by Ian O'Connor
Only now Belichick’s players were angered and confused by the move he’d made. Browner, the former Patriots cornerback, ripped the coach over the Butler decision and called the locker room “divided” in an Instagram post that was liked by Patriots linebacker Dont’a Hightower. Butler’s own statement on Instagram was liked by a number of current and former New England teammates, including Brady, who added this comment to the post: “Love you Malcolm. You are an incredible player and teammate and friend. Always!!!!!!”
Brady’s support put pressure on Belichick to give the fans something more than his boilerplate response that he plays the people he thinks give his team its best chance to win. Benching Butler was likely his most puzzling Super Bowl decision since trying a fourth-and-13 pass against the Giants ten years earlier rather than asking Gostkowski to attempt a 49-yard field goal, and Patriots fans deserved an explanation.
But they weren’t getting one anytime soon. If Belichick had out-Belichicked himself this time, the fans would have to live with it. His coaching quirks had worked out for them far more often than not.
Not that Belichick wasn’t hurting this time around. Upon leaving his locker room on Sunday night, dressed in a dark gray suit with a purple shirt and tie, Belichick was feeling what Marv Levy and Mike Martz and Pete Carroll had felt on the wrong side of some of his more memorable NFL moments. He was eating a slice of pizza he’d pulled from the team spread as he walked with Linda Holliday, who was wearing a shirt with her boyfriend’s surname embroidered in silver sequins on the back. Holliday still had a strand of Eagles confetti in her hair when a team staffer pointed the couple toward the team bus.
Bill Belichick had no parade to plan for, so he did the only thing a losing Super Bowl coach could do. He loaded his sorry, second-place ass on that bus on this bitterly cold Minneapolis night and started the drive toward the combine, free agency, the draft—the endless, all-consuming search for players who could ensure that this would never again happen to his team. Truth was, even if the rest of the league didn’t know it, Belichick seemed to have his opponents right where he wanted them.
The greatest football coach of all time was only five weeks behind.
Epilogue
Tom Brady felt trapped. He still wanted to play football, but he was not sure he wanted to play anymore for Bill Belichick. If Belichick wanted a chance to win it all with another quarterback, well, maybe Brady wanted a chance to win it all with another coach.
Two could play that game.
“If you’re married 18 years to a grouchy person who gets under your skin and never compliments you, after a while you want to divorce him,” said a source with knowledge of the Brady-Belichick relationship. “Tom knows Bill is the best coach in the league, but he’s had enough of him. If Tom could, I think he would divorce him.”
Brady was no less interested in playing for Josh McDaniels than Belichick was in keeping and playing Jimmy Garoppolo, said one team source. So it was no surprise that Brady threw some passive-aggressive social media jabs at Belichick in the weeks after their crushing Super Bowl defeat. To his comments on Malcolm Butler’s Instagram post he added a telling remark to Rob Gronkowski’s advice for Danny Amendola, who decided against taking another hometown discount and signed with Miami. In describing the honor of playing with someone so tough, Gronk advised Amendola to “Be FREE, Be HAPPY” in a 60-word Instagram post that included 58 lowercase words. “Well said gronk!!!!” was Brady’s response, punctuated by handclap emojis.
The quarterback also starred in a Gotham Chopra documentary called Tom vs. Time, on Facebook Watch, which opened with Brady referring to his coach in the first episode as “Belichick” and then closed without his ever referring to him again. Belichick is barely seen over six episodes; he’s almost treated as a bit player in the drama, a midlevel staffer. Until the final scenes.
“These last two years have been very challenging for him in so many ways,” Brady’s wife, Gisele, said of her husband as she drove her car. “And I think he tells me, ‘I love it so much and I just want to go to work and feel appreciated and have fun.’”
Tom Brady just wants to go to work and feel appreciated and have fun.
“It’s a big commitment,” he said in the next scene, “sitting here, laying here, three days after the year getting my Achilles worked on and my thumb. And you go, ‘What are we doing this for?’ You know, ‘What are we doing this for? Who are we doing this for? Why are we doing this?’ You got to have answers to those questions, and they have to be with a lot of conviction. When you lose your conviction, then you probably should be doing something else.”
Brady had been badly wounded by Belichick’s decision to shut down his fitness guru and life coach, Alex Guerrero, whom he credited with his longevity. “Tom felt it was just a mean thing to do,” said someone close to him. Brady was wounded enough to consider retiring rather than playing another season for Belichick. A source close to the quarterback said in late March, with the draft rapidly approaching, that Brady still wasn’t sure if he was going to return.
But in the end, even if he wanted to, Brady could not walk away from the game, and he could not ask for a trade. The moment Belichick moved Garoppolo to San Francisco, and banked on Brady’s oft-stated desire to play at least into his mid-forties, was the moment Brady was virtually locked into suiting up next season and beyond. Had he retired or requested a trade, he would have risked turning an adoring New England public into an angry mob. Brady was not about to take that risk. He was not about to leave the fans and Robert Kraft with a hole the size of Boston Common at quarterback.
That didn’t mean Brady had to like the circumstances of his return. Beyond his anger over Belichick’s marginalization of Guerrero, he was sick and tired of the unforgiving way he was being coached. In the middle of Tom vs. Time, Brady said of his teammates, “My connection with them is through joy and love. It’s not through fear. It’s not through insults. That’s not how I lead.” One Brady confidant said those comments were made with Belichick in mind.
At the end of April, after the Patriots declined to use either of their two first-round picks to select Louisville’s Lamar Jackson or another available quarterback to fill the Garoppolo void (they drafted LSU quarterback Danny Etling in the seventh round), Brady sat down with broadcaster and friend Jim Gray at the Milken Institute Global Conference, in California, and stated publicly for the first time that he would play in 2018 and beyond. But when Gray asked Brady if he felt appreciated by Belichick and Robert Kraft, and if he felt they had the “appropriate gratitude” for what he had achieved, the quarterback said, “I plead the Fifth!” A smiling Brady paused and then said, “Man, that is a tough question.”
Gray did not need to add Kraft to the conversation, as the owner and quarterback were still enjoying as warm an employer-employee relationship as there was in the NFL. Brady’s issue was with Belichick, and only Belichick.
“I think everybody in general wants to be appreciated more in their professional life,” the quarterback said, “but there’s a lot of people that appreciate me way more than I ever thought was possible as part of my life . . . I think what I’m learning, as you get older, it comes from within—the joy, the happiness, those things come from inside. To seek that from others, to seek that from outside influences, people you work with . . . I feel like it comes from within for me. So I’m trying to build up what’s within me, so that I can be the best for me, so that I can be the best for other people. That’s part of growing. I’m learning these things, too.”
Brady did call Belichick the best coach in league history and “an incredible mentor to me,” and he did say he could not have built his legendary career without him. “We’ve had a great relationship,” Brady said, “a very respectful relationship for a long time.” And that relationship was tested as never before.
“He has a management style [with] players,” Brady said of Belichick, “and he would say, ‘Look, I’m not the easiest coach to play for.’ I would agree. He�
�s not the easiest coach to play for.”
Especially when the Patriots weren’t winning the whole thing. Brady’s most dangerous target, Gronkowski, had clearly reached his own limit with Belichick, fueling reports that he was weighing a jump to Hollywood and/or the world of professional wrestling. Boston insiders Tom E. Curran and Mike Giardi reported on Gronk’s extreme frustration with Belichick and his insistence that the team’s strength coaches and trainers offered his beaten-up body the best path to a productive and relatively healthy season. The Herald’s Karen Guregian wrote that Belichick had “chastised Gronk in front of the players for being a TB12 client” early in the 2017 season.
Gronk was miserable. Brady was miserable. Some fans and current and former Patriots were still miserable over Belichick’s decision to sit Malcolm Butler in the Super Bowl. Asked about social media in his 2017 CNBC interview, Belichick had said he did “all I can to fight it” and that his goal—as it related to his players—was to “try to stamp it out.” But he was losing that social media war, and his intentional bungling of popular forum names (referring to Snapchat as “Snapface”) was not helping his cause. Belichick’s two best players, Brady and Gronkowski, had used the Internet as a weapon against him, and in his Twitter goodbye to the Patriots, Amendola mentioned “Mr. Kraft, teammates, staff and all of Pats nation.” He did not mention his head coach.
Amendola was a lot less subtle about his feelings for Belichick in an April interview with ESPN’s Mike Reiss. Asked about the Butler benching, Miami’s newest receiver said, “I have my thoughts about it, because I was out there putting my blood, sweat, and tears out on the field that night, and one of our best players wasn’t on the field. To tell you the truth, I don’t know why. I did ask, but I didn’t get any answers. I can’t make decisions like that, so I don’t necessarily worry about it, but I know Malcolm is a great player and he could have helped us win.”
Amendola also said he sensed that Belichick’s decision to sit Butler hurt his teammates. “Nobody really got an explanation for it,” he said. “He’s a brother of ours . . . And I hate to see a guy who worked so hard throughout the season not get a chance to play in the biggest game of the year and really get no explanation for it.”
Three years earlier, Seattle coach Pete Carroll made a baffling Super Bowl decision that helped the Patriots to their fourth title and effectively ended the Seahawks’ chances of establishing their own dynasty. Seattle never recovered from that goal-line call. In some ways, Carroll never recovered from that goal-line call.
Is it possible that the Butler benching signaled the beginning of New England’s end by magnifying every hidden and unhidden conflict inside Belichick’s program? Is it possible that the head coach who forever gave his players the credit for victories and blamed himself for defeats had lost his compass and allowed his ego to run amok with all the talk of greatest this and greatest that?
Amendola told Reiss that Belichick is “an asshole sometimes.” His assessment echoed the words left tackle Nate Solder wrote for the Players’ Tribune website after he left for a big free-agent deal with the Giants. Though Solder praised Belichick and McDaniels for freeing him to miss practices and meetings if he needed to tend to his cancer-stricken son, the tackle described the Patriots’ work environment as a “cold” place where everything is “predicated on performance.” That culture was sustained, and tolerated, because the players knew that, more than any other NFL coach, Belichick gave his team its best chance to win.
But with the Butler call, he failed to give the Patriots their best shot against the Philadelphia Eagles. Mr. Do Your Job didn’t do his, and Brady, Gronkowski, and other winning Patriots who had long overlooked whatever problems they might’ve had with Belichick started acting out. Suddenly the coach of the Patriots was starting to resemble Humphrey Bogart’s Philip Francis Queeg in The Caine Mutiny. Brady and Gronkowski didn’t show up for voluntary off-season workouts, another sign that Belichick’s approach was under siege. Citing a need to spend more time with his family—though he did his fair share of corporate jet-setting in places such as Monaco while teammates were toiling in Foxborough—Brady didn’t even show for organized team activities in late May; he was the NFL’s only starting quarterback who didn’t attend OTAs, voluntary practices that Brady had called vital in the past for building chemistry with his receivers. Like Gronkowski, he finally appeared for mandatory mini-camp in June, when he cited “personal reasons” for his absence and claimed that his relationship with Belichick was “great” and that he’d “loved” playing for him in 2017.
Sources disputed that characterization and maintained Belichick had lost his firm hold on the team. “Bill has worn thin on everybody,” said one team source who added that Belichick was “very lucky to have Bob Kraft and Tom Brady in his life, because they’re the only owner and quarterback who could’ve put up with him for this long.”
Kraft told reporters in March that he had met with his coach and Brady, as planned, and he tried to downplay the significance of the sit-down by saying they “have meetings all the time.” Only this meeting was different—far different. By any objective measure, the unity the Patriots swore they had in January was going, going, gone.
Suddenly Belichick was staring down one of the most daunting challenges of his career. He had lost championship veterans in Butler, Amendola, Solder, and Dion Lewis in free agency, but Belichick always knew how to replace talent. That wasn’t going to be a problem too burdensome to overcome. The much bigger off-season issue was whether Belichick had lost his locker room and his team . . . perhaps for good.
He was 66 years old, and people were wondering if Belichick’s days as the league’s most imposing force were over. It was a stunning fact, really, as Belichick had just appeared in his record eighth Super Bowl as a head coach, and his 11th overall, and he had nearly won three titles in four years for the second time. In some ways it was the ultimate compliment—Belichick’s Patriots had established such an absurdly high standard that a season ended by a one-possession defeat in a Super Bowl that saw Brady throw for more than 500 yards could be characterized as a disaster.
In the lead-up to his 19th season in Foxborough, Belichick faced the toughest questions he had faced since taking over the Patriots, in 2000, and answering for the specter of failure—as a head coach—that had followed him from Cleveland. Could he win back his players after the Butler benching as he’d won them back after the Lawyer Milloy trade in 2003? Could he recover from a devastating defeat and a relatively dysfunctional season to break his tie with Vince Lombardi and win championship No. 6?
On one level, the reaction to Belichick’s coaching in the Super Bowl was unfair—he knew his team best, after all, and his postseason records suggested that he was the most qualified person on the planet to determine whether Butler would help or hurt the cause. On another level, Belichick had never cut anyone around him a break. Why should he get a pass now?
It was going to take time for the fractures in Foxborough to heal. But if nothing else, Belichick had earned that time. He had earned everyone’s benefit of the doubt. He had earned the right to fix his relationship with Brady, Gronk, and the fan base. More than anything, he had earned the faith of all New Englanders that he could lead the Patriots to another Super Bowl, where the next critical choice he made would notarize his greatness one more time.
In a stormy early spring that promised to make for a fascinating 2018 season, the coach of the Patriots still seemed more likely than not to win that sixth title before he was done. And as for any old Lombardi fans who bet against Bill Belichick in 2000, at least one—an older, wiser columnist from St. Cecilia High—wouldn’t be making that same mistake again.
Acknowledgments
A number of books served as helpful roadmaps to understanding Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots’ system, and none were more valuable than the late, great David Halberstam’s The Education of a Coach and Michael Holley’s Patriot Reign and War Room. NFL Films documentaries
and highlights were terrific resources, as were newspapers including, but not limited to, the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Providence Journal, and the Hartford Courant in New England, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Akron Beacon Journal, and the Columbus Dispatch in Ohio.
I learned so much about Belichick’s Patriots by reading and watching the dedicated men and women who have covered them over the years. Their ranks include, but are not limited to, Greg Bedard, Ron Borges, Albert Breer, Bill Burt, Nick Cafardo, Tom E. Curran, Mark Daniels, Kevin Duffy, Michael Felger, Chris Gasper, Mike Giardi, Karen Guregian, Ryan Hannable, Bob Hohler, Jeff Howe, Doug Kyed, Kevin Mannix, Shalise Manza Young, Tony Massarotti, Jim McBride, Phil Perry, Mike Petraglia, Christopher Price, Ian Rapoport, Mike Reiss, Michael Smith, Ben Volin, and Michael Whitmer.
Heavyweight columnists Dan Shaughnessy and Jackie MacMullan were always among my most reliable role models. Steve Buckley taught me a ton about professionalism when I was a kid reporter at the National Sports Daily, and Gerry Callahan was one of the best columnists anywhere before he left newspapers for radio. In Cleveland, the great Mary Kay Cabot was a tremendous resource, and Tony Grossi, Bud Shaw, and Peter John-Baptiste were most kind with their time. In New York and New Jersey, old colleagues Mark Cannizzaro, Rich Cimini, Brian Costello, Vinny DiTrani, Mike Eisen, Bart Hubbuch, Gary Myers, Tara Sullivan, and David Waldstein were a major help. Nationally, Jarrett Bell, Greg Bishop, Kevin Clark, Peter King, Tim Layden, Chris Mortensen, Bill Simmons, Jenny Vrentas, and Dan Wetzel were among the industry titans whose significant works informed me.
At ESPN, rising star Steve Ceruti was always there when needed. My über-talented teammates Seth Wickersham and Kevin Van Valkenburg did far more than pitch in, and the accomplished author and TV reporter Gene Wojciechowski was a valued sounding board. Bill Hofheimer, Allie Stoneberg, and the distinguished storyteller Greg Garber helped when they didn’t have to. Of course, I will always remain indebted to Rob King and Leon Carter for bringing me aboard.
