by Ian O'Connor
Some coaches brought up Brady’s upscale endorsement deals in recent years and whined that he’d “gone corporate” after fronting for Dunkin’ Donuts in simpler, more modest times. Belichick had a different complaint of sorts. In sports-bar debates over the all-time greatest coaches, he knew there were still doubters and haters who liked to bring up his sub.-500 record without Brady under center, even after he finished 11-5 with Matt Cassel in 2008. As much as he appreciated everything Brady had done for him, Belichick was already telling people he looked forward to the day he could try to win a Super Bowl without him.
In that regard, Brady wasn’t going to make it easy on his coach. He had teamed up with a controversial fitness guru and self-styled life coach, Alex Guerrero, as he pursued his goal of playing into his forties. In 2013, five years after Guerrero helped Brady recover from his knee surgery, the two opened the TB12 Sports Therapy Center at Patriot Place, an open-air mall adjacent to Gillette Stadium that featured shops, restaurants, bars, and the team’s Hall of Fame. Brady had described Guerrero as one of his best friends, and he’d recommended him to other Patriots and to Pittsburgh Penguins superstar Sidney Crosby, who was battling neck and head injuries.
Brady had made an interesting choice for a business associate. Guerrero had studied traditional Chinese medicine at a California college that had since closed down. The magazine Boston reported that he had been sanctioned by the Federal Trade Commission for passing himself off as a doctor and for marketing a product that he falsely claimed could prevent or even cure cancer and other diseases. Brady had endorsed a Guerrero sports drink, NeuroSafe, which claimed to contain properties that expedited the brain’s healing process after it was concussed, before FTC pressure compelled Guerrero to stop marketing the drink.
With the goal of reducing inflammation in the quarterback’s aging body, Guerrero had Brady on a fun-free, plant-based diet that would’ve made a wild boar puke. Brady also performed workouts designed to make his muscles more pliable and less susceptible to injury, and the truth was, he hadn’t missed a single start since blowing out his knee in 2008. For this he credited a man who admitted that conventional practitioners of medicine saw him as “a kook and a charlatan.”
Brady had put his money on this wildly imperfect horse, and he was going to ride it into what he hoped was a distant sunset. Toward that end, the quarterback was staring down a difficult proposition. Dante Scarnecchia, the great offensive line coach, had retired, and the Mankins trade with Tampa Bay had left the line looking awfully young and thin. New England had brought in the star cornerback Darrelle Revis, formerly of the Jets and the Bucs, but didn’t acquire any explosive playmakers on offense to give the old man a little extra help.
So Brady looked a little creaky in his first three games, winning two but failing to crack 250 passing yards in any. He wasn’t happy with his performance, or with that of the offensive line under coach Dave DeGuglielmo, formerly of the Jets, Dolphins, and Giants. Before he played that Monday night game in Kansas City, Brady told people he was beginning to worry about his standing with Belichick. He went to work behind a line that included rookies Bryan Stork and Cameron Fleming, and he again looked dreadful. Brady was picked off twice and strip-sacked, setting up a Chiefs touchdown. He completed only one of seven throws of more than ten yards, leaving his completion rate on such throws (32 percent) as the worst in the NFL.
Belichick had seen enough after Brady threw a pick-six that gave Kansas City a 41–7 lead early in the fourth quarter. He benched the starter for Garoppolo, who had gotten off to a slow training-camp start before showing encouraging progress during preseason games. And, sure enough, Garoppolo immediately led the Patriots on a scoring drive, hitting Brandon LaFell for 37 yards before finding Gronkowski on a 13-yard scoring pass. As he returned to the sideline, Garoppolo received congratulations and high fives from teammates relieved that something positive had come out of this miserable night. Brady didn’t appear to be among those giving him a hearty attaboy. In fact, Brady gave high fives to a number of offensive teammates, just not the one who had performed Brady’s job better than he had.
It was garbage time in K.C., but still: Garoppolo completed six of his seven attempts on the night for 70 yards. The next morning, Boston Globe columnist Ben Volin published a piece under the headline “End Game Becomes Apparent” that declared it was time “to start wondering if the clock is running out on Brady’s Patriots tenure a lot more quickly than we thought.” Brady was statistically one of the worst quarterbacks in the league and the worst in the dreary AFC East. That was why Belichick was asked if the quarterback position would be evaluated during the week; he shot the reporter a look before dismissing the question with a snorting half laugh and a slight shake of the head.
Brady spent his benched portion of Monday night’s game brooding and looking like the loneliest man on the planet. He was working on yet another contract that was well below market value, and he had to be incensed that this was how he was being thanked by Belichick—with a shaky offensive line, limited outside receivers who couldn’t stretch the field, and a talented heir apparent replacing him in a national TV game. If Brady remained on the roster throughout the 2014 season, he would be guaranteed salaries of $7 million, $8 million, and $9 million over the following three seasons, at a time when Rodgers was making $22 million a pop. Brady, a three-time Super Bowl champ, ranked 16th among quarterbacks in average salary ($14.1 million) and made less than Alex Smith ($17 million average) and Andy Dalton ($16 million), who had combined to win one postseason game. (Brady had won 18.)
Suddenly the week leading into Sunday night’s home game against the Bengals had become a referendum on whether Brady’s days were numbered in New England. To complicate matters, Garoppolo was represented by Brady’s agent, Don Yee. It wasn’t common to see an agent juggle the best interests of a franchise player and those of the hotshot hired to take his job.
In a Wednesday press conference, Belichick was peppered with questions about Brady’s age and the quality of the talent the coach had placed around him. Belichick created a stir by repeatedly answering, “We’re on to Cincinnati,” before elaborating with the much more expansive “We’re getting ready for Cincinnati.” Few NFL coaches could get away with Belichick’s act in pressers, but the New England coach had done enough winning to operate by his own public relations playbook.
Belichick was a master of keeping his team focused on what was important, namely this game against the Bengals, and when kickoff arrived, Brady and the Patriots were ready to defy their obituary writers. The fans chanted the quarterback’s name, and Brady responded with a vintage performance—a season-high 292 passing yards and two touchdowns in a 43–17 victory that felt just as profound as New England’s 41–14 defeat in Kansas City. Brady had become the sixth NFL quarterback to pass for at least 50,000 yards. He acknowledged afterward that it had been a long week; ESPN’s Chris Mortensen had reported that enough tension existed between the quarterback and the coaching staff over his diminished role in game planning to potentially send him to another franchise for the final seasons of his career. Brady denied the report and claimed that he had strong working relationships throughout the team facility. He did concede that he was aware of what people were saying and writing about his looming endgame in Foxborough.
“Well, it’s hard to be oblivious to things,” he said. “We all have TVs or the Internet or the questions I get and the emails that I get from people who are concerned. I’m always emailing them back like ‘Nobody died. It’s just a loss.’”
After the blowout of the Bengals, Belichick was surrounded by half-dressed Patriots as he stood in the middle of the locker room with a game ball in his hands. “We’re certainly not big on individual stats around here,” he said, “but 50,000 yards, Tom . . .” The players started applauding as Brady walked toward Belichick, who handed him the ball and then started to offer his right hand for a handshake. That wasn’t going to be good enough this time. Brady had entered the locker
room to a hug and a kiss on the cheek from Robert Kraft, whom he regarded as a second father; Kraft, in turn, regarded the player as his fifth son. Brady had a transformational relationship with the owner, and the quarterback was known to be a warm person who sometimes knocked his male friends off-balance by telling them he loved them.
But his relationship with Belichick was purely transactional; the two had never gone to dinner in all their years together. “They have a strictly professional relationship, 100 percent,” said Brady’s father, Tom Sr. “Bill’s got many friends, and Tommy has many friends, and what Tommy needs from Bill is direction and coaching, and what Bill needs from Tommy is performance. They don’t need to have a dinner.”
An occasional victory hug wasn’t asking for too much. So after taking the game ball from Belichick, Brady leaned toward him, wrapped his arms around him, and patted him on the back five times. The Patriots had started what would be a seven-game winning streak that would propel them to their 12th AFC East title in 13 seasons with a healthy Brady under center and silence all concerns that the quarterback was washed up. (Brady threw 22 touchdown passes and four interceptions in that winning streak.) Before they left the locker room on that seminal Sunday night against Cincinnati, Brady shouted, “Bring it down” as he lifted his right hand in the air and locked fingers with Belichick’s. The players closed in on the coach and the quarterback, put their hands in the air, too, and shouted the desired response after Brady barked, “Team on three: One . . . two . . . three.”
As the players dispersed, Brady and Belichick lingered for a second and exchanged a few words before going their separate ways. They had enjoyed one of the most successful business partnerships in NFL history. Before the 2014 season concluded, that partnership would be fractured by a controversy unlike any pro football had seen.
In the second quarter of the AFC Championship Game at Gillette Stadium, Tom Brady dropped back and underthrew a pass to Rob Gronkowski that was intercepted by the Indianapolis Colts’ D’Qwell Jackson, who had picked off only one pass in his previous 48 games. Jackson wanted the ball as a souvenir, so he handed it off to the Colts’ director of player engagement, who immediately handed it to an assistant equipment manager. New England already held a 14–0 lead, and unless the Colts established some momentum after the pick, it appeared they would lose a playoff game to their tormentors for the second consecutive year. Meanwhile, the equipment staffer noticed that the ball Jackson had intercepted seemed underinflated.
Ryan Grigson, the team’s general manager, was notified of the ball’s condition. The GM wasn’t surprised: He’d been tipped off by his equipment manager, Sean Sullivan, that the Patriots were allegedly in the habit of manipulating game balls. The day before the game, Grigson had sent an email to Mike Kensil and Dave Gardi, senior members of the league’s football operations department, that included an attachment from Sullivan that read, in part, “As far as the gameballs are concerned it is well known around the league that after the Patriots gameballs are checked by the officials and brought out for game usage the ball boys for the patriots will let out some air with a ball needle because their quarterback likes a smaller ball so he can grip it better, it would be great if someone would be able to check the air in the game balls as the game goes on that they don’t get an illegal advantage.”
Gardi responded that Kensil would take up the matter with the game officials at Gillette Stadium, and the Grigson email and Sullivan attachment were forwarded to game operations personnel and to senior members of the league’s officiating department. The Colts had been suspicious of ball tampering since New England’s 42–20 victory over them in November, when Mike Adams intercepted two Brady passes and brought the balls to the bench area, where equipment staffers found them to be soft and spongy and coated in what they described as a tacky substance. So, seven years after Spygate, the Colts and the NFL were ready for the Patriots in the event they cheated again. And when Indy’s equipment staffers used their own hands and a digital pressure gauge to determine that the ball from the Jackson interception in the AFC Championship Game was similar to the balls from the Adams interceptions in Week 11, the mother of all NFL circuses was born.
Various officials were informed of the Colts’ concern, and soon enough Grigson and Kensil had made their way down to the field from the press box and control booth. Kensil and Troy Vincent, a former star cornerback and the league’s executive VP of football ops, decided that the footballs for both teams should be weighed. Alberto Riveron, from the officiating department, made the final call to collect the balls and test them at halftime to ensure that they complied with NFL regulations calling for game balls to be inflated to a pressure level between 12.5 and 13.5 pounds per square inch.
On the September day the Spygate case broke in Giants Stadium in 2007, New Jersey state troopers, FBI men, and security officials for the Patriots and the Jets engaged in a hidden high-stakes game for control of the confiscated camera while the teams battled on the field. On this night in Foxborough, seven years later, league and game officials conducted a hidden test that would shape the way much of America outside of New England looked at the Patriots’ machine. In the dressing area of the officials’ locker room, the balls were weighed with referee Walt Anderson’s two pressure gauges.
New England’s balls were tested first, and 11 of them came in below the 12.5 minimum PSI requirement on both gauges. The ball D’Qwell Jackson intercepted was measured three separate times—at 11.45, 11.35, and 11.75 PSI. With the start of the second half bearing down on them, the officials had time to measure only four of the Colts’ balls. Those four were all at or above 12.5 on one gauge, while three of the four came in below 12.5 on the second gauge. The Patriots’ balls were inflated to meet NFL standards, but no air was added to the Colts’ balls because they were in compliance on at least one of the gauges. The balls were returned to the field for the second half, and Kensil, a former Jets executive, approached New England equipment manager Dave Schoenfeld on the sideline and reportedly told him, “We weighed the balls. You are in big fucking trouble.” The Patriots then proved they knew how to play with properly inflated footballs, too. They outscored the Colts 28–0 in the second half and celebrated their sixth trip to the Super Bowl under Belichick before everyone went home happy.
Everyone except Grigson and other Indianapolis officials who felt they’d been had. In notifying the league the day before the game about the Patriots’ alleged ball tampering, Grigson had said, “All the Indianapolis Colts want is a completely level playing field. Thank you for being vigilant stewards of that not only for us but for the shield and overall integrity of our game.” Grigson wanted the NFL to act before the game started, not after. How in the world could the game officials allow New England’s balls out of their sight after they were given advance warning that the Patriots might tamper with those balls?
These questions wouldn’t be asked immediately, in a public forum, unless the story of what had gone down got out right away. Up in the Gillette Stadium press box, past midnight, wrapping up his column after finishing a postgame show for WTHR in Indianapolis, Bob Kravitz saw a text on his phone from a source telling him to call about something really important. Kravitz tried the source two or three times before finally reaching him and hearing that the NFL was investigating whether the Patriots had improperly deflated footballs that night. Kravitz thought the whole thing sounded outlandish, but he made some calls and got the story confirmed. He tweeted out the bombshell after he’d returned to his hotel, then finished writing and enjoyed a beer at the lobby bar. When he finally checked to see how his exclusive was doing on Twitter, he couldn’t believe his eyes. “It was like, my God, we’ve broken the Internet,” Kravitz said.
The columnist couldn’t sleep that night; he was too busy staring at his ceiling and wondering what the hell he had gotten himself into. Kravitz arrived at the airport for his early-morning flight just hoping, praying, that someone would confirm his exclusive. He knew he’d gotten it right,
but every journalist who has broken a major news story knows that feeling of dread when confronting the 2 percent chance that the reported story was false as a result of some misunderstanding.
And then Bob Glauber, of Newsday, printed confirmation from the league that an investigation was indeed underway, and Kravitz was in the clear. The Patriots, on the other hand, were not. Belichick said he didn’t find out about the allegation and investigation until Monday morning—a claim that was extremely difficult to believe—and pledged to “cooperate fully with whatever the league wants us to do.” As information started to trickle in, Belichick was trying to figure out who might’ve told the Colts that New England was allegedly taking air out of the footballs. The Baltimore Ravens were a pretty good place to start. The Patriots had just defeated the Ravens in Foxborough in a controversial divisional playoff game that saw the home team rally from two 14-point deficits to advance.
Baltimore’s coach, John Harbaugh, had become the AFC’s answer to Tom Coughlin as a Belichick stopper, which was a bit ironic, given that Belichick had recommended him for the Ravens job. Harbaugh said he was “incredibly awed” by the fact that Belichick called Ravens owner Steve Bisciotti on his behalf, and he honored that recommendation by beating the Patriots’ coach in two road playoff games (by a combined 34 points) and by almost beating him a third time at Gillette Stadium in the AFC Championship Game following the 2011 season. Belichick knew he had to create opportunities to beat the Ravens in their latest postseason clash, and that was precisely what he did. He ran three third-quarter plays in their divisional playoff comeback with four offensive linemen and skill-position players reporting as ineligible receivers, and the Ravens had no idea how to react or whom to cover. Referee Bill Vinovich announced the ineligible Patriot on the play known as “Baltimore,” running back Shane Vereen, who was on the line of scrimmage as a de facto extra lineman but split wide right and standing as if he were about to run a pass route. (Stretched wider on that side was the actual split end, Julian Edelman.)
