This little curve of the city, Boylston Street to Tremont Street to City Hall Plaza, has done something to every shivering soul standing here. It is February 3, 2015, New England’s version of Super Tuesday, and some among the restless crowd are attending their first championship parade of the century. For others, it is their ninth.
Newbies and veterans alike hold up signs and phones into the twenty-two-degree air, hoping to get the attention of a Patriot and, with luck, maybe a short video. This ritual has changed them all and changed the city as well, and that’s not easy to do in Boston. No matter where they stand along the parade route, they are within ten feet of some schoolteacher’s lesson plan. How do you change the course of a city that helped change the course of history?
This is the land of once upon a time, with the country’s oldest public park, its first botanical garden, first restaurant, oldest subway tunnel, aged churches where the first hallelujahs were shouted in the 1700s, and the place where Paul Revere signaled the first signs of trouble to the other patriots. “One if by land, two if by sea…”
And that’s just the history on or near this special-occasion route. Even with the scope limited to recent history, no one thought Bill Belichick and Tom Brady would be a historic duo the first time they rode on duck boats through these streets in February 2002. But that’s what started it all, this new spirit in the old city. They are the ones who initiated this ever-flowing spring of multisport success.
Fifteen years ago, they arrived in a city that wanted to talk about sports scars, featuring a series of generational gut punches thrown by the Red Sox. They heard about second-place finishes and play-off droughts and old men, long gone and in some cases long dead, who were sold by the Sox and gave their best years to the Yankees. Or had too many men on the ice against the Canadiens. Or had more chances to win and still lost the get-rich-quick NBA lottery that had Tim Duncan as its prize. They heard all the stories that helped put the edge and anxiety of the New England sports fan into perspective. Then Belichick and Brady added their story, the one that almost always ended with New England winning, and hardened hearts began to melt.
It explains why Belichick, in an orange boat with his girlfriend Linda Holliday, can see a red, white, and blue sign in the crowd that reads BELICHICK FOR PRESIDENT, 2016. When Brady comes by, holding and kissing his son, Ben, many in the crowd hold up four fingers and begin to chant, “MVP.” They’re the ones who changed the standard for how local coaches and superstars are measured. Their first title was earned when they overcame steep odds and a talent gap that was perceived to be huge. In the eyes of New Englanders, it was also proof of what could be accomplished with the right amount of talent, grit, and want-to. It was the century’s first championship, and appropriately so; it was all New England industriousness, spunk, and substance.
If the Patriots could stare down and beat a 14-point favorite like the Rams, then of course the Red Sox could overcome the biggest seven-game series deficit, 0-3, in baseball history and beat the Yankees in 2004. That was the same time when the Patriots were setting an NFL record with twenty-one consecutive wins. The message was loud and bold, and it was for all pro sports teams in the region: Get it done. The odds are irrelevant. Close the deal.
The Celtics caught on in 2008, taking control of the NBA Finals after they erased a 24-point deficit in game four. It was the biggest comeback victory in finals history. And if they could do that, why couldn’t the Bruins feel confident three years later? They were down 0-2, at home, in their first series of the postseason and then won four out of the next five. In their last series of the play-offs, they went down 0-2 again. This time they did it against a Vancouver team that had scored the most goals in the league and given up the fewest. Game seven of the Stanley Cup Finals was in Vancouver. The Bruins won in a shutout.
All that winning can skew a region, internally and externally. It becomes a region of optimists, always hopeful, even if the Seattle Seahawks are a single yard away from keeping the championship count at eight. It becomes a region of fighters, too, unwilling to back down from anyone, any team, any league, no matter how well credentialed and deep pocketed. Optimistic fighters. That’s who these people are in the cold, holding up defiant signs that read DEFLATE THIS and singing along, word for word, to the Beastie Boys. You gotta fight… for your right… to party.
The fight won’t be necessary today. The memories of the game are still too fresh.
Next week will still require no wars. There will be trips to Disney World. Butler will learn how quickly life changes: a trip to the Grammys, where he chats with John Legend on the red carpet; a trip to an auto dealer in Norwood, Massachusetts, who hands him the keys to his red Chevy pickup gifted to him by Brady.
It was coming, though, a fight bloodier than the ones that New England’s Rocky Marciano used to have in the 1950s (although, as almost anyone in the city could tell you, “The Rock” from Brockton never lost a fight). The heavyweight fight over air pressure looked more absurd the more serious it became.
It had been nearly a month since ESPN’s respected football insider, Chris Mortensen, posted the following erroneous tweet: “NFL has found that 11 of the Patriots footballs used in Sunday’s AFC title game were under-inflated by 2 lbs each, per league sources.” There were entire shows on the network, whether news-based or opinion-driven, that were built around the premise that the cheatin’ Patriots were using footballs that were as flat as their reporter suggested. Mortensen never corrected the tweet. When the Patriots made a simple request to the league to publicly correct the misinformation, they were rejected—an ominous sign.
Stacey James, the Patriots’ media relations chief, wrote to Greg Aiello, the NFL’s communications head, on February 17: “What is unconscionable to me is that the league holds data that could very well exonerate us from any wrongdoing and completely dismiss the rampant reports and allegations of nefarious actions, but the league refuses to provide the data. I cannot comprehend how withholding the range of PSIs measured in the game is beneficial to the NFL or the Patriots… Meanwhile, leaks continue to cause us irreparable harm. Imagine if you were in my position. I would love to know what you would be doing to get the league to help.”
James had his e-mail forwarded to Jeff Pash, the league’s executive vice president and, according to an NFL-generated press release, a coleader of the league’s football investigation. Pash began communicating with Patriots attorney Robyn Glaser. If it wasn’t obvious to the Patriots then that they were in trouble, it should have been. Glaser sent several e-mails, practically begging the league to at the very least release a statement saying that the often repeated “eleven out of twelve” story line was wildly inaccurate. The tone, from Glaser’s side, was pleading.
Referencing an ESPN story in which Jim McNally was accused of personally handing illegal footballs to officials (which wasn’t true), Glaser wrote to Pash, “Surely you have seen the ABUNDANCE of stories and articles this new ESPN piece has prompted since last night. If not, do let me know so I can send you links. This ESPN piece, which by its own admission is supported by not one but ‘FOUR sources familiar with the investigation’ is yet the latest in League leaks (because the only others ‘familiar’ with this investigation are us, and we can assure you we are not talking to ESPN or anyone else). And, once again, the information is not only inaccurate, but completely inflammatory and profoundly damaging to our brand.”
Pash’s response to such pleading and warning, twenty-five minutes later, was laconic: “I want to acknowledge your note and Stacey’s note to Greg. I have seen the ESPN story. I have no reason to think it came from our office but I certainly do not condone leaks which I do not [sic] serve anyone’s interest.”
They were having different conversations, at different levels of urgency, and that wasn’t going to change. Remarkably, the Patriots didn’t protest the biggest fundamental flaw in the investigation. On one hand, the league said Ted Wells was acting independently. On the other, the league said that Pash was the coleader of the investigation.
Wells, as a solo investigator, most certainly had the ability to be objective; Wells, working along with Pash, was tethered to the league agenda, no matter what his intentions were. As one of the top attorneys in the country, he could easily poke holes in and destroy a similar setup if, for example, it was used in an attempt to undermine one of his clients. But there were too many intersecting layers here. Wells and the members of his team, Lorin Reisner and Brad Karp, had worked with and defended the league in the past in, as they cited on the Paul, Weiss website, “several litigation matters.”
For the Patriots, it felt like something big was going to happen. Wells had requested the cell phones of many people he wanted to interview. When he asked for Brady’s and kicker Stephen Gostkowski’s, each told him no. Wells countered to Brady and his representative, Don Yee, that he didn’t need the phone, per se. What would suffice instead was any communication that was relevant to inflation or deflation of the ball. Brady and his representatives declined again. Wells didn’t say anything at the time, but he believed Brady was making a crucial mistake.
Each week, at every corner, it seemed that the Patriots were in a brawl of some sort. The league hadn’t announced its ruling on the Patriots’ tampering charge against the Jets, but a contractual decision needed to be made on the principal involved.
The Patriots had enough cap room to pick up Darrelle Revis’s sizable option, but it would change who they were as team-builders. They’d have to let three or four good players leave (which some fans supported) to hold on to one All-Pro player at those numbers. They declined his option and tried to make a deal that was more cap-friendly. But he got his ring, and now he was ready to be a Jet again. They gave him $39 million fully guaranteed in March.
There was foreboding in the region in April. Where was that report from Wells and Pash? What was it going to say? Were the Patriots going to be cleared? Or would the NFL find that McNally had actually made an unusual bathroom break: stop in, take a smidgen of air out of a bag of footballs, and then walk out, all in ninety seconds?
The latter scenario is what most people outside of New England believed. Some would support their argument by using that tweet from Mortensen, still uncorrected, that had reached its eighty-fourth consecutive day of posting on April 15. But if there was a day not to think about air pressure, it was that one. Early that morning, word began to spread that the jurors in the Aaron Hernandez murder case had reached a verdict. Even though the prosecution never produced a weapon or a motive, it put together such a compelling case that the defense, in closing arguments, admitted for the first time that Hernandez was at the scene of the crime on the June 2013 night that Odin Lloyd was murdered. The defense argued that Hernandez, then twenty-three, didn’t know what to do after witnessing his two friends, who were to be tried separately, commit the horrific act.
At roughly 10:25 a.m. on the fifteenth, the jury agreed that they didn’t believe that version of events. They convicted the former Patriots tight end of first-degree murder. His sentence was a formality: life in prison without parole. He’d spent almost two years in custody, continuing to walk into court with confidence and nonchalance. He often joked with his attorneys, his fiancée, and court officials. There were times when he even chuckled when prosecution witnesses were testifying against him. That was his consistent behavior from the day of his arraignment in June 2013 to the moment he was convicted.
As the verdict was read, his mother and his fiancée sobbed loudly as they hugged and rocked slowly back and forth. Hernandez shook his head, the first time that he displayed a sense of disbelief, and made eye contact with his fiancée and mother. “Be strong,” he said to them. “Be strong.”
Nothing that the Patriots experienced could compare to the gravity of the Hernandez situation. Their issues were merely workplace grievances. But as trivial as they were when contrasted to the society at large, there was something bothersome about them. They were talking to an entity, their own league, that either wasn’t listening to them or listened and rejected every idea that they had. The major issues that had to be resolved were the findings of the report, which had begun nearly one hundred days earlier, and the status of the tampering charge against the Jets.
Talking with the league was not enjoyable, though. The Patriots felt like a state abandoned by its own country. The NFL never said, Hey, you’re on your own. It didn’t have to for the feeling to be internalized.
At least, a week after the verdict, there was the respite of going to the White House. For some. Even that trip turned into a controversy when Brady elected not to go and gave no reason for missing the trip with his team. Was he angry? Busy? Making a political statement? It wasn’t clear.
The team carried on without him and seemed to enjoy the trip to the capital. Some players went to visit the veterans at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center before hanging out with a bunch of their fans in the House and Senate. With Bill Belichick standing to his right and Robert Kraft to his left, President Obama couldn’t resist letting the moment pass without mentioning the number one Patriots topic in America.
“I usually tell a bunch of jokes at these events, but with the Patriots in town I was afraid that eleven out of twelve of them would fall flat.”
There were groans. Kraft and Belichick tried to force smiles, while a few of the players actually did laugh. Sore subject. Much more sore than anyone knew because this was the point Glaser was trying to make in those private e-mails to Pash. The inaccurate story would never be referred to as inaccurate anymore because it had existed so long on its own without being straightened out. The Patriots knew this all too well. It’s why they still had to remind major outlets, such as ESPN, and reporters that, no, the Patriots never did tape a Rams walk-through in 2002. A Boston Herald article just said they did.
“All right, all right,” the president said, “that whole story got blown a little bit out of proportion.”
Puns all day long. Was this Wes Welker or Barack Obama?
Eventually, the president got to the substance, saying that “Belichick and Brady is the most successful player-coach tandem, perhaps, in NFL history.” He even gave up the podium, creating a photo op for the ages: Belichick, in a suit and tie, behind a lectern that read SEAL OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.
Shortly after returning from Washington, the Patriots had to know that the league report was going to go harshly against them. This could no longer be considered paranoia or coincidence; every time members of the organization felt that they had a good case for something, the league either ignored them or shut them down. The NFL said nothing about the leaks. It said nothing about the incorrect PSI numbers. It didn’t engage in constructive e-mails. And now, the league ruling on whether the Jets tampered was insulting and unprecedented. The NFL agreed that the Jets tampered. The penalty: $100,000. Roger Goodell had spent years droning on about the shield and the integrity of the game. Now he was saying that a divisional rival broke the rules, got the player it wanted all along, and the punishment was just one hundred grand. So why the moralizing about air pressure in the balls?
The previous two tampering cases, both on Goodell’s watch, had led to the offending teams losing fifth- and seventh-round picks as well as swapping draft positions, in the fifth and third rounds, respectively.
Just when the Patriots were ready to shake their fists at the injustice of that, it dropped. The date was May 6, 2015. It was Wells’s report, all 243 pages of it. It had footnotes, it had a science section, it had a table of contents, and, most important, it had these phrases: “generally aware” and “more probable than not.”
“For the reasons described in this Report, and after a comprehensive investigation, we have concluded that, in connection with the AFC Championship Game, it is more probable than not that New England Patriots personnel participated in violations of the Playing Rules and were involved in a deliberate effort to circumvent the rules,” Wells and his team wrote. “In particular, we have concluded that it is more probable than not that Jim McNally (the Officials Locker Room attendant for the Patriots) and John Jastremski (an equipment assistant for the Patriots) participated in a deliberate effort to release air from Patriots game balls after the balls were examined by the referee. Based on the evidence, it also is our view that it is more probable than not that Tom Brady (the quarterback for the Patriots) was at least generally aware of the inappropriate activities of McNally and Jastremski involving the release of air from Patriots game balls.”
The opinions were swift, and in some cases immediate. Hosts from both of Boston’s full-time sports radio stations picked through the report and read chunks of it live on the air. ESPN went to live coverage and got takeaways from its analysts. CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News, and NPR all had coverage. Twitter had Wells, the Patriots, Brady, and “more probable than not” all trending. It was a day that showed the power and weakness of the media. The power is that the news got out fast. The weakness is that no one had time to read it before being asked to comment on it. So there was some skimming and then incomplete concluding.
Still, some of the arguments were fascinating. The Patriots slammed the report as “incomprehensible.” Don Yee, Brady’s agent, said that Wells and the league went into the investigation with its mind made up and that “there was no fairness in the Wells investigation whatsoever” and that the report was “a significant and terrible disappointment.” Wells, taking exception to the criticism of Yee and others about his work, held a conference call to address some of the point-by-point attacks.
“I think it is wrong to criticize my independence just because you disagree with my findings,” he said. “I totally reject any suggestion that I was not independent or that the report was slanted in some way to reach a particular result.”
He said Pash assisted as a facilitator and not much else in the process. That statement would be revisited and tested in several weeks. He also said that the Patriots cooperated with him except in one major area. He wanted another interview with “The Deflator,” McNally, who called himself that in a text to Jastremski in May 2014. The Patriots countered that they had made him available four times to Wells, and a fifth interview was just excessive. For those who didn’t read the report, the texts between McNally and Jastremski were all they needed to see. The dude called himself The Deflator. What else is there to say?
The report was so divisive that it split a football family. At ESPN, analyst Damien Woody discussed the findings with analyst Tedy Bruschi. Both former Patriots. They practiced together. Traveled together. Essentially lived with each other for four years and won a pair of Super Bowls together. Now they sat across from each other, on TV, and had a tense back-and-forth over The Deflator and Brady.
Woody: These guys handle the rock, handle the ball. So you mean to tell me that Tom Brady when it comes to these individuals working on the equipment staff, that he wouldn’t know who these guys are?
Bruschi: This is what I believe. Tom Brady would not tell anyone to do anything illegal. That’s what I believe.
Woody: And that’s fine.
Both: We disagree.
Bruschi: You think Tom Brady would tell someone to do something illegal?
Woody: Yes!
Bruschi: That’s fine. I do not believe that. I know Tom Brady. I know his integrity. I can vouch for him. I’ve spent a lot of time with him, all right? I vouch for this guy’s integrity, up and down, as long as you want me to do it. He would not ever tell anyone to implicate themselves or do something illegally that would circumvent the rules of competitive play. That’s not who he is. That’s the person that I know. And that’s what I believe.
Woody: It wouldn’t be the first time that an athlete has been caught with his pants down in a situation like this. I respect Tom Brady just like you respect Tom Brady.
Bruschi: You don’t respect him!
Woody: Why is that? I do!
Bruschi: You don’t respect him. You’re saying that he told these guys to break the rules.
Woody: Okay, but that’s like the same thing as my kids in certain situations… They might tell me a story. That doesn’t mean I have less respect for them.
Bruschi: Tom Brady had said that he did not tell them. In his press conference, post–AFC Championship Game, he said, “I had no knowledge of the situation.” In so many words. You don’t believe him.
Woody: Right. I don’t. You do.
Bruschi: A guy that you played with for years and won two Super Bowls with… and you don’t know him?
Woody: I do know him. But that’s okay, though.
Bruschi (his most animated now): Then you know him as someone who would say, who would tell someone, “Man, listen. Go break the rules. Deflate those balls after I’m done with them.”
Woody: We’re talking about a competitor.
Bruschi: Do you believe that?
Woody: We’re talking about the ultimate competitor.
Bruschi: You really believe he would do that?
Woody: Why not? It happens… Everyone is always—
Bruschi: My former teammate, my friend Tom Brady, would not do that.
Woody: We’re talking—playing in a league where everybody is trying to look for the competitive edge. I’ve tried to look for the competitive edge. Everyone is always looking for the competitive edge to stay on top. Do rules get broken sometimes? Of course they do!
The two of them had a host to moderate their discussion, but it was unnecessary. They not only represented themselves and their personal opinions; they staked flags for two of the most passionate camps that were arguing the details of this case nationally. Bruschi would be the overwhelming president of the New England states; Woody would have the rest of the country. Truly, it was The Nation versus Patriots Nation.
In New England, though, the borders got tighter. The walls were fortified. For or against? You had to declare, early in the conversation. They mobilized in person and online. They monitored and quickly identified friends and foes. For example, Damien Woody, former Patriot who attended Boston College, was now an enemy for his comments on Brady.
“I honestly felt like I was being excommunicated from the entire city of Boston,” Woody says now. “Throughout the whole thing, I used common sense and the smell test. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Tom. I love him. He’s the GOAT. Some people were like, ‘Damien must be bitter’ or ‘It didn’t end well with the Patriots.’
“Look, I never thought that this was anything big. I was blown away by how big this thing got. ‘Defend the Wall!’ and all this other stuff. It’s not that serious. I felt the media was being irresponsible about it. Some of ESPN was irresponsible, too. I was asked a question about it and I gave an honest answer. I’m always willing to have a healthy conversation about it.”
Real conversations were impossible to have once the league announced its penalties: the loss of a first-round pick in 2016, the loss of a fourth-round pick in 2017, a $1 million fine, and a four-game suspension for Brady. It was the biggest fine in league history. Wells said in his report that he found no fault with Robert Kraft, Belichick, or equipment manager Dave Schoenfeld. The penalty suggests the league believed otherwise. If the harshness was due to Spygate eight years earlier, the league is admitting that it is reprosecuting a violation that has already been paid for by the Patriots. Are they assumed to be guilty as long as Belichick is their coach and Kraft is their owner?
The weekend before heading to San Francisco for the league’s spring meetings, Kraft talked with Sports Illustrated’s Peter King. The owner wouldn’t characterize his relationship with Goodell. He wouldn’t say whether he planned to sue the league. He wouldn’t get into the much-debated text messages of Jim McNally and John Jastremski or why they were suspended if the Patriots did nothing wrong. But it was clear that he was angry and considering his options.
“I just get really worked up. To receive the harshest penalty in league history is just not fair. The anger and frustration with this process, to me, it wasn’t fair. If we’re giving all the power to the NFL and the office of the commissioner, this is something that can happen to all thirty-two teams. We need to have fair and balanced investigating and reporting. But in this report, every inference went against us… inferences from ambiguous, circumstantial evidence all went against us. That’s the thing that really bothers me.”
It sounded like Kraft was ready to fight when he went to the Bay Area. Many of the people in his hometown certainly were. They were the ones who offered to buy him drinks in New Orleans in 2002. They slapped him on the back down on Bourbon Street, called him Bobby, ecstatic that their owner was one of them. He had sat on those aluminum benches at old Foxboro Stadium like they had. He knew the distance they had traveled, as Patriots fans, to even have a franchise for which to cheer.
They didn’t have to hear that conversation with King to know exactly how he felt. They got it.
So when he held a press conference saying that he would reluctantly accept the penalties…
When he said he wanted the rhetoric to stop, and that the Patriots were one of thirty-two in this collective…
He didn’t sound like one of them anymore.
He sounded like one of them. As in the billionaires’ club. No one from Kraft’s old neighborhood, in Brookline, begrudged him for making money. They didn’t care about that as much as they did roots. Had he forgotten about them and decided to protect his influence and committee connections in the league? That had to be it. He and his attorneys had been fighting with the league since January. It was now May, and one thing should have been clear to this most successful businessman: The league was not reasonable when it came to the Patriots.
There was no reason or relief from the league when Stacey James, the PR chief, asked for it. Robyn Glaser, the attorney, asked for help from the league and was ignored. Football operations asked for it, by way of the tampering charge against the Jets, and pretty much got that gesture, common in Massachusetts, that one receives after cutting someone off in traffic. The Wells Report itself, 243 pages long without a single critical comment about the league—which is nearly impossible from an “independent” document—didn’t provide a reasonable view for the Patriots. Goodell took two draft picks and cash and returned a four-game suspension, based on text interpretation and air pressure. What on earth made Kraft think that the NFL was going to be reasonable now?
At home, he was being ripped up and down the radio dial, by Patriots supporters and haters alike. The supporters, the fighters, were shocked that the general didn’t have the mind-set to wrestle. The detractors used the opportunity to point out that the retreat was an admission of guilt.
One man who didn’t contribute much to the commentary was Tom Brady. It seemed as if it were ten years ago when he made that remark about being surprised by nothing in the league anymore. He said it in 2013 after losing receivers and watching other teammates traded in a blink. But that was just basic, ground-level NFL stuff.
Brady was nearly thirty-eight years old. Even after all his time spent in the public eye, the public didn’t believe that what they were seeing and hearing was real. He liked to win, so he was going to compete against the Ivy League lawyers just like he would against some middle linebacker from a football factory.
The people who said he took a little off the top were calling him a liar. Those angry and disappointed that he just didn’t “admit it” were saying they didn’t believe him. Some were telling him to move on and accept his fate like Kraft did. That was not going to happen.
“Tom’s integrity is one of the most important things to him,” says Chris Eitzmann, one of Brady’s first roommates with the Patriots. “He’s always been that way.”
The modern sports fan is used to athletes going the other way. They don’t mention integrity all that much, nor do they give long press conferences about conscientiously staying within the lines. It’s ironic that Kraft backed down in San Francisco, where Brady learned to win. The owner could say whatever he wanted, but he wasn’t speaking for Tom Brady. Brady had won on the road before, in his day job, and now he was prepared to take the fight to his opponents. He’d go to their habitat, in Manhattan, whether conference room or, if necessary, courtroom.
The anticipation of and release of Wells’s report had overshadowed nearly every significant football event in the spring and early summer. At least there was the championship celebration itself, a party at Kraft’s house in June. It was one of the few times in the first six months of the year that players could relax and not hear about air pressure and suspensions. Brady and Gisele Bündchen were there, as was pop star Wiz Khalifa, and a video of the quarterback dancing went viral. The biggest party takeaway was the ring, each one loaded with 205 white diamonds.
A week after the party, it was time for business again. Tom Brady arrived at 345 Park Avenue in Manhattan, NFL headquarters, on Tuesday morning, June 23. The last time he saw Roger Goodell, Brady was receiving the Super Bowl MVP trophy, the third one of his career. He was smiling that day, wearing jeans and a cream-colored sweater. But today was about business. He wore a navy suit, white shirt, and dark tie. He arrived in a sedan, surrounded by lawyers armed with files and exhibits.
It was just before nine thirty a.m., and Brady was about to experience how conflict looks and sounds when it’s unleashed at the corporate level. The two dozen people there, mostly lawyers, were adept at white-collar combat. This was officially Brady’s appeals hearing, although the tension in the room didn’t suggest a spirit of flexibility or negotiation. Both sides were entrenched, intent on pointing out the absurdities on the other side of the table.
The art of refusing to listen was perfectly displayed by Lorin Reisner. On this morning, Reisner was a double threat: He was one of the authors of the “independent” Wells Report, as well as the attorney who was doggedly trying to get Brady to incriminate himself on air pressure in footballs. Brady had gladly shared that he was angry with the size and hardness of the footballs in a 2014 win over the Jets. After that game, John Jastremski measured the footballs and found that they were grossly over the legal limit, at 16 PSI. Brady was livid. The officials hadn’t been mindful. From that moment on, he asked the equipment staff to insist to the officials that they know the rules and inflate the ball to a proper level, at 12.5.
But Reisner didn’t focus on the total news of that story. He wanted to talk about Brady’s preference for 12.5, which is a legal number; he ignored the fact that a game ball was at 16, which was well past illegal.
“Now, you have said publically that you like footballs to be inflated to a level of 12.5 PSI, correct?” Reisner asked.
“I said that after the championship game,” Brady replied.
“And so, how long have you known that 12.5 is your preferred level of inflation?”
“After the Jets game,” Brady answered.
“And how did you come to learn that 12.5 is your preferred level of inflation?”
It was obvious that Reisner’s questioning here was following his contributions to the Wells Report. He wasn’t buying the explanations. Brady told Reisner that before Jastremski got to New England, the quarterback learned that the PSI had always been at 12.7 or 12.8. He didn’t know that until the Jets fiasco. But Reisner didn’t want to talk about the Jets fiasco.
“You say you ‘just picked the number.’ Did you pick that number for any particular reason?”
“Ball pressure has been so inconsequential,” Brady answered. “I haven’t even thought about that. I think at the end of the day, the only time I thought about it was after the Jet game, and then after this was brought up, after the championship game. It’s never something that has been on my radar, registered. I never said ‘PSI.’ I don’t think I even knew what that meant until after the championship game. It was never something that even crossed my mind.”
Reisner’s approach was the same. He backed up and sped forward again: “How did you come to pick 12.5 as the number?”
“We looked in the rulebook,” Brady replied.
“How did you come to pick 12.5 as the number for your preferred pressure level for the footballs?”
One of the first statements of the day, from league attorney Daniel Nash, was that this was not a criminal or civil trial. Reisner seemed to think differently. Brady mentioned the Jets game again, the rulebook again. It didn’t matter.
“Did you pick 12.5 because it was toward the lower end or the lower end of the permissible range?”
Brady told the lawyer that they were looking for consistency, and they found a number that they liked in the rulebook. It would stand to reason that he would pick 12.5 when the league had gone as high as 16. It didn’t matter what he said, although his next answer could have and would have been plausible if it had been a different room. But not with this rhetoric. Not with the opponents, like Reisner, that Brady could see along with the ones he couldn’t, owners and GMs around the league who supported everything Team Goodell was doing.
“Is it fair to say that you prefer the footballs inflated to a pressure level at the low end of the range?”
Brady repeated his story about how that Jets game changed his outlook. And then he gave his best answer yet: “Whenever I went to pick the game balls, I never once in fifteen years ever asked what the ball pressure was set at until after the Jet game. So whether it’s 12.5 or 12.6 or 12.7 or 12.8 or 12.9 or 13, all the way up to the Colts game, I still think it’s inconsequential to what the actual feel of a grip of a football would be. So the fact is, there could be a ball that’s set at 12.5 that I could disapprove of, there could be a ball that’s 13 that I could approve of. It all is depending on how the ball feels in my hand on that particular day. So I don’t think my liking to a football could be a very psychological thing. I just want to know that there is consistency in what I’m playing with.”
Brady’s team had a smart game plan, and it was able to produce some stunning admissions under oath. Ted Wells, for example, after harping on his independence for weeks, acknowledged that NFL executive vice president Jeff Pash read drafts of the Wells Report before its release and even included comments. Wells said he wasn’t sure of the specifics of those comments because they weren’t provided directly to him. They were given to a colleague and, he presumed, the contributions involved “some kind of wordsmithing.” He said that one of his colleagues also prepared a first draft before Wells reviewed it, and that colleague was Reisner. Literally, “independence” became “interdependence” in a New York minute.
“Would your principal colleague on this case be Mr. Lorin Reisner, who is seated over there?” Brady’s attorney Jeffrey Kessler asked Wells.
“Correct,” Wells answered.
Kessler got Wells to acknowledge that he and Reisner were being paid by the NFL for the appeals hearing. And since Pash, a league employee, obviously was as well, it led Kessler to a logical conclusion.
“Just for the record, my observation that the statement that the Paul, Weiss firm is independent is clearly not correct. We now have testimony that they represented the NFL in this proceeding. They viewed the NFL as their client.”
The most confusing and contradictory testimony of the day belonged to Troy Vincent, a former player and the league’s executive vice president of football operations. He said he had never heard of the ideal gas law and that he wasn’t aware that in cold weather, the inflation level of the football would drop. He admitted that he put his signature on two incorrect reports. One, by league employee David Gardi, said the Patriots had a ball measuring at 10.1 PSI. Another suggested that all the Colts’ balls were in compliance, which they weren’t. Vincent also said that the league didn’t record the data of its football tests and that the two pressure gauges it used were inconsistent.
“Is it fair to say, Mr. Vincent, that there was a lot of confusion about what these numbers were, that Mr. Gardi didn’t even know what the numbers were correctly at this time?” Kessler asked.
“Not at all,” replied Vincent.
“You think it was very clear?”
“I think it was clear,” Vincent answered.
Kessler was incredulous. Perhaps some of Vincent’s colleagues were, too. “If it was so clear, do you have any explanation as to how he could have ‘10.1’ written down as the figure and it was not one of the figures?”
“I can’t speak for David,” Vincent said.
At one point, Brady was asked why he spoke to John Jastremski so much in the days after the air-pressure story broke. He said that they were talking about the Super Bowl and, candidly, all the developments of the deflation story. It seemed that the league was expecting a more sinister, less plausible answer than the one Brady gave. It had been a long, hot summer day in the city, and after a few breaks, it finally ended at 8:27 p.m. That had been exactly eleven hours of football and science talk, but even after a half day of talking, there was no resolution.
Anyone who looked at the transcript would have walked away thinking that Brady, at the very least, had a good chance of getting his suspension reduced. But consistent with the way things had gone in the previous six months, there was a chasm between what should have been and what actually was. On Tuesday morning, July 28, ESPN personality Stephen A. Smith had some breaking news. His sources were telling him that the suspension would likely be upheld, in part, because Brady “destroyed his phone.”
Finally, after not seeing the signs for months, Kraft understood what was going on. This was a nasty fight, and there wasn’t enough respect for any type of compromise to be reached. Brady had told Wells in the spring that he never planned to turn over his phone. Wells eventually told him that the phone was not required, just electronic data within a narrow scope. He and his team eventually agreed to that, as well as providing information for every person with whom he had been in contact. That led to a public release of Brady’s e-mails, in which he referenced pool covers, new shoes, his charitable endeavors, and a dinner meeting with the owner of the Vancouver Canucks. He also gave the league contacts for every person with whom he had sent one of his nearly ten thousand text messages that the league wanted to see. All mundane stuff, with no references to PSI. And now Goodell was saying that the new information, the damaging information, was that Brady destroyed a phone that he never planned to give them in the first place?
Worse than that, the league continued to change the script. May’s “generally aware” became “orchestrated and provided rewards” in July. In the beginning, Brady was the quarterback who likely knew that the guys were up to something. Now the league was saying that he was the mastermind and that, although there was no precedent for what they believed Brady had done, Goodell placed it in the realm of using and/or masking performance-enhancing drugs.
After the upheld suspension and clumsy analogy from the commissioner, Kraft did a reversal.
“I first and foremost need to apologize to our fans, because I truly believed what I did in May, given the actual evidence of the situation and the league’s history on discipline matters, would make it much easier for the league to exonerate Tom Brady. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Tom Brady is a person of great integrity, and is a great ambassador of the game, both on and off the field. Yet for reasons that I cannot comprehend, there are those in the league office who are more determined to prove that they were right rather than admit any culpability of their own or take responsibility for the initiation of a process and ensuing investigation that was flawed.
“I have come to the conclusion that this was never about doing what was fair and just. Back in May, I had to make a difficult decision that I now regret. I tried to do what I thought was right; I chose not to take legal action. I wanted to return the focus to football.”
For the Patriots and Brady, the only way they could get the focus to football was to go through the court system first. It was yet another challenge for Brady, in a career of football mountain climbing. When he was eighteen, the obstacle was the depth chart, where he was so far down that they couldn’t sense his presence or hear his voice. A few years later it was being asked to share the space with Drew Henson. He left that Drew and was blocked by another one, Bledsoe. He’d been coasting freely since those days, in his midtwenties, winning everything in his path: fans, games, endorsements, trust.
He’d played with dozens of teammates who’d claimed to love the game so much that they’d play it without compensation. They’d do anything to get on the field. They could never imagine this, suing your league for the chance to play and remaining professional even when the commissioner lies about you and yet calls you the liar. Players couldn’t relate. Maybe only one other guy could. Bill Belichick. A scandal had been placed at his feet eight years ago, and he continued to coach through it. He was called every negative name possible and he led a team to the doorstep of perfection.
Brady had his scandal now. This was being put on him, and not only was he being called a cheater; he was being called a liar. Daily. When he held press conferences, he answered questions of those who said he was dishonest. When he sat in that room with Goodell for half a day, the commissioner walked away and wrote that he wasn’t credible.
A few days away from Brady’s thirty-eighth birthday, he got a gift without even realizing it. He and the Players Association planned to take the NFL to court to fight Goodell’s decision. They filed their suit in Minnesota, where the association had enjoyed historic success, going back to the days when players were granted unrestricted free agency for the first time. But it was a sign of the times that there was a sprint between the league and the union to see who could file first, and the NFL won that race. After Goodell’s decision to uphold the four-game suspension, the league strategically filed in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, because they felt a Manhattan court was more likely to uphold its ruling.
Since the league filed first, a U.S. District judge in Minnesota, Richard Kyle, ordered the union’s case be transferred to New York. It was viewed as a loss for Brady in some corners, but Brady’s lead attorney, Jeffrey Kessler, wasn’t just spouting lawyer-speak when he said, “We are happy in any federal court, which, unlike the arbitration before Goodell, provides a neutral forum.”
The judge was randomly selected, and the one who happened to get the case was Richard Berman. A lifelong New Yorker, Berman had many instances in his career where he had either ruled against the status quo or strongly urged contentious sides to settle their differences so he wouldn’t have to do it for them. He was passionate about defending the powerless and marginalized, and had written extensively on child services and the protection of children.
He was equally critical and complimentary of pop-culture stars, once ruling in favor of singer Mariah Carey in one case and against actor Cameron Douglas, the son of Michael and grandson of Kirk, in another.
It was going to take all Berman’s experience and skill as a peacemaker to strike a conciliatory tone between the union and the league. He asked both sides to “tone down the rhetoric” and attempt to find common ground. He would soon learn that they weren’t interested. The day before the Patriots played a preseason game against the Packers, Brady and Goodell were in court all day. The judge met with both sides separately, trying to convince them to settle. He sensed no movement, so he announced that there were varying strengths to both arguments. But since both sides believed that theirs was the stronger, that approach didn’t work, either.
It was less than a month from the beginning of the season and football fans were live-tweeting quotes from a federal judge. There was the merger of football and the law on a daily basis, which led to everyone being a member of the debate team. Every word and mannerism of Judge Berman was parsed. Court dates became just as important as, if not more important than, preseason games. Both sides, from the lawyers to the fans on the street, routinely convinced themselves that they had an advantage.
Kessler was a rock star; Kessler was overmatched. Brady was being railroaded; Brady must have done something because those underlings wouldn’t lift a finger without his permission. The air came out of the football due to the ideal gas law; the air came out because The Deflator went into that bathroom with a needle and drew it out. The Patriots are great and other teams and fans are just jealous; the Patriots habitually cross the line, and other teams are sick of it. It was the dominant topic in New England, much more so than the Patriots themselves. They had won the Super Bowl six months earlier, but it didn’t feel that way. Their fans never got that victory-lap summer, that carefree, toes-up-at-the-beach summer that most champions and their observers enjoy. They didn’t know if they were going to unveil a Super Bowl banner on September 10, the night of the opener, or if that would be the evening that Brady’s burden—that four-game suspension—would begin.
When Brady walked out of court at five thirty p.m. on August 12, he got a preview of what was to come, regardless of Berman’s ruling. “Cheater, cheater…” he heard as he got into a car and was driven away. Patriots fans were with him every step of the way, for obvious reasons, but the nation wasn’t following New England’s summer reading schedule: twenty pages of Goodell’s appeal rejection, 243 pages of the Wells Report, and 457 pages of the appeal hearing transcript. It was far from J. K. Rowling and Stephen King. Who wanted to spend a summer like this? Besides, the average football fan, whether in media or in the break room, wasn’t using those documents to form an opinion. Most of them had their minds made up already.
On September 3, 2015, the day Judge Berman’s decision came down, it was worth noting that Brady had accumulated eleven wins while playing in the state of New Jersey against the Jets and Giants. That was cool, but this was better: He was now 1-0 in Manhattan, essentially playing a road game against the NFL, the biggest, baddest, and richest giant in North American sports. He had taken the league to court and had his suspension vacated.
New England reacted as if a war had been won. Television and radio stations interrupted programming with flashes of BREAKING NEWS. Fingers couldn’t move fast enough as tweets and retweets were being processed with Brady-themed expressions of joy. Gronk tweeted a picture of Brady celebrating a touchdown by riding on the back of the big tight end. He wrote, “Let’s go! This season to be one heck of another ride. #PatsNation.” Devin McCourty tweeted an applauding meme of NBA star Kevin Durant, who had delivered one of the most inspirational and emotional MVP speeches ever. The caption was Durant’s money line, delivered to his mother, “You the real MVP.” McCourty wrote, “Judge Berman U know what u are.” Brady jerseys and Brady-slogan shirts (FREE BRADY, DEFLATE THIS, and GOODELL SUCKS) could be seen all over the region. An elementary school principal, Mark Springer, learned the news and shared it on the PA system; his teachers, preparing lesson plans and classrooms, reacted with shouts and high fives. The latter was fitting, because the old elementary school script had been turned on its head: The bully had requested a three o’clock meeting by the bike rack, and this time he was the one who walked away with the bloody nose.
For now, no one was worried about the appeal immediately filed by the NFL. Sure, it was going to be heard, but not until after the season. There were also the words of the nation out there, the one with forty-four states and a negative view of the Patriots. They argued that the win was one of procedure, not a declaration of innocence. Commentators in New York, and even a couple in Boston, got it in their heads that Berman was somehow starstruck by Brady, and that’s why he ruled as he did.
Brady used his personal Facebook page to post a message that was celebratory and reflective.
The regular season starts tomorrow morning and I can’t wait to fully commit my energy and emotion to focus on the challenges of the 2015 NFL season. I want to thank my family, my friends, all of the fans, past and current players and my teammates for the support they have given me throughout this challenging experience. I also want to thank Judge Berman and his staff for their efforts to resolve this matter over the past five weeks. I am very grateful. My thanks also to the union’s legal team who has fought so hard right along with me.
While I am pleased to be eligible to play, I am sorry our league had to endure this. I don’t think it has been good for our sport—to a large degree, we have all lost. I am also sorry to anyone whose feelings I may have hurt as I have tried to work to resolve this situation. I love the NFL. It is a privilege to be a member of the NFL community and I will always try to do my best in representing my team and the league in a way that would make all members of this community proud.
I look forward to the competition on the playing field and I hope the attention of NFL fans can return to where it belongs—on the many great players and coaches who work so hard every week, and sacrifice so much, to make this game great. Most importantly, I look forward to representing the New England Patriots on Thursday night in our season opener. I hope to make all of our fans proud this year… and beyond!
His words were wiser than he could have imagined when he wrote them. There were going to be many conversations like the one his father, Tom Sr., had with San Francisco radio host Chip Franklin. Reacting to the big news of the day, Franklin told his KGO audience that he’d rather have out-of-football Tim Tebow over “Tom Brady, who is a cheater—a cheater and a bad sport and a big freaking baby.” He went on to say that Tebow is a winner and that Brady is a system quarterback who doesn’t have the commanding presence of Tebow. He was interrupted by a phone call from the quarterback’s namesake.
“You’re being silly,” the senior Brady said. When the host asked him whom he would rather have, Tebow or his son, he replied, “That’s a stupid question. But more important than being stupid on that point is the prior point you just made about Tom Brady telling the ball boys to put a pin in the ball. You have no evidence… you are full of crap.”
The elder Brady had a couple of things in his favor on this call. He was incensed, perfect for talk radio, and he understandably was well versed in the facts. While readership of the Wells Report was high in Boston, it certainly was not in San Francisco. Brady made a reference to the host’s deficiency as he answered a question about why the quarterback disposed of his phone. “If you read the Wells Report, which you probably didn’t, Wells said that Brady cooperated one hundred percent. The second thing that the Wells Report said was, ‘We don’t need your phone.’ If you don’t need somebody’s phone, what the heck do you care what happens to the phone?”
The tense conversation lasted for just a few minutes, but it lasted long enough for some cutting and honest commentary from the senior Brady. When Franklin began to say that he was merely offering analysis based on the “facts” from the NFL, Brady interrupted, “Wait a sec, wait a sec. Is that the same facts that Chris Mortensen put out, that all the balls were underinflated by two pounds? It’s all lies. It’s all ESPN. It’s all NFL propaganda. Don’t you get it? The only person who has testified under oath in this is Tom Brady. We know that Goodell has lied. He lied in the Ray Rice case. He lied in this case. He lied in the Peterson case. How many times do you need to know that this guy is a flaming liar?”
The exchange was coming to a close, and Brady had one more piece of advice for the host: “If you’re going to be on the radio, know the facts.” The NFL, the most powerful sports brand on its continent, had the resources and the operatives to create its own facts. How many Franklins were out there on the radio, reciting the league’s version of the Brady Chronicles, without a Tom Brady Sr. to edit and check them?
One week after Judge Berman’s ruling, the Steelers were in Foxboro and Goodell was not. The 2014 championship banner was unfurled and the sellout crowd could finally let go after an entire offseason of holding its breath. At times they sarcastically chanted for the commissioner, who has a summer home in Maine. “Where is Roger?” they teased as they reveled in the return of Brady. Pittsburgh would have to be the first team to pay for the stressful offseason and the contentious NFL leadership. So much for Brady and the preoccupations of his training camp. He completed twenty-five of thirty-two passes for 288 yards and four touchdowns. He looked the same, and so did the Patriots. They won again, 28–21. Once again, they also had to defend themselves postgame.
Pittsburgh coach Mike Tomlin revealed in his press conference that at times his headset wasn’t functional. When he expected to hear his coaches, he instead heard a familiar accent saying pro-Patriot things. Former Patriots quarterback Scott Zolak, who grew up twenty miles from Pittsburgh, was now a New England analyst on the Patriots’ flagship radio station, WBZ-FM. The signals got crossed and Tomlin could hear the high-strung “Zo” and his Pittsburghese, talking about the prowess of Brady.
It was strange. Tomlin was asked postgame if his headset went out. “That’s always the case,” he answered. A reporter sought clarification and wanted to know if that was always the case at Gillette Stadium. “Yes,” the coach replied. He was asked exactly what happened and he said, “We were listening to the Patriots’ radio broadcast for the majority of the first half on our headsets.” The implication was that the Patriots did this to them, although the league pointed out that it was in control of the headsets. The problem was due to an electrical issue, made worse by the weather.
Living as a perpetual suspect. That’s what it meant to be a Patriot in 2015. Tomlin’s complaint had a way of bringing everyone back to the street penalties of a scandal. The NFL’s accounting department had already logged the $1 million air-pressure fine, and those 2016 and 2017 draft picks had evaporated into a computer program. Within weeks, Jim McNally and John Jastremski would be allowed to return to Foxboro and work for the team again, albeit with different job titles. But on the ground level, there was something folks were always trying to pin on you. There were always logic-defying tales from the underground, untold stories, conspiracies, plots.
It wasn’t just Tomlin. ESPN and Sports Illustrated had both published stories about the illicit ways of the Patriots. They talked about videotaping, but also mentioned interns who were instructed to sweep trash cans and locker rooms for opponents’ scouting reports and game plans. One story suggested that the Patriots offered warm sports drinks. Another one said that the stiffness and overzealousness of the air-pressure penalty was due to a leaguewide view that the Patriots had skated too easily with Spygate. For fans who tried to understand how a team could be so competitive year in and out, they’d believe anything. Why not? If the Patriots would take the time to train their cameras on other coaches… perhaps… possibly… maybe…
Just one game into the season, an unprompted Belichick used a conference call to defend his system, past, present, and near future. He had turned sixty-three in the spring, and his statement years earlier was that he wouldn’t be coaching pro football well into his seventies. He was still at the top of his game, and so was Brady. The assumption a decade ago was that maybe burnout would get to the coach and age would slow down the quarterback. But those maladies weren’t wearing on either of them. The innuendo and tragicomic investigations were burdensome.
“I just think overall it’s kind of sad, really, to see some stories written that obviously have an agenda to them with misinformation and anonymous-type comments. Writing about warm drinks and trash cans, stuff like that, it’s just, I think it’s a sad commentary. It’s gone to a pretty low level; it’s sunk pretty deep.”
Ten years ago, he wasn’t always willing to look back. There was so much work to be done and a feeling that so much more could be accomplished. They had won three out of the previous four championships and all aspects of the organization were healthy. The quarterback was in his prime, the franchise vaults were lined with extra draft picks, and the same word could be used for the salary cap and the reputation of the Patriots: clean.
For the current Patriots, games just aren’t questioned; plays, legal plays, are questioned. Belichick watched the Titans and Lions run offensive sets with unusual formations, to varying results. He and Josh McDaniels studied it, tweaked it to their needs, and brought it out for the play-off win over the Ravens. John Harbaugh claimed that no one in the league had done it before, although it happened twice already that season. The league apparently believed him and the rule was changed in the offseason.
Change is inevitable and necessary. Sometimes it is also messy and infuriating. On this day, Belichick doesn’t mind looking back and thinking of some of those men who kept making those great plays, seemingly on demand. All of the guys who came in early to the meetings and took notes. The guys who refused to be idle during down moments in practice. There were so many great professionals, too many to name.
“This organization has won a lot of games, but particularly in reference to the great teams from ’01, ’03, ’04, back in there, and all the great players that played on those teams, to take away from what those guys accomplished, what those teams accomplished, how good they were, how many great players we had, how well they played in big games, how they consistently showed up and made big plays, game-winning plays, it’s just not right. I’m not going to get into a back-and-forth on it, but that’s how I feel about it.”
A lot of those guys are still applying the lessons that they learned from one another and Belichick, bringing their football concepts to the mainstream American workforce. In Indianapolis, former linebacker Rosevelt Colvin runs a UPS store. He hears himself being Patriot-like when he manages people and makes hiring decisions. His typical interview questions make it clear what he’s looking for: Do you have transportation? Does your voice mail work? Are you a drama person? If you wake up at nine and the store opens at nine, what’s the first thing you do? If you take a shower, we open thirty minutes late; come right in and we’re only ten minutes behind.
All over the country, Ty Law is running Launch, his trampoline-experience business, like an NFL team. When he played, he noticed that fans didn’t just like football. They liked the pre- and postgame traditions, the smell of burgers and chicken during tailgates, Frisbees and cornhole in the parking lot three hours before kickoff. He designed Launch the same way. “It ain’t just the jumping,” he says. “You’ve got to have a certain energy, a certain experience. The jumping is just a by-product.” After many battles with Belichick over contracts, Law is the economist now. He and Magic Johnson sat down for hours discussing business principles. Now Law frequently goes to his phone for the app that provides up-to-the-second financial reports from his ten Launch locations in Massachusetts, Florida, Connecticut, and North Carolina.
Tedy Bruschi, Roman Phifer, Matt Cassel, and many others still keep in touch with a free-flowing and often irreverent group text. They can all comment on the familiar Patriot on TV, Bruschi. They probably have no idea how much preparation he puts into work with his new team, at ESPN. He has multiple TVs in his home office and spends half of the week watching and taking notes on every game in the league. He’s mastered the ESPN video system and sometimes helps new production assistants efficiently find film. He e-mails producers with segment ideas, complete with captions and graphics they can use.
Being a Patriot means that the lessons are always in you, even when you’ve been gone for a decade. Phifer still views the notebooks he kept and continues to be amazed by their depth and efficiency. A dozen years out of football, he still uses Belichick phrasing. “Bill always told us, ‘Know your personnel,’” he says. “You have to know when and why a change-of-pace running back is out there. What’s this tight end like to do? Know your personnel. I use it in everything. I can be talking to a friend of mine who’s complaining about a relationship. ‘Hey man, you’ve got to know your personnel…’”
If this season has a mission statement, Belichick has unintentionally defined it with his tribute to all the players who have provided a foundation for the 2015 Patriots. Every game is a defense of the system, today’s and yesterday’s. Every completed pass proof that Brady does it naturally.
Brady marched through the schedule, throwing touchdown passes and settling scores. There were those 28 points against the Steelers, followed by forty against the Bills, and 51 against the Jaguars. In an instant, 3-0. A squeezing of the Cowboys left them with 6 points and the Patriots with 30. The Colts, who started the air madness, were next in Indianapolis. Local bakeries had cakes with deflated football designs. There were re-creations of that night in Foxboro, when a conference championship game became an afterthought.
Many predicted that the Patriots would roll the Colts as they usually did. The Patriots did win, but there was nothing usual about it. The highlight of the night was a sloppily executed special-teams play in which the Colts tried to surprise the Patriots on fourth-and-three. If John Harbaugh wanted to see an illegal formation, this is what he was looking for: The Colts had nine players near the sideline and two, Colt Anderson and Griff Whalen, on the line of scrimmage. Whalen, a 195-pound receiver, was the center. Anderson, a 195-pound defensive back, was the quarterback. Several Patriots stood over the unprotected pair, almost daring them to run a play with no linemen and no chance to go anywhere. In one of the more bizarre decisions in NFL history, they did.
“What in the world?” Al Michaels wondered aloud to an NBC TV audience and his broadcast partner, Cris Collinsworth. “You tell me.”
The play led to a flag and penalty description from referee Tony Corrente that may have been a first as well: “Illegal formation. The whole right side of the line was not on the line of scrimmage…”
Tom Brady’s Revenge Tour was what some people called it. At home, New York, Miami, and Washington were taken care of. On the road, as time expired, Stephen Gostkowski made a field goal to beat the Giants by a point. The Bills, now coached by Rex Ryan, were beaten for the second time in the season, this time 20–13. The Revenge Tour had played ten dates and been perfect on them all. But this had begun as an odd year and now was carrying over to a disturbing season.
The Patriots were in Denver, which was without Peyton Manning. The annual Brady-Manning game was replaced by Brady–Brock Osweiler. Manning was on the sideline, unable to play due to both injuries and ineffectiveness. He still saw more of the field than most, and brought high-definition vision to things that defensive coordinators tried to camouflage. You weren’t going to fool Peyton. The problem for him was that his brain was his only remaining superior football asset. His arm strength was gone. Some throws couldn’t be made. There was real talk that he would be forced to retire at the end of the year.
Brady had other issues. His players were falling all around him, on offense and defense. The Patriots entered the Broncos game without Julian Edelman, Danny Amendola, and linebacker Jamie Collins. During the game another linebacker, Dont’a Hightower, left with an injury and, after a high Brady pass to the right side, it appeared that there was yet another serious injury. To Gronk. Brady clasped his own helmet when he saw Gronk writhing on the field. This was the Rx Revenge Tour: injuries popping up to cut the season short.
The game in Denver was lost, and so was the one the following week against the Eagles.
It’s humbling to observe how the world works, how a career can be celebrated, for the most part, with no critics or enemies around for miles and miles. And then, overnight, you’re a cheater. You’re a liar. The critics are at the front door, actually there, standing beside news trucks and behind cameras. They wield microphones, wanting to know what you know and when you knew it. They realize that they don’t have the legal power to arrest you, but their portrayals can imprison you for a long time, possibly forever.
As the Patriots were wrapping up their thirteenth division title with Belichick and Brady, Manning was being questioned about an Al Jazeera America report that suggested he was using an NFL-banned substance, human growth hormone, to extend his career. He called the story “garbage” and never backed down from that position. Most people in the media believed him, and said so. Most people in the media didn’t believe Brady, and continued to say that also.
Brady had heard his coach talk about distractions and uninformed opinions hundreds of times over the years. He’d heard the message presented to different audiences: a veteran and hungry Patriots team, looking to win its first title; an experienced, championship group trying to maintain its edge; a team in transition trying not to be overwhelmed by the dominance of past teams (Belichick had taken down some of the Super Bowl pictures in the building because he wanted his players to focus on the present).
What exactly they were now was hard to say. They had a recent championship and they had youth. They had health as well because the injury to Gronk wasn’t nearly as serious as it had appeared. They had the deferred scandal, the one that Brady would likely have to fight again in the spring. That would be in Manhattan as well, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. They also had a current scandal, a mini one by comparison.
Defensive end Chandler Jones, six days before a divisional play-off game with Kansas City, walked to a Foxboro police station and asked for help. It was a cold January morning in New England, yet the six-foot-five Jones was shirtless as he wandered toward the police station at 7:45 a.m. He wasn’t arrested but instead was taken to a local hospital for treatment. It was later reported that he had experimented with synthetic marijuana, much more dangerous than cannabis, and composed of psychoactive chemicals. Jones briefly chatted with the media leading up to the Chiefs game, vaguely apologizing for a stupid mistake.
What was this team? No one knew. The record said 12-4, the number two seed in the play-offs. The offensive line and the focus said something else. No one paid attention to either one after the Kansas City game because Brady had helped mask it all. He made quick decisions in the pocket, wasn’t sacked all day, and finished with over three hundred yards and a pair of touchdown passes. He and the Patriots were now ready for a couple of firsts and lasts. They were moving on to the conference championship game for the fifth consecutive season. That hadn’t been done since the Raiders pulled it off, a few months after Brady was born. The Patriots’ opponent for the conference title was the Broncos, led this time by Peyton Manning.
He was back, he was healthy, and he was realistic. This was going to be the last Brady-Manning game and he knew it. This wasn’t going to be like the others. He was going to be charged with staying out of the way so his defense could carry him to the Super Bowl. That had never been the story of a Brady-Manning game, ever. It played out that way precisely on this day, though.
It wasn’t a day for offense, as both quarterbacks struggled to get conversions on third downs. It was worse for the Patriots because they were on the road, and the home crowd made it difficult for Brady to alter his communication with the offensive line. As a result, the Broncos had a good idea when the ball was going to be snapped, and they sped past flat-footed linemen and were on Brady in an instant. The seventeenth and final Brady-Manning game lacked the artistic flourishes that many of the sixteen before it had. In the end, the Patriots made it competitive, despite their untrustworthy line, but they lost 20–18.
At midfield, Belichick and Manning embraced. The quarterback leaned down and said in Belichick’s left ear, “Hey, listen. This might be my last rodeo. So it sure has been a pleasure.” The coach in the gray hooded sweatshirt hugged Manning and said, “You’re a great competitor.”
A full year had passed since the previous championship game, against the Colts, and the Patriots’ offseason seemed to mirror the previous one, too. Last year, they waited to hear from Ted Wells. This year, they waited to hear from a three-judge panel that would determine if Brady’s record in Manhattan would be pushed to an overwhelming 2-0 or a suspension-worthy 1-1.
In between the wait, there were changes. Chandler Jones, aside from his Sunday morning issue at the Foxboro police station, was entering a contract year. The Patriots decided to trade him to Arizona, in exchange for a second-round pick and guard Jonathan Cooper. They moved on from receiver Brandon LaFell and brought in Chris Hogan, from divisional rival Buffalo, and veteran Nate Washington. There was a complementary tight end swap, too: Scott Chandler, who was disappointing, left and Martellus Bennett arrived via trade. Defensive end Chris Long, son of Hall of Fame lineman Howie Long, was signed as well.
The point in 2016 was the same as it was in 2015, and 2014, and 2013… all the way back to Belichick’s first draft class when he told the skinny quarterback, Brady, to make sure the rookies knew what the hell they were supposed to be doing. This game is fast, baby. Sit around too long and the next trend, the next great talent, the next rule change, will make you suddenly irrelevant. Adapt or be consumed. That is true in all aspects of the game, whether it is the young men who play it, the older ones who coach it, or the lawyers and marketers and accountants who run it. Or, in some cases, such as Tom Brady versus the NFL, the jurists who officiate it.
On a solemn April morning in New England, seven months after Judge Berman’s words had sparked a regional party, the news came from New York. Brady had lost this one. Two judges, Barrington Daniels Parker Jr. and Denny Chin, said that Roger Goodell had properly used his “broad discretion” as commissioner and had exercised fundamental fairness as stipulated by the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Another judge, Robert Katzmann, the chief, disagreed. The four-game suspension was back on. Those who weren’t paying attention wondered what Brady would do next.
He is a New Englander now, no “honorary” required as a preface. The area claimed him after the first title, swore him in for life after the second or third, became sisters and brothers prepared to fight for his reputation after the fourth. They would never back down if he didn’t, and if he chose to keep going, since he previously had no experience backing down, the games would continue.
One game had him in tailored suits and expensive watches that he endorsed, competing against men who went to school for this, guys who never lofted MVP trophies but instead have “JD” and “Esq.” after their names. If there’d been a path that allowed him to go all the way to victory in the Supreme Court, unlikely as that might have been, he’d have taken it. But even Tom Brady knows that you can’t win ’em all.
The other game is the one that he and Belichick have been engrossed by, together, for sixteen years. They are the two anomalies in this system, all things around them spinning and changing as they remain the same. Two adaptable personalities, built for any era. They came into New England and stood behind other franchises and their personalities. They’ve seen dozens of them come and go, would-be coaching stars like Rick Pitino and actual ones like Doc Rivers and Claude Julien and Terry Francona. They’ve seen superstars drop in and exit, often amicably and sometimes angrily. They were here before Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen and after them. They were entertained by Manny Ramirez, Pedro Martinez, Curt Schilling, Nomar Garciaparra. All of them gone now, talking about the game or coaching it.
For Belichick, sometimes the offseason coaching moves are reminders of wisdom and youth. All in one hire. Way back when he took the job, in 2000, it wasn’t unusual to see his sons in his office. The older one, Steve, was twelve then. He’d ask questions and Belichick would give him answers. Sometimes he’d just watch. Steve eventually went to Rutgers to play football and lacrosse. Then he became a Patriots coaching assistant, a low man in the apprentice program. Now, at twenty-nine, he’ll be the safeties coach on his father’s staff. Naturally, there will be a story about the son taking over the family business for his father, who is sixty-four. It’s not likely, for many reasons, the best one being obsession. Still. Belichick loves the job, and everything that goes with it, far too much to just walk away.
Belichick has had the same job description and mostly the same office for sixteen years. In that time, he’s seen eighteen different Boston head coaches and managers. That’s the side of “do your job” that is assumed and rarely spoken: Do that job superbly and quickly, because eventually there will be an owner, a player, a media posse, even a scandal or two, that will get you fired.
Belichick and Brady have won, at historic levels, and the system says that’s not supposed to be. It is rich and big and tyrannical, this system. But it can be beaten with talent and smarts. And a willingness to fight.