Belichick

by Ian O'Connor

  All these years later, Coughlin appeared to have won a far more significant battle. The Patriots seemed frozen in disbelief on their sideline. Bad omens were everywhere. New England’s Laurence Maroney took the opening kickoff, and he was shut down at his own 26 by the Giants’ Zak DeOssie, the former training-camp ball boy for Belichick and the son of one of Belichick’s old Giants linebackers, Steve DeOssie. The Patriots’ coach was gracious enough to greet his fellow Andover alum with a hug near midfield before the game, something Giants teammates razzed DeOssie about. During the game, veteran Patriots who remembered him as a camp kid, the Bruschis and Vrabels and Larry Izzos, were yelling at DeOssie as he prepared to perform his duty on punts. “Ball boy,” they shouted, “you’re going to get us a Gatorade after you mess this snap up.”

  Twenty-nine seconds remained when Brady took the field. Once a draft-day afterthought, Brady had grown into the NFL’s most reliable player. It seemed the quarterback never did or said anything that hurt his team. Yet during the week, he’d stepped out of character by mocking Burress’s prediction of a low-scoring Giants victory. “We’re only going to score 17 points?” Brady asked incredulously. “OK. Is Plax playing defense? I wish he had said, like, 45–42, something like that. I wish he’d give us a little more credit for scoring a few points.”

  Brady had violated his own “Well done is always better than well said” code, and now he had a lousy 14 points on the board and a desperate need for three more just to buy himself overtime. The most prominent newcomer also deviated from the old New England playbook. “We’ll see who has black on after the game,” Moss had said in reference to the funereal attire worn by the Giants when they touched down in the desert.

  The Patriots weren’t ever supposed to get caught up in silly public banter, but they were on a seek-and-destroy mission all year, and their emotions had ultimately fractured their focus. Sloppy practices led to an uneven Super Bowl performance and an inability to finish huge defensive plays on the Giants’ final drive. Wearing two sweatshirts with sleeves cut off near the elbows, including a blood-red Patriots hoodie on top, Belichick wasn’t at the peak of his game, either. Rather than attempt a 49-yard field goal in the third quarter with his second-year kicker, Stephen Gostkowski, who had a career long of 52 yards and had made a 50-yarder in the playoffs the season before, Belichick chose to go with a Brady pass on fourth and 13, a pass that sailed out of the end zone. “I don’t know why you don’t kick that ball,” said the Giants’ Tynes, whose overtime 47-yarder in the NFC Championship Game had just become the longest postseason kick in Lambeau Field history. “That was a head-scratcher to me.”

  Belichick’s decision also baffled some Patriots, including Bruschi, who, years later, as an ESPN analyst, cited the decision as a strike against Belichick in an on-air discussion about who should be considered the greatest NFL coach of all time. With the game being played indoors, Gostkowski would’ve had perfect conditions to work with.

  Belichick had also abandoned the running game that was effective in New England’s two playoff victories. The Patriots ran the ball only 16 times for 45 yards, almost all of it the work of Maroney, who’d rushed for a combined 244 yards on 47 carries against Jacksonville and San Diego. Belichick decided to put the Super Bowl on the right shoulder of Brady, who threw 48 times against those 16 handoffs. New England’s lack of balance allowed the Giants’ pass rushers to tee off and sack Brady five times, after they’d taken him down only once in December.

  As the crowd buzzed with the anticipation of an indelible upset, the Patriots were left to confront the dire circumstances of a last-gasp possession. On first down, a rushed Brady threw waywardly downfield. Twenty-five seconds to go. On second down, Giants rookie Jay Alford beat right guard Russ Hochstein to his left and plowed into Brady’s midsection for the sack. Nineteen seconds to go. On third-and-20, Brady and Moss flashed their historic greatness for the last time that season. The quarterback took the snap, rolled right to buy himself some time, stepped up, and launched the ball with everything he had toward the receiver streaking down the left side of the field. Moss had a step on cornerback Corey Webster, who’d helped win the NFC Championship Game by intercepting Brett Favre in overtime, and safety Gibril Wilson. If Brady had heaved it 69 yards in the air instead of 68, Moss might’ve caught it and either scored or put New England in position to tie or win on the next play. But Webster got his left hand on the ball, barely, deflecting it away. Ten seconds to go.

  The camera found Belichick with his hands on his hips, licking his lips. He looked right and then swiveled his head quickly left, and his expression reflected the grim reality of the moment. It was fourth and 20, and Brady called time out. The Patriots had to try the obvious, again, a deep shot to Moss, and hope for a defensive pass interference call or a miracle catch. Brady lined up in shotgun formation as Belichick conferred with his offensive coordinator, McDaniels, and then lifted his right leg and planted his foot to signal for his last snap. He caught that snap and launched another pass down the left side of the field, but this time Moss didn’t come as close to hauling it in as he encountered the same two defenders and went crashing out of bounds. One second to go. The Giants started to celebrate what John Mara would call the greatest victory in franchise history.

  Madison Hedgecock, a Giants fullback, dumped a Gatorade bucket of ice water on Coughlin as Brady walked off the field, helmet in hand. Suddenly Belichick decided to jog across the field toward Coughlin while a credentialed functionary carrying a red flag chased him from behind, followed by New England’s security chief, Mark Briggs. Carey, the referee, tried to intercept Belichick before he got to Coughlin, as the Giants had to take one more snap to make the game complete. The losing coach pushed past the ref and gave the winning coach a hug, then Belichick started walking off the field and toward the exits while surrounded by security and cops. “The official word from the NFL is a play has to be run,” Joe Buck said on the Fox broadcast. “But it appears it will be run with Bill Belichick up the tunnel.”

  Eli Manning took a knee, and Coughlin pumped his fist in triumph. Much had been made of the head coach’s transformation—under threat of termination—from an unforgiving tyrant to a more humane leader, and he, too, had spent the week in a stunningly jovial state. His young grandchildren had stormed his hotel room at 7 a.m. on Super Bowl Sunday to draw animals and other figures on his game plan, and he adored every second of it.

  His Giants played loose and hungry, moving Moss to say that “their intensity from the beginning snap to the end of the game was really higher than ours.” Moss also said the winners “just had a better game plan,” and neither comment reflected well on his coach. The Giants had set up this result by burning nine minutes and 59 seconds of clock time on the opening 16-play drive. They would beat up the favored Patriots like the 2001 Patriots had beaten up the favored Rams, and, after winning three different Super Bowls by three points, New England finally lost one by the same margin. A Giants fan held up a sign afterward that said 18-1, and amid the delirium O’Hara surveyed the sheer devastation on the Patriots’ faces. “Junior Seau was laying on his stomach, face flat on the ground,” O’Hara said. “He couldn’t believe he was that close. My heart went out to him.”

  So many poignant postgame scenes outside the stadium separated the winners from the losers. Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce boarded the bus back to the champions’ hotel wearing most of his uniform—he simply didn’t want to take it off. Kyle Brady ran into Coughlin, his former coach in Jacksonville, in the parking lot and congratulated him on the upset. “Brady,” the winning coach responded, “we should’ve done this together.” Patriots linebacker Rosevelt Colvin, out with a broken foot, was blaming himself for not being available as he took his endless trudge to the bus in a walking boot. Patriots guard Logan Mankins—who hadn’t shaved during the winning streak—pulled some clippers out of his bag and started cutting his mountain-man beard right there on his team bus. His teammate Stallworth, feeling completely gutt
ed in the back of that bus, wore headphones for the ride back to the hotel, which felt like it lasted days.

  Before the Patriots pulled away from University of Phoenix Stadium, Belichick was sitting in the first row of bus No. 5642, staring at the final stats for the night. The matriarch of the Giants’ ownership family, Ann Mara, saw the former Giants assistant and left her bus to board his and offer some words of comfort. “I didn’t know if I should do it,” she later told her son John, “but I saw him sitting there looking so unhappy. So I just wanted to go down and tell him what a great coach he was and what a great season they had.”

  The New England locker room had been a scene of unspeakable pain. This was the kind of misery that visited the St. Louis Rams when they lost to the Patriots six years earlier, and the Baltimore Colts when they lost to Joe Namath and the Jets decades before that. The 2007 Patriots had made 18 consecutive trips into postgame locker rooms laughing and joking and reveling in their own glory, and suddenly they were walking into a mausoleum. Their own.

  Stephen Neal, the lineman who injured his knee in the defeat, recalled the looks on the faces of Seau, Moss, and Welker—the relatively new Patriots who had yet to win a ring—and the emptiness he felt for failing to win them one. Mostly the players in that godforsaken room remembered the deafening silence, occasionally pierced by the sounds of men weeping.

  “I’ve never been in a locker room so quiet,” Stallworth said. “They say you could hear a pin drop on the floor, but if that locker room floor was carpeted you could still hear a pin drop. Guys were crying. It was horrible. The atmosphere and feeling inside was . . . I can’t explain it. Shock. Disbelief. Sadness. I hate to compare it to a funeral or say it was worse than that, but it was horrible.”

  Almost to a man, the Patriots were slumped at their lockers and silently blaming themselves. Even after a soul-crushing defeat, these players were wired to look in their own mirrors when assigning culpability. It was all part of the ethos of what would widely become known as the Patriot Way. Third-string quarterback Matt Gutierrez, an undrafted free agent who appeared in five games that year, was in the room wondering what he could’ve or should’ve done differently in practice to make Tom Brady better, or to make the first-team defense better. He didn’t play a single down in the Super Bowl, yet he felt as responsible for this program-wide breakdown as Brady did. Ditto for Bam Childress, a practice squad receiver, who was asking himself if he could’ve done something else during the week to help Moss.

  Into this dark abyss stepped the head coach of the New England Patriots. What is he going to say? players thought to themselves. What can any coach possibly say in this moment? Belichick stood among these shattered men and started to speak. “It’s more emotional than I’ve ever seen Bill,” said Heath Evans.

  “I saw a defeated look on his face,” said Stallworth, “and I’d never seen anything like it . . . I had never seen a coach that way before. He was just—he was not tearing up, but he was extremely upset. He didn’t say much. Maybe he spoke for less than a minute.”

  Maybe he spoke for 45 seconds or 55 seconds, or 15 to 30 seconds longer than Stallworth recalled. The length didn’t matter; the message did. And in that locker room, Belichick realized he had to coach his greatest team through one more possession. He had to ease his players’ pain, and so he did what New England Patriots do. Belichick blamed himself.

  “Other than my father,” Evans said, “I’ve never had more respect for a man at any moment in my life as that man in that moment.”

  As low as he’d ever been, Belichick rose to his chief responsibility. “He said, ‘We didn’t prepare you guys well enough. The coaches didn’t do a good enough job, and that falls on me. I didn’t prepare you guys well enough, and I’m really sorry for that,’” Stallworth recounted. “He didn’t blame the coaches. He blamed himself for everything and he apologized for that. He could’ve easily said, ‘It sucks, but we didn’t make enough plays.’ He didn’t mention the players at all . . . To me, that shows a lot about who he is as a person.”

  Evans said Belichick took specific responsibility for the offensive failures in the game. “He owned the situation, and it wasn’t verbiage,” the fullback said. “He was broken over the fact he had cost not himself, but his team, his coaching staff, and maybe most importantly his owner an opportunity to go down in history. He felt he mismanaged game-time scenarios and adjustments, and the truth is we had plenty of opportunities to win the game and the players didn’t get it done.

  “I’ve seen many coaches try to pull it off, and didn’t pull it off, when trying to BS a bunch of grown men,” Evans said. “I loved, respected, and honored Bill before that moment, and this magnified it after. With his powerful position, with everything he’d accomplished, he could’ve had a hard time saying he was sorry. Most prideful, arrogant people want to blame others, and that was never the case with him . . . The message was loud and clear, and especially guys on the offensive side of the ball fully understood what he meant and the ownership he took. I’d say, in my words, he took full ownership over the loose coaching decisions he made.”

  Belichick had started the season with his worst hour as a football coach, the Spygate scandal, and he had just finished it with his finest. He gave his heart to his men when he had nothing left to give them, and then it was time to leave. Stallworth made this one last observation about the undisputed leader of the best 18-1 team the NFL had ever seen:

  “It was almost like he just faded to black when he walked away.”

  16

  Hernandez

  On April Fools’ Day 2008, Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft apologized to their NFL peers for New England’s illegal videotaping practices. Roger Goodell had gathered owners and head coaches at the league meetings at the Breakers in Palm Beach, and no, they did not have the same reaction to Belichick that they had to Kraft.

  “Robert was a lot more convincing than Bill,” one owner said, “let’s put it that way.”

  Kraft was a well-liked and respected steward of the game, someone who appeared genuine in his concern for the greater good of the league. He did not strike his audience inside the hotel’s Ponce de Leon Ballroom as someone who was merely sorry his team had been caught cheating. He sounded like someone who was sorry that people in his franchise, on his watch, had embarrassed the NFL and called into question the integrity of the competition.

  Kraft said that nothing outside of his family mattered more to him than the league, and that the Patriots would never again bring dishonor to the game. The room applauded him when he was done. Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy was among the listeners who approached Kraft afterward to express how much they appreciated his contrition. Dungy called Kraft’s speech “very sincere and heartfelt.”

  When Belichick rose to speak in the closed-door session, there was a different vibe in the room. Kraft wasn’t the one responsible for Spygate, after all, nor did he have any knowledge of it before Matt Estrella’s camera was confiscated in September. Belichick had orchestrated the entire thing, with Ernie Adams acting as co-conspirator, and he was facing a crowd of vanquished competitors who largely disagreed with Goodell’s decision to destroy the Patriots’ tapes and notes used in carrying out the operation. A league official who had heard Belichick address opposing coaches and executives in other settings described the typical reaction to him this way: “When he gets up, you can feel the loathing in the room.” Part of that loathing was inspired by Belichick’s perceived arrogance. And part was inspired by Belichick’s winning percentage against those men in the room.

  One owner in the audience said that loathing and skepticism hung in the air as Belichick claimed, again, that he had misinterpreted the rules and thought sideline videotaping of coaches’ signals was legal as long as those tapes weren’t used for a real-time advantage in the same game. “It’s accurate to say there wasn’t a single person in the room who believed what Bill said, that he misinterpreted the rule,” the owner said. “That’s one person in the lea
gue who doesn’t misinterpret anything.”

  That morning, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and sandals, Belichick met with reporters at the annual AFC coaches breakfast and actually broke news. He disclosed that he’d spoken with as many as five NFL representatives after the Super Bowl about the illegal filming of signals; neither the Patriots nor the league had previously disclosed that fact or the fact that other team officials were also interviewed.

  The Patriots understood that this was serious business. In fact, when they hired former Panthers and Texans head coach Dom Capers in February as a special assistant/secondary coach, some figured they’d just purchased an insurance policy. Capers had finished the runner-up to Belichick in Foxborough in 2000, and if Belichick ended up getting suspended, Capers could have been an experienced hand to summon from the bullpen. Not that New England’s head coach had any plans for getting suspended.

  “I’ve addressed so many questions so many times from so many people,” Belichick said, “I don’t know what else the league could ask.” He blamed himself for not getting a clarification on the videotaping rule from Ray Anderson in the league office. “That was my mistake,” Belichick said. He also claimed that he “barely knew” former video staffer Matt Walsh, who was making noise about having new and important Spygate information in his possession, and remained adamant that New England had not taped the Rams’ walk-through before Super Bowl XXXVI, contrary to the Boston Herald report.

  “I’ve never seen a tape of another team’s practice. Ever,” Belichick said. The coach assured reporters that his program had become “more efficient, more streamlined” in the wake of Spygate—though he’d never use that word, “Spygate,” to describe the case—to ensure that the episode wouldn’t repeat itself. On a related matter, the league voted in a rule that allowed one defensive player to wear a communication device in his helmet, like the quarterback does on offense, to receive calls from the sideline. That device would dramatically reduce the need for hand signals and thus reduce the opportunity for spies to steal them.