fewest points in the league two years in a row. If that wasn’t enough hype, the location of the game would surely put it over the threshold. For the first time in the forty-eight-year history of the game, the Super Bowl was being held in the sizable shadows of New York City.
Although the Patriots were two hundred miles from the site of the game, they were still a part of the story. Their celebrity/popularity, their actions, and sometimes even their words ensured that they would be at the center of conversations. Belichick had gotten mostly negative pushback for his comments about Welker’s play on Talib, and that was enough to trigger former Globe columnist Bob Ryan. Now semiretired, the excitable Ryan, a regular contributor on national TV and radio shows, had long suggested that New England had no idea how much America hated the Patriots. He used Belichick’s comments on Welker to reintroduce his point.
“When Belichick stupidly acts out in public the way he did last Monday it reminds America about Spygate, something he has never owned up to and something that has never been forgotten in the outside world. Patriots losses are greeted warmly across America, and many people love to remind us that it is an undeniable fact that the Patriots have not won another Super Bowl, post-Spygate, a circumstance viewed by many as a form of cosmic retribution. Analysts less spiritually-minded think it has more to do with the lack of a championship-caliber defense all these years, but in any case, this failure to add another Lombardi Trophy to Belichick’s collection makes millions of American football fans happy.”
As if he had edited Ryan’s column and was determined to live out every sentence of its truth, former Rams running back Marshall Faulk agreed to do a Radio Row interview with Boston’s WEEI. Officially, he was there to pitch a product, but he and hosts Lou Merloni and Mike Mutnansky understood that wasn’t the case. He had a cause, and he had harped on it a year to the day earlier with another New England media personality, Tom E. Curran. Before that Super Bowl, between the Ravens and 49ers, Faulk told Curran, “I’ll never be over being cheated out of the Super Bowl.” He said he didn’t understand why the commissioner had destroyed the Spygate tapes, why the Patriots appeared to be prepared for all their plays, and why Roger Goodell didn’t punish Belichick more severely.
True to his word, Faulk wasn’t over the loss from February 2002 when he talked with Merloni and Mutnansky in January 2014. Bob Ryan was right. He had company. Even Roger Goodell had mentioned, in a 2011 interview with Peter King, that he felt “deceived” by Belichick with his Spygate apology. Four years later, the league’s leader said he’d expected Belichick to express his regret with more humanity, as opposed to releasing a statement. Spygate was almost seven years old now, but there was still first-day bitterness over it, in owners’ suites, locker rooms, TV studios, and even league headquarters.
The Patriots and their fans were not paranoid; everyone was waiting for them to do anything small so they could retry Spygate and descend with a mightier punishment. There was a sense among the coaching staff as well as fans that the league was looking for anything, even if it was failing to signal on a right turn. If Faulk deserved credit for anything, it was his willingness to at least partially say what many in the league were thinking.
“I still consider Bill Belichick one of the greatest coaches. I still consider Tom Brady one of the greatest players. That team and what they did, and went on that run, it was great. The only thing that bothers me is there’s something that exists that gives us doubt on why the game went the way it did. The question is, how did they become a championship team? Listen, I’m not going to be the only one to say this: Ever since they got fined and said, ‘Okay, we’re not doing that anymore,’ they’ve won how many Super Bowls?”
He was told the correct answer. None. He was asked if they hadn’t won because they weren’t taping coaches anymore.
“I’m just telling you how I feel about it. If that’s your perception of what I’m saying, then that’s your perception. I’m not taking anything away from Bill Belichick and Tom Brady; they’re great. I’m going to continue to tell you that… I’m just telling you it’s just ironic that that’s the case.”
He was clearly saying what the hosts said he was. He just didn’t want them to label it. But his words were not hard to comprehend.
“The only thing I know is ever since that happened and it got exposed, what we have is 0-2 in Super Bowls. That’s all. I’m not saying they have anything to do with each other; I’m just telling you what the facts are.”
Faulk was reminded that the Patriots had won the most games in football since Spygate, duplicating the success they had before the stick-to-their-ribs scandal.
“It’s successful,” he replied. “But we’re talking about championships. There’s a lot of teams that win a lot of games.”
Belichick often told his players to ignore the noise. He had it written on the walls in football operations, clear enough and large enough for all players to see. But telling them to ignore the noise was akin to telling them to ignore the atmosphere. The sun. Day and night. The noise was everywhere, in and out of New England. There was that noise about their misfortune in championship games since Spygate. Noise about the system of Belichick, and how maybe he needed to load up the way former Patriots coach Pete Carroll had. His Seahawks had dominated the Broncos in the Super Bowl, winning 43–8. The Patriots couldn’t touch Manning; the Seahawks couldn’t keep their hands off him or his receivers.
Ignore the noise about the quarterback, too? There were always people talking about the lack of playmakers around him. Kenbrell Thompkins? Aaron Dobson? Even a magnificent talent like Gronk was no guarantee to be there at the beginning of the 2014 season. How do you ignore that? And although Brady didn’t fear or hear the clock that reverberates in most aging athletes, he’d be thirty-seven in August. More than one person could hear that clock, and maybe even one of them was Belichick.