Patriot Reign (10 page)

“Yeah, sorry about that. I didn’t make that clear to
your girl. But J. R. Jenkins—”

“No interest. We’ve got a full
roster. I’m not sure—”

“But kickoff specialists are so hard to
find. I guess Baltimore used him for that purpose—”

Pioli rolled his eyes. He brought out his sarcastic wit.

“I
guess he can take Deion’s job, huh?” he said, referring to impressive rookie
Deion Branch.

“Yeah? Paying the same money?”

“I’m
sure Deion would love that. People are calling to send us someone to take his
job.”

“Hey, I’m just looking out for my guy.”

Pioli
hung up.

“I get a hundred calls like that a week. The best is when
you’re losing games and they call you and tell you, ‘Yeah, you guys are really
struggling. It looks like you need some help on your offensive line.’ I mean,
how would you react to that? It’s so insulting.”

Jason insulted
Pioli in many ways, and not just with his football comments. Pioli said he
couldn’t do his job without Nancy Meier, who has lived Patriots history since
she was nineteen. She is a wife, a mother of two children, and a woman who has
seen a whole lot of football.

“She’s probably been in the league
longer than he’s been alive, and he’s saying ‘your girl.’ He was pooping his
diapers when she was fricking working in the league.”

This was yet
another sign that the Patriots were not the same team they were in 2001. When
you are winning, these phone calls do not come. When your flaws are not
obvious, you don’t have Jasons on the periphery, tugging at your coat and
telling you to look over here. The calls were reminders that the night in New
Orleans, with the colors falling from the top of the Superdome, was from
another football time zone. By any measure, 5–5 equals average. On an average
day, average teams receive average phone calls.

“And when we get
someone hurt, it’s like pit bulls on pork chop underwear the day after a game.
Somebody gets hurt, especially on a national game, my
phone’s ringing off the wall. A lot of it is ambulance chasing. I
understand.”

Meier told Pioli that the last flight from Denver to
Boston was at 6:20. Theoretically, if Jashon Sykes decided to accept the $9,000
weekly raise that the Patriots were going to offer him, he could throw a few
things in a travel bag and hop that 6:20. Sean Gustus, a recent Richmond
University graduate who was trying to break into scouting, would pick him up at
the airport. Gustus would drop him off at the Residence Inn and then return in
the morning. There would be doctors to see, papers to sign, and new coaches and
teammates to meet.

At least that was the plan. When Pioli talked
with Sykes, there wasn’t any noticeable excitement in the linebacker’s voice.
He attended Colorado University, and the feeling was that if the Broncos put
him on their fifty-three-man roster, he would be content to stay in Denver. He
didn’t say that, although you could hear it.

“Why don’t you give
Brian a call back and then tell him to give me a call when you decide what you
want to do,” Pioli said to Sykes. “There’s a six-twenty flight tonight out of
Denver. It’s the last flight getting you into Boston. And we could have you on
the practice field tomorrow.”

“Okay,” Sykes said.

“All right, so give Brian a holler and give me a call.”

“I
will.”

He didn’t. Sykes was staying in Denver.

There
are phone calls, draft meetings, contract negotiations, and film studies all
folded into Pioli’s job. But what it can be reduced to is this: every day he
goes to the office wondering how and where he can find the right kind of
players for Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots.

T
here is nothing outwardly unusual
about the Four Points Sheraton Hotel in Norwood, Massachusetts. It has a
“casual upscale” restaurant on the first level, with sports showing on the
televisions near the bar. It has a spacious ballroom, which has been the site
of numerous class reunions and wedding receptions. On the second floor, at the
top of the stairs and to the right, it has a conference room that resembles
hundreds of others in the state. But the conference room becomes distinct, at
least on several Saturday nights in the fall and early winter. The room becomes
the place where 20 men meet and review the plan for the Patriots’ game the next
day.

Many of these men, the members of Bill
Belichick’s football Cabinet, could sit among the sports fans at the bar and
remain unnoticed for hours. They are assistant coaches, coaching assistants,
and members of the support staff. They are officially silent, permitted to
speak with the media only on special occasions, yet each of them has control
over an aspect of the game and is equally responsible for helping to shape and
enforce Patriots policy. Their biggest fear is a team breakdown in general and
a breakdown in their department in particular. They work for an organization
where accountability is one of the sacred codes: there is no place to hide if
things get sloppy. And if sloppiness happens too often, they know that the
sympathy card cliché—“We all have bad days at the office; we’ll get ’em
tomorrow”— will not console the bosses.

Romeo Crennel is in charge
of the department in which Belichick made his name. Defense. He explains the
simple coaching ethos: “When we lose, I always feel like
there’s something I did wrong. There’s something I could have done
better—there’s a call I should have made to help us. I think if you’re going to
survive in this business, you cannot accept losing, you don’t like losing, and
you take losses extremely hard. I take losses hard because I have to: if you
lose, you’re going to get fired.”

The coaches—different ages,
races, and politics—are as diverse as the routes they took to the NFL.

One of them, Jeff Davidson, was the starting left tackle who protected
John Elway’s blind side in 1991. The Denver Broncos drafted Davidson in the
fifth round in 1990, two rounds before they selected a receiver out of Savannah
State named Shannon Sharpe. Another assistant, Rob Ryan, was the only white
coach on an all-black staff at a historically black university in Nashville.
Ryan used to gas up a 1989 Thunderbird and travel through Georgia and Florida
trying to convince young men that there were many academic and athletic reasons
to choose a school such as Tennessee State. “And then I’d remind them that the
school’s female-to-male ratio was seventeen to one,” he says. One coach, Eric
Mangini, is a member of Chi Psi, which makes him Belichick’s fraternity
brother. That status didn’t get him any special privileges in Cleveland, where
he handed out media notes in the press box and picked up dirty jerseys in the
locker room. One worker, Brian Smith, is an avid hip-hop fan and 2004
Providence College honors graduate. He was nicknamed “Reeses” by receivers
coach Brian Daboll because “he’s not cool enough to be Eminem.”

Biology does not make all of them a family; time and aspirations do. When
they arrived in Norwood on December 7, 2002, it was the
145th day of their football season. With an exception or two, they had spent
all of those days— Thanksgiving included—together. Whether it was at the hotel
for seven
A
.
M
. coaches’ meetings
or at Gillette Stadium for staff meetings in the afternoon, they were always
discussing ways to win football games. A few of them are quietly talented
strategists themselves, destined to one day lead their own “programs.”
Followers of pro teams usually don’t call them programs, but that’s exactly
what Belichick is trying to build in New England. He wants coaches and scouts
to be developed in the Patriots system, just as players are.

It’s
part of the reason football operations will always have a few young and smart
trainees, thirty-and-under football enthusiasts who can come into the company
at entry level and be promoted in two or three seasons. Daboll and Josh
McDaniels arrived in Foxboro as coaching assistants. Both became position
coaches before turning thirty. As a teenager, Smith performed several odd jobs
with the Patriots and still found time to excel in his classes. Now he is the
team’s director of operations. Nick Caserio was hired as a personnel assistant
in 2001 and became an area scout in 2003. They join veterans such as Charlie
Weis, Mike Woicik, and Dante Scarnecchia, father of video assistant Steve
Scarnecchia. All of them understand what’s expected of them, from the team
meetings in Foxboro on Monday afternoons to the coaches’ meetings in Norwood on
Saturday nights.

“All he wants is perfection,” says Ryan, who is
now the defensive coordinator of the Oakland Raiders. “If you can give him
perfection, you’ll be all right. He wants it as close as you can get. And he
knows what you have to give.”

Some of the coaches are less
tolerant of their own imperfections than Belichick
himself. Once during training camp there was a scheduling miscommunication that
led to strength-and-conditioning coach Woicik arriving late for a practice.
Belichick understood that it wasn’t Woicick’s fault, but the strength coach was
torn up about it. He showed up at Belichick’s office and tried to pay a fine.
But the coach, knowing Woicik’s thoroughness, wouldn’t accept it.

On Saturdays, sometimes the coaches arrive in the conference room before
Belichick does. The conversation is often light and humorous, with the coaches
teasing each other about their picks in the office college football pool or a
loss by someone’s alma mater. When Belichick approaches and walks toward the
head of the long conference table, it’s as if the judge has entered the
courtroom. He rarely jokes in these meetings. Most of the humor comes from
comments he makes in the context of player or game evaluation. He is not easily
pleased, and neither are they. He goes around the room and gets final status
reports from Crennel, Weis, Woicik, and special-teams coach Brad Seely. He
misses nothing—weather, officials, inactives, what’s at stake.

At
the December 7 meeting, the Patriots were 7–5 and seeking their fifth win in
six weeks. They would play Drew Bledsoe and the Buffalo Bills—for the second
time that season—the next day at Gillette. After a four-game losing streak, the
Patriots were now beginning to climb toward the top of the AFC East standings.
They had ended their skid a month earlier in Buffalo, winning 38–7. A few days
before the November 3 Buffalo game, Belichick sensed two issues that could
cause the slide to continue: selfishness and too much focus on Bledsoe. He
touched on both in an October 28 team meeting, leaving no
doubts about his position on both subjects.

“We need to have
everybody together on this team. Now, there’s not one person in this room—not
one—who can’t improve. And it starts with me. I’ll sit down with any of you and
show you where you can improve. Any of you. Okay? So all of us can be better
and need to be better. That’s where your focus needs to be: what can you do
better to help this football team? There’s not going to be any toleration for
‘I’m doing my job, someone else can do theirs better.’ Well, maybe they can.
But all of us need to do a better fuckin’ job too. So let’s start with that and
move forward.”

This season was frustrating him, on the field and
in the meetings. He questioned himself several times, wondering if he and his
staff had properly prepared the players. Were they giving them things that they
couldn’t handle? Were they making themselves clear? After the team’s fourth
consecutive loss, 24–16 against Denver, a dejected Belichick had retreated to
his office and had a long conversation with Scott Pioli. The team had warts,
sure, and some of them couldn’t be corrected until the off-season. But other
things—attitude and communication—could be fixed before training camp of 2003.
He wanted to make that clear in the October meeting.

“You’ve got
three choices,” he continued. “Talk about yourself, either say something
constructive or be supportive. Otherwise, shut the fuck up. Okay? Shut the fuck
up. We don’t need anything other than one of those three options. Either you
get better, you support someone else who is trying to get better, or you have a
constructive suggestion that will help this football team.
If it will help, we’d all love to hear it. Otherwise, shut the fuck up, all
right? And let’s look in a positive direction. Everybody understand that?
That’s the only way it’s going to work, fellas. Stick together as a team,
support each other as a team.”

He knew his trade of Bledsoe would
be reprised and analyzed all week. He knew that there were still pockets of
Bledsoe supporters, inside the organization and out.

“Obviously
there’s going to be some extracurricular activity this week as far as press and
the media and TV and everybody else talking about a lot of other shit besides
the game itself. Let’s cut right to the chase: I’m responsible for making
personnel decisions on this team. I made them two years ago, I made them last
year, I make them this year, and I’ll make them next year. So if there’s any
personnel decision made on this team, ultimately I’m the one who is going to be
responsible for it. You guys aren’t making them. You guys really don’t have any
input into making them. So just refer everything to me and stay out of it….
Don’t worry about last year or last week or the off-season. Don’t worry about
any of that shit. If I have to answer it, I’ll answer it. You guys don’t have
to worry about that. It wasn’t your decision, it’s not your job, and it’s
really not anything that you need to concentrate on.”

They went to
Buffalo later in the week and began Sunday afternoon by scoring the game’s
first 17 points. They led 31–7 after three quarters and were never threatened.
As one of the team buses cruised away from the stadium and toward the airport,
Mangini looked out the window and saw debris strewn in the parking lots and the
last fires simmering from tailgaters’ grills. “It looks like one of those
scenes from the end of a war,” he said.