Patriot Reign (11 page)

B
ack in the Sheraton a month later,
it is time to approach Buffalo again. If New England can win the game, it will
make the Patriots’ record against the Bills 5–1 since 2000.

“Until they have some success against us, there’s got to be some doubt,”
Belichick says to the coaches. “They don’t know if they can beat us.”

He asks Woicik about defensive lineman Rick Lyle, and Woicik says he
plans to work him out before the game. He asks about the health of safety
Tebucky Jones, and he is assured that Jones will be ready to play. He goes over
the list of possible inactives, and he asks Weis if he has a strong opinion on
either going into the game with an eighth lineman or going with seven and
making tight end Cam Cleeland active. “I’m indifferent,” Weis says. He
decides to activate Cleeland and leave Greg Randall, Tom Ashworth, and Russ
Hochstein inactive. He says the team had a good week of practice, and he wants
to see if Buffalo can sustain an eight- to ten-play drive.

No one
is animated during these rundowns, no matter how strong the statements are. The
coaches are dressed casually, but the room has the spirit of a business
meeting. There have been elements of game-plan review during the week, but this
is the only time when it all comes together for everyone to see and hear. This
is the time to remind everyone that the Patriots must throw on the Buffalo
safeties and break tackles in the secondary. There is a note to “throw deep or
deeper routes on Clements (not 10- to 12- yard routes unless pressed).”
Clements is cornerback Nate Clements, whom the offensive coaches believe to be
vulnerable deep. They have also noticed that the Buffalo
safeties bite hard on play-action passes.

They are comfortable
with the way they plan to defend Bledsoe. And they have a grasp of what the
Bills are going to attempt against them. Buffalo’s primary defensive coverage
is “Cover 8.” The Bills’ safeties line up 9 to 12 yards deep and rotate on the
snap. They make it difficult for teams to detect any pre-snap rotation. The
weak safety and weak corner line up even and then rotate on the snap. It is
mentioned that last year Buffalo’s approach played as “Cover 8 Weak Sky.” There
are six single-spaced pages of notes on the Bills. It is up to the Cabinet to
reduce its detailed information into digestible points that players can
remember when they are on the field trying to control Bledsoe and jam Peerless
Price and Eric Moulds. Each coach brings his own twist and own experience to
getting the message across. The beauty and measure of temporary relief comes on
Sunday evenings, when the message has been received and the game has been
won.

Winning Sundays are the most quiet and satisfying moments of
the week. They are quiet because, for those wearing headsets, the loud voice
traffic in their heads is gone. They don’t realize how much noise is there
until they remove the headsets and no longer feel the rush of competition,
intensified by the desires of 70,000 fans. During the game the coordinators are
receiving information from the coaches in the box: down and distance,
formation, their sense of what the other team is going to attempt to do. The
coordinators then take that information and make a quick decision on what the
call will be, relaying it either to quarterback Tom Brady, if you’re Weis, or
to the defensive players on the field, if you’re Crennel.

“It’s the competition,” Crennel says. “It’s the
crowd— although you try to tune the crowd out. It’s the challenge and
excitement of ‘Okay, it’s third-and-8. What is this guy going to call? What am
I going to call? Can I make the play? Can my guys make the play and get off the
field? And can we do it enough to win the game?’ ” Sometimes Belichick’s deep
voice can be heard over the headsets: “Good call.” He watches the game and
makes decisions when his authority is needed. If he sees something developing,
he’ll tell his coordinators so it can be reflected in their calls. His mission
is always to subtly lift the field, like a man lifting a car hood, so opponents
will be slightly off balance and never quite right as they try to sustain
drives. He is so relentless with study and preparation because of game day.
What good is it if he sees it and no one else does? He wants them all to see
it. He would actually prefer that his players make their own adjustments on the
sideline instead of watching the game.

Pioli does watch the game.
He is upstairs in the coaching box, a box too small to contain the competitive
zeal of men who define their professional success by what happens on the field.
For them, there are no throwaway plays. Every call on both sides of the ball
was carefully selected, their response to something they see or anticipate
seeing from the other team. There is never a moment of impulse: no one ever
shouts into the headsets, “Hell, let’s just throw it deep.” A few times during
the game a team will come out in a formation that is not part of its usual
package. “I smell shit, RAC,” Ryan will warn. “Look out for a trick
here.”

Often, Belichick will be buzzed during the game. It will be
Ernie Adams, who is intensely watching—with head- sets—from the coaches’ box.
“Bill, I’m expecting some kind of pressure here,” Adams
will say. Or he’ll review a controversial call and handicap the coach’s chances
of success on a challenge. “A catch is defined as firm grasp and control, and
he doesn’t have it,” Adams will report. “Let’s challenge this one.”

The manic NFL coaching atmosphere tends to attract smart risk-takers who
love the mixture of physical and intellectual competition. It is like that in
New England and in other cities throughout the league. The average NFL team is
a storefront propped before the public, with a range of activity going on in
backrooms. Assistants and staff members who will not be featured in media
reports lead these activities, which are sometimes as basic as listening to
venting or making runs to the airport. What makes the leaders of Patriots
football operations different from heads of some companies is the value they
place on jobs that have no glamour. They truly respect those who do grunt work,
so much so that they are willing to promote them if they show the aptitude to
be promoted.

Belichick is trying to construct a meritocracy where
no one is placed in a categorical box and chained there for the rest of his
coaching career. He looks at his own start in coaching, with little pay and not
even a piece of glory in black and white. (In the official Colts history, he is
not listed on the coaches’ page.) If others are willing to take a similar path,
without whining about it, he knows he has someone special. That’s why he has so
much confidence during his coaches’ meetings and during games: hard workers
surround him.

In Woicik he knows he has someone who takes all
assignments seriously. Before each game officials ask Belichick who his
“get-back coach” is. It is Woicik. The get-back coach is
the one who makes sure players are not too close to the sideline. The first
time Belichick gave Woicik the job, Woicik was so into it that Belichick said
he had never seen anyone do it better. The strength coach also impressed him
when he arrived for his job interview with detailed charts and presentations.
Woicik has a thick booklet for the Patriots’ off- season program. It includes
everything from his pyramid of physical success—skill, movement, power,
strength, conditioning, flexibility—to his attention to nutrition and recovery.
Players reading Woicik’s manual never lack information. He even includes
grocery lists and fat analyses of food from fast-food chains McDonald’s, Burger
King, Dairy Queen, KFC, and Taco Bell.

In Crennel, Belichick sees
a man who chased football in Kentucky, Texas, Georgia, and Mississippi. He was
at Ole Miss just sixteen years after James Meredith became the first black
student to integrate the Oxford campus. Crennel, who is black, talked with his
wife before taking the Ole Miss job. She said she’d be willing to give it a
try.

“Probably the biggest thing that made you wonder was the
Rebel flag and the Klan and all that,” he says. “But if you were helping their
team to win, even though they might have some of those vices in the back of
their minds, they’d choose to forget about it for a little while. My experience
in Mississippi was not a bad one, because the people I dealt with wanted to be
helpful.” Crennel went from Ole Miss to Georgia Tech, and from Georgia Tech to
the New York Giants.

While in New York, Crennel, Belichick, and
Weis all worked together. Weis was a Giants coaching assistant in 1990, nine
years after Crennel began there. He had been a head coach in high school and an
assistant coach in college before going to New York. Weis
remembers a conversation he had with Belichick in ’90, the week before a
November 18 game with the Lions. Detroit was on its way to scoring the
fifth-most points in the NFL, and Weis told Belichick he had some ideas about
the team’s run-and-shoot offense. “Let’s hear them,” Belichick said. Weis told
him what he knew. The Giants won the game 20–0, limiting the Lions to 208 total
yards. Weis says he never forgot how gracious it was of Belichick to mention
him—an assistant to the assistants—when speaking with the media
afterward.

Brady says Weis’s creativity and toughness inspire him.
“Charlie goes through surgery where he almost died, and he’s back trying to
coach us,” Brady marvels. The coach had gastric bypass surgery in the summer of
2002. He thought the procedure was going to be an uncomplicated one, but he
came so close to death, owing to excessive internal bleeding, that he was twice
given last rites. He remembers waking up in the hospital and seeing Brady in
his room.

It was Brady who also said that he enjoyed playing
football because it was an opportunity for him to be around like-minded “high
achievers” who love the game. It’s the same with the coaching staff. Some of
them, like Davidson, Pepper Johnson, and Markus Paul, played in the NFL.
Others, such as Belichick, Weis, and Ivan Fears, did not. The link is that they
are high achievers, immersed in a scrupulous culture of winning.

O
n December 8, a windy Sunday in
Foxboro, the Patriots prepared for Bledsoe’s return to New England. The
quarterback was a well-liked player in the region, and he gained
new fans on his way to Buffalo. Before leaving, he placed
full-page ads in both the
Boston Globe
and the
Boston
Herald,
thanking local fans for their support. The fact that he was
traded was not a surprise; the fact that he went to Buffalo was
startling.

The Patriots were willing to risk trading
a former Pro Bowl player to a team in their own division. They were willing to
trade him to a team with an offensive coordinator, Kevin Gilbride, who enjoyed
long passes as much as Bledsoe did. The Bills had Moulds and Price, two
receivers on their way to 1,200-yard seasons. It appeared to be a good match.
The Bills had a record of 6–6, trailing the Patriots by one game in the
division. They had beaten Miami the previous week, 38–21.

Mangini,
the Patriots defensive backs coach, was ready for the return. Before the game
in Buffalo, he had given his players a sheet outlining the Bills’ passing
principles. Some of the same rules applied a month later:

• This offense is built on vertical routes and big plays. The
  coordinator is pass-oriented, and Drew wants to throw the ball down the
  field.
  
• We must force Drew to throw into tight coverage or
  hold the football. Do not give up any easy completions.
  
• There will be some game-plan formations, but they will be limited.
  They have not run any bunch or stacked receivers this season.
  
• The Bills will run their two-minute offense anywhere on the
  field.
  
• There has been no shifting and very little motion.
  What you see is pretty much what it will be.
  

As the coaches had discussed the night before, Woicik
had indeed worked out Jones and declared him ready to play. So that would help
Mangini’s unit as well. Victor Green would start, but Jones would be able to
contribute. He would soon be in position to make one of the best plays of the
game.

When it was time to play, Bledsoe stepped on the field to a
nice ovation. It was respectful and a bit restrained, a collective tip of the
cap but nothing too indulgent. It was the nicest thing that would happen to him
all day. He and his teammates couldn’t get into a flow at all. They appeared to
have a 27-yard completion to the New England 15, but an illegal motion penalty
wiped it out and they were forced to punt. They were still in the game in the
first quarter, even though they were down 10–0, when Bledsoe threw a pass that
was intercepted by lineman Richard Seymour. Two plays later, Brady threw a
9-yard touchdown pass to receiver Donald Hayes.

Seventeen to
nothing. Now Bledsoe was really playing into the Patriots’ hands, because he
was going to have to do what they expected anyway: throw it long. They were
ready for him. He was able to prove Belichick wrong in one sense. He was able
to end the first quarter and begin the second with a long drive, a drive that
exceeded eight to ten plays. He was able to lead a fourteen-play drive from his
own 9 all the way to the New England 1. But on second down, he dropped back to
pass and tried to force the ball into coverage. Jones was watching him the
whole time, anticipating the throw. The ball was thrown for tight end Dave
Moore, but it was a poor throw and a poor decision. Jones intercepted it. The
Patriots converted the turnover into 3 points, and now it was a matter of
running out the clock.

The Bills weren’t going
to come back from a 20–0 deficit, although they did cut the lead in half in the
third quarter. Once again, there were too many Buffalo mistakes. Price fumbled,
and that led to an Antowain Smith touchdown run. And when Bledsoe touched the
ball after that, he threw another interception, this one to Ty Law. He ended
the day with four interceptions. The members of the Cabinet ended the day with
hugs for each other and a few relaxing moments spent at home with their “other”
families.