Tom Brady has expressed the sentiment many times: There is nothing the Patriots can do to surprise him anymore. Nothing. He is the most grown of the grown men in the locker room these days, five months away from his thirty-seventh birthday. By March 2014, there isn’t much he hasn’t seen from the Patriots or even from the league itself.
He understands the nature of the game, from its brutality on the field to its corporate warriors in New York, always prepared for legal combat in the name of defending the shield. He’s won more often than any player in football, and that isn’t just about appearing in five Super Bowls and eight conference title games. At the genesis of winning is an understanding of how things and people work, and that is one of his overlooked skills.
He’s learned a lot over the years. He, Matt Light, and Patrick Pass used to be the youngest of the twenty-two Patriots who were three-time champions. Now all but two, Brady and forty-one-year-old Adam Vinatieri in Indianapolis, are retired. If Brady is to win another Super Bowl, he’ll do it with a bunch of players who will find it hilarious that there was no such thing as an iPhone or iPad the last time he palmed the Lombardi Trophy in February 2005. This game cycles through players and trends quickly. You’ve got to have two things ready at all times: an impromptu good-bye or a packed bag.
For Brady, it’s always been the good-byes. He forced Drew Bledsoe’s in 2002, was hurt by the abruptness of Lawyer Milloy’s in 2003, and was angered over the negotiating that led to Deion Branch’s in 2006. There is a story for all of them. Ty Law, fellow Wolverine, is the one who sold him the condo way back in the Cherrywood Lane days. Willie McGinest displayed unique leadership and introduced him to trusted friend and business partner Alex Guerrero. Mike Vrabel, chess player/coach on the field and comic in the meeting room, was the reminder that hard work could and should be fun. Randy Moss showed him how high the offense could go, specifically how far the quarterback could go, with a prodigy-in-residence. Light, who played with Crohn’s disease and never made it public, was the consistent and loyal protector.
After listening to and watching Bill Belichick for fourteen seasons, Brady has heard the themes repeat. Be prepared. Ignore the noise. Do your job. Even for those like Brady, veterans knowledgeable in the departures and arrivals orchestrated by Belichick, the spring of 2014 still is full of twists.
The most shocking move was actually put in motion a year earlier. Darrelle Revis, the most talented player ever drafted by the New York Jets, tore his ACL in the third game of the 2012 season. The Jets’ world changed in his absence: The general manager who drafted him, Mike Tannenbaum, was fired after the season. The new guy hired in 2013, John Idzik, traded him to Tampa for first- and fourth-round picks. Once there, Revis signed a $96 million contract with no guarantees and then Tampa got a new general manager, former Patriots scouting director Jason Licht. He had a vision for a young team, one that didn’t include the high-salaried cornerback.
On March 12, 2014, the Bucs made it official. The best cornerback in the NFL was available for anyone to sign, although everyone could plainly see that one team made more sense than any other in the league.
The Patriots.
Sure.
Revis, twenty-eight years old and in his prime, in a Patriots uniform? The same player who seemed to enjoy every second of being on the New York side of the Jets-Patriots rivalry. The player who was angry because he said Brady prodded their sideline. He’s the player who went on TV, twice, to deliver one-word putdowns of the Patriots. He called Randy Moss a “slouch” in 2010. Two years later, sitting next to Gronk in an ESPN studio, he was asked to share the first thing that came to mind about Belichick. “Jerk,” he replied. The host was stunned, so Revis repeated it, clearer and louder.
Slights aside, Revis was a money player. He shut down top competition, and he expected to be paid well for it. Belichick and the Patriots hadn’t been aggressive in free agency, at least not Revis-level aggressive, in seven years. The Jets, meanwhile, had history with him. And they needed him. But the Patriots knew someone who had a deeper history with Revis. That history went beyond Revis’s draft day with the Jets in 2007, his national signing day with the University of Pittsburgh in 2004, and even his first day of high school in Aliquippa, Pennsylvania, in 2000.
“The house that I grew up in was the house that Darrelle’s grandma [Aileen Gilbert] lived in,” Ty Law says now. “I’ve known him since he was five or six years old. Let me tell you, he stood out even when he was a little kid. And that’s saying something when you’re from Aliquippa.”
The small western Pennsylvania town, about twenty miles from Pittsburgh, is known for producing NFL talent. Law, eleven years older than Revis, grew up there watching Revis’s uncle, Sean Gilbert, star for the Quips in high school basketball and football. Gilbert was a colossus, six feet five inches and three-hundred-plus pounds as a defensive tackle. He had his number, 71, retired in high school, alongside Mike Ditka’s 80. He went to Pitt and was drafted third overall by the Rams in 1992. Law’s cousin, Hall of Fame running back Tony Dorsett, also took the familiar Aliquippa-Pitt-NFL path. As had Ditka, a Hall of Fame tight end. When Revis became a free agent, many people knew how to contact him, but few knew exactly what to say. Law did.
He knew how every great athlete from Aliquippa was expected to be tougher and more competitive than most. They competed hard at everything, not just football. Law laughs as he remembers playing a game in which kids would get a twig, put it in a stream, and see whose twig was fastest, end to end. Anything and everything is turned into a competition when you’re a Quip. Years ago, after Gilbert had been traded from St. Louis to Washington, the team made him its franchise player and offered a salary of $2.5 million. He told them in February of that year, 1997, that he’d never sign a deal that undervalued him like that. He said he was taking his family back to Aliquippa and that he’d sit out the season if he had to. That’s exactly what he did, his firm stance closely observed by his sister’s twelve-year-old son, Darrelle. The next year, he was traded to the Panthers and signed a then-record contract for a defensive lineman: a $10 million bonus and $45 million overall. It was about fairness, respect, and never, ever backing down.
Aliquippa no longer makes steel, and its unemployment and crime rates are high. But everyone in town follows the athletes who make it out, and they keep score.
Law made five Pro Bowls and was part of three Super Bowl champions. Like Gilbert, he wasn’t afraid to talk about money and say how much of it he deserved. Like Revis, he’d let his emotions run high before and resorted to name-calling with Bill Belichick. He knew what it was like to have Belichick on your side in big games, and he’d experienced negotiating against him trying to get a big payday. He explained to Revis that Belichick isn’t just the wooden guy from interviews and the sideline. The coach appreciates greatness, and he’d be willing to move Revis all over the field, allowing him to be as free and creative as he needed to be.
“I told him that it’s about leaving a legacy,” Law says. “He had all the numbers and awards over the years, but I told him that he doesn’t want to be Champ Bailey. Great player, don’t get me wrong, and I respect Champ. But he got all those Pro Bowls, and those are the only things hanging in the rafters. You want that championship banner.
“Darrelle had a lot of offers. There were teams that had just as much money as the Patriots, if not more. But this was a chance to play with Tom Brady and get a ring. I’m not saying he made his decision because of me, but I’d like to think I had something to do with it.”
Revis signed a two-year, $32 million contract with the Patriots, officially. But the second year was a complex team option, and if the Patriots exercised it they’d have a cap charge of $25 million in 2015. That wasn’t going to happen. So everyone understood up front exactly what this unusual Revis-Patriots union was. They’d likely be bound for just one year, and if everything worked out as planned, the marriage would dissolve yet all involved would leave with diamond rings.
Belichick’s signing of Revis fooled some observers into thinking that the coach was changing the way he did business. The talent of Revis, along with the anticipation of watching him play, obscured the fact that this was the same Belichick making yet another sensible signing. Revis for a year was good value, and not only did his presence improve team depth; it gave the defense its own Brady figure, a transformative player who emboldened ordinary play designs. It also deprived and frankly embarrassed the Jets. It’s bad enough to have Revis return to the division, but even worse to see him with the Patriots. Missed opportunities like this would soon cost Idzik, the Jets general manager, his job.
Believing that the Patriots were “loading up,” New England fans went into the second weekend of May, draft weekend, excited by the possibilities. The team’s first two selections were twenty-ninth and sixty-second overall. For teams that consistently draft well, that translates into two immediate starters. There was a restless and vocal segment of the fan base that wasn’t convinced that Belichick’s economics worked for a late-career Brady. They wanted every move to be made with the quarterback’s date of birth in mind.
After drafting Dominique Easley, a defensive tackle from the University of Florida who had bad knees and a reputation for having a bad attitude, they surprised everyone with their second-round pick.
When it was time to announce the sixty-second pick, former Patriot Willie McGinest took the Radio City Music Hall stage. He wore a red Patriots sweater under his tailored suit jacket, an outfit that led to resounding boos from the New Yorkers in the crowd. He teased the crowd, saying, “Your New England Patriots and my New England Patriots…” And then he gave the actual pick: Jimmy Garoppolo from Eastern Illinois. A quarterback.
“Wowww,” said Rich Eisen, hosting the NFL Network’s draft coverage.
It was an appropriate summary. With the first two choices, the Patriots nearly guaranteed that they wouldn’t get major contributions from their draft picks in 2014. Beyond that, the Garoppolo selection was significant. Belichick’s Patriots had never drafted a quarterback this high.
When Belichick was asked to explain the pick on draft day, he managed to take a couple of shots at the Colts as he answered.
“Organizationally, I don’t think we would put together a team the way Indianapolis did when they lost Manning, and they go 1-15 or whatever it was. I don’t think that’s really what we’re looking for. Unfortunately, we lost Tom in 2008 and we had a player who stepped in and won 11 games. We want to be competitive even if something happens to a player at any position. I think depth is always important. You never know when you’re going to need it. But I don’t think we would be happy going 1-15, if we had an injury at one position. But other people have different philosophies.”
The 2014 draft was spread over three days, Thursday through Saturday, and the selection of Garoppolo on day two, May 9, wasn’t the only controversial event that day. Two Patriots employees, John Jastremski and Jim McNally, traded text messages that afternoon. There wasn’t anything unusual about that in itself. McNally, a game-day operations part-timer, and Jastremski, a full-time assistant equipment manager, texted constantly. Their tone ranged from ordinary to burlesque. Their language reflected the culture they were in: direct, blunt, sarcastic, profane. That was never a problem in Foxboro. The issue was that their texts, in time, would be shared with the rest of America.
“You working,” McNally asked Jastremski, about two and a half hours before the draft resumed with round two.
“Yup,” Jastremski replied thirty seconds later.
“Nice dude… jimmy needs some kicks… lets make a deal… come on help the deflator.”
When nearly ten minutes had passed without a reply from Jastremski, McNally sent a follow-up text: “Chill buddy im just fuckin with you… im not going to espn… yet.”
That exchange, when eventually released to the public, would trigger debates and commentaries that would go far past the intensity of traditional rivalries played out on social media and talk radio. It would go past football and, really, all sports. It would go through owners’ suites and across the mahogany desks of America’s top lawyers. It would whistle through arbitration and district court. It would be the dividing line in a war that had text interpretation as one of its issues. No one was neutral on the texts, even though few were privy to the dozens of exchanges that happened before, exchanges that might have put the texts into context.
What a 2014 season it was going to be. At the end of it, no fan would be able to honestly say that he or she saw it coming. It’s not every day that the league and one of the league’s most valuable commodities line up across from each other and attack, blood on the shield be damned.
The beginning of the season, though, was conventional. The Seahawks were the favorites to defend their title, and the Broncos and Patriots were considered the best in the AFC. As usual, the expectation in New England was to get to the Super Bowl and win it.
The Patriots appeared to be a long way from contending on September 7, the opener in Miami. Brady had to feel worse than anyone, physically and psychologically. He threw a lot, fifty-six times. He got hit a lot, sacked four times and pounded on a half-dozen occasions just after he released the ball. He was responsible for three turnovers, two fumbles and an interception. Sam Monson, a preseason Brady doubter from Pro Football Focus, was onto something. Brady looked bad; his offensive line looked worse. There was a story there, too. A few weeks earlier, Belichick traded the team’s nastiest and most experienced lineman, Logan Mankins, to Tampa for a backup tight end and a fourth-round pick. The deal was immediately panned, and there was nothing about this game that made it look smart. In addition to the battering of Brady, two rarities happened on the same day: The Patriots lost an opener and Darrelle Revis gave up a touchdown.
The team didn’t look right, and that would have been the case even if they had pulled out a win against the Dolphins.
There was no insight about who they were the next week, in Minnesota. The Vikings were missing their offense, which is what running back Adrian Peterson was for them. Peterson was deactivated forty-eight hours before the game following news that he was indicted for negligent and reckless injury to a child. That child was Peterson’s four-year-old son. The muscular running back, six foot two and 220 pounds, acknowledged that he struck his son repeatedly with a switch. He said it was the way he was raised growing up in Texas, and that this style of corporal punishment taught humility and manners.
The Peterson news capped a disastrous week for the league. The football talk was sandwiched between discussion of severe parenting and domestic violence. A video had emerged of one player, Ray Rice, punching his fiancée in a casino elevator in Atlantic City. Another player, Greg Hardy, was convicted of assaulting his ex-girlfriend and communicating threats. Roger Goodell said that he hadn’t seen the elevator video when he suspended Rice for two games. Once TMZ got the footage and it went viral, the commissioner changed course and suspended Rice indefinitely. As for Hardy, who was convicted in July, Goodell never did suspend him. But with the attention on Rice, and now Peterson, Hardy was placed on the commissioner’s exempt list. It meant that Hardy would continue to get paid, but he wasn’t eligible to play in the games.
Criticism of Goodell and throat-clearing from corporate sponsors was beginning to compete with the games, so New England’s 30–7 win over the Vikings didn’t make much of a ripple. Much more instructive was the guest segment on CBS This Morning, five days before the game. Robert Kraft was scheduled to talk about the weekly Thursday Night Football package on CBS. But as he had done many times in the past, barely two minutes into his appearance, he volunteered his endorsement of Goodell.
“I know our commissioner has taken some heat,” he said as he lounged comfortably in his chair, making eye contact with all three hosts. There were dozens of critics who wondered why the NFL was so slow to react appropriately to domestic violence. As for the graphic Ray Rice video, well, it essentially matched what was in the police report and what Rice and his fiancée, Janay, told Goodell when they met with him in New York. Kraft continued, “He had no knowledge of this video. The way he’s handled this situation himself, coming out with the mea culpa in his statement ten days ago, and setting a very clear policy on how we conduct ourselves in the NFL, has been excellent. And anyone second-guessing that doesn’t know him.”
Kraft was comfortable enough to applaud Goodell, even when scores of fans and even players were pointing out some of the commissioner’s obvious contradictions and conflicts of interest. Goodell swore by the letter of the NFL law when it was convenient, and when it wasn’t he’d go with something else. His handling of Rice was a perfect example. He made his ruling with the original two-game suspension. It was light, by most accounts, but it was his binding decision. When the video was released, a video that the Associated Press reported someone in the NFL had seen prior to its TMZ release, Goodell deflected the heat by “retrying” Rice for a case the commissioner had heard months earlier.
Goodell was fond of saying that he would change his mind on penalties if he was given new information. In the Rice case, as disturbing as the video was, the information wasn’t new; the overwhelmingly negative reaction was. Rice and Janay, who had married since the incident, talked openly about that night and how it was a test of their relationship. They’d gone to counseling. Rice was in a domestic violence diversion program. Obviously something happened to warrant that.
Even before the controversial fall of 2014, many players bristled at the inflexibility of Goodell. All any dissenting voice could do was lash out publicly because the seat of power was Goodell’s.
“I have confidence in his judgment and whatever he decides is in the best interest of the game,” Kraft told the Globe. “I have a lot of confidence that Roger Goodell is doing that all the time.”
Kraft’s early-season issue was public relations for the commissioner and the league. The on-field Patriots simply had an issue of execution. They were a raggedy 2-1 after beating the Raiders at Gillette, 16–9. Their next game, September 29, was a Monday Night Football special in Kansas City. America wasn’t used to seeing the Patriots play like this. They were so bad in a 41–14 loss that with just over ten minutes to play, a familiar symbol of winning was out of the game, standing on the sideline with his arms folded. That was the nice way of describing Tom Brady’s 159-yard passing day. In other words, Brady was benched.
No one expected young Jimmy Garoppolo to make his debut so soon, under these circumstances. He threw seven passes, completed six, and got his first touchdown pass when the touchdown-creator himself, Gronk, converted a 13-yard pass into a score. For the first time since the early days of Brady–Drew Bledsoe, Belichick was asked about his quarterback after the game. He had made a reference to evaluating everything, to which a local TV reporter, Mike Giardi, followed up, “Do you consider evaluating the quarterback position?”
Belichick stared for a long time and smirked. It was his visual way of saying that he wasn’t crazy enough to demote Brady. But the talk around his 2-2 team was imbalanced, and the combination of commentary and wild reporting had no limits. A few minutes after the game, former NFL quarterback Trent Dilfer stood on the field at red-clad Arrowhead Stadium and emphatically diagnosed the Patriots for his ESPN audience.
“When you’re weak, when you’re the weakest kid and you go into a bully’s house, you get the snot beat out of you. We saw a weak team. The New England Patriots, let’s face it: They’re not good anymore.”
There was more of that at the nearest media outlets, local and national. No one was spared. Three weeks earlier, during his weekly segment on WEEI, Brady had been asked a question about how long he wanted to play and he colorfully replied, “When I suck, I’ll retire. I don’t plan on sucking for a long time.” There were numerous one-liners on sports-talk radio about Brady, leading the twenty-ninth ranked offense in the league, and when that retirement announcement was coming.
On and on it went, from former quarterback Boomer Esiason saying that “the Patriots have really big problems, and I don’t see the answer on their roster” to ESPN reporter Chris Mortensen citing sources claiming that Brady had “uncomfortable tension” with the coaching staff and was unhappy due to his lack of involvement in game plans. Mortensen went on to say that Garoppolo would be the Patriots’ quarterback “sooner rather than later,” but not in 2014.
For players having a hard time ignoring the noise, the coach gave a primer in the middle of the chaotic week. At one point during his press conference, he was asked about problems in the Kansas City game. He answered, “We’re on to Cincinnati,” which was the next opponent. Again, a reporter asked about the offense. Again, Belichick responded, “We’re on to Cincinnati.” This time, a reporter wanted to know if Belichick felt that he’d given a thirty-seven-year-old Tom Brady enough support to be successful.
“We’re on to Cincinnati…”
When the 3-0 Bengals finally arrived for a Sunday Night Football matchup, they met a team that hadn’t been seen all year. Brady was well protected all night, was sacked just once, and threw for nearly three hundred yards along with three touchdown passes. Just to prove its versatility, the offensive line pushed the Bengals back all night and allowed Josh McDaniels to call a staggering forty-six running plays. Being on to Cincinnati was a good thing. The Patriots won 43–17.
They won again the next week, too, easily defeating Buffalo 37–22. Games against the Jets were tough, despite the talent level, so the next win was a much-closer-than-expected 27–25. Brady threw three touchdown passes, which gave him a total of ten in the past three games. No one mentioned retirement, tension on the coaching staff, or young Jimmy Garoppolo anymore. Yet Brady was agitated during the Jets game, and the texting Patriots employees, Jim McNally and John Jastremski, thought they knew why. Jastremski, whom Brady often referred to as “JJ” or “Jonny,” was most responsible for preparing footballs so they had the proper feel for game day.
“Tom is acting crazy about balls,” Jastremski texted to a friend about twenty-five minutes after the kickoff against the Jets. “Ready to vomit!” he added five seconds later.
The friend replied two minutes later. “He saying they’re not good enough??”
“Tell later,” Jastremski answered.
The next morning, Jastremski texted his fiancée about the previous night’s footballs. “Ugh… Tom was right. I just measured some of the balls. They supposed to be 13lbs… They were like 16. Felt like bricks.” Later, he and McNally got back into their texting routine regarding the overinflated footballs. League quarterbacks are allowed to treat the footballs as they please, with the intention of reducing the new-football slickness by game day. The only restriction is that the air pressure in the football has to fall within range of 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch, or PSI. In October 2014, it was a topic that rarely, if ever, came up during football discussions. The talking heads on TV didn’t mention it, nor did coaches, the commissioner, or the fantasy football crowd. It was the realm, presumably, of quarterbacks and officials.
“Tom sucks,” McNally texted Jastremski. “im going to make that next ball a fuckin balloon.”
“Talked to him last night,” Jastremski replied. “He actually brought you up and said you must have a lot of stress trying to get them done. I told him it was. He was right though… I checked some of the balls this morn… The refs fucked us… a few of them were at almost 16. They didn’t recheck them after they put air in them.”
McNally responded, “Fuck tom… 16 is nothing… wait till next sunday.”
Twenty seconds later, Jastremski replied, “Omg! Spaz.”
Since the Patriots played the Jets on a Thursday night, they had ten days before their next game, at home against the Bears. It was a stretch of games where Darrelle Revis and the entire defense would be challenged because it featured some of the most prolific quarterbacks in the game. In succession, the Patriots would face Jay Cutler, Peyton Manning, Andrew Luck, Matthew Stafford, Aaron Rodgers, and Philip Rivers.
Before any of that happened, leading up to the Bears game, McNally seemed to enjoy the text thread of screwing with Brady and the inflation of the footballs.
“Make sure you blow up the ball to look like a rugby ball so tom can get used to it before Sunday,” he wrote to Jastremski five days before the game. Nine minutes later, Jastremski’s reply was simply “Omg.”
They resumed the conversation two days later, a full week after the Jets game. Jastremski picked up the thread this time with, “Can’t wait to give you your needle this week,” and included a smiling emoticon at the end. Seven minutes later, McNally wrote, “Fuck tom… make sure the pump is attached to the needle… fuckin watermelons coming.”
“So angry,” Jastremski answered.
“The only thing deflating sun. is his passing rating,” McNally wrote for his walk-off line.
Once again, on Friday, two days before playing the Bears, there was more banter. Jastremski started it this time. “I have a big needle for you this week.” McNally responded, “Better be surrounded by cash and newkicks… or its a rugby sunday.” Thirteen minutes later he added, “Fuck tom.”
Jastremski answered, “Maybe u will have some nice size 11s in ur locker.” To which McNally wrote, “Tom must be working your balls hard this week.”
Sunday, it turned out, wasn’t as interesting as the exchange between the employees. The Patriots breezed through their first quarterback test. They had 38 points by halftime, and if McNally did anything sinister to Brady’s footballs, the Patriots quarterback had no problems with it. He threw a season-high five touchdown passes, three of them to Gronk, and the Patriots prevailed, 51–23.
It had been just one month since the head coach was being asked about evaluating the quarterback; since many writers, fans, and former players suggested that Brady’s best days were behind him; since that shrill statement from Trent Dilfer, above the postgame din of Arrowhead Stadium, that the Patriots were “not good anymore.”
After a surprisingly easy 43–21 win over the Broncos, their fifth straight win since Kansas City, they really weren’t good anymore. They were ascending past that, and they were unmistakably the best team in the conference. Before the Broncos’ game, or Brady-Manning round sixteen, there was a lengthy ESPN story comparing the quarterbacks. One of Brady’s friends, Kevin Brady (no relation), responded to the article in an e-mail to Tom, and part of the quarterback’s reply provided a hint into his mind-set: “I’ve got another 7 or 8 years. He has 2. That’s the final chapter. Game on.”
Future aside, Brady and the Patriots had to go back in history to remember the last time they had seen a cornerback like Revis. In the ten-year space since Ty Law’s departure and Revis’s arrival, the Patriots had an assortment of corners with various quirks. Asante Samuel was a playmaker with good hands, but he wasn’t physical and wasn’t effective in all areas of the field. Devin McCourty had a great rookie season, but he lost confidence in year two, and by year three and now, he was a full-time free safety. A bunch of draft picks, from Darius Butler to Jonathan Wilhite to Terrence Wheatley, had track-star speed but struggled to track the football in the air. They’d all had frustrating episodes when they’d be facing the receiver, back to the ball, as the ball came zipping in past their earholes. The best corners had a quick clock in their heads, one thousand one, one thousand two, one thou—bam. Turn and look for that ball in about 2.6 seconds.
Revis was even better than that. He combined instincts and study, so he paid attention to receivers adjusting their gloves before a play (This is his play, he’s pulling his gloves) and added that to his existing knowledge of the formation and the receiver’s tendencies. The Patriots used to be bullied by the best receivers. But now they had an ace fighter at their fingertips, a guy who could get it done with toughness and smarts.
Going into Indianapolis on November 16, it wasn’t a game for a skilled player like Revis. It wasn’t even a game for Brady. When the Patriots played the Colts, it was elementary football, Big Kids versus Little Kids. Belichick was known for having different game plans for different opponents, and not being afraid to switch things up. It wasn’t that deep against the Colts. The Patriots believed that they could line up and overpower them, and that’s what they’d done since Chuck Pagano, a former Ravens assistant coach, took over Indianapolis in 2012.
The first time the Patriots played the Pagano-led Colts, in 2012, they scored 59 points and ran for 115 yards.
The second time they played, in 2013, they scored 43 points and ran for 234 yards and six rushing touchdowns.
This was going to be the third time, and the expectation from the offensive linemen was that they were going to be doing a lot of run-blocking for someone. On this night, that someone would be an undrafted muscle man named Jonas Gray. He was five-foot-nine and ripped, and he naturally ran low without much flourish. His running style was Man Runs through Wall. He was raw, basic, and he tapped into the Colts’ biggest weakness. They were soft. They couldn’t do a thing about it when good teams ran at them repeatedly. Gray finished the game with 201 rushing yards and four touchdowns in a 42–20 win. The Colts were the best team in their division, the AFC South, so they were headed to the play-offs. One team they didn’t want to see in the postseason was the Patriots.
Before the next game, against the Lions at Gillette, Brady did an interview with one of his former teammates in the media, Randy Moss. Like many Patriots in their playing days, Moss was hesitant in interviews. But as an analyst for Fox, his natural personality was on display. All of his New England teammates enjoyed him, none more than Brady, whose locker had been next to Moss’s.
The TV session began with Moss teasing the Fox crew, saying they were preparing rose petals for Brady the same way royal attendants did in the Eddie Murphy movie Coming to America.
“I heard that,” Brady said as he walked on the set, drawing laughs from everyone.
The Brady-Moss interview captured the mutual respect between the men. Brady was extremely comfortable on camera, more comfortable than usual, and he gave Moss the most honest answer to date on the criticism he’d received earlier in the season.
“Really, for my pro career, I’ve never really had a lot of criticism. We won the first year that I played. And then we won two more shortly after that. Then we had some unbelievable years where we went undefeated. So this is really the first time that people have come down on me.”
The understanding between the two, and all of America for that matter, was that Brady would be scrutinized for what he did on the field. And since he and the Patriots were on a seven-game winning streak, after a 34–9 win over Detroit, there wouldn’t be much about which to complain.
In a boon for CBS, the network got to televise the game of the year, Patriots and Packers from Lambeau Field. With the way both teams were playing, 9-2 for the Patriots and 8-3 for the Packers, a Super Bowl meeting in Arizona was possible. As it was, the network was ecstatic over the ratings magnet of star quarterbacks Brady and Aaron Rodgers. During the game, which was as competitive as promised, play-by-play man Jim Nantz set up his partner, former Giants quarterback Phil Simms, to share a story about Rodgers’s preparation of the footballs.
“He said something unique,” Simms said, explaining that Rodgers told him, “I like to push the limit to how much air we can put in the football, even go over what they allow you to do, and see if the officials take air out of it.” Simms said that Rodgers has unusually large hands, and that he finds large footballs easier to grip. Simms didn’t name any other quarterbacks specifically, but he said most of them were the opposite of Rodgers in that they want the football “smaller and soft, so they can dig their fingers into it.” Simms added one more nugget: “You know, the officials do check those footballs. Sometimes they can get lucky and put an extra half pound of air in there to help Aaron Rodgers out.”
The Patriots lost to the Packers, 26–21, and air pressure was not the reason. The bigger problem was air space, as Rodgers was able to artfully complete a key third-down pass to receiver Randall Cobb, who was well covered by Patriot Logan Ryan. That play effectively won the game, preventing Brady from another opportunity against the Packers’ defense.
The Patriots collected impressive wins in San Diego and at home against Miami before going to New York to take on Revis’s old Jets.
The tone had changed considerably since Revis last played there. Head coach Rex Ryan used to be the loudest coach in the league, constantly bragging about the talent of his players and their abilities to frustrate anyone who challenged them. But he and John Idzik, the general manager, didn’t view the talent the same way these days. Both men were most likely out after the season, which meant that the organization would have its fifth different head coach and fifth different GM since Belichick got to New England.
The Jets were 3-11, the opposite record of the Patriots. From a Jets perspective, there was something spiritually wrong about the best homegrown talent the organization ever produced going to New England and putting the Patriots in position to win another Super Bowl. When Ryan had arrived in New York promising to take down the Patriots, his words were backed up by the skills of Revis. Now there was number 24, in red, white, and blue, helping to steamroll him. The game was close, 17–16, but the Patriots were back where they always were: division champs, preparing for the postseason, forcing another divisional rival to clear out a regime and start over.
As they began thinking about the play-offs, Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick also strategized on what to do about the words of Jets owner Woody Johnson. They believed Johnson was guilty of tampering when he answered a question about Revis at a press conference and said, “Darrelle is a great player. If I thought I could have gotten Darrelle, for [what the Patriots got him for], I probably would have taken him… I’d love Darrelle to come back.”
It was one thing to say that about a player who was under contract for three or four years. It was just short of recruiting to say it about Revis, whom the league understood to be in a contract year. He also had history with the Jets and, in the NFL’s dark world of back-channel dealing, it wasn’t unrealistic to think that the Jets and Revis’s representatives had been in contact about options after the 2014 season. As it was, the case seemed to be unambiguous when Johnson’s comments were compared to the NFL’s tampering policy: “Any public or private statement of interest, qualified or unqualified, in another club’s player to that player’s agent or representative, or to a member of the news media, is a violation of this Anti-Tampering Policy.”
There was no question that there was a violation; the only question was what the NFL was going to do about it.
Maybe it was the nature of the litigious season, but there was definitely a Gotcha spirit as the play-offs unfolded.
When the Patriots and Ravens met in a divisional play-off game on January 10, 2015, it was almost guaranteed that something controversial was going to happen. The rivalry began with genuine mutual respect, but now it had devolved into one of those relationships in which both sides act like there’s respect, for political reasons. Belichick recommended Baltimore coach John Harbaugh for the job in 2008, and there were many Baltimore connections, football and otherwise, for the Maryland native. But this is a competitive league, and this was the fourth time in five years that one of these teams was going to be ending the other’s season.
Twice in the game, it looked as if the Ravens would be that team. They leapt to a 14–0 lead, and when the Patriots tied the score, the Ravens added two more touchdowns to make it 28–14 five minutes into the third quarter. It was a typical New England winter day, twenty degrees with a nasty windchill, but the Patriots offense was not equipped, at least not on this day, for the ground game associated with cold-weather football. They were one dimensional, and Ravens defensive coordinator Dean Pees was too smart to be fooled in those situations. If the Patriots were going to pass on every second-half play, they would have to be creative in their play-calling.
On their first touchdown drive of the third quarter, the Patriots confused the Ravens with their offensive formations. On one play, for example, running back Shane Vereen was lined up as a tackle. His number, 34, suggested that he was eligible to receive a pass, but on that particular play he wasn’t. A Raven still accounted for him as if he were, and it sent the Baltimore sideline into some disarray. Harbaugh even got a penalty for complaining about it to the officials.
The Patriots were onto something. It didn’t take a lot of creativity to find Gronk, who always seemed to be open. His score, on a five-yard pass from Brady, made it 28–21 in the third quarter. The fun began two minutes later, when Brady lateraled to Julian Edelman, who’d been a college quarterback at Kent State. With the defense drawn to him, Edelman lofted a perfect pass down the left sideline for Danny Amendola, who caught it and ran to the end zone for a fifty-one-yard scoring play.
Edelman may have had that pass, but Brady handled the rest of them. It was one of the best play-off games of his career, as he finished with 367 yards and three touchdowns. His final touchdown pass, to Brandon LaFell, was not only the game winner; it also moved him past Joe Montana for the top spot in career postseason touchdown passes.
After the game, a 35–31 Patriots win, Harbaugh was angry. He said the Patriots’ clever declaration of eligible and ineligible receivers was “clearly deception” and said, “It’s not something that anybody’s ever done before. The league will look at that type of thing and I’m sure that they’ll make some adjustments and things like that.”
He was right and wrong in the same sentence. The tactic had been used several times in 2014, in the pro and college seasons. Despite that, the league wasn’t always forward-thinking in these matters, so there was likely to be a change in the offseason.
For now, the Patriots were going to their fourth consecutive conference title game. They would face the Indianapolis Colts, the best possible opponent.
On the Saturday before the game, the Patriots were thinking of running on the Colts. The Colts were thinking of writing about the Patriots. Indianapolis equipment manager Sean Sullivan e-mailed Colts general manager Ryan Grigson, saying that he was concerned about the Patriots’ footballs. He said that Colts coach Chuck Pagano had received a call from the Ravens’ special-teams coordinator, and there had been some trouble with Baltimore’s ability to use footballs that they had treated; instead, they were forced to use the slick, out-of-the-box ones.
“As far as the gameballs are concerned,” Sullivan wrote, “it is well known around the league that after the Patriots gameballs are checked by the officials and brought out for game usage the ballboys for the patriots will let out some air with a ball needle because their quarterback likes a smaller football so he can grip it better, it would be great if someone would be able to check the air in the game balls as the game goes on so that they don’t get an illegal advantage.”
Grigson received the e-mail and either forwarded it or referenced it in his own e-mail to the NFL: “Just another FYI below. Again, all the Indianapolis Colts want is a completely level playing field. Thank you for being vigilant stewards of that not only for us but for the shield and overall integrity of our game.”
The league’s senior vice president of game operations, David Gardi, replied that he would look into it and make the officials aware of the issue. At this rate, it seemed that the football was getting more attention than the actual football game. Which is exactly how it played out on Sunday evening.
Despite being warned about concerns over the footballs, referee Walt Anderson lost sight of the balls twenty-five minutes before the start of the game. He said it was the first time in nineteen years of officiating that something like that had happened to him. He lost the balls because a member of game operations, Jim McNally, had taken the balls to the field. But on his way there, he stopped in the bathroom and took the footballs in there with him.
All of these actions would be dissected and analyzed for the rest of the year, to a much greater degree than anyone realized on January 18. Was it a sting operation from the NFL? Did the Patriots tamper with the footballs? Did on-site league officials knowingly allow certain improprieties to happen, if indeed they did happen, just to prove a point?
Those questions and many more like them provided the only tension of the night. The game was similar to the first three Patriots-Colts matchups with Pagano as the head coach. It was a blowout, and it got there fast. The final was 45–7, and it led to a late-night party on the field at Gillette. Gronk danced, and so did Darrelle Revis’s mom, Diana. Then there was a dance-off between Gronk and Diana. The fans stayed as late as they could, despite the cold and rain, because they wanted to enjoy the party as well. Bill Belichick looked at Jim Nantz and said, “We’re on to Seattle…” That drew a stadium full of cheers because everyone got the reference, how “We’re on to Cincinnati…” had turned around their season. The Patriots were returning to the Super Bowl for the sixth time under Belichick and Brady and, finally, this was an opportunity to shut everyone up about Spygate. If they could win this next game, against the Seahawks, it would force everyone to talk about football, and not scandal.
The problem was that in the eyes of the NFL, the football was the scandal.
As the on-field party was ending, a league investigation had already begun. In fact, the Patriots’ twelve footballs had been measured at halftime and eleven of them were found to be below 12.5 PSI. Early on, at least, the league seemed unaware that all footballs, no matter what their inflation level, would lose air pressure in the cool January condition. The second half had been played with alternate, properly inflated footballs. Jim McNally had already been questioned for thirty minutes by NFL security at the stadium.
Now the chain had begun, in the middle of the night, and when it reached the Patriots and their fans, it was going to make them sick. McNally, just before midnight, spoke with equipment manager Dave Schoenfeld and told him that he’d been interviewed. With all the buzz on Twitter, Berj Najarian, one of Belichick’s closest advisers, texted Schoenfeld at 1:45 a.m. The chain was rattling now, moving quickly. Najarian and Schoenfeld met in Najarian’s office just before two a.m. Twenty minutes later, Pro Football Talk had a story about ball deflation. Newsday had a story at four a.m. The chain reached Brady and thousands of Patriots fans when three WEEI radio hosts, John Dennis, Gerry Callahan, and Kirk Minihane, interviewed him on air and asked what he knew about the story.
“I think I’ve heard it all at this point,” he said with a laugh.
Minihane asked him directly if the Patriots deflated balls, and he said no.
The atmosphere was thick now, and no amount of mind-over-matter exercises would allow anyone, even Belichick, to ignore the noise. The noise was the norm. People wanted someone to blame. Same old Patriots, cheating again. That was the national refrain. Initially, the fingers pointed toward Belichick. But when he said, on January 22, that he had no idea about ball preparation and that Brady would know more, there was anticipation that Brady did it.
On the afternoon of the twenty-second, Brady stood before a press gathering that was clearly expecting some type of confession. That much was clear with their questions, their rising incredulity, and, at times, barely camouflaged anger when they weren’t getting what they expected. Brady stood before them in a gray sweatshirt with a white T-shirt underneath it. He had on a Patriots winter hat with the team’s original logo, the hiking minuteman, Pat Patriot, on the front. He was casual. The crowd was frenzied.
First question: “When and how did you supposedly alter the balls?”
The tone was set with that one, and it never ventured far from that register: Brady was expected to confess. The majority of these people believed that he did it. The majority of Americans, too. This session alone, with its fifty questions about air pressure and texture and grip, was going to more than make up for the first fourteen seasons of his career, when criticism was at a minimum.
“I didn’t alter the ball in any way” was how Brady’s response to the first question began.
Maybe Brady knew then that people didn’t believe him. Or maybe it was that second question: “This has raised a lot of uncomfortable conversations for people around this country who view you as their idol. The question they’re asking themselves is, ‘What’s up with our hero?’ Can you answer right now, is Tom Brady a cheater?”
These were real journalists. But it was as if they were actors spoofing journalists. It was wild. It was still early in the process, so all the terms weren’t known yet. Some of the questioners talked about actual pounds of air instead of air pressure. No one mentioned the ideal gas law—a scientific law not on the legal books. There weren’t questions about the Colts’ footballs or the process the officials went through to get those balls on the field.
This was all on Brady now.
“I feel like I’ve always played within the rules. I would never do anything to break the rules. I believe in fair play and I respect the league and everything they’re doing to try to create a very competitive playing field for all the NFL teams. It’s a very competitive league. Every team is trying to do the best they can to win every week. I believe in fair play and I’ll always believe in that for as long as I’m playing.”
The questions kept coming, some fair and most not, some neutral and most with a presumption of guilt. If they listened, Brady was telling them about the way he looked at the world, football and otherwise, but it was too much of a circus to consider the thoughtfulness that he’d put into moments like this. “I think part of being in this position and putting yourself under a spotlight like this and being open for criticism, I think that’s very much a part of being a professional athlete,” he said at one point. “We can only express to you what our side is and how we approach it. Then everyone is going to make their own conclusion.”
He answered many questions that way, and he had no idea how long it would last. Just past the quarter pole was the sixteenth question: “How does it make you feel that they’re calling your team cheaters?”
Answer: “I think a big part of playing here is trying to ignore the outside forces and influences and people that are maybe fans of our team or not fans of your team; or fans of yourself or not fans of yourself. Like I said, everybody is entitled to an opinion. Those opinions rest with those people. I think you can just go out and try to be the best you can be, deal with people with respect, with honesty, with integrity, have a high moral standard. I’ve always really tried to exemplify that as an athlete. I’ll continue to try to do that.”
Question twenty-seven: “Is this a moment to just say ‘I’m sorry’ to the fans?”
Question twenty-eight: “For the fans that are watching and looking into that camera, what do you say?”
Answer: “I’m not sure. What would you like me to say? I’m not quite sure.”
No one in the NFL did press conferences like this, starting from the top. Roger Goodell had been the commissioner for nearly a decade, and he’d never stood like this and addressed a free-form session from journalists demanding answers about a scandal. Belichick certainly wasn’t going to field fifty questions like this and answer them all patiently and expansively. Then again, perhaps the Belichick method was justified, because for all of Brady’s direct eye contact and elaboration on answers, the room didn’t believe him. He knew it. His friends knew it, too.
His business manager, former Patriots employee Will McDonough, received an e-mail from Assistant U.S. Attorney Eric Christofferson following the press conference: “The sanctimonious finger wagging over deflation might be the most absurd thing I have seen the media do, which is saying something. Some of the questions TB was asked today were more obnoxious than a congressional inquiry. Sucks that he had to go through that in the absence of any actual facts. In my business, those kind of questions get you sanctioned by a judge. He was amazingly calm. I’m sure he’s relying on friends like you to keep him sane.”
ESPN and other outlets carried the press conference live. When it was over, the ESPN crew of host Trey Wingo and analysts Mark Brunell, Jerome Bettis, and Brian Dawkins gave their opinions on what they had seen. None of them believed Brady. Brunell, a former quarterback, appeared to be emotional and on the verge of tears. “I just didn’t believe what Tom Brady had to say,” he said. Bettis said Brady missed an opportunity to take responsibility and admit a simple mistake. After a brief lecture he concluded, “I’m disappointed in you, Tom Brady.” Dawkins lamented that this was a small deal that became a big one because “we have somebody who won’t own up.” Wingo made a reference to Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal—the daddy of all “gates.”
Everyone on the set fell into a pattern that was becoming common in the first week of the scandal. They often mixed commentary about the condition of the football with the air pressure in the football. Brady never said he wasn’t aware of the footballs’ condition, because he was in control of that. The final say on air pressure was at the discretion of the officials. The footballs that Brady approved had nothing to do with air pressure; he approved them based on how they felt. Ideally, he wanted them inflated to the lowest level permitted by the league, which was 12.5 PSI. It was up to the officials to do the inflating. Sometimes they got it right; sometimes they pumped it to the sixteen of the Jets game; sometimes they weren’t exactly sure what they did because they couldn’t remember which gauges they used and they didn’t record relevant data.
The day before, with the conversation about footballs and air pressure reaching NPR, CNN, and all the morning news shows, in addition to the usual sports channels and sites, other Brady friends e-mailed. One, J. J. Dudum, was exasperated by the accusations, writing, “Will you tell these idiots to shut the ‘F’ up about these deflated balls!!! Give me a break!!! Maybe if it was close let’s chat about it but 45–7 you kicked their Ass!! Don’t they have something better to talk about?????”
Brady’s reply was simple, yet it summarized the moment as well as New England football since 2007.
“We are the Patriots,” he wrote. “Everything is a big deal.”
They were going to Arizona to play in the Super Bowl, the ultimate goal for every team in the league. They would meet the Seahawks, the defending champion blessed with the number one defense in the league. It was going to be their toughest game of the season. And as difficult as the game was going to be for the Patriots, it felt like it wasn’t even close to the toughest thing ahead of them.