Patriot Reign (5 page)

In
2000 they knew the answers would lie in the hiring of Bill Belichick. If there
was anyone who understood systems, how to apply them, and how to hire personnel
to execute them, it was him. The fighting between the Jets and Patriots almost
prevented it from happening. Robert Kraft was aware that he might need a backup
plan if Belichick couldn’t be released from his New York contract, so the owner
traveled all the way to Palm Beach Country Club to secretly meet with an
alternative candidate. He interviewed Butch Davis, who was then the head coach
at the University of Miami. Davis intrigued him enough to earn a second
interview. He took a private jet to Boston and checked into a hotel under an
assumed name. The pursuit of Davis ended when the relationship between the Jets
and Patriots softened enough to make a deal. The Patriots gave the Jets three
draft choices, including a first-rounder in 2000, and the Jets freed the coach
from his contract.

The twenty-four-day New England–New York
episode was over. It had begun with Belichick scrawling his resignation on a
piece of paper—he wrote that he was resigning as “HC of the NYJ”—and it had
ended, technically, with the professional phone call between Kraft and
Parcells. But it really wasn’t over for anyone. The arguments, accusations, and
stalemates had elicited emotions and thoughts that couldn’t be easily reversed.
Some relationships, like the one between Belichick and
Parcells, would never be the same. Parcells would stay in the New York front
office and Belichick would travel to New England and work for Kraft again. Soon
Belichick would reconnect with old Patriots and introduce himself to new ones.
He would shake hands, meet with heads of departments, and heads of businesses.
There was an office in Foxboro waiting for him. He was going to need to fill
that office with his football knowledge, his economic sensibility, and a
symbolic hard hat. He had some rebuilding to do.

One of
the best things about February 14, 2000, was the clarity it brought to Bill
Belichick and his new employer, the New England Patriots. It was a switch from
the first three weeks of the year, when nothing had been clear for either the
coach or the organization. Belichick hadn’t been sure if he could win his
professional and psychological freedom from the New York Jets. Now that he had,
he was rewarded with what could be best described as strange
love.

It was Valentine’s Day—Drew Bledsoe’s birthday,
ironically—and there was a piece of paper on the coach’s desk spelling out the
Patriots’ depth chart in black and white. On this day the good news and bad
news were the same for Belichick: this was his team now. It was exciting. And
depressing. There had been hours of commentary on the
public breakup of Bill Parcells and Belichick, but a larger point was often
overlooked: the Patriots were terrible, in more ways than most people
knew.

The roster was uneven, flecked with veterans too close to
the end and young players who were never going to meet projections. The
offensive line was made up of twenty-two-year-old Damien Woody and four
players—Max Lane, Derrick Fletcher, Todd Rucci, and Zefross Moss—on their way
out of the NFL. In 1996 and 1997 the team had received six additional draft
picks as compensation for losing Parcells and running back Curtis Martin, who
was signed by the Jets as a restricted free agent. Five of those six picks were
wasted on below-average players who combined to play 129 NFL games. Just one of
the picks, running back Robert Edwards, was a good player. But after rushing
for 1,115 yards in his rookie season, Edwards completely tore three ligaments
in his left knee and partially tore another during a rookie flag-football
game—on the beach—as part of the Pro Bowl festivities in Hawaii. His victory
was avoiding an amputation and being able to walk without a limp. He would
return to football, but he wouldn’t be as skilled.

A pattern of
financial mismanagement had settled in at Foxboro as well: the team was more
than $10 million over the salary cap. Suddenly the Patriots were developing the
tag of other unfortunate franchises: they were overpaying for a lack of
production (Lane, Rucci) and unwilling or unable to be creative as productive
players (Martin, Tom Tupa, Otis Smith) went to the Jets. It was not surprising
to Belichick that as he took the job two of his best players— Tedy Bruschi and
Troy Brown—were unsigned.

As bad as the
contract situation appeared to be, there was something worse. The Patriots were
a divided team, a tiny nation of fiefdoms. That was true of the locker room,
and it was true of the coach–general manager relationship. Pete Carroll and
Bobby Grier did not present a united front, and the players knew it. If some of
them couldn’t get what they wanted from Carroll, they were not above turning to
Grier to see what he thought. The Patriots lacked leadership and knew nothing
of meritocracy. Theirs was a culture of entitlement and preferential
treatment.

Given all of the Patriots’ poor qualities, a matchmaker
would have never recommended that they go on a date with Belichick. He took an
economist’s view of spending, and they did not. He believed that the scouting
department should be run by one of his best friends, Scott Pioli, and he seemed
unconcerned that a rift or power struggle might ever develop between
them.

“Why would it?” he once said. “I can’t do Scott’s job and he
can’t do mine. We work perfectly together.”

He believed in some of
the principles of the Naval Academy, where one of the traditions is a classic
teamwork exercise. The young midshipmen, or plebes, are required to climb the
twenty-one-foot Herndon Monument after it’s been covered with 200 pounds of
lard. They are expected to work together to find a way to change a hat atop the
oily monument. Once they do that, they shed plebe status and move up a
class.

Belichick also was adamant about his teams being able to
bridge any of their racial differences. He was a teenager in the mid-1960s, one
decade after the Supreme Court’s
Brown v. Board of Education
ruling. He remembered the tension between some white
students at Annapolis High and some black students at Bates High. He saw a
lot—certainly not all—of that uneasiness reduced when the high school on Chase
Street in Annapolis fully embraced integration and, as a by-product, began
producing stronger sports teams.

Individually, the Patriots had a
handful of players who were ready for the commitment that Belichick was going
to demand. But the coach knew what this team was collectively when he helped
create game plans against it in New York. It wasn’t his type of group, and he
began to change that without even realizing it. He began to turn the franchise
into a champion early in the spring when he gave quarterbacks coach Dick
Rehbein a predraft assignment.

Belichick told Rehbein the Patriots
were planning to select a quarterback who could grow into Bledsoe’s backup.
There were two players Belichick had in mind, and he told Rehbein to work out
both of them. One of them, Tim Rattay, was in Lafayette, Louisiana. The other,
Tom Brady, was in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Rehbein went to Louisiana
first. He was instantly impressed with what he saw. He told Belichick that the
only thing he didn’t like about the six-foot Rattay was that “he’s a little
short,” but the ability was undeniable. Rattay played in a spread offense at
Louisiana–Lafayette, and he averaged 386 passing yards per game for his college
career. Rehbein guessed that, within a year, Rattay would be ready to be a
number-two quarterback.

After his visit to the University of
Michigan, Rehbein made another enthusiastic trip home. He liked the Brady
kid too, and the kid knew it. When friends asked Brady if he
was getting any interest from pro teams, he told them that the Patriots were
one of his suitors. Rehbein described him as a winner, a leader with a good
attitude. The quarterbacks coach told Belichick that if a decision had to be
made between the two, he would give the edge to Brady. Belichick had studied
the tapes and felt the same way.

On April 21, deep into the second
day of their first draft with the Patriots, Belichick and Pioli looked at their
board. They had already selected Dave Stachelski, Jeff Marriott, and Antwan
Harris. Brady was available in the sixth round, at pick number 199, and
Belichick stared at his name. “Brady shouldn’t be there,” he said. “He’s too
good.”

He had meant that Brady was good in a relief sense— good
enough to fill the role that they had envisioned for him as a backup. He wasn’t
thinking of the Brady who grew up admiring Steve Young and Joe Montana. He
didn’t think of how much joy Brady had for playing just about anything as a kid
in San Mateo, California, where he lived in a neighborhood with sixty kids. One
family had nine children in the house, and the folks across the street from the
Bradys had six. All of the neighborhood kids would run about playing football,
baseball, capture the flag, and hide and seek. Brady was energized by
competition. He liked to talk about it, and he liked to be a part of it. When
he wasn’t throwing footballs with his right hand, he was trying to hit
baseballs as a lefty, just like his favorite players—Wade Boggs, Don Mattingly,
and Will Clark.

The Patriots took Brady at 199 and watched the
49ers take Rattay at 212. It was as if they got a quarterback and the lead
foreman of their cleanup crew with one pick. Brady would
grow into Bledsoe’s backup, as predicted. But he would quickly outgrow the
job.

B
efore 2001 it had been eight years
since Bill Belichick had had to make a tough quarterback call. Back then, in
Cleveland, it wasn’t just a choice of quarterbacks. It was perceived as a
cultural statement. Bernie Kosar was one of them, a northeastern Ohioan who
wanted to play for the local team. Belichick was seen as the cold outsider, the
Browns’ coach who could matter-of-factly say what the fans—and even owner Art
Modell—didn’t want to hear. He said that Kosar had “diminishing skills” and
that was why he was released midway through the 1993
season.

“In the end, I just didn’t really feel like
it was going to work out,” Belichick recalls. “Even though Vinny [Testaverde]
was hurt, I knew he was coming back at some point. It was either deal with the
problem or postpone the problem. So after we lost to Denver, Mike Lombardi and
I talked to Art. We all sat in the office in the stadium and talked about it. I
think we were all in agreement about what had to happen. And then the next day
we had a staff meeting and talked about it again. Everybody was in agreement
again.”

So Kosar, from a town just sixty miles east of Cleveland,
was loosed. It’s hard to make a bolder move than that.

“I felt
like it was the right thing to do. Here, more than ten years later, I think
it’s clear-cut from a football standpoint,” Belichick says. “And I say that
respectfully of Bernie, who did everything you would want a football player to
do. He worked hard, was smart, understood the game—all those
things. I just thought Vinny was a better player.”

He thought
Brady was better than Bledsoe in 2001 too. He had noticed Brady’s leadership
qualities during the previous year’s rookie minicamp. If a group task needed to
be done—if twenty-five guys needed to be organized—Brady was the one doing the
organizing. His coach liked his approach, even when he was a fourth-stringer
behind Michael Bishop. Brady often praised Bishop’s arm strength, said he was
one of the most talented athletes he’d ever seen, and did some self-scouting of
his own. He could learn a lot from Bledsoe, John Friesz, and Bishop. Brady
thought he must have been a fourth-string quarterback for good reasons, so more
work needed to be done.

He took football seriously. He knew the
playbook well and often imagined himself running the team. He developed a
reputation as the hardest worker in the weight room, often causing strength
coach Mike Woicik to say, “He works just as hard during the season as he does
during the off-season program.” Brady had a leading man’s ability to hold the
attention of the audience and a senator’s flair for working the room. He would
talk and listen to anyone, regardless of how different they were from
him.

Brady kept pushing the people in front of him. He passed
Bishop on the depth chart. At the end of the 2001 training camp he had passed
veteran Damon Huard, who had been expected to be the team’s number-two
quarterback. Bledsoe did not have a good preseason, but it was going to be hard
for Brady to pass him too. Bledsoe had just signed a ten-year, $103 million
contract extension. He had become a familiar member of the greater Boston
community and a favorite of the Krafts. But the coaches had noticed Brady’s ascent, and Bledsoe’s play early in the ’01
season was making the twenty-four-year-old Brady difficult to ignore.

After losing their opener to the Bengals, the Patriots played the Jets on
September 23 in Foxboro. It was one of Bledsoe’s worst days as a pro. His
numbers didn’t dismay the coaches as much as his judgment did. He had a delay-
of-game penalty after Belichick and offensive coordinator Charlie Weis had
decided to go for a touchdown on fourth-and-goal from the 1. Four minutes
apart in the first half, he had an intentional grounding penalty and an
interception, both in New York territory. He was costing the team points and
field position in what was obviously going to be a close game.

With five minutes remaining, Bledsoe’s miserable play no longer was the
day’s central issue. On a third-down scramble from his 19, Bledsoe moved toward
the right sideline. He gained 8 yards and was cleanly and ferociously hit by
linebacker Mo Lewis. Bledsoe didn’t know it then, but blood was beginning to
leak into his chest cavity. An artery near his rib cage was partially torn, and
he had what the team would call a sheared blood vessel. He returned to the game
after the Lewis hit, but the pain had worsened. Brady took over in the final
two minutes and drove the team to the New York 29 with fourteen seconds left.
Four incomplete passes later, the Patriots had lost, 10–3.

Bledsoe
spent four days in Massachusetts General Hospital. A tube was inserted in his
chest to remove blood and cycle it back into his circulatory system. When he
was sent home on the 27th, he was told he couldn’t do any heavy lifting—carrying his young children included—for two weeks.

He could attend meetings and help Brady on the job, but
he couldn’t practice.

The Patriots won their first game, on the
30th, against the Colts. They lost the next week in Miami and then came home to
beat the Chargers in overtime. They were 2–3, and all along Bledsoe thought
Brady was temping in his place. He was wrong for several reasons. Brady was
better than Bledsoe thought, and the organization was different from the one he
had known for the past three seasons. Under Belichick, all Patriot jobs could
be classified as temporary. They were earned and held by performance, not
status or longevity. Belichick didn’t go out of his way to antagonize stars,
nor did he do anything special to accommodate them. He believed that one trait
made all pro athletes equally created.

“We can talk about money,
we can talk about trophies, talk about all that shit, okay? But the thing that
means the most to players is to be able to go out there and get on the stage,”
Belichick says. “Once you take the stage away from them—whoever it is—they have
nothing that can match it. You can talk about all the money they have in the
bank, but if they don’t have their self-esteem and their pride, then they don’t
have their stage.”

After the Patriots lost to the Rams on November
18, Bledsoe wanted that stage back. He had been helpful in quarterback meetings
and games, dispensing advice to Brady. Now his chest had healed and the doctors
had cleared him to be on the field. He wanted to play. And Brady wanted to
play. In the past those who were clearly not in his quarterbacking class had
always backed up Bledsoe. Once upon a time a faction of New England fans had
asked to see Bishop as the starter. It was a request any
reasonable fan would like to forget, a low test score that should be mercifully
struck from the record. Brady was different. He was a more composed quarterback
than Bledsoe, although he lacked his arm strength, experience, and pedigree.
There was a fight for a position that talent alone was not going to settle. A
judge—in this case Belichick— was going to have to make a ruling.