Read Patriot Reign Online

Authors: Michael Holley

Patriot Reign (6 page)

BOOK: Patriot Reign
11.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

“It’s a competitive environment. I sure as hell didn’t want to give up
the job,” Brady says. “Part of the reason I was ready then was that the year
before I had prepared like I was going to play. I was confident, and the
coaches were confident in what I could do.”

For the fans, Bledsoe
versus Brady had turned into Nixon versus Kennedy, circa 1960. It was the major
topic on sports radio stations and the question with which the sports pages
grappled. There was no predictable chart or grid for Bledsoe or Brady
supporters: some husbands liked Bledsoe and some wives liked Brady; some
brothers liked Brady and some sisters liked Bledsoe.

This wasn’t
necessarily Belichick’s repeat of the Cleveland Kosar-Testaverde controversy.
He wasn’t going to have to cut a popular player. But he was in his second year,
rattling a star who had spent nine years as the franchise’s best-paid and most
marketed athlete. Belichick’s choice meant that he would have the most talented
and most expensive backup quarterback in the NFL. Making the decision would not
be a problem. Presenting that decision would turn the situation into an awkward
and eventually nasty one. When Belichick did not return the job to Bledsoe or
give him an opportunity to win it back with practice reps,
Bledsoe interpreted that as the coach lying to him. The charge irked
Belichick.

“I don’t feel like I misled him. I really don’t. You
know, that kind of bothered me. I understood his disappointment, I understood
he wanted to play, I understood that he was a good competitor. He was a
hardworking guy, he had been in the organization a long time, and I respected
that. Nobody wanted him to get hurt and miss two months. There was nothing we
could do about it. You don’t take a player who hasn’t played in two months and
then just stick him back in there like nothing had happened.”

It
was too late. Bledsoe felt that he had been deceived. Belichick says that he
offered Bledsoe the chance to get something back, all right: timing, not a job.
“I wasn’t talking about him as a starter. I was talking about him at least
throwing to guys that he might be throwing to in the game, if he had to play as
a backup. Which ultimately happened in the AFC Championship game.”

It was a long road to Pittsburgh, though. With the unexpected death of
Rehbein in the summer of 2001, Belichick had become the quarterbacks coach. He
often met with Brady, Bledsoe, and Huard in a small Foxboro Stadium office.
It was uncomfortable in there, and not just because the stadium was
outdated.

“I knew he was unhappy,” Brady says of Bledsoe. “It was
strained. When Coach Belichick was around, Drew would become quiet and
reserved.” Bledsoe was the same way in the team captains’ meetings on Tuesday
nights. The meetings were designed so that there could be an exchange between
the coaching staff and the players. But the meetings were inadequate for
Belichick-Bledsoe. The other captains noticed it and
occasionally commented. One of the captains was Bryan Cox, the inimitable
linebacker who always carried an extra opinion just in case you didn’t have one
of your own. He had also lost his job to injury, but didn’t respond the way
Bledsoe did. Of course, Cox brought that up once or twice in the captains’
meetings.

“You could feel the strain in the relationship all the
way around,” Belichick says. “I mean, I met with the quarterbacks every day:
myself, Drew, the other two quarterbacks, and Charlie. There is no question
that there was discomfort in the room.”

Outside of the team,
Bledsoe’s urban legend began to grow. The popular story was that the
quarterback was the opposite of the modern athlete and that he
didn’t
let his agenda interfere with the overall mission of
the team. It wasn’t quite that clean. Bledsoe wasn’t reckless in the office,
but it was known how angry he was. He had his problems with Belichick, but he
also wasn’t happy with Weis. He did have an outlet for his anger: Woicik’s and
Markus Paul’s weight room. In there he became tougher and pushed himself harder
than he ever had. Woicik and Paul didn’t find fault with his work habits and
attitude. But this was Bledsoe-Brady, where no judgment was unanimous.

During a staff meeting one of the coaches said of Bledsoe, “His shitty
attitude means we have to do one of two things: trade him to the highest bidder
[in the off-season] or tell him he’s the starter and Brady will compete with
him.”

Brady says Bledsoe was professional with him and never
focused on the situation at work. “But it was definitely hard on our personal
relationship. Drew and I were friendly, but we were already very different. I
was twenty-four and he was twenty-nine. He had a family and
I was single. Lots of things. We were never really great social
friends.”

They had a decent working relationship, good enough for
the team to make it to the Super Bowl. On the way there, in the AFC
Championship game on January 27, 2002, against the Pittsburgh Steelers, Brady
sprained his left ankle in the second quarter and was replaced by Bledsoe.
The veteran excitedly ran on the field and began whipping passes. He threw a
touchdown pass to David Patten and made two difficult completions to Brown and
fullback Marc Edwards. He completed 10 of his 21 passes that day for 102 yards.
When it was over, he cried.

As emotional as the Pittsburgh game
was—Bledsoe received a game ball—the quarterback was still being evaluated.
According to the coaches’ game breakdowns, Bledsoe’s statistics were: one
mental error, four bad throws, and four bad choices. The logical
counterargument to those unflattering numbers was rust. How could Bledsoe
expect to play well when the majority of his reps hadn’t come with the
starters? How could he be sharp when he hadn’t played in a game in four
months?

Belichick didn’t view it that way. As much as he respected
Bledsoe, he had an idea of what his quarterback should do. The model for that
idea was Brady. Brady had shown an ability to stay calm, recognize defensive
nuances, and shout out the necessary adjustments for his receivers, backs, and
linemen. When he coached against Bledsoe in New York, Belichick would often
present the quarterback with a “Cover 5” defense. It features man-to-man
coverage with two deep safeties to help on the receivers. Belichick would tell
his defensive backs to be physical at the line of scrimmage. Then he would play
the educated odds, going with scientific and anecdotal
research that revealed Bledsoe would not be accurate enough or patient enough
to make the throws that could defeat an effective “Cover 5.”

It
didn’t take nearly as much research to figure out Bledsoe’s post–Super Bowl
stance. After New England won the first Super Bowl in its history, Bledsoe did
not respond to the Patriots’ calls or letters when the team was attempting to
coordinate an off-season workout schedule.

“It was clear to me he
didn’t want to be on this football team,” Belichick says. “And in the end I had
to decide whether to resolve the situation before training camp. It was clear
to me at that point that there would be some kind of confrontation one way or
the other. He was starting to take a stand.”

The stand was
probably good for everyone. It made the separation easier. Belichick could be
unconventional at times, but he wasn’t likely to bench a young quarterback who
was MVP of the Super Bowl. Bledsoe would be able to leave New England knowing
that he had rarely said or done anything that embarrassed the organization. The
Patriots’ reconstruction had begun to take shape soon after Bledsoe’s
twenty-eighth birthday. Now, with Bledsoe at thirty, it was time for some
paperwork and other formalities to make the makeover complete.

Cincinnati called with a proposal. So did Buffalo. The Bills and team
president Tom Donahoe were reluctant to give up a first-round choice for the
quarterback. But when the Patriots didn’t budge from their request on April 19,
the day before the 2002 draft, Donahoe sent a fax to Foxboro. In it he said he
was making his final offer, but any good negotiator could see through the
claim. The fax was sent to Belichick, Pioli, Robert Kraft,
and chief operating officer Andy Wasynczuk. It was received at 11:47
A
.
M
.:

Dear Scott,

We realize how busy you, Coach Belichick, and your
entire organization are in your draft preparations. We wish you good success
this weekend with your picks.

The Bills wanted to make one last attempt to
complete a trade for Drew Bledsoe and wanted to state our proposal in writing
so there is no confusion or mis-communication. If something is capable of
being completed, we would like to know today. We feel that tomorrow everyone’s
focus needs to be on the draft.

PROPOSAL

In the 2003 draft, the Bills
will trade a solid #2 pick to New England for Drew Bledsoe. If Drew Bledsoe
starts 12 games and the Bills go to the play-offs, the pick becomes the Bills’
#1 pick in 2003. However, if
Bledsoe fails to report and/or
pass a physical, the trade becomes null and void.

After you have a chance to discuss our proposal,
please give Jim Overdorf or myself a call to discuss further. Thank you and all
the best this weekend.

Two
days later Bledsoe was in Buffalo. The cost for Donahoe and the Bills was a
first-round pick, regardless of Bledsoe’s or the team’s performance. In
Buffalo, Bledsoe would get the chance to start again. He would be going to a
team with two good receivers in Eric Moulds and Peerless Price, a good running
back in Travis Henry, and an offensive coordinator, Kevin Gilbride, who would
give the quarterback an opportunity to take several
“shots” down field every game. He also would have a chance to play the Patriots
twice a year.

The Patriots had what they wanted. To them, Brady
was more than a quarterback who watched ESPN and said to himself, “I never want
to be on that crawl at the bottom of the screen: ‘Patriots quarterback Tom
Brady arrested. …’I never want to look like an ass who will let down my family,
my teammates, and my organization.” He was more than a connoisseur of
competition, one who would watch professional and amateur runners in the Boston
Marathon and exclaim, “These are some of the toughest people I’ve ever seen in
my life.” He was more than a man who was in awe of great writers, filmmakers,
musicians, and even politicians. “Take the president of the United States, for
example,” he says. “I’m not talking about George Bush specifically as much as
I’m talking generally about the position of president. What an awesome
responsibility that must be, to lead a country under the most intense
scrutiny.” He was more than the leader who could speak warmly of taking hits:
“The first game of the season, your jaw is aching, your head hurts, your hip
hurts. As the season wears on, by week thirteen or fourteen, every single
person in the league is hurt. You’re limping to the bathroom in the
morning.”

For the Patriots, Tom Brady was the fictional character
they put on paper and watched come to life. That’s truly what happened. Pioli
and Ernie Adams rewrote the scouting manual long before the team drafted Brady.
If you read the Patriots’ manual on the characteristics of a perfect
quarterback, it’s a Brady outline. It may not capture all the qualities of the
real thing, but it comes close. As Brady carried the team closer to where it
wanted to be, from a six-game winning streak at the end of
the 2001 season to a win in the snow in a divisional play-off against Oakland,
the manual began to read like the quarterback’s biography. He was everything
the Patriots wanted. “A quarterback for the New England Patriots must make the
right decisions and make them fast,” reads part of the manual. “Just because a
person is smart does not necessarily mean they can make quick decisions under
pressure.”

On a February evening in New Orleans a smart Brady
would make quick decisions under pressure. A worldwide audience would learn
what the late Rehbein had seen in2000. Brady was a team player. He would drive
his team as far as he could as quickly as he could. And when he couldn’t go any
farther, he was confident that a kicker could finish the job.

CHAPTER 4
DISSECTING THE
GREATEST SHOW
ON TURF

The smoky hotel room was not going to work for
Adam Vinatieri. He knew it as soon as he opened the door marked 209. He was
that rare business traveler in New Orleans, one who wasn’t looking for a good
time on a Saturday night. He didn’t want to enter this room at the New Orleans
Airport Hilton and be reminded of other places in the city. This smelled like a
juke joint or pool hall, ventilation thick enough to alter one of his
kicks.

He and his teammates had come here, thirteen
miles away from the French Quarter, for a Saturday night of peace. Their
previous hotel, the Fairmont, had been on Baronne Street. When you stayed
there, you understood that temptation was as close as the next open window or
elevator ride. There were Super Bowl crowds mixing with Mardi Gras crowds. There were parades, clowns, and streakers. There
were flashers, hustlers, and autograph seekers. The parties were plentiful,
even if they were taking place during one of the most reflective periods in
U.S. history.

On the first Saturday of February 2002, patriotism
was running high and the country was at war. It was still difficult to grasp
the totality of September 11, 2001, and the worst foreign attacks ever on U.S.
soil. The Secret Service and forty-seven other local and federal agencies came
to New Orleans, concerned that there might be another terrorist attack. The
Louisiana Superdome was surrounded by cement barriers and chain-link fences and
protected by snipers and fighter jets.

There was the poignancy of
a team in red, white, and blue uniforms—called the Patriots no less—attempting
to reach an ideal that has long resonated in the American soul. Here was the
little guy trying to stop the machine, in this case the quick- and high-scoring
St. Louis Rams. Here was the modest Main Street bodega trying to keep up with
the corporate strip-mall chain. And here was someone holding one of the most
marginalized positions in the game—kicker—trying to be sure he was as prepared
as the quarterbacks, linebackers, and coaches.

Since he would kick
off a party to be televised to the world the next night, and since he was
already seeking perfection on Saturday to ensure that Sunday would be just
right, he switched rooms. Vinatieri had a routine for everything. This had to
be a part of it. Handling the small things now would make tomorrow seem more
manageable. He would change rooms. He would attend the mandatory team dinner at
6:00. He would attend the mandatory squad meeting at 8:30. Then he would return
to the clean air of his new room and slowly begin to focus
on a game that he wasn’t expected to decide. After the squad meeting, he was in
for the night. He paged through some magazines, briefly listened to some
television noise, and was in bed when one of the assistant coaches, Ivan Fears,
began curfew checks after 11:00.

America hadn’t laughed much in
the months preceding the game, but America would have found this to be
hilarious. This was the kicker? A
kicker
insisting on the
proper environment? How was a kicker going to save the Patriots from the St.
Louis Rams? How was perfection itself going to save these 14-point
underdogs?

The Rams weren’t just a football team; they were
representatives of a culture that wants results and wants them quickly. They
were as fast as the Internet, an instant-message offense. They had a
three-season body of work that couldn’t be matched by any offense in NFL
history: 526 points in 1999 when they won Super Bowl XXXIV, 540 in 2000 when
they made the play-offs despite being betrayed by their defense, and 503 in
2001 when they were starting to think of themselves as a young dynasty. Theirs
was a powerful offense of illusion, one in which one play would appear to
mirror the other. But there was always a blur in the mirror, a subtle motion
that would play tricks with the reflection. It was one thing for opposing
coaches to study the offense and figure out its complexities. It was something
entirely different to take that message to their players and convince them,
essentially, to disbelieve reality. Because, you know, the reality they thought
they saw actually wasn’t real.

It was too heady for most teams to
comprehend. The 2001 Rams were computer-generated, with a carnival nickname—“The Greatest Show on Turf”—to match. Kurt Warner was
the quarterback, and he was the league’s MVP. Marshall Faulk was the running
back, and he was the league’s Offensive Player of the Year. Torry Holt and
Isaac Bruce, the starting receivers, had combined to average 15 touchdowns per
season since ’99. The head coach was Mike Martz, a professorial Californian who
was fascinated with the idea of making less look like more. And with all the
attention given to pro football’s number-one offense, it was easy to forget
that the speedy St. Louis defense was ranked third in the league.

Martz, a Civil War scholar, gave a glimpse of his offensive philosophy a
few days before the Super Bowl. “The Union Army was convinced that the
Confederacy was twice the size it actually was,” he told the
Detroit
News
. “A lot of it had to do with the movement of the troops and where
they were attacking. Deception is certainly some of what we do. It keeps people
back on their heels and gives us probably a little more credit for what we
are.”

The deception had worked in November in Foxboro. The Rams
played the Patriots in a regular-season game and won, 24–17. Warner passed for
401 yards, and the Rams’ offense had twice as many yards as the Patriots’. If
St. Louis could do that in chilly New England on slow grass, what would happen
when the Rams were expected to be scientists in ideal laboratory conditions:
domed stadium, 72 degrees, artificial turf?

Most football
observers considered it to be a rhetorical question—yet they couldn’t resist
answering it anyway. From sportswriters to broadcasters to former coaches and
players to celebrities to political talking heads, the opinions were nearly
unanimous.

Marv Levy, former coach of the
Buffalo Bills: “You have to pick the Rams. They’re the most talented team I’ve
seen in years.”

Peter Brown of
The Sporting News
:
“It’s gonna be ugly. Cinderella eventually becomes a pumpkin. You can’t be
lucky and win the Super Bowl.”

There were some exceptions, and a
couple of them were surprising. One came from national security adviser
Condoleezza Rice, a football enthusiast who dreams of being NFL commissioner.
During an interview on CNN with Wolf Blitzer, Rice briefly changed the course
of her conversation—she had been talking about terrorism—and gave an opinion on
her favorite sport.

 

BLITZER
: “So you want to tell us who’s going to
win the Super Bowl?”

RICE
: “Well, shouldn’t
I be reserved if I’d like to eventually be commissioner? Let me just say this:
if New England can stay in the game until the fourth quarter, I think they’ve
got a very good chance to win this game.”

 

One of the most ironic picks came from Cleveland, where the sideline star
of the Patriots, Belichick, began his head coaching career. Five years after
Modell had fired Belichick, New England was seeing what Cleveland expected in
the early 1990s. An entire six-state region believed Belichick to be a football
draftsman, capable of charting game plans so original that no team—the superior
Rams included—would be able to separate the Patriots from their first
championship. That was not the popular opinion in Cleveland. For many reasons,
readers of the
Cleveland Plain Dealer
must have been stunned
when columnist Bill Livingston predicted a Patriot win and
explained it by writing, “Nobody can beat the Rams? I beg to differ. The Rams
can. The only people who turn it over as much as the Rams are cooks at
IHOP.”

But St. Louis turnovers—and there were 44 of them during
the season—would not guarantee a New England win. Belichick had said, with no
trace of sarcasm, that his kicker was his most consistent player all season.
That’s usually not a good thing. But Vinatieri was different. Two weeks before
the Super Bowl, Vinatieri had made a 45-yard field goal in a snowstorm to force
overtime in a divisional play-off. He returned to win that game, against the
Oakland Raiders, with a 23-yarder. He gained the respect of strength coach Mike
Woicik by becoming stronger during the season. At one point Woicik said that
Vinatieri had no physical weaknesses. He gained the respect of special-teams coach Brad Seely by kicking well in bad weather. He was a football player who
happened to be a kicker, and his teammates accepted him as one of them.

Belichick liked the kicker too. But the coach and his staff were going to
have to come up with something that relied more on art than sentiment to stop
the Rams. When Belichick checked into his room at the Hilton, he found a
foot-long, stuffed Rams doll lying on his bed. It was wearing a helmet, with
pins stuck in its torso. Belichick wasn’t sure who placed the effigy in his
room, but he laughed and put the doll with his luggage. It was the Saturday
before a game that could earn him a ring as well as redemption. He had already
constructed a plan that could pierce the Rams. He had already announced to his
team that the defensive plan from November—blitz!—was inadequate and that was
his fault. He realized Warner’s release was quick enough to make pressure negligible. The more the Patriots blitzed, the
more space they created for him to throw, either in the seams or on the
perimeter. A smart quarterback could sit back and fill the open spaces.

This time the strategy would have more thought. Martz appreciated
military strategy from an academic point of view, but it was a way of life for
Belichick and his defensive coordinator, Romeo Crennel. Belichick grew up in
Annapolis, Maryland; an only child, his playground was often the U.S. Naval
Academy campus where his dad worked. Crennel spent much of his childhood less
than two hundred miles away in Lynchburg, Virginia, as his father went on
assignments in Korea and Japan. Sergeant Joseph Crennel was in the Army for
twenty-six years. He would give his five children household chores to do and
then review them with a military inspection. One of his two boys, Romeo,
planned to follow him as an enlisted officer. But when Romeo tried to get into
the advanced ROTC corps as an undergraduate at Western Kentucky, he was denied;
he was told he was overweight and had flat feet.

Both Belichick
and Crennel had grown up with fathers who had minds for strategy and mothers
who were gifted communicators. Mary Crennel was the perfect complement to
Joseph. She believed in details too, but her approach was softer than the
sergeant’s. To win, the Patriots were going to need both: get the right plan
and then present it to the team clearly and simply. Belichick and Crennel began
talking about it after the AFC Championship game, on the plane from Pittsburgh
to Boston. The next day, Monday, January 28, Belichick boarded a noon flight to
New Orleans while Crennel and the other assistant coaches remained in
Foxboro. They studied tape of all the Rams games and
followed their head coach to Louisiana on Tuesday afternoon.

Once
he arrived at the Fairmont, Belichick faxed some ideas back home to Crennel. He
also huddled with Ernie Adams, his old prep school buddy. Adams had a vague
title with the Patriots—football research director—and could often be seen
carrying either the
New York Times
or some four-hundred-page
book. At Phillips Academy, Adams was so proficient in Latin that the school ran
out of courses to offer him. He loved football too and was one of the few
people who knew the name “Belichick” before Bill arrived on campus in the fall
of 1970. Adams had already read Steve Belichick’s book on scouting,
Football Scouting Methods
, and was eager to meet the author’s
son. Belichick and Adams played next to each other on the football team, center
and guard, and they didn’t venture far from each other—philosophically at
least—after that.

While Adams was not a coach, Belichick consulted
with him the same way a president consults with a top adviser. Once, during a
training camp skit, Patriots rookies flashed a picture of Adams with the
teasing caption, “Do You Know Who This Man Is?” It got a lot of laughs. No one
could quite define Adams, but Belichick knew he was brilliant and could help
him see things that might escape even some trained football eyes.

Crennel, Adams, and Belichick all came up with independent thoughts on
defending the Rams. Belichick likes to see what his employees think,
independent of him. “That way you don’t have those crude masturbation
activities. Sometimes somebody can get going and then everyone follows that
line of thinking, that process. And then everybody agrees.
It’s better when we just analyze independently and all agree or work it out
ourselves.” Early on Tuesday they merged their brightest ideas and began to
strip away some of the St. Louis mythology.

“They have five basic
passing concepts,” Belichick told Crennel later that day. “They don’t have
thousands of plays. If we stop those five concepts, we’re going to have a
chance. They change formations around, and they shift everybody all over the
place. But if we can stop the concepts, that’s the heart of what they want to
try to do.”

Belichick was a curious mechanic with the St. Louis
offense in his hands. He had deconstructed the engine, tagged the most
indispensable parts, and rearranged the structure just as he found it. Among
the five concepts, he noticed that one truth rose above the other four: Warner,
despite throwing for 4,830 yards (second-most in NFL history), was not the key
to the St. Louis offense. Accepted NFL theory says that harassing the
quarterback leads to mistakes. Belichick believed that, but with a twist. He
planned to harass Warner by disrupting the most important player on the
field.

BOOK: Patriot Reign
11.36Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Jaguar by Bill Ransom
They Found Him Dead by Georgette Heyer
Crystal Deception by Doug J. Cooper
Eighteen Acres: A Novel by Wallace, Nicolle
Betraying Season by Marissa Doyle
Virgin Whore by Thomas Henry
Precious Lace (Lace #4) by Adriane Leigh
A College of Magics by Caroline Stevermer
The Upright Heart by Julia Ain-Krupa