Brown was already an important part of the offense and the primary kick returner. And now he was a contingency defensive back, kept behind glass to be broken only in the event of an emergency.
It took all of two plays for Mangini to have to break the glass.
Against the Rams in week 9, the emergency came up on the second play from scrimmage. Samuel was knocked out of the game and Brown was in after just a handful of practice reps. Not only wasn’t it a disaster, but Brown actually produced one of the most versatile games anyone had ever seen. He dropped an interception, but could be forgiven because he added three tackles, three receptions, and a touchdown on special teams.
That touchdown came courtesy of a trick play Bill Belichick saw his dad Steve’s Navy team pull in 1962. According to the rules of football, on any given play, all offensive players substituting in must come inside the numbers. While the Pats lined up for a short field goal, Brown did just that. He got the attention of the official, then just started casually jogging off the field, unnoticed by anyone on the Rams, even as he stopped in bounds. The snap came directly to Adam Vinatieri, who easily lobbed an uncontested pass to Brown, who walked across the goal line for the score. For obvious reasons, they called that one “The Sleeper.”
The following week against Buffalo, the abject humiliation of poor, undeserving good soldier Drew Bledsoe continued. In fact, it reached new depths as he was intercepted. By Troy Brown. But in Bledsoe’s defense, he had completed a lot of passes to Brown, and at some point it could’ve been muscle memory. The quarterbacks in Cleveland and Cincinnati who got intercepted by him in Weeks 13 and 14 didn’t have that excuse.
The one person in New England enjoying all this the most was probably Corey Dillon. I want to be fair to Dillon. I’ve gone through about 150 analogies in my head looking for one that does him justice, but it wouldn’t be right to compare him to an animal that had been let out of its cage or a prisoner that had been set free. So let me put it this way: in 2004 Corey Dillon was like a really talented football player who no longer had to play for a shitty organization and now found that what he did on the field had value because it contributed to wins and he played his ass off. I think that one works. (Take that, all my English teachers!)
Dillon was a steady, durable, and bruising runner who gave the Patriots offense an element it hadn’t had in the Brady era. In the middle of the season, he racked up four straight 100-yard games, then made it six out of seven. As winter came on, he got better and ended the season with arguably his best game of the year at home against San Francisco, with 116 yards on only 14 carries, good for 8.3 yards per attempt. He finished with 1,635 rushing yards on the season, the highest total in franchise history.
The “character” concerns that were such a problem in Cincinnati never materialized. He just showed up, did his work, and played great football. No one was really certain how much of that was due to the fact that he was misunderstood in Cincy, whether the Bengals were simply a terrible organization, or because the Patriots had so many solid veteran leaders that a notorious malcontent wouldn’t dare step out of line. But my guess is that it was some ratio of all three. Plus, any time the subject came up, Dillon always said that all he ever wanted to do was win, and finally he was getting his chance.
As good as Corey Dillon, the offense, the defense, and the Patriots’ 14–2 record were, they weren’t good enough. Not good enough for the top seed in the AFC, anyway. That spot went to the Steelers, who still hadn’t lost a game with Ben Roethlisberger starting and finished 15–1. Barring a major upset, if the Patriots were going to go to their second straight Super Bowl, they’d have to go through Pittsburgh. Again.
16
Chum in the Water
As the No. 2 seed in the AFC playoffs, the Patriots had earned a bye for the Wild Card round. For their two coordinators, it was the opportunity to go on job interviews. Romeo Crennel sat down with a few NFL teams and was rumored to have the best shot at becoming the head coach of the Cleveland Browns, though nothing was official. Charlie Weis scored a sit-down with his alma mater, the University of Notre Dame. In fact, at South Bend, Weis had been roommates with Fighting Irish legend Joe Montana. College programs were under no restrictions to wait before they hired NFL coaches, and Notre Dame wasted no time naming Weis to their head coaching vacancy.
Weis gave a press conference in which he assured his team and their fans that the school was well aware of his priorities. He was going to give the Patriots his major attention for as long as they kept winning, and his Notre Dame responsibilities would have to wait for his free time or until after the season. Period.
The bye week had also given the Patriots the chance to sit at home watching the Wild Card games and waiting to find out which team they’d be facing. What they witnessed would strike fear in the hearts of mortal men.
The Indianapolis Colts hosted the Denver Broncos and obliterated the league’s fourth-ranked defense with one of the most awe-inspiring displays of offensive playoff football ever. They blew Denver out of the Midwest with a 49–24 win that included 530 yards of total offense, 454 passing yards and four touchdown passes by Peyton Manning, 7 for 10 on third-down conversions, an incredible 27 first downs, and the Colts scoring touchdowns on 7 of their 10 possessions. It was an annihilation. And it meant a rematch of the previous year’s AFC championship game in the divisional round playoff at Gillette on Sunday.
Right after the Denver game, Colts kicker Mike Vanderjagt told a TV interviewer from Indianapolis that he wasn’t really worried about facing the Patriots. “I think they’re ripe for the picking,” he said. “I think they’re not as good as the beginning of the year and not as good as last year.”
You can question the wisdom of a kicker talking shit under any circumstances, but to do so before a playoff game against an archrival that happened to feed off that kind of thing was just asking for trouble. Publicly at least, the Patriots’ response was limited to a Rodney Harrison one-liner. “He has to be a jerk. Vanderjerk,” he said.
The day before the game, the Steelers had beaten the Jets, so both teams knew they were playing for the chance to play the conference title game at Pittsburgh. With that on the line, Bill Belichick was handed an opportunity to play games with his players’ heads, and he did not pass it up.
Someone had given Belichick the word that the Colts had reached out to the Steelers’ organization requesting 1,500 extra tickets to the championship game for their families and friends; the coach made damned sure his players knew it. He then folded his arms, squinted his eyes, and slowly nodded his head like Kreese telling his Cobra Kai dojo to show no mercy.
I might have made up that last part for dramatic effect. But I think it’s in the spirit of what he was getting at.
While the weather wasn’t nearly as bad as the Titans game the previous year, it was a nasty 25 degrees with a wind chill making it feel like 16 and every breath the players took hanging in the air in front of their faces. Tough conditions for most offenses, and the Patriots defense was relentless.
The first two Colts possessions produced no first downs. The third produced one first down, but ended with their third punt of the day, more than they’d had the entire game the week before. Their fourth drive lost 12 yards.
But the fifth Indy possession was the real tone-setter. In fact, it was the entire game in microcosm. Even more, it was how the Patriots saw themselves in comparison to the Colts.
Indianapolis had finally started moving the ball, taking it from their own 30 to the New England 39, when Manning hit running back Dominic Rhodes on a little dump-off pass. Tedy Bruschi wrapped Rhodes up, but rather than just bringing him down, he got his arms around the ball and ripped it out as the two fell to the ground. That play was the perfect message to the rest of the team. It symbolized the Patriots simply wanting it more—a metaphor lost on no one. Bruschi held the ball up at the bench and said, “They want this football? They ain’t got it! They ain’t got it!” “It” in this case being the ba
ll. The game. The will to win. A ring. All of it. The Patriots had something the Colts simply did not.
For all that, though, it was still only a 6–3 Patriots lead well into the third quarter. That’s when they let Corey Dillon take over. Using a mix of Dillon runs and short, high-percentage passes from Brady, New England put together two long touchdown drives that ate up the clock and put the game away. The first drive started from their own 13 and took more than 8 minutes. The second began at their 6 and lasted nearly 7½ minutes. Together they lasted over a full quarter of the game and made it 20–3. Then Rodney Harrison ended it by intercepting Manning deep in the Patriots’ end as Sensei Belichick screamed, “Finish him!”
OK, that didn’t happen, either. What Belichick actually did call those two drives was “as good a football as we’d played since I’ve been here.”
In all, the Patriots ran over the Colts for 210 rushing yards, 154 of them by Dillon. The victory was theirs, but they’d also made a statement—or confirmed the one they’d made on the same field against Indy a year earlier. Plus, they had a score to settle from earlier in the year, and Bruschi let it be known. “You want to change the rules? Change ’em!” he told a reporter on the field after the game. “We still play. That’s what we do!”
The contrast between the two teams could not have been clearer. The Patriots were the tougher team. They fought harder. They weren’t some soft dome team that put up huge numbers indoors but couldn’t hack real football played out in the elements. They embraced the bad weather. Relished it.
And that extended to the quarterbacks. Brady now had an 8–0 postseason record for his career and a reputation as a proven winner who keeps his head in the biggest moments and delivers. Manning was seen (around New England anyway) as a hothouse flower who put up huge numbers under perfect conditions, but then folded when the weather was bad, the opposing defense was tough, and the pressure was greatest. He was to Pats fans what the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez had become to Sox fans: the superstar who would always put up big numbers but never win when it counts. And the perfect guy to make sport of.
The Patriots advanced to the site of that streak-ending Halloween mess, their worst game since the beginning of the last season. It was a rematch the Steelers wanted. On the whole, they felt they’d shown in that earlier game that they could beat the best and wanted to prove it. Pittsburgh defensive back Ike Taylor compared it to hearing a song you like, so you ask the DJ to play it over again.
One guy who was not feeling the same way was Tom Brady; all he was feeling was a severe flu. As the team flew out a day early due to bad weather messing with everyone’s travel plans, Brady lay across an entire row of seats. Then he crawled off to his hotel bed with a 103-degree fever and who knows what kind of fluids coming out of both ends of his body.
But he recovered—at least enough to take part in a walk-through at the hotel ballroom where Charlie Weis scripted his first few plays of the game, the first of which would be an end around to Deion Branch. There was no telling how it would work the next day, but among a bunch of guys in sweat pants in a function room that had probably just cleared out from a wedding or a bat mitzvah, it looked great.
To that point, Ben Roethlisberger had looked like anything but the prototypical rookie quarterback. He’d posted a passer rating of almost 100. He was physically imposing, almost impossible to bring down, and seemed to have a superpower for escaping sacks, getting out of the pocket, keeping his eyes upfield, and completing long passes. Plus, of course, winning games.
But all of those things would stop in this game.
The Steelers’ first possession ended with a Roethlisberger interception that gave New England the ball at midfield. Then trying the Branch end around play, the Pats picked up 14 yards and eventually settled for a field goal.
The next Steelers’ drive came down to a fourth and 1. So they lined up in a power run look, with Jerome Bettis, one of the great punishing, short-yardage running backs of all time, behind the fullback. Not only did Bettis not gain the yard, but he was also stopped for a loss and fumbled, the ball recovered by Mike Vrabel.
Now the chum was in the water. The shark had smelled the blood, and the feeding frenzy was about to begin. On the very next play, Brady hit Branch over the top of the defense for a 60-yard touchdown.
Upon further review, Brady had faked a handoff on the play, freezing the linebackers. Then he pump-faked a pass that made second-year safety Troy Polamalu, whom they’d lusted after in the draft the year before and was already one of the best defensive backs in the league, commit to one side of the field. Branch ran a deep slant to the part of the field vacated by Polamalu and Brady hit him in stride for the easy score and a 10-point lead.
For Troy Brown, it was a return to the scene of the crime where he stole the AFC championship from the Steelers three years earlier by producing two special-team touchdowns. And while he didn’t do that this game, he did return punts, catch a pass, and play defense. He had three tackles and sat underneath the Steelers’ underneath routes to clog up Ben Roethlisberger’s short passing lanes.
On one such play, the Steelers were down 17–3 with the ball at the Patriots’ 19 and in position to make it a one-score game. Roethlisberger looked underneath but found Brown there, so he looked upfield for Jerame Tuman. What he found instead was Rodney Harrison, following the quarterback’s eyes as he stared down his target, jumping the route, intercepting the pass, and sprinting upfield with it. The only Steeler with a chance to make the tackle was Roethlisberger, but he was wiped out of the play by Mike Vrabel as Harrison literally walked across the goal line carrying the ball like a lunch box for the score that effectively put the game, and the conference title, away.
Then, just for laughs late in the game and leading by 21, Charlie Weis called the same Deion Branch end around he’d drawn up in the hotel ballroom the day before, the one they ran on the game’s first play. This time, Branch took it 23 yards for the touchdown.
The Patriots had only produced 322 yards of total offense, but Adam Vinatieri connected on all five of his field goal attempts and the defense forced five turnovers. It proved that this team not only didn’t lose what they had begun to call “T-shirt and hat games,” but they could also beat you in any way. In any conditions. On any field, home or away. In this case, pounding a team that hadn’t lost since the second game of the season into their own FieldTurf, 41–27, in a game that wasn’t that close.
Now they were headed to the Super Bowl in Jacksonville, to face Pennsylvania’s other team, the Philadelphia Eagles.
17
Flap Your Wings
After three straight losses in the NFC championship game, the Eagles had finally made good on their fourth attempt with a convincing 27–10 win at home, holding the Falcons to just 202 yards total. It was a performance on both sides of the ball made more impressive by the fact that the most gifted athlete on their team, wideout Terrell Owens, didn’t play. Owens was injured in the 14th game of the Eagles’ season, requiring a surgery that put two screws into his ankle. Prior to the injury, he’d already put up exactly 1,200 receiving yards, including a stretch of five straight games with over 100 yards.
But as I mentioned earlier, he was generally considered the pluperfect narcissistic diva who was more interested in counting his catches and bitching if his quarterback didn’t throw to him enough than he was about wins. True or not, that was his reputation. He was a one-man media circus, less famous for anything he ever did on the field than he was for that time he held out in a contract dispute and staged a bizarre press event in his driveway while working on his perfect 8-pack abs doing shirtless crunches. In New England, he was the anti-Patriot, the kind of player who was never going to win anything, because pro football had become a morality play where championships were only won by teams—T-E-A-M-S—in the truest sense of the word, not by selfish, self-obsessed superstars.
Most of the speculation in the lead-up to Super Bowl XXXIX centered around the question of whether Owen
s would play. It had been six weeks since he’d last stepped on a football field, so it didn’t seem likely he’d make it onto the field in Jacksonville. And even if he did, expecting him to be a factor with all that surgical metal in his leg seemed like a big ask. Las Vegas seemed to agree, and installed the Patriots as seven-point favorites.
The problem with that was this was a Patriots team that thrived on being disrespected, that used any slight against them as the gamma rays that turned their collective Bruce Banner into a giant green rage monster when they needed it. Whether it was finding the 2001 Steelers packed and ready for New Orleans or the defensive rule changes back in the spring or the Colts asking for more tickets to the game in Pittsburgh, any insult, real or just perceived, could be turned into bulletin board fodder.
Rodney Harrison seemed to have a particular genius for it. It wasn’t uncommon for them to win a game and find him saying afterward, “Nobody believed we could do it!” without ever really saying who the “nobody” was that didn’t think the defending Super Bowl champion with a 21-game win streak could win a game. Whether it was something he’d heard some talk-show caller say or read on an Internet message board wasn’t important. It was them against the world. This is a little hard to pull off when you’re a touchdown favorite to win your third title in four years.
And that is where the Eagles came up big to give Harrison and the Patriots just the rage fuel they needed. With Owens’s status in doubt, Philly’s Freddie Mitchell stepped into the role of mouthy, attention-whoring wide receiver. For example, after the Eagles beat the Vikings in their first playoff game, Mitchell said, “I’m a special player. I want to thank my hands for being so great.” Which is actually hilarious.
Five Rings Page 14
