Their names were linked together for a decade at the Giants, and then later, over a span of some two decades, with New England and the Jets: Parcells and Belichick. The Bills, they were called, and those on the outside presumed they were good friends, which they were not. They were close associates who worked extremely well together for a common cause; their skills and talents blended uncommonly well, and, in the beginning at least, each needed the other. Both of them were very smart, but they were far too different in style and manner to really be friends. Parcells was physically bigger, and he seemed much more like what a football coach should be. If a stranger who knew almost nothing about football went into a room of twenty men and was told to pick out the one who was a football coach, it was an almost sure thing that he would pick Parcells. He was volatile and wore his emotions close to the surface. He found that it worked for him, that he could use his emotions as an instrument of coaching. He had a sharp, sardonic wit and a very considerable skill with words; he could taunt a player, sometimes with cruel humor, and in the one-way coach-to-player relationship, the player dared not answer back. Even his very best players and his assistant coaches feared his tongue. He knew the game and had a very good feel for the game and for the mood of his team, but he was never an Xs and Os man, like his junior partner.
No one in that era, it seemed, was better at challenging his players to reach for more, and Parcells had the rare ability to make it seem like a question of their very manhood. His great edge as a coach came from getting into the heads of his players. Starting in the mid-eighties and -nineties, he became the lineal descendant of Vince Lombardi, coaching as Lombardi might have, with a great hold on the emotions of his players, and doing it in an era that was far less congenial to such techniques than when Lombardi had ruled the coaching world. After all, once, when one player had sent his agent in to negotiate a better contract with Lombardi, the coach had simply picked up the phone and traded the player to another team. That kind of unchallenged authority no longer existed, not in an age of agents and free agency. Parcells’s manner seemed to shout that he was a tough guy, that he was not to be crossed, and that those who failed him failed because they were too soft. He could be quite sophisticated when he wanted to be, but he cultivated the public image—and it was not a badly contrived image—as the prototype of the blue-collar, local guy, a man of old-fashioned loyalties and simple tastes, meat and potatoes, and maybe a draft beer at the neighborhood bar. He came across as someone who might well have been driving a truck had he not just by chance found his calling as a football coach. In that incarnation he was very simply a Jersey Guy.
Belichick was very different. He was driven by his brain power, and by his fascination with the challenge that professional football represented to the mind of the coach as well as the bodies of the players. He could not lightly shed Andover and Wesleyan; nor did he try to. He was much less skilled than Parcells at reaching his players emotionally and thereby challenging them to do more. This never came naturally to him; it was not who he was. In addition he thought it was the wrong way to go, that it was too short-range, and that in the end you could only go to that emotional well so often, and then it went dry. What did fit his personality was the sum of his knowledge, being the best-prepared coach on the field. Players would do what he asked not because he was their pal, but because he could help them win and they came to believe in his abilities. If Bill Parcells’s strength came from being the coach who believed that everyone had a button to push, and that he was the man who knew how to push each and every button, then Bill Belichick’s strength was to be the coach as the ultimate rational man, surrounding himself with players who wanted to learn his system, who would buy in because his skills always prepared them so superbly.
In the beginning Parcells’s and Belichick’s relationship was a mutually advantageous one, and both men knew it. Each had strengths the other lacked, and they made a formidable combination in that first decade—Parcells, the head coach, the motivator, a man putting together a team of excellent assistants, of whom certainly the most talented was Belichick, who started as a linebacker coach and in time became the defensive coordinator. Building on what Ray Perkins had started, Parcells began to turn the Giants’ program around, and by the middle of the decade they were once again a feared team. Anyone who played them had to pay a price, and even if you won, the victory tended to be Pyrrhic. They played in the NFC East, where the football was not always fancy, and at a time when the Redskins, Eagles, Cowboys, and Giants competed for hegemony. It was very physical football, with plenty of outdoor games late in the season in what would surely be cold, windy, perhaps even snowy weather. Both of them, Parcells and Belichick, coached through their defense. They did not want to put their defense in a bad situation, and they did not want to wear it out. They did not like to go three and out—that is, three plays, no first down, and have to kick. They preferred to grind out first downs and wear the opposing defense down. When Parcells got the team in late 1982, he told Belichick that he wanted him to be the defensive coordinator the next year, but that he was not going to give him the title yet, because he did not want to put too much pressure on him. So at first there was no defensive coordinator, although Belichick handled the defensive team meetings.
As Parcells and Belichick were never destined to be real pals, the Parcells regime made genuine friendship difficult. It was always an edgy place, deliberately so. There were always going to be zingers, one-way zingers, for in the Parcells world, the head man zinged but others did not zing back. Many of the zingers were aimed at the better players, in order to show that there were no immunities; there were plenty of jabs at Phil Simms and Jeff Hostetler, the quarterbacks, just to let all the players know that no one was safe from Parcells’s tongue. (“I have nothing but great things to say about the man as a coach,” Hostetler once told Bill Gutman, who wrote a biography of Parcells, “but I didn’t enjoy a minute of my time around him. I know that sounds strange, but that’s how it is when you’re around Bill Parcells.”) In the same way, Parcells often used his sarcasm against some of his better assistant coaches, perhaps because he knew they were the ones who could take it. To be successful, an assistant had to be able to stand up to the head coach, and the good ones did, though that did not mean they liked the ground rules, the kind of hazing that went with the job.
The rules were very simple. There was one head coach, and that was Bill Parcells, and he gave all the interviews and met with the press, and unless otherwise instructed, the other coaches worked in semi-anonymity. That did not mean that serious fans, those watching the Giants as they began to emerge into greatness, did not understand that there was, hidden away there, an exceptional young assistant coach named Belichick, his emotionless face, on occasion, flashing across the television screen, and the network announcers would sometimes make references to Bill Belichick’s extremely creative defenses.
Bill Parcells’s journey to the Giants job had been a long and hard one, harder than that of Bill Belichick, because Belichick had started out with the connections that came through his father. Parcells grew up in New Jersey, a good if not especially great high school player, went off to Colgate, a very good small college, but one with a smalltime program, not that different, in fact, from Wesleyan. He soon decided it was too small a football platform and transferred to Wichita State, where he played linebacker and was picked in the seventh round by the Detroit Lions. He went to their camp, but lasted only two weeks there; the players were already getting bigger and faster, and his future in football, if he wanted one—and he badly wanted one—would have to be as a coach, not a player. He needed a job—he was already married and the father of a daughter—but the doors of coaching did not open that readily for him. Luckily, one of the Wichita State assistant coaches had taken a job at Hastings College in Nebraska, and he offered Parcells a job as a defensive coach. It was 1964, and his salary was $1750 a year. Included among his duties was lining the field before practice, he later said, and washing the uniforms afterward. He and his wife and baby daughter lived in a small one-bedroom apartment above a dentist’s office for $62.50 a month. He coached there for a year and then went back to Wichita State as a defensive line and linebackers coach. Hastings, in the coaching world, had been a step down, and this was a step back up. He spent two years coaching at Wichita, and then the head coach was fired, and he was out of a job. This time his luck was a little better. His high school coach, Tom Cahill, was coaching at West Point by then—so, finally, in terms of the larger coaching fraternity, there was a connection and a break, and in 1967 he went to Army.
He spent three years at West Point, critical years for a young coach, for they were when you looked to establish more connections, tried to meet more people, tried to find out who was on the ascent and who had the feel of a winner. From West Point, he went to Florida State, where Steve Sloan, a former Alabama quarterback, was already marked as one of the rising talents, coaching on the offensive side of the ball. Sloan liked Parcells. He thought he had an unusually good way with the players; his style was an interesting combination of being gruff and yet oddly human.
Sloan went from Florida State to Georgia Tech, where he did well, and when word began to get around that he might be offered the head coaching job at Vanderbilt, Parcells called and said he would like to come along. In fact, Sloan had already penciled him in as his first choice to become defensive coordinator. In 1973 the Vanderbilt job came through. At Vanderbilt, Sloan and Parcells did well enough to go to one Bowl game, the Peach Bowl, but the problems that had bedeviled Bill Edwards and Steve Belichick twenty years earlier were now greater than ever, as the SEC had become quite possibly the toughest conference in the country. They were soon both frustrated there, and Sloan wanted out. He took a job at Texas Tech, the team he had tied in the Peach Bowl. Sloan again offered Parcells the job as his top defensive assistant, but he also told the Vanderbilt officials that Parcells was the best person to succeed him. Vanderbilt thereupon offered Parcells the head coaching job. It was the ultimate coach’s dilemma. He was thirty-four, and like every young coach who had taken such a hard road, he dreamed of only one thing, of being a head coach. But he had also been fighting the Vanderbilt system for some time from the inside, and he knew the only way to go was down. By this time Vanderbilt simply could not compete on the SEC level. He could see season after season of 3–8 and 4–7 records just ahead. When they failed yet again, it was not the chancellor they would fire, but the coach. So he took the Texas Tech job instead. He did well at Texas Tech, and that was where he learned the uses of sarcasm and how to challenge the players. He liked to tell the story about a halftime speech he gave in one game when his defense was not playing well, and he had gone out into the hall and brought in one of those huge industrial garbage cans, and there, in front of his team, he had dumped the entire garbage can on the floor, telling them, “That’s all you are, you’re garbage.”
Three years later he was offered the Air Force Academy job. Since 1964, as Bill Gutman wrote, Parcells had been “a Bronco, a Shocker, a Cadet, a Seminole, a Commodore, and a Red Raider. Now he was about to become a Falcon.” More importantly, he was finally about to become a head coach. But he did not like coaching at Air Force. It took only three months for him to realize that he had made a mistake. In his first season there he was 4–7. The situation was not unlike the one at Vanderbilt. Any coach there had to struggle with tough academic entrance requirements and, in addition, accept the primacy of military rules—and the politics that went with them. But then in 1979, Ray Perkins, whom Parcells had once met through Sloan (the Alabama connection), asked him to become the linebacker coach in New York. That was his seventh job in fourteen years. No wonder that when the Giants called, Judy Parcells had no taste for moving yet again.
If Bill Belichick had done a serious apprenticeship, four years at a relatively low level in three different systems, it had not been that difficult. From the start he had been in the NFL, surrounded by mostly big-time assistants, experienced professionals who were going places, and living in big cities. By contrast, Parcells had been working for much of that time on the fringe, in tiny towns, not all of them easy for a Jersey Guy. As Parcells himself once wrote about Lubbock, Texas, where Texas Tech is located, the only thing you could do was “watch the wind blow [as you’re] wondering where the next city was exactly.” Coming to New York and New Jersey, then, was even sweeter for him than it was for Belichick.
If any coach had ever paid his dues on the way to getting the job he wanted, it was Bill Parcells. But his first year as head coach was hard; they went 3–12–1. Phil Simms, who they hoped would be the quarterback of the future, was injured once again; if anything the team seemed to be slipping. George Young, the Giants general manager, who had given Parcells the job, covertly offered it to his old friend Howard Schnellenberger, then in the process of coaching some great University of Miami teams. A decade earlier they had both been in Baltimore, where Schnellenberger was head coach and Young his offensive coordinator. Young never confirmed that he tried to replace Parcells, but there was no doubt that the offer had been made, and there was also no doubt, among the people who knew and liked Bill Parcells, that his personality seemed to change after that. He became, they believed, harder-edged, more cynical about it all, less trusting of anyone and everything. Here, after all, was the man who had hired him, barely giving him a chance, and, without talking to him, going out and looking for a successor. It was a reminder of how tenuous your job was in the world of coaching and that no matter how hard you had worked for it, they could and would take it all away so quickly. It was not a place for the tenderhearted.
There was a lesson there for Parcells: You had to take care of yourself—at the expense of others, if need be. If you had to be tougher on the players than you had been in the past, so be it. If you had to be tougher on your assistants, then so be it. Everyone, after all, was out to screw everyone else, and George Young had just proved it.
Parcells, with his own job in jeopardy, warned Bill Belichick that he might not be able to protect him, because he could not even protect himself. “George Young is trying to screw me, and we might all be gone,” Parcells said. “So if you want to go, and you get the right offer, you ought to go.” They had just had a terrible year, Belichick thought, and one more like that, and they would all have been gone for sure. Belichick had been asked to come out to Minnesota by his old friend Floyd Reese, who had taken a job as defensive coordinator and who offered him a job with the Vikings as a kind of deputy, handling the defensive backs. Les Steckel, a tough, hard-line kind of coach, was about to replace Bud Grant, who was considered to be one of the last of the laid-back coaches. Steckel was not in any way laid back, he was an ex-Marine and an Ironman competitor, and he was going to run a very different kind of team. Belichick had flown out and talked with Reese and Steckel, and the pay was very good for that period—$60,000 a year plus bonuses. He had come very close to taking the job, so close that it had even been announced on the local Minnesota television stations on the late night news.
But at the last minute he had pulled back. There were too many things that bothered him—a new head coach, a large part of the coaching staff left over from his predecessor, an uncertainty as to whether he would fit in well with the group other than with Reese. The next morning Reese came by to pick him up and Belichick said he couldn’t do it. For all the things that were wrong with the New York situation—the second-rate practice facilities, the uncertainty at the top—he was happier than he had realized back East, not at all sure of how well he would do in the Midwest. He liked the East Coast and had fallen in love with Nantucket, the island off Cape Cod, and hoped to build a house there. He was not sure he would fit in well under Steckel, who did not work out well in Minnesota and was gone in a year. But the very sense that he had a choice made him feel better, indeed liberated him. He was not locked into one venue, and he returned from Minnesota happier than when he had gone out, because he had chosen his job, and the job had not entirely chosen him. He also thought there was a good chance that the Giants’ situation would get better.
It did. If 1983 was a terrible year, then very quickly the program began to turn around: 9–7 in 1984, 10–6 in 1985, and then 14–2 in 1986. Parcells ran the Giants very well in those years. He was a smart football man and had a natural feel for the moods and needs of his players. Having coached in so many different places, he had a solid sense of how to put an organization together. If he was a lot tougher than some of the coaches the players had dealt with, he still gained in comparison with the unbending Perkins. Amid all of that, Parcells and Belichick would emerge as two of the League’s signature coaches of the era, both of them talented, both of them for a time content to work together in a partnership; it was fascinating, because it involved two very different human beings, each representing a very different side of football’s human equation—one primarily its emotions, the other primarily its strategy. But, caught in all that, was something that weighed on each man, as Parcells reached higher and higher plateaus of success (almost always with Belichick at his side). There was the question of whether Parcells could do it without his supremely gifted assistant—was he not merely dependent on Belichick, but perhaps too dependent on him? (Were Jersey guys ever dependent on anything or anyone else?) But a comparable question surrounded Belichick as he gained more and more recognition: whether he could do as well as a head coach—did he have what was then considered to be the right personality or did he have a charisma deficit? Was he the kind of man you wanted next to you in a foxhole?—a saying used almost always by men who had never been in foxholes about other men who had never been in foxholes either.
Parcells dealt with his assistants by challenging them, and the challenges often came in the form of second guesses. It was your job to answer the challenge, to defend your idea, but because of the way his advice was proffered, he was always the winner: If the play worked, everyone was a winner, and if it didn’t, then it was your fault, not his. “That blitz won’t work,” he might say to Belichick. “Do you want me to throw it out?” Belichick would respond. “No,” he would answer, “but it won’t work.”
Once they played Detroit when Barry Sanders was at the height of his game. Sanders was the most artistic of running backs, an absolute joy to watch, unless you were assigned to stop him; he was a runner with power and speed, and wonderful moves. No one in the game could hesitate and then move to full speed—often, it seemed, in a completely different direction—like Sanders. Belichick had prepared an unusual defense, one designed for Sanders’s speed and agility. It featured only two down linemen, four linebackers, and five defensive backs. In that sense, it was something of a forerunner of the defense he would eventually use, a few years later, against Marshall Faulk and the Rams. “What the hell is this?” asked Parcells, who always favored the three-four. “Well,” Belichick answered, “we’re up against a run and shoot, and we need as much speed in there as we can get.” Parcells did not agree. “Don’t you think we need to be more physical?” he asked. Belichick said no. Then Parcells slammed his fist down on the table. “Why the hell don’t you just put Stephen Baker in there—he’ll give you the speed,” he said, referring to a wide receiver who, at 155 pounds, was the smallest, lightest player on the team. From then on, whenever Belichick drew up a comparable defense, he would tell Parcells, “And we’re going to put Stephen Baker in on this particular defense....”
Parcells loved to create intrigue among his coaching staff. One of the things he would do was tell one coach what was bothering him about another coach, so that the message would be delivered, without it coming directly from the head coach. He also, Belichick thought, had a shrewd way of putting the burden on the assistants; it was as if there was the general implication that everyone was always trying to screw him. Here in Belichick’s case he had given him these great line-backers, and all this freedom, and what was Belichick going to do with them? Was he maximizing their abilities? I’m giving them to you, and if you don’t lead the league in defense, then something’s wrong. So don’t screw it up, he seemed to be saying.
Sometimes he would get on Belichick during a game. For instance, if Belichick had put something extra in on the defense, an extra wrinkle or variation, he would hear, “What the hell was that? That wasn’t in the game plan. That was dumb as shit.” Later, he might apologize—he hadn’t really meant it, he wasn’t really like that, they were all a team here. It was a complicated relationship with benefits for both men, and yet with feelings that were never entirely reconciled. It probably, as these things do, tended to work better and more harmoniously when they were all on the ascent, when everything was yet to be achieved, than when they reached the higher plateaus, when the scrutiny of the media and public became infinitely greater and the rewards for the success were to be divvied up. The egos of everyone tended to be suppressed on the ascent—subservient to the great task ahead, when a team begins to win—and much more of a problem once a championship had been attained. In truth, Parcells did give Belichick magnificent players and essentially a free hand to use them as he wanted. They had poured most of their top draft choices into defense rather than offense, and they had put together a great defense, a good if not dominant front three (or four, or even two), a good if patched secondary, and a great, essentially world-class group of linebackers. A good many talented men make their way through the portals of the NFL as defensive coaches without the good fortune to handle such extraordinary players. They would form the critical core of two Super Bowl championship teams and make the Giants, for much of the eighties, a joy to watch, not merely for its own regional fans, but also for any football fans who liked the tempo of a game to be set by the pure physicality and intelligence of the defense. There was no doubt that this was a marvelous opportunity for Belichick.
When Belichick arrived to help coach the Giants, his old friend Ernie Adams was on a very different kind of coaching track. Quite content to be a sort of resident intellectual and theoretician of the staff, he was immediately aware of the changes that had taken place in his friend during the four-year apprenticeship. He had already put it all together, Adams thought. He might have a preference to coach the defense, but he understood what was happening with the offense equally well. What was wonderful about his apprenticeship, Belichick would say, was that he had been given so many different jobs and forced to learn things that he might not have bothered to learn otherwise. When he first got together with Adams on the Giants, the two of them would often run laps around the field after practice, and he would tell Adams that he did not understand how some of the other coaches in the League had decided they were only going to understand one side of the ball—offensive specialists who did not master the defensive side, and defensive coaches who seemed to have equally little interest in the offense. That absolutely amazed him. He had made it his business to know both.
That totality of his knowledge, the great depth of it, would manifest itself, Adams came to believe, in his being so good a game coach; he excelled not just in preparation before a game, but also while the game was actually going on. He was much more analytical than most other coaches, and he never lost that analytical ability, not even in the most tense moments of a game. Knowledge about both teams was stored away and ready to be used at all times. With the Giants he was already very good at doing his game plan in the days before a game, but what was even more remarkable, Adams believed, was that during the game, as the other team began to make its adjustments against his defenses and began to enjoy a greater measure of success, he was just as good. With the game on the line and thousands of people screaming away, often in hostile venues, Belichick did not lose his cool; he could always somehow manage to step back and take a cold look at what the other team was doing and what his own team had tried, and then figure out what he needed to do in terms of instant adjustments. That, Adams believed, became a kind of Belichick trademark: the ability to adapt his game plan even as the game was being played out, and not to be sucked in by the emotions of it, or to be a prisoner of what he had decided to do beforehand. In Adams’s words, that was “the rarest kind of ability—the ability to see the game as if it were over, even as it was being played out.” It would not do very much good, Belichick would often say, to do a brilliant analysis on Monday.
All of that, Adams believed, came together in his other trademark: He was an outstanding situational coach, a man who could get his team to adapt week after week in order to respond to the strengths and weaknesses of any particular team they would be playing. Most of the other teams were much more predictable; each Sunday the same team with essentially the same defense would show up. But his teams were always a bit different, always adapting to the needs of that week and that particular opposition. This was never more in evidence than during the extraordinary run the Patriots made during the 2004 playoffs, as they defeated the Colts, the Steelers, and finally the Eagles—three very exceptional and very different teams—with a dazzling display of defensive artistry, but different artistry each week. What was particularly interesting, Adams believed, was that Belichick already had much of that ability when he joined the Giants in 1979; it was just a matter of letting it flower.
Adams had always known where Belichick intended to go, how successful he wanted to be, and by 1979 he believed that his friend had already reached the point where all his talents were in play, and that others soon would see it as well. What Belichick had felt somewhat tentatively four years earlier when he had first arrived in Baltimore had crystallized into a hard-edged confidence. Then he had needed, at least in his own mind, to prove to himself and to the players that he could coach them, that he had the ability to get them to do the things they were supposed to do. For four years he had been in the process of becoming the Bill Belichick of the NFL who would finally surface in the media: serious, ultra-studious, not much downtime, and not much laughter there. He did not have a light touch, especially with the general public; he was there to know the answers, often before the players had the questions. That persona—the Belichick who had never been young—was one he had either created for the NFL or had evolved because of the game’s needs. Part of the design was more or less deliberate, and part of it was who he was. For when he had first entered the League, he had been a young man teaching older men, and he had needed to prove to them he was an authority figure. Thus, he believed, he had been forced to be more aloof and more authoritarian than most coaches or teachers working their first jobs. In physical terms he was not imposing, so he would have to make up for it by dint of willpower. A stern game face did not hurt. But it was also how he was most comfortable—being serious and completely disciplined. That did not mean he was not close to other coaches his own age and did not socialize with them, but it meant that the more human Belichick, the Belichick who laughed and relaxed, was someone his players could only wonder about.
He was not one of the League’s hard-ass coaches, one of those men who deliberately came up with rules almost for the sake of rules, as if the more rules there were, the stronger the hierarchy. But he was tough, and he always knew what point he wanted to make. Pepper Johnson, the linebacker who was drafted out of Ohio State in 1986 and who became one of his favorite players, remembered the difficulty of dealing with him when Johnson was a rookie. Once there was a preseason rookie scrimmage against the Cleveland Browns, in which the Giants were on defense and the Browns were driving, getting five yards per carry on each play. One of the reasons for their success—and it seemed to be an afternoon given over to a successful Cleveland running game—was that the Giants had the wrong defense in there, a defense especially designed to stop the pass.
As the afternoon went on, Johnson, who was calling defensive signals, kept looking over to the sideline, where Belichick was standing, to let him know that they had to make an adjustment, so they could stop the run. It seemed as if Belichick was intentionally looking away. Finally, Johnson did catch his eye, and the coach’s face seemed to be framed in anger; that anger seemed to be directed, as best Johnson could tell, at him personally, as if all of this were Pepper Johnson’s fault, because he was the highest draft choice on the field. Finally, the Giants made the defensive stop. As they came to the sidelines, totally exhausted, they expected to hear some words of praise. Not on this day, for on this day a lesson was being taught. Suddenly, Belichick’s voice seemed to lash out at them: You’re with the New York Giants now! I don’t care what you did in college. I don’t care whether you were All-American! (That zinger was aimed directly at Johnson, who had made some All-American teams.) Here you stop the run! I do not care what defense you’re caught in! You stop the run! They don’t run against us! They never run against the Giants! And they never, never run against us up the middle! If we can’t stop them any other way, we stop them with pure physical ability!
And that, thought Johnson, was the lesson for today and for every day as long as they played for the Giants: You began with a physical game, and you stopped the run first and foremost.
Much of the Giants’ sustained success was attributable to their greatest player, Lawrence Taylor, who was also quite possibly the best defensive player in the League in that era. They had drafted Taylor from North Carolina in 1981, and he joined the talented Harry Carson as a linebacker. It was the beginning of something very special. In 1984, the Giants added Carl Banks, a great linebacker from Michigan State, and then, in 1986, Pepper Johnson from Ohio State. With that, and with Gary Reasons, the Giants had one of the most exceptional groups of linebackers in pro football history, and the core defensive team that would help to win two Super Bowls.
All four were different, Belichick thought. Taylor was the kind of player you got once in a lifetime, unbelievably strong and quick, with astonishing instincts for the game and for the ball. Parcells, Belichick thought, wanted to hold Taylor out a bit as a rookie, but Belichick told Perkins that Taylor had to be on the field, and he got permission to use Taylor from the start on special teams. He just splattered opposing players, and soon the coaches began to enjoy watching the film of the special teams, watching certain opposing players deliberately try to get out of Taylor’s way—if need be, slipping a little to the other side of the field as he approached. Taylor was one of the smartest players Belichick had ever coached; he not only knew his own role, but the role of every other player on the defense. When Belichick gave the linebackers tests, Taylor was always the first to finish; the others needed to study hard the night before, but he never did. He was also stronger than almost anyone else on the team. He weighed about 250 pounds, but he could power rush better than players fifty pounds heavier. His power resided mostly in his lower body, from his knees to his butt, and his thighs, in particular, were so powerful that he was incredibly explosive. No tight end in the League could really handle him. “I’d watch him, and it was fascinating,” Belichick said years later. “He’d be fighting off the tight end with one hand, checking out the way the play was going, and then he would make his move, and it always seemed so easy for him.”
Taylor’s feel for a given game, Belichick thought, was just phenomenal, and it gave him the rare ability to lift his teammates, and if they were playing at home, the crowd, as well. He did not always go all out, at one hundred miles an hour, Belichick thought, but he had a great feel for the hinge plays—that is, the plays on which the game turned—and he would rise to them. When the other team was moving the ball late in a game, if he was not that keyed to second and eight, “then when it was third and four, he was a lion.” There were days when he simply soared above the level of everyone else on the field, and he would not let anything interfere—and days when he played and played brilliantly when any other player would have sat it out. There had been a day in practice—Belichick thought it was during the 1986 season—when he had rolled his ankle in practice and everyone was sure he would be out for one or two weeks, the ankle was a truly gruesome sight. So on his own, without telling the coaches, he went to a nearby racetrack and somehow managed to find someone there who was an expert in horse medicine, who had some kind of pill—a horse pill—and he took it and played well. Belichick had been told about the pill later, and absolutely believed the story. They could motivate him by saying someone was better than he. In the 1981 draft George Rogers had been taken ahead of him, so when they were going to play New Orleans, Belichick, in the defense team meetings, would talk about what a great runner Rogers was, how powerful he was, how hard to stop, knowing it was like throwing gasoline on a fire. He did the same when they played Tampa Bay, talking about what a great defensive lineman Hugh Green was, taken number seven in the country, five places after Taylor, and he lovingly showed film that highlighted Green’s best plays. “Look what Green did there—now that’s a great play,” he would say, until Taylor would shout out that if they liked the fucking guy so much, they should have drafted him.
Banks was different, a tough player with exceptional technique and, like Taylor, a great team player. He always understood that what he was doing demanded sacrificing for the team, so that, more often than not, Taylor could be showcased. At first, Banks was not that strong in pass coverage, but he worked at it, and he became better every year. Because Banks was so good, the defenses could not load up against Taylor, as they might have otherwise. If he did not have the pure physical ability of Taylor—and no one did—he made up for it by working harder. At the end of a game, his teammates knew, he would have left everything he had on the field. In those days the Giants also had Mark Bavaro, who was quite possibly the best tight end in the League, or certainly one of the two or three best ones, and Steve Belichick, who occasionally dropped by the practices, noticed that Parcells never became so animated and interested as when they were doing drills that pitted Banks against Bavaro. It was great fun to watch for everyone, the best against the best.
Harry Carson had been there before the others, and he had suffered through many bad years, a fine football player waiting for the rest of the team to catch up with him. He was a man of uncommon integrity, as good a man, those around him believed, as he was a football player. Greatly respected by his teammates for his willingness to accept responsibility, he was the son of a railroad worker and a domestic. He burned with the belief that he had not gotten the respect and acclaim that should properly have been his, because he had gone to a predominantly black college, South Carolina State, in an era when black athletes no longer had to do that. Thus, there had been a not-so-subtle downgrading of his career. He was taken by the Giants in the fourth round of the 1976 draft—and had he played for a white college, he might have gone much higher. That made him the kind of man, Belichick thought, who always had a little more to prove and always managed to prove it, a man with a chip on his shoulder, albeit a good chip. All those losing years in New York had been very hard on him. He had once tried to give back a week’s salary because he felt he had not played well, and a few years later, when Ray Perkins arrived, he tried to quit, because the team had started the 1980 season 1–5. Only the combination of Perkins and Willie Jeffries, his college coach, managed to talk him into staying.
He was, Belichick thought, a very good athlete, not quite as fast as Taylor, but very strong, a player who might seem faster than he was because he made such quick reads. His body was a little different from the others; he had shorter legs, a long torso, and thus a lower center of gravity. But, with Carson, so much of it was about instincts, almost beyond what a coach could teach him. “I would ask him,” Belichick once said, “Harry, how did you know that was the trap and not the trap pass, because they look exactly alike.” He couldn’t really explain it, Belichick remembered, but it had something to do with the tempo of the play.
Pepper Johnson came later to the group, but he ended up staying with Belichick for much of his career, and in 2005 was still working for him as a coach. Johnson was quick—he had longer legs, and a shorter torso than Carson—and he was good on pass coverage. He was a very smart, almost bubbly player, who got on well with his teammates.
Suddenly it was as if Belichick had nothing less than the best job in professional football; he was working with great players who had a wonderful sense of one another, and there was wildly intense competition from other teams in the NFL—most notably from the Eagles, the Cowboys, and the Redskins, and eventually, at playoff time, from the Forty-Niners. Every game was a challenge, but a challenge you went into with confidence. He was in his mid-thirties when that run began and he was very aware of his good fortune the entire time, that something like this might not happen again, that it was best to take the pleasure from it while it was there. He could not believe his good luck in his choice of professions. It was almost a decade since he had first entered the League, and getting to work each morning was still thrilling.
In 1986 the Giants finally made it to the Super Bowl, which was always the main objective. “In this league the only thing that matters is the jewelry,” as Parcells once said, referring to Super Bowl rings. The road to the Super Bowl in those days was a great deal harder in the National Conference than in the American Conference, because of the sheer physicality of the dominant teams. That year the Giants manhandled San Francisco in a playoff game, 49–3. Just before that game, Parcells had walked into the offensive line meeting and asked, “Is this the meeting of Club 13?” What was Club 13? one of the linemen wanted to know. The number of yards the Giants had been able to get on the ground against San Francisco the last time they had played, he answered—thirteen yards on nineteen rushing plays. They could, he added, have gained more yards just calling nineteen quarterback sneaks.
Then they played Washington in the Conference championship game. If anything, some of the New York coaches thought, the real championship game that season was not the Super Bowl, but the conference title game against the Redskins. The Redskins were very good that year, but because the Giants had been better during the regular season, beating them twice, the game was at Giants Stadium. The Washington games in those years were small wars, a great traditional rivalry upgraded in its modern incarnation because both teams were very good and played exceptional defense. The thing that Belichick knew was that the Redskins were a very different team if you were ahead of them in the second half, than if they had the lead. For a variety of reasons they were not nearly as good a team at coming from behind. He had forgotten the precise statistic, but it was something like twenty-six wins and one defeat when they entered the fourth quarter with a lead back then. They were primarily a running team, and when Jay Schroeder passed, it was often a play action pass, that is, a pass disguised within a seeming run formation. At the same time they had a ferocious pass rush, with two of the best rushers in the league, Dexter Manley and Charles Mann, and thus their ability to put pressure on your passer—if you were behind—was lethal.
It was perfect, late-season weather—in a reverse sense: very cold, with winds up to thirty-five miles an hour, the kind of weather that mandated the kind of defense the Giants played so well. That day they just shut down the Redskins, leading 17–0 at halftime, and their defense permitted Washington nothing in the second half. The Redskins got off thirty-seven plays in the second half, thirty-four passes, two would-be passes that ended in sacks, and one run. The Giants’ Phil Simms, content to sit on his lead, had thrown the ball only twice during the entire second half. The most impressive statistic of all was what they had done to the Redskins on third and fourth downs: Washington was 0 for 14 on third down, and 0 for 4 on fourth down, which meant they were 0 for 18 on the biggest plays of any drive. The Redskins had won twenty-six games in a row in which they had gained one hundred yards on the ground. No coach, drawing up defensive assignments, could have expected them to be carried out so completely. That day, George Rogers, one of the best backs in the League, ran nine times for fifteen yards, and Kelvin Bryant did only a little better, carrying the ball six times for twenty-five yards. That was the day the players carried Bill Belichick off the field on their shoulders—something very rare for an assistant coach.
There were, Belichick thought, four or five moments in an entire coaching career when all the hard work was validated, and one of them had come after that game. It came not as he was being carried off the field by his defensive players, though that was sweet, but later in the locker room. There was jubilation in the locker room, not just because of the thrill of victory, but because now they were going to the Super Bowl. Carl Banks lay down in front of his locker, unable to join the celebration at first because he was so tired. For a moment Belichick was worried. “Carl, are you okay—is anything wrong?” he asked Banks. “No, I’m just totally exhausted,” Banks said, and Belichick thought to himself, what an extraordinary moment for a coach, to witness a great athlete who had played so hard and given so much right to the very last play that he could not join the celebration.
Based on that performance against so physical a Washington team, the Giants did not think Denver could stay with them. They simply did not believe the Broncos had comparable physical power. In the regular season they had played Denver in late November, and it had been, in the minds of the Giants coaches, a surprisingly close game. Raul Allegre had kicked four field goals, and George Martin, the big defensive end, had intercepted a pass and returned it, running it back seventy-eight yards, as Frank Litsky of the New York Times noted, as if in slow motion. The final score had been Giants, 19–16. John Elway had played well, completing twenty-nine of forty-seven passes for 336 yards, but there was a one-dimensional quality to the Denver offense at that point, which was made to order for someone like Belichick.
But the regular-season game had given the Broncos a sense that they might be physically close to the Giants. To Belichick the job was a relatively simple one, given that New York had such a significant physical advantage. The main job was to keep John Elway from scrambling, because if he got outside the pocket, he instantly became far more dangerous.
In the Super Bowl the Giants were able to do that with a reasonable amount of success. Belichick did not think that New York played that well in the first half. There were a couple of dumb penalties. But with Denver leading 10–7 and driving near the end of the half, with a chance to open an even larger lead, the Giants made a goal-line stand and Denver missed the field goal. Then, just before the half, George Martin sacked Elway in the end zone, and the score was 10–9.
At halftime Belichick told the defensive players that they were overreaching, trying to do too much, and that each player did not have to make every play; all they had to do was carry out their assignments, and it would work out. They were so keyed up, he thought, he needed to rein them in. And then in the second half they completely wore the Broncos down, scoring the first four times they touched the ball. Phil Simms had one of his great days, twenty-two of twenty-five when it was over, and they won Super Bowl XXI, 39–20.
The competition in the National Conference in those days was unsparing. Starting with the victory of the Forty-Niners in Super Bowl XIX, the Chicago Bears won once, the Giants twice, the Redskins twice, the Niners three more times, and the Cowboys, a new emerging dynasty, three times over a dozen years. The Eagles, an equally punishing team, seemed to be slotted in the bridesmaid role. Getting to the Super Bowl was difficult enough; repeating was much harder. Certainly, no one thought the Giants were easy to play, but it took four years for them to get back to the Super Bowl. Even then it was a hard go. They won their first ten games, then stumbled, and lost three of their last four games, including a tough, very physical one against San Francisco, 7–3. But then, when the playoffs started, Carl Banks finally returned from an injury and that significantly strengthened the defense. The National Conference Championship game, played in San Francisco, pitted the favored Niners (14–2 in the regular season, going in) against the Giants (13–3, going in). It promised to be uncommonly physical, featuring two great teams with superb defenses; one, the Niners, probably had the better offense. It was also a collision of two teams which, because of the competition, though they inhabited different coasts, knew each other very well. George Seifert had been an exceptional defensive coordinator, and he had been studying and admiring the handiwork of Belichick since the latter had coached the Giant special teams. To someone like Seifert, the talents and drive of the young man back east were obvious—great intensity, well above the norm, and exceptional originality. The defensive coverage that Belichick had created for the regular season game was infinitely more sophisticated than anything San Francisco had faced all season, and had kept the Niners off balance for much of the game. Thus before the game there had been a lot of talk among the San Francisco coaches about opening the game up more and taking the initiative more—not so much reacting to the Giant defensive set and not letting them dictate the play calling and the tempo, but making them react to the Niners offense, something they would find, during the game, easier said than done. To say that it was physical was an understatement—both quarterbacks were racked up that day, Jeff Hostetler, starting for the Giants on a hard hit by Jim Burt (though able to come back), and Montana, trying to elude Lawrence Taylor, creamed by George Martin on a clean hit from the blind side in the fourth quarter.
It had been a very close game, and the Giant defense had once again done an exceptionally good job of limiting Montana and making him throw short, taking away the things he wanted to do. Banks had pounded Jones all day long, and the corners had worked hard on slowing down the wide receivers. Montana would end the day completing eighteen of twenty-six passes, good for only (for him) 190 yards. There had been just one big offensive play, a 61-yard third-quarter pass from Montana to John Taylor, which had given San Francisco a 13–6 lead. That meant the other seventeen completions brought the Niners a total of only 129 yards. The first six Giant points had come from two Matt Bahr field goals.
As such the Giants had managed to keep it close, and they had added two more field goals. After Bahr’s fourth field goal, San Francisco led 13–12. The Niners got the ball back with only 5:47 left in the game. They seemed at that moment very much in control, moving down the field comfortably on a drive that appeared likely to give them not merely a critical field goal, and thus a decisive lead in a game that was so much about defense, but would allow them to hand the ball over to the Giants with precious little time left on the clock. “We were on the drive to ice the game,” Seifert said, “and everything was going exactly the way it should have gone.” They had reached the Giant 30-yard line. All they needed was one more first down, Seifert remembered. Then they called a running play, Roger Craig carrying the ball, part of the attempt to get the first down and burn the clock, when Erik Howard, the Giant nose tackle, broke through, smashed Craig hard in the midsection, and knocked the ball loose. Lawrence Taylor recovered it. It was, Seifert decided later, poor play calling on his part, a coaching mistake. It was too much of a finesse play, with the guard pulling, and when the guard had pulled it had meant that there was more in the way of opportunity for the defense to penetrate and a lot less protection for Craig when he was most vulnerable. The Giants had taken over the ball on their own 43 with 2:36 left, and they finally drove to the San Francisco 24, where, with four seconds left, Bahr kicked his fifth field goal for the two-point New York victory, 15–13. A kick that just barely made it through, Seifert remembered. That was something for the Giant defense to be proud of, two games in the same season against the great Montana, the most resourceful and agile quarterback of an era, a player who had always seemed able to outwit even the best defenses, 120 minutes against him and only two touchdowns and a total of 23 points given up. It had been two great defensive teams playing at a superlative level, one touchdown allowed in the entire game. Seifert was more impressed than ever by Belichick. As for himself, coaches live in a world where the possibilities for regret, even over just one play, are boundless, and George Seifert thought he had coached poorly not in that game, but for one play, and though he went on to a career of continued excellence, that decision on occasion gnawed at him, and sometimes when he was out on his boat fishing, fifteen years after the fact, he thought of the moment, under three minutes on the clock, and how he had failed to make the more conservative call, and they had lost the chance for the only three-peat in Super Bowl history. The victory gave the Giants the Conference championship and the right to play Buffalo in the Super Bowl in Tampa.
Buffalo was probably, Belichick thought, a better team than the Giants, with more weapons, because they were so good on offense. They were seemingly without weaknesses. On their way to the Super Bowl they had scored 44 points against Miami and then destroyed a good Raider team, 51–3. Buffalo was certainly the most explosive team the Giants had seen all season. Their offensive coordinator was Belichick’s old friend and first boss, Ted Marchibroda. No one did the offensive part of the game better in that era than Marchibroda, unless it was Bill Walsh. A year earlier Marchibroda had invented what was called the no-huddle offense: Designed for maximum speed, it was supposed to confuse the defense, to keep it from being set and prepared, and finally to exhaust it. Essentially, it was the two-minute drill—the kind of super-speed offense normally used only at the end of the game when you were behind.
In fact, that was how Marchibroda had discovered it; the previous year when the Bills had fallen behind the Houston Oilers late in a game, the Bills had gone to their two-minute drill, in which the offensive team needed to run a maximum number of plays in the shortest time possible in order to score more than once. That worked so well against the Oilers, Marchibroda suddenly thought, why not use it throughout the game, why not confuse them and wear them down earlier? So the Bills started running it, more and more often, and they enjoyed great success with it. What made them particularly successful was that their offense was perfectly tailored for it—some very good receivers, a talented quarterback, and a running back, Thurman Thomas, who was also an excellent receiver. It put enormous pressure on a defense that had a hard time getting set and adjusting to all the weapons that might be used against it.
Marchibroda, however, was idiosyncratic in one way: He was fifty-eight years old at the time, and he did not like to call the plays himself. In that sense he was old-fashioned. He wanted his quarterback to do the play calling, because the quarterback was the one out there on the field, and he was not merely seeing the defense, but feeling it as well. That was the way it had been done when Marchibroda was a young quarterback, breaking in more than three decades earlier, and it was the way he had always coached: You prepared your quarterback, and then let him call his game. Belichick remembered a moment in his first season with the Colts, back in 1975, when he was working as a young assistant for Marchibroda; Bert Jones, their quarterback, had come to the sideline on a critical third and short play and asked Marchibroda for a play, and Marchibroda gave him four plays. Jones, a bit flustered, asked the coach which one he wanted, and Marchibroda told him to make the choice himself. Now, with Kelly at quarterback, Belichick thought, that might prove a small advantage. Belichick, who had given hours and hours of his life over to the study of Jim Kelly during the past two seasons, on the theory that they were fated to meet him in a big game like this, did not think that Jim Kelly read defenses as well as some other quarterbacks in the League.
But the Bills were quick, and they had a lot of tools. They came up to the line of scrimmage in the no-huddle offense and simply exploded at you. The defense had barely set up, it sometimes seemed, and the Bills had already called their play and moved the ball. After just four or five plays in a row from the no-huddle, the defensive linemen seemed to be dragging and seemed to get no chance between plays to catch their breath. The system, if nothing else, gave the offense far greater control over the tempo of a game. Perhaps, people thought, watching the Bills, it was one of those moments when the offenses in the NFL were so good, the players so fast, the possibilities on each play so varied, that the offenses in pro football had finally and definitively gone beyond the capacity of defenses. The challenge for a defensive coach in dealing with them was obvious: Try to slow down the Buffalo offense and change the tempo. They had already beaten the Giants in Giants Stadium during the regular season, and their victories in the playoff games implied that they were getting better each week. There was one break for the Giants—when they played in Tampa it would be on grass, not turf. One of the things they ought to do if at all possible, Belichick told his players, was accidentally kick the ball after the referees took it from the huddle and set it up; they could also disentangle themselves more slowly from piles after the play, just to slow down the Bills. In addition, if they were injured when the Bills were running the no-huddle, they were not to limp off—because the Bills could easily run a play. Instead they were to stay where they were, and let the trainer come out to them.
If there was any vulnerability to Buffalo, Belichick decided, it was going to have to be Jim Kelly, and the fact (or the hope) that he did not read the defense as well as some other elite quarterbacks, most notably Montana and, later, Belichick’s own Tom Brady. As expected, Kelly was calling all the plays that day, and Belichick thought he had a tendency to look at a defense, see it and freeze it in his mind, and not understand the variations the defensive players might run off of it. Thus Kelly might not react well to what seemed to be the same defense, but which in reality disguised quite different ones. He would, when a series of offensive downs was over, Belichick believed, come to the sidelines, ask his coaches what the defense had been doing, and take it back with him for the next offensive series. Thus Belichick thought that his defense had a good chance to be a step ahead of Kelly all day long. Time of possession, he and the other Giant coaches thought, would also be very important; the longer the Buffalo defense was on the field, given the explosiveness of the Buffalo offense, the better for the Giants.
In the first half, he believed, the Bills would try to show speed and depend on their passing attack. All week he tried to prepare his defense for the speed of the Buffalo offense. The Giant defense would line up, and, as quickly as possible, the scout team would run its plays—quick, quick, quicker—in order to key the team to a much faster tempo than they were accustomed to. Belichick also thought that the Bills would not be able to run the ball consistently against them, not when it really mattered and when the Giants wanted to stop the run. Not many teams could. So he decided to let Buffalo run it a bit, giving them a little more mileage on their runs than he usually did. He did not want Jim Kelly throwing on every down. The Bills were less dangerous, he thought, given the superb abilities of the New York defense, if they went to their running game, which also had the advantage of taking more time off the clock. He thought the Giants could stop Thurman Thomas, even though he was an exceptional back, if and when they needed to, because they were so good against the run. Maybe on a drive Buffalo would get three first downs, but the Giants could stop them on a fourth one. So he told the defensive team that he did not care if Thurman Thomas gained a hundred yards on them that day. Better, he said, that Thurman Thomas gained a hundred yards, and Kelly passed for a hundred fifty, than Thomas be shut down completely, because then Buffalo, frustrated on the ground, would go to the air, and Kelly might pass for three hundred fifty. What Belichick really hoped was, in effect, to tease Kelly, to offer him the running game in the second half and then at critical moments take it away from him.
Thinking that way, that they should cut Thurman Thomas some slack, and selling it to his players were two different things. If there was one thing that Giant defense prided itself on that season it was the ability to stop the run, to shut down the League’s star running backs. It was a point of pride with them that they did not readily give up hundred-yard games to opposing runners; only Gerald Riggs of the Redskins and Johnny Johnson of the Cardinals had done it in the last two seasons. Every week that season, when Belichick met with the defense and pointed out their goals for Sunday, the first thing he spoke about was keeping the other team’s top rusher under a hundred yards. That was what Giants football was all about. But now he was saying he wanted to change that for the Super Bowl. “You guys have to believe me,” he kept saying. “If Thomas runs for a hundred yards, we win this game.” The defensive players were appalled. They were in no mood on the eve of their biggest game in four years to change their MO and become so generous. Preventing Thomas from running was virtually built into their manhood. Belichick asked them for a show of hands—who in the group wanted to be the MVP of the Super Bowl. At first no hands went up. “Don’t be shy,” he said and gradually a great many hands went up—Pepper Johnson, always ebullient, put up both hands. “Then let Thomas run,” he told them.
What followed was as good a Super Bowl as had ever been played. Who would win the game would be whoever had the lead when the clock ran out. In the first half, the Giants showed what looked like a three-four defense, although whether it actually was represented a very good question. Essentially it called for two down linemen, traditionally heavier and slower, in the front three (in this case Leonard Marshall and Erik Howard), along with Lawrence Taylor, who was normally a linebacker and was a man so fast as to be impossible to categorize, and then went to the four linebackers. But the four linebackers who represented the four part of the three-four were not really linebackers. Only two were: Pepper Johnson, very quick, very versatile in what he could do and exceptionally good at pass coverage, and Carl Banks, a great linebacker against the run and constantly improving against the pass. The outside linebackers were safeties, Greg Jackson and Reyna Thompson. That meant that with the other two safeties and the two cornerbacks, there were six defensive backs on the field, and if you counted Taylor and Johnson as men who played almost as if they were defensive backs, it was almost like eight. Sometimes in that half they also went to a two-three-six, that is, two defensive ends, three linebackers, and six defensive backs. Occasionally, though, they would show the same formation, but change it enough to make it heavier, by bringing in different players, more true linebackers. Sometimes, for a few snaps, they played a two-man front with four linebackers (Taylor a linebacker now) and five defensive backs.
It was a very tight first half, 12—10 Bills, with the Buffalo offense largely held down. The Giants were surprisingly confident at halftime that they could move the ball on the Bills. Belichick thought that the Bills, given the defenses New York had used in the first half, would try to run more in the second half, and that he could vary his defense, without showing all the variations of it when they lined up. He thought Kelly would have difficulty in deciphering their changing defensive look. He believed that the Bills, having seen so small a New York defense, would think that they could run on the Giants in the second half. So the Giants got a little bigger in the second half, and they went to four linebackers, instead of using the two defensive backs as linebackers. In a way, it was a tease defense, egging on Buffalo to do the things you wanted them to do, rather than the things that came more naturally to them. If the defense was imperfect in the second half, if Belichick got angry over a couple of missed coverages and blown plays, they nonetheless kept the Bills from the most important objective of all—setting the tempo of the game—and they kept Buffalo slightly confused, always a bit behind.
It more or less worked. It worked because the Giants won, and because, among other critical things, their offensive line won the battle with the Buffalo defense in the second half, when they were able to go on two very long drives that took a huge amount of time off the clock. One drive, which opened the second half with a touchdown, took fourteen plays and lasted for 9 minutes and 29 seconds, and the other, in the fourth quarter, yielded only a field goal, but took 7:24 off the clock. The Giants ended up dominating the time of possession for the game: 40:33 minutes to 19:27 for the Bills.
But it was still close. With four seconds left and the ball on the Giant 29, the Bills sent their placekicker, Scott Norwood, in, and his kick went wide right. If the Bills had gone to Thurman Thomas more at the very end, Belichick thought, they might have gotten their kicker a little closer to the goal line, and the kick would have been easier, and they might have won. At the end of the game, Marv Levy, the Buffalo coach, told reporters, “We just didn’t have enough time to move the ball.” Belichick believed, after the game was over, that his sense of Kelly had been accurate.
Thurman Thomas ran for 135 yards, a little more than Belichick had in mind. His own Giant players had not entirely believed Belichick’s scheme before the game, but they had gone along with it because they believed in him; he almost always got these things right, and this time he had done it again. After the game, in the locker room, Carl Banks turned to Pepper Johnson and said, “Man, did Bill call that game, or did he call that game?”