But I thought that at least with such a grotesque overreach by a commissioner pandering to the other 31 franchises, the Pats would be perceived as having paid their debt to society and we could all get on with our lives. Even back when I thought this story would just go away, I was not nearly as wrong as I was about that.
Not only did the public NOT think the Patriots had been overly punished, but they also thought Belichick got away with a slap on the wrist. ESPN’s Gregg Easterbrook argued for a one-year suspension but said even that “would be a mild penalty. Belichick’s lack of remorse creates an argument for a lifetime ban.” I remember saying that ridiculing this hysteria would be a mild penalty. Gregg Easterbrook’s lack of any kind of perspective argued for stuffing him in a locker.
Naturally, no one screamed louder or more self-righteously than the New England media, which sensed weakness and decided to pounce. All of them, even a usually levelheaded voice like Bob Ryan, couldn’t resist lazily reaching for the low-hanging fruit of the obvious political analogy.
“What we have here is a football version of Watergate,” Ryan wrote months later. “Bill Belichick is Richard Nixon. Brilliant. Tormented. Paranoid. Controlling. Highly suspicious of the media.
“Watergate was overkill. There was no need for it. Like, was Richard Nixon ever really in danger of losing the 1972 election to George McGovern? Spygate was likewise unnecessary. . . . Remember the ultimate moral of Watergate: The cover-up is worse than the crime.”
To review: Moving a camera out of the designated camera area is NOT like parking in the red zone. It’s the exact same thing as violating an oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States. Duly noted.
For anyone who wasn’t living inside the Patriots’ locker room, it’s hard to say how all this was affecting the players and coaches. The only insight I have comes from a friend of mine in the stand-up comedy business, Boston comic Lenny Clarke, who was not only on the Denis Leary show Rescue Me and in Farrelly brothers movies, but was also in both Curse of the Bambino films.
Lenny tells the story of how around this time, he got a call from Belichick saying he needed him to come down to Gillette. Lenny explained he was at the Red Sox game, which is no less than an hour away—on a good night. Belichick said he had sent a car, it would be there waiting to take him to the stadium. So he agreed. When he got there, he was greeted by the coach saying he needed something to lighten the mood and cheer everybody up. So Clarke lit into him in front of the whole team. “You got a whole stadium with 50,000 people carrying phones!” he yelled. “Why the fuck do you need to send the one guy who’s not allowed to tape the sidelines?!?” while everyone howled laughing.
Especially the coach.
What we do know for certain is how the team responded on the field, which was to perfection. The Patriots were locked into a total “Us vs. the World” mind-set and proceeded to go scorched earth on everyone. If everybody else was going to call them frauds, dismissing everything they’d worked so hard to accomplish as merely the result of cheating, then the Pats were going to prove them wrong, and make them pay. They might as well have sold concert T-shirts listing all their game dates and with “Unholy Retribution Tour: 2007” across the top.
The Chargers came to Foxboro for Sunday Night Football and exacted their revenge for the disrespect in the playoff game by getting their doors blown off, 38–17.
The Patriots dropped another 38 on Buffalo the following week, with Randy Moss twice catching deep touchdowns over the top of coverage by the Bills’ Jabari Greer. They put up 34 points each of the next two weeks against Cincinnati and Cleveland before rolling over the Cowboys 48–27 in Dallas.
The following week was at Miami, where they unleashed all the destructive power of Brady’s new weapons. Wes Welker caught nine passes for 138 yards and two touchdowns, which was about 10 percent of his total output in three years with the Dolphins. Moss only caught four balls, but they were for 122 yards and another two scores. Double covered all day, he leaped in the air to pull one touchdown in over the helmet of a defender, and on the other he just stood in the end zone between two defensive backs and casually hauled in the pass while they fell to the turf like Jenga towers.
They saved the worst of it for Washington in week 8, crushing the Redskins and their beloved and respected coach Joe Gibbs. Gibbs had recently come out of retirement, and the game of football had clearly evolved beyond his capacity to evolve with it. But the Patriots showed no mercy, with Brady throwing a touchdown pass to Welker to make it 45–0 on the way to the 52–7 victory.
In fact, the Patriots scored fewer than 34 points just once through their first 10 games. In doing so, they changed the narrative from “Why do they cheat?” to “Why are they running up the score?” And the answer was always the same. The dreaded “arrogance.”
Patriots fans were loving every second of it. Every point. Every unnecessary, statistics-padding, late touchdown pass with the game out of reach. If the other 44 states were going to treat New England like the bad guy, then we wanted to be the wrestling heel, the kind of villain who walks into the arena pounding his steroidal chest, sneering at you through his sweaty hair, pounding your hero into the mat and then stealing his girl. That’s what the Patriots were doing, and we were online every day making sure the rest of the country heard from us.
All of that bragging and Internet trolling was only made worse by what happened a few hours after that win over Gibbs’s Redskins.
The Red Sox won the World Series again.
Once more, they put together an incredible come-from-behind series win in the ALCS, this time against the Cleveland Indians. It would be remembered as one of the classics had it not come just three years after the all-time greatest comeback against New York. In this one, they were down 3–1 in the series before winning the last three by a combined score of 30–5.
As in 2004, this victory World Series was also a sweep, this time over the Colorado Rockies, an outcome that never really felt in doubt. A personal highlight for me was seeing Dice-K Matsuzaka in game 3 not only pick up the win but also drive in two runs with a bloop single. It meant that he finished his postseason with more RBIs in one game than Alex Rodriguez had had in four. You’ve got to have villains to make the heroes that much better.
The difference between this championship and the last was that this one wasn’t about curses or Babe Ruth or your dead grandma. This was about excellence. It was about a well-built team dominating Major League Baseball. And about a city that could now brag about five championships in two sports in a span of just six years.
The enduring image of this second championship wasn’t about grown men holding their babies in front of the TV with tears in their eyes or people bringing Sox hats to the graves of loved ones. It was Red Sox reliever Jonathan Papelbon, six foot five and 230 pounds of pure id, wearing an empty Bud Light 30-pack on his head and dancing a jig to “Shipping Up to Boston,” his walk-out song from Boston band Dropkick Murphys from the very Boston Oscar-winning movie The Departed.
Barstool hosted a Halloween party at a club across from the Boston Garden and there had to be two dozen guys there in Red Sox uniforms with beer cases on their heads. I felt I needed to stay focused, so I wore a gray Patriots hoodie with the sleeves cut off, a Motorola headset, and devil horns. I went as Evil Bill Belichick. Evilchick.
The possibility of the NFL’s first undefeated season since the 1972 Dolphins was real. But as the win total got up into the double digits, the wins became tougher, the margins of victory not nearly so big. The Patriots beat the Eagles by a field goal, and they were basically finished in Baltimore on Monday Night Football, trailing 24–20 late in the game and failing on no less than three fourth-down attempts. But incredibly, they got a second chance on all three.
On the first, just after the 2-minute warning, they failed to convert. But Ravens defensive coordinator Rex Ryan had called a time-out just prior to the snap. With another crack at it, the Pats failed again, but
a false start penalty on Russ Hochstein had blown the play dead, setting up a fourth and 6. On this one, Brady scrambled for 12 yards to keep the drive alive. Later in the drive, a fourth and 5 from the Baltimore 13 fell incomplete, but the Ravens were called for defensive holding, automatic first down. Brady then hit Jabar Gaffney in the end zone to take a 27–24 lead.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say the Ravens felt they’d been jobbed, or that they lost their composure just a bit. After the touchdown, linebacker Bart Scott picked up two unsportsmanlike penalties, one for throwing the official’s flag into the stands. On the extra point, safety Ed Reed was offsides. All three penalties stacked on top of each other treated us to the sight of Stephen Gostkowski kicking off from the Ravens’ 35-yard line. And even still, Baltimore almost won it, completing a Hail Mary pass to Mark Clayton, who was tackled at the New England 3 as time expired. For the first time all season, the 12–0 Patriots had barely gotten away with one.
The closer they got to the Perfect Season, the more the pressure seemed to build. It helped that in the lead-up to the next game, they got some useful bulletin board fodder (which is to say I got bulletin board fodder to write about).
First there were the Ravens, who in no uncertain terms said they’d been robbed, and this was just another example of the Patriots not being on the level. On top of that, all game long we were treated to the sight of Don Shula, coach of the ’72 Dolphins, in the ESPN broadcast booth, openly rooting against the Patriots. By now, he and all his 17–0 Dolphins players were fully invested in seeing the Pats lose, with guys like Mercury Morris seeming to give an interview every couple of days to say their unbeaten season was legitimate and the Patriots were frauds. Shula himself had given an interview where he was asked about New England’s coach and he turned it into a granddad joke. “Who? You mean Bill Beli-cheat? Bwahaha!” he said.
It was in that environment that the Steelers came to Foxboro and handed the Patriots a gift of safety. In a midweek interview, Pittsburgh safety Anthony Smith “guaranteed” his team would win. He might as well just have put a bull’s-eye on his uniform.
Brady lit up the Pittsburgh defense like he’d never done before, finishing with 399 yards and four touchdowns, while never getting sacked. The Patriots kept their foot on the gas all night, going no huddle throughout the second half, putting together a 12-play scoring drive that began on their 1 and included five straight completions to Welker. And they pulled off one broken play in which Brady threw a backwards lateral to Moss that hit the ground, so Moss tossed it back to him and Brady hit Jabar Gaffney for a 56-yard score. That gave Brady credit for a fumble and a touchdown pass on the same play.
Mostly, though, they targeted Anthony Smith. No matter what they say publicly about “Ignore the Noise,” this game was proof positive that the Patriots do listen. They treated Smith like Freddie Mitchell 2.0. After one touchdown pass, Brady ran into the end zone specifically to get into Smith’s face mask and give him a ration of shit. Meanwhile, the crowd in the end zone seats chanted, “Guar! An! Tee! Guar! An! Tee!”
“Lesson learned,” said Patriots cornerback Ellis Hobbs after the game. “A hard lesson learned. . . . [T]here’s a fine line, and he crossed it.”
In his postgame, Belichick actually gave us the rare negative comment about an opponent when he said, “We were glad when he was in there.”
The 16–0 season came down to the final game, a Saturday night contest in New Jersey against the Giants. Yet there was more at stake than just the first 16-win season ever. The Patriots were just six points shy of the single season points record, set in 1998 by Randy Moss’s own Minnesota Vikings team. There were individual records on the line as well. Tom Brady had 48 touchdowns, one behind the single season record held by Peyton Manning. Moss had 21 receiving touchdowns. That record was 22 in a season, set by Jerry Rice. There was a lot of history riding on this one.
Not that you’d know it by the way the league was handling it. The game was to be carried only on the NFL Network, which saw it as a perfect opportunity to expand its brand. The problem was, the network was still fairly new and wasn’t included in most cable systems’ basic package, so only a tiny sliver of the viewing public would be able to watch it. A group of Washington politicians saw this as the perfect opportunity to do what they do best, which is grandstand. Some New England senators got together with Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and threatened to take away the NFL’s antitrust exemption if they didn’t make the game available to other networks. So by the time it aired, it was not only on NFL Net but also CBS, NBC, and, if memory serves, QVC, The Weather Channel, and Lifetime Television for Women.
It did not disappoint. The Giants were not a great team. They didn’t do anything especially well, finishing in the middle of the pack both offensively and defensively for the season. In the second half of the season they were only 4–3. New England was a 13.5-point favorite. Unless something crazy happened, there was no reason to think the Patriots wouldn’t win, easily. Then something crazy happened. Simply put, the Giants played really, unexpectedly, well.
On only the second play of the game, Eli Manning connected with Plaxico Burress on a 52-yard completion that set up a touchdown. An early second-quarter Brady-to-Moss touchdown pass gave New England a 10–7 lead, but also broke the team’s scoring record and tied both the passing touchdown and the receiving touchdown record.
A Domenik Hixon kick return touchdown put the Giants in the lead, and a quick-strike, 85-yard touchdown drive at the end of the half made it 21–16. New York followed a Patriots 3 & out by scoring again to make it 28–16, the most the Pats had been behind in a game all season.
On the next possession, three straight completions to Wes Welker put the ball at first and goal from the 1, and the Patriots tried the old Mike Vrabel trickerization again, but a penalty brought it back, keeping his perfect record intact. Then a Laurence Maroney rushing TD made it a five-point game.
Finally, came the most significant single play in regular-season NFL history. There have been thousands of plays that have determined playoff spots, seedings, and changed the course of careers and legacies. But only one did what this one did. Moss got behind the cornerback on a deep Go route up the sidelines. Brady hit him with the pass but the ball was slightly underthrown; Moss had to reach back just slightly and dropped it. My guess has always been that in the huddle, Brady called what we used to in touch football as kids when you wanted to try a play again: “S.P.!” Because they ran the same play. This time Brady hit him perfectly in stride.
That one play broke two major records and made the Patriots the only 16–0 team in the history of the sport. Name me one other play that ever did that much.
It wasn’t easy. The perfect regular season looked very much in doubt for a while. But they pulled it out, even though New York kept fighting back. The kicker is the Giants weren’t even playing for anything but pride. They were in the NFC playoffs, locked in as the five-seed, but they went into the game as a group refusing to rest up for the playoffs and hand the Patriots that slice of history. Instead, the Giants forced them to earn it—and gave us a major scare. I had watched this one with my Barstool buddy Uncle Buck at his house, and as I headed out late on that Saturday to make the long ride home, I remember saying to him, “Hey, at least we don’t have to worry about the frigging Giants anymore.”
After their playoff bye week, the Patriots again hosted Jacksonville for the Saturday night prime-time game, and again on January 12, which was 11 years to the day they’d beaten the Jaguars to go to Super Bowl XXXI under Bill Parcells. Because time is a flat circle.
The results were very much the same. Brady was flawless. He completed 24 of his 26 pass attempts for a near-perfect passer rating of 141.4. He hit one deep 53-yarder to Donté Stallworth, but for the most part he was content to just kill the Jags with the proverbial thousand paper cuts. He only connected with Randy Moss once but hit Welker nine times. And those were only for 54 yards, as Josh McDaniels’s offense just
kept taking what Jacksonville was giving them.
The Patriots’ defense let Jacksonville hang around somewhat. At one point it was 28–20 New England and then 31–20 with about 4 minutes to go when Rodney Harrison intercepted Jags QB David Garrard to put the game away. It was Harrison’s fourth straight postseason game with a pick, which also tied a record. They were headed to the AFC championship game, and it would be a return of the grudge match from last year’s playoffs against the Chargers.
Although not a lot of players on either side played like it. Tom Brady was notably un-Brady-like, throwing three interceptions—one in the end zone—in what was one of his weakest performances in a big game, college or pro.
You can give credit to the Patriots’ defense, which held San Diego to just four field goals, and to Junior Seau, who forced one of those field goals with a huge third and 1 stop inside the New England 5 when he recognized his old team’s formation, read the play, and tackled running back Michael Turner for a loss.
You can credit Laurence Maroney, who gave the Patriots 122 rushing yards and a touchdown for the second straight game. And most especially you can give credit to the Chargers’ QB Philip Rivers, who had arthroscopic surgery on his knee just so he could still take the field with a torn ACL. He wasn’t great by any means, completing less than half his throws and getting intercepted twice, but there was certainly nothing at all wrong with his guts.
The same could not be said for the 2006 NFL Most Valuable Player LaDainian Tomlinson. The self-described “very classy person” barely even showed up. He carried the ball twice in the early going, good for 5 yards. Then he went to the bench and sat down, his helmet with the trademark Darth Vader face mask and dark sun visor on his head, with a hooded poncho pulled over him. For the entire rest of the game. Frozen in place like he was watching a kids’ hockey game in a cold rink at 5:00 a.m.
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