Patriot Reign (14 page)

“Last year” had been a familiar chorus among the
Patriots and their fans—until the 24–7 loss to the Titans. “Last year” was
seemingly the answer, question, and reference at the center of everything. A
comment about the team’s 5–5 start would often come with a
companion piece: “They started 5–5 last year too.” An observation about Smith’s
rushing yardage was usually paired with what he had done “last year.” The
Patriots’ defense of 2001 had not been as soft against the run as the 2002
Patriots’, but the “last year” choir was quick to recall that The Super Bowl
XXXVI champions were not highly ranked on defense either. Everyone did it, and
they did it daily. Belichick tried to shut himself and the team off from
nostalgia, but it was difficult.

“It was so tough, because we had
played a certain way the season before,” Brady says. “We were still practicing
hard, and competing hard. But we weren’t winning. It was like, ‘What the hell
is the problem?’ Coach Belichick was frustrated with the team a lot, and I was
more stressed out than I had ever been. I thought it was very evident on my
face. My body language was terrible for most of the year.”

The
nostalgia stopped in Nashville. Titans quarterback Steve McNair hadn’t
practiced all week because of sore ribs. But he was able to run for 49 yards
and two touch- downs. Those 49 yards were the third-best number on the team
after the 101 from Eddie George and 85 from Robert Holcombe. It was tough for
any coach to watch and any team to experience. The Patriots were being bullied;
the Titans refused to let them have the ball, holding it for a remarkable
forty-one minutes and forcing the Patriots to squeeze any brilliance they had
into a small space. But nothing was there.

It didn’t matter that
the Patriots knew the Titans were basically running Buddy Ryan’s defense and
that Ryan’s son, Rob, was a New England coach. The staff knew what was coming:
over front, man coverage, “46” package, blitz zone. Rob Ryan liked to joke that
he and his twin brother, Rex, drew up the defense, “showed
it to Dad, and he called it the ‘46.’ But he’s not saying that.” There was
something the Patriots lacked, and what they lacked the Titans had. It was
obvious to the nation’s viewers, because one team— missing tackles,
intercepting the ball and then fumbling it away, unable to avoid thoughtless
turnovers—looked out of place standing next to the other. And if that wasn’t
bad enough, Brady had gotten hurt. The Patriots didn’t say it, but it was a
first-degree separation of his right shoulder— his throwing shoulder.

As he sat on the team’s one
A.M
. charter flight
back to Providence, Belichick thought about all the work they needed to do.
When he told John Madden during the production meeting that the game would tell
him a lot about his team, he had been hopeful, optimistic. Now there was just
an inescapable sense of gloom and a true test of his leadership. They got back
to Providence around four
A.M
. and were at the stadium
shortly after five. Just in time to begin another day, another week, and
another game with the New York Jets.

W
hen the Patriots returned to
Foxboro on Wednesday, December 18—Tuesday had been their day off—they were
greeted by a large drawing near the bulletin board. It was a scale, with the
logos of all the teams they had played in the past on one side and the
green-and-white logo of the rival New York Jets on the other. The message was
simple: the Jets were all that mattered.

The Patriots
were 8–6. They could take a very direct route to the play-offs by winning their
last two games, against the Jets and Dolphins. They would
still be able to win by splitting the games, but that would put them in a maze
of tiebreakers and mathematical possibility. It was easier to just win twice in
two weeks.

It was the week before Christmas, but it was hard to
know that in football operations. Downstairs the players and coaches were
trying to figure out a way to beat the Jets, and upstairs the scouts were
holding their early draft meetings. There wasn’t a lot of joy after the Monday
night loss to the Titans. Belichick wasn’t in the mood for a lot of talking. He
knew the Jets were not the same team the Patriots had beat in September, 44–7.
Like Tennessee, New York had opened the season with a win and then lost four
consecutive games. The Jets had a 2–5 record on October 28, but they were 7–7
as they prepared for their Sunday night game with the Patriots. Belichick
clearly made those points at a noon meeting.

The next day he read
some of the comments that Steve Martin had made to the New York media. Martin
was a former Jet, so he was asked if he was surprised that his exteammate,
All-Pro center Kevin Mawae, had been involved in a fight at practice.

“Yeah, I heard about that,” Martin told the reporters. “That’s what he
does. He plays dirty. He used to do that when I was there. Someone probably got
mad because he did something dirty. He did that the whole time I was there.”
Martin also reported that he was brought to New England to help out against the
run and be effective on third down. But it appeared, he said, that his role had
been reduced to standing around, since he had lost his starting job after the
Patriots lost to Green Bay at home.

That week, Martin had lost his
starting job. Now, before the Jets game, he lost his
employment altogether. He was fired three days before playing his old
team.

Belichick was tired of him, for sure. He was also tired of
being pushed around on defense. He was tired of the helpless feeling that
mediocre teams have. It’s the feeling that success is out of their hands, that
some other team will have to come in for things to be right.

That
feeling would become tangible fact on Sunday night. Later, in the off-season,
Belichick would use the second New York game as a piece of evidence during an
animated speech in a coaches’ meeting. This, he would argue, was why things had
to change in Foxboro. He would point to poor coverage, particularly on third
down. He would point to players’ “giving up” opportunities to make tackles. He
would note that quarterback Chad Pennington completed his first 11 passes
against the Patriots and, once again, another back—this time it was Curtis
Martin— rushed for more than 100 yards.

The Patriots lost to the
Jets, 30–17. And now, an hour after the game, Belichick was in his office. His
family and friends were either in the office with him or just outside, talking
with each other. His parents were standing against a wall, a few feet away from
the drawing of the “Jets scale,” a drawing that was now moot. Belichick’s
mother, Jeanette, is a small woman who is as passionate about communication as
her son is about coaching. When she was in practice, as she puts it, she spoke
seven languages. In different ways—and in different places—she sometimes has
the same analyses as her son. Once, on a trip home to see his parents in
Annapolis, Belichick was giving some of the reasons for poor player
performance. Near the top of his list was “shitty
coaching.” When he got home and was speaking with his mother in the kitchen,
she gave her reasons why some students don’t do well with foreign languages.
“Bad teaching” was her quick answer.

She knew a lot more than
languages. She knew football too. She turned to her husband and said, “You know
what I don’t understand? I don’t understand why they don’t call roughing the
passer more. I thought Brady was going to be a bag of bones out there.” Brady
had completed just 19 of his 37 passes. He may have been hit well after he
threw, but that wasn’t why he was hurting. He still had discomfort from the
shoulder injury in the Titans game. “I’m going to tell him that you feel sorry
for him,” Steve Belichick said to his wife. “I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear
that.”

It was as if Steve Belichick were reading from a cue card.
A couple of seconds after the comment was made, the lanky Brady turned the
corner. He was walking slowly. His shoulders were slumped. He was well
dressed—his sister Nancy likes to pick out the clothes he wears on game
days—and he was wearing a floppy newsboy hat. Belichick’s daughter, Amanda, was
there with a friend, and they watched the handsome quarterback walk by. He
looked to his left and recognized Steve and Jeanette. He leaned over to kiss
the coach’s mother. “They’re killing you out there,” she said. “They should
call roughing the passer more.” Brady blushed. He said he just wasn’t playing
well. He smiled at Amanda and her friend—a smile that excited the friend—and
walked out to the players’ parking lot.

It was well after
midnight. Soon Belichick would step out of his office and walk down the hall.
He had been rough on the team following the game, much tougher than he was
after the loss to the Titans. He spoke to his friends. He
stopped, briefly, next to his parents. His mother hugged him. “I love you,” she
said. Softly, he said, “You too.”

A tough season had come down to
one game. The Patriots would have to defeat the Dolphins and hope that the
Packers could beat the Jets. If that happened, the Patriots and Dolphins would
be 9–7, the Jets would be 8–8, and the Patriots would win the division on a
tiebreaker. If not, the Patriots would simply fall back to being an average
team, just one year after being the best team in football.

L
ate on Christmas night, a
Wednesday, a snowstorm hit greater Boston. It had been raining earlier in the
day, the rain turned to sleet, the wind blew—in some areas at sixty miles per
hour—and about five inches of wet and heavy snow fell in Foxboro. It could have
been the snow or it could have been the wind, but when the Patriots returned to
work on Thursday, they found that their practice bubble was not usable. Because
the bubble was at risk, the New England Patriots were going to have to take a
road trip up Route 128 to Boston College.

A few
players got a kick out of this as they saw three buses parked in front of
football operations. “You mean to tell me that this organization can spend $325
million for a stadium,” one of them said, “and they can’t put out a couple of
million for a new bubble?” Variations on that sentiment were expressed
throughout the buses. (A new practice bubble would be in place for the 2003
season.) The Patriots arrived at Alumni Stadium, walked through the snow and
ice, and entered the bubble. There appeared to be a
baseball meeting going on at the end of the field. Belichick went to speak
with the group, they applauded after a few minutes, and then they
dispersed.

The field was free of kids, and that was a good thing.
It was a parental advisory atmosphere. Weis yelled at rookie David Givens, who
had dropped a pass against the Jets that could have turned the game. Belichick,
who was still disgusted with his team’s inability to cover, yelled at the
defensive backs through coach Eric Mangini. “Hey, Eric,” the coach shouted.
“Why can’t we cover anybody on ‘Cover 5’? Someone is running free every fucking
time. Every fucking time!” Mangini told his group to line up and try the
coverage again.

The Patriots were injured—Tedy Bruschi and Deion
Branch were out—and desperate. In a season that was nothing like the previous
one, it seemed appropriate that they were in this position: on a college
campus, in a bubble, competing for practice time with a group of baseball
players. It would have been purely amusing if they had beaten the Jets. But in
the context of the 8–7 season, the practice situation felt ridiculous.

When the session ended, the defending NFL champions returned to Foxboro
to find ribs, cornbread, greens, and sweet potatoes in the cafeteria. For a
little while their moods lifted. They had a good time together, as usual. They
were a close team, something that Fauria had noticed as soon as he arrived in
Foxboro.

“It wasn’t like this in Seattle,” he says. “I’ll use
training camp there as an example. There was a serving tray where they had the
salad, and it was kind of like the divider in the room. There were tables on
both sides. I’m telling you, all the white guys were on one side, and the black
guys were on the other. Now, I’m not saying it was
prejudice or a race issue, but it always seems to happen that way.

“I don’t see that here at all. You see those domino games in the locker
room? You have guys like Marc Edwards and Mike Vrabel saying, ‘Slap the domino,
motherfucker,’ just like everyone else. Seriously, I think it’s a credit to
Scott [Pioli]. He really brings good guys in. And I felt that right away. All
the guys are generally good guys, with the same emphasis on winning.”

Belichick defined exactly what that emphasis was on Friday, in his most
revealing production meeting of the season. Phil Simms and Armen Keteyian of
CBS were at the meeting—Greg Gumbel would meet them later at practice—and they
caught the coach in one of his unguarded moments. If it hadn’t been so
spontaneous, it would have seemed staged: Belichick flopped onto a brown coach
and began joking with Simms and Keteyian. There were rumors about Bill Parcells
joining the Cowboys, so Belichick jabbed Simms by asking if he was going to
Dallas to be the offensive coordinator. Simms said he would love to coach if he
could be well paid while not being accountable for a team’s record. Everyone
laughed.

The sight of Belichick on the couch was irresistible.
“Are we your analysts?” Keteyian joked. He imitated a therapist. “So, Coach
Belichick. Tell us how you feel….”Simms told Belichick that he would have to
pay for this session, and it was going to be expensive. “I’m just letting you
know, Belichick: I’m going to charge your ass a lot of money.” Eventually Bill
on the Couch was asked if the Patriots had felt the weight of being Super Bowl
champs. He was asked if the season had drained his team.

“I would
never admit this publicly,” he said. “But absolutely. There
is so much pressure on this team. Every week. Every single week.” Keteyian
began reading off the Patriots’ schedule to enforce the coach’s point. “And
even against Chicago,” Belichick interrupted, “we went into their place while
they were on a 6-game losing streak. It’s been draining.”