Patriot Reign Read online

  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 proficien
t 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.”