Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

  The sports sites were jammed with preachy, holier-than-thou columns about how the NFL had let the Patriots off easy. How Bill Belichick deserved to be suspended and still owes the world an apology. How the Super Bowl proved they can’t win unless they cheat. Plus there was the business of the Herald admitting they ran with a story about a walk-through tape they never confirmed because that tape never existed. Some Jets’ season ticket holder actually filed a lawsuit in federal court alleging he’d been defrauded. That is, by the Patriots for taping signals, and not by the Jets for not having won anything since 1968.

  Front and center of it all was Arlen Specter. His voter-pandering faux outrage centered around the fact that after handing the Patriots the most crippling punishment the league had ever delivered, he ordered the Spygate tapes destroyed. What Specter expected to find on there besides shots of the Jets’ coaching staff sending in signals is anyone’s guess. Specter was on the Warren Commission that botched the JFK assassination investigation so badly; maybe he hoped to find the Grassy Knoll gunman in the 300 level of the Meadowlands. Regardless, he was still talking about holding hearings. With the nation fighting two wars and the economy in free fall thanks to massive corruption by the financial markets and the government, this smarmy weasel was talking about taking up the Senate’s time over some videos of zone coverage signals.

  Even the “destroyed” tapes thing is a red herring. Fox Sports football reporter Jay Glazer has a copy of the actual recording on his phone. He shows it at parties. I asked him about it in a radio interview and, while he didn’t have it on him, he confirmed that it’s mostly shots of the scoreboard (for down and distance), then the sideline for the signal, pan to the field for the play, with some footage of the cheerleaders during the time-outs. But Goodell had ordered the league’s copies destroyed, so Specter and his conspiracy theory tinfoil-hatted followers pretended there was something far sketchier on them, and demanded justice.

  People were waiting for someone to step forward and break the vow of silence about the taping, some bitter ex-Patriots player or some disgruntled former coach who’d come out and admit the illegal activity. But none did. One shadowy figure who kept getting mentioned was former assistant Matt Walsh, whose name was mentioned in John Tomase’s fake news piece in the Herald. The fact that he hadn’t spoken publicly gave birth to all sorts of nutty theories, like he was missing, presumably at the bottom of a river somewhere, or God knows what else. Then in May, Goodell gave a press conference in which he said he’d talked personally to Walsh and was satisfied he had nothing to add, and that as far as the NFL was concerned, there was nothing more to talk about. Not that anyone stopped talking about it.

  And yet, while Spygate hysteria was the reason for all the hatred, in a weird and ironic way it was also the path to getting things back to normal. It gave the Patriots’ fan base a cause, something to push back against.

  Thanks to the Spygate lunacy, in the Kübler-Ross model of the Five Stages of Grief I was able to skip right past Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance and go right from Anger to More Anger with Shitloads of Fighting Back. If the fight didn’t end with the 2007 season, then Patriots fans were still willing to fight. It was a better alternative than just wallowing in misery. I looked for all the sanctimonious anti-Patriots commentary I could and tried to grab the verbal club someone was beating that dead horse with, throw it away, and then beat them with the dead horse. It made life worth living again. Plus, it was a skill that would really come in handy in the future.

  At least the ongoing Spygate saga added some laughs to what was otherwise a relatively quiet off-season. The NFL had taken the Patriots’ own first-round pick away, No. 31 overall, but because Belichick had the foresight to trade a pick last year for San Francisco’s first in 2008, they were sitting on the seventh pick.

  As the draft approached, rumors were flying that the Patriots were desperately working the phone lines trying to move up into the top five. The Jets were drafting one slot ahead of them, and the thinking was that Belichick was interested in defensive end Vernon Gholston out of Ohio State. The draft was on Saturday, and the Herald’s Mike Felger called Belichick at 5:00 p.m. on Friday for an update, to find the coach on his way out the door to go to his son’s lacrosse practice. Not a game. A practice. So much for furiously pulling out all the stops to land Gholston.

  Instead, whether they were bluffed into doing it by the rumors or what, the Jets took Gholston, who went on to an undistinguished career as a total draft bust, with five starts over three seasons before being cut and never playing an NFL game again. Once the Jets made their selection, the Patriots actually moved back thanks to a trade with New Orleans, dropped down to pick 10, and took linebacker Jerod Mayo out of Tennessee. Mayo went on to win the AP Defensive Rookie of the Year and in three seasons was first-team All Pro.

  There were also the usual personnel changes. Cornerback Asante Samuel, who had been seeking a top-of-the-market deal, was allowed to leave via free agency and signed with the Philadelphia Eagles. Notwithstanding that he’d developed into a very good cover corner, it was hard to forget the potential championship-winning interception he’d let slip through his fingers. Besides, they’d drafted and coached him up, so there was no reason they couldn’t just make one of the several defensive backs they’d drafted into the next Samuel.

  But here was where they were wrong. Looking back, I think the Patriots’ draft philosophy had changed. In that 2008 draft they took cornerbacks Terrence Wheatley and Jonathan Wilhite. The following year it was Darius Butler, whom Belichick had personally worked out at UConn. Each of them was in that five-foot-nine, five-foot-ten range and in the neighborhood of 185 pounds. It’s just one man’s opinion, but I feel as though they believed that because the league was legislating contact in pass coverage out of the game, the future belonged to smaller, super-agile athletes who could stay with receivers without being physical with them. I once saw Butler at a charity basketball game, and he was one of the most athletically gifted human beings I’d ever seen.

  There was a problem with that. The NFL, despite their best efforts, hadn’t succeeded in taking all the physicality out of pass defense. In fact, it was becoming even more important as massive, imposing receivers kept coming into the league. Real men. Like Detroit’s Calvin Johnson, Green Bay’s Jordy Nelson, Denver’s Demaryius Thomas, and Dallas’s Dez Bryant. And the types of corners best able to handle them would be strong, physical types like Darrelle Revis of the Jets, Arizona’s Dominique Rodgers-Cromartie, and Tampa’s Aqib Talib. These smaller, quicker backs the Patriots banked on never panned out, and that miscalculation took a toll on their defense, which took years to rectify.

  Beyond that, the biggest news of 2008 didn’t involve the Patriots. It was the Celtics, led by coach Doc Rivers, beating the Los Angeles Lakers in the Finals to win the NBA title. It was an incredible, almost instantaneous turnaround, with GM Danny Ainge completely transforming the franchise into a champion with just a couple of moves in the span of about two days.

  Ainge had assembled a Big Three, but Paul Pierce, Kevin Garnett, and Ray Allen were the ones who subjugated their egos, worked together, and allowed Rivers to mold the team according to his vision in a way that’s not unheard of but, in a players’ league like the NBA, isn’t universally done either.

  That gave Boston/New England six championships in three sports in just seven years. It defies logic and any sense whatsoever to claim any one of those team’s winning had anything to do with the other. But then again, sports isn’t supposed to be science. You could allow yourself a little metaphysics and believe that maybe winning was contagious, because what’s the harm?

  But even if you didn’t believe that, you could still say without fear of being contradicted that at least the days when Boston was a toxic environment for players, where the pressure to win was so pervasive that they were caving in under it, was gone. All three teams were built with athletes who thrived in the environment, from Tom Brady to David Ortiz to Paul P
ierce. From Troy Brown to Curt Schilling to Kevin Garnett, these were proven winners who took the ball in big moments and won rings. Which is all we ever wanted in the first place. It was goddamned glorious.

  When the regular season finally began, it was a godsend. Finally the chance to end the congressional hearings talk, put the memes with the video cameras in the rearview, and move beyond 18–1 forever. It was real football. And it felt great. For exactly 7:22 of game time. Which is how long it took for the Doomsday Scenario to become our reality.

  You know it’s bad when Tom Brady hits Randy Moss for a 26-yard completion and Moss fumbling the ball away isn’t the worst thing that happened on the play. While everyone was watching the flight of the ball, Brady went down in pain, clutching his knee, and in the time it took you to say, “Sonofabitch almighty, the season is over before it begins!” the season was over. Before it began.

  The player who delivered the kill shot was Kansas City Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard. And while I would’ve liked to join the chorus of fans screaming for the capture of the assassin John Wilkes Bernard, I simply never could. The Patriots ran a play action fake to back Sammy Morris as Pollard came across the line. Morris engaged him and took him to the ground as Brady stepped forward into his throw. The hit wasn’t late. It wasn’t a cheap shot. Pollard kept coming after Brady like it was his job. Because it was. If you’ll pardon the metaphor, it was a painful alien abduction rectal probe that reached right up inside the new season and pulled its guts out. If anyone had been thinking nothing could be as painful as The Super Bowl That Shall Not Be Named, they now stood corrected.

  Brady left the field and it wasn’t 24 hours before they ended any hope by placing him on Injured Reserve with a torn ACL. The quarterback for the defending AFC champions was Matt Cassel. He’d be starting the following week against the Jets. The last time Cassel had started a game it was for the Chancellor (CA) High School Chancellors, possibly against their archrivals the Taft Toreadors from Woodland Hills (but don’t hold me to that).

  You can look at Cassel’s 2008 performance in one of two ways, either that going 11–5 in the NFL is tough and he deserves all the credit in the world, or you can point out that Brady went 16–0 with practically this same roster and a five-game drop-off is about what you’d expect going from an elite quarterback to a replacement part. It all depends on whether you’re a “16-ounce beer can is full” or a “16-ounce can only has 11 ounces of beer in it” type of person.

  But Cassel played better than anyone could reasonably expect. He followed the QB Hippocratic Oath, which states, “First, do no harm.” He kept his mistakes to a minimum. The Patriots’ coaching philosophy was always that no quarterback will ever walk off the field saying an incompletion cost his team the game, or that coming off the field for the punting unit cost his team the game. It’s turnovers that kill you. And in that respect, Cassel was fine. He didn’t throw a pick until his third game, and never had more than two in a game. He finished the year with 11, to his 21 touchdown passes.

  The highlight of his season was back-to-back games against the Jets and Dolphins in which he topped 400 yards and three passing touchdowns in each game. The first was a Thursday nighter at Gillette with Brett Favre now quarterbacking the Jets. The Patriots took over on their own 38 with 1:04 left and no time-outs, needing a touchdown for the tie. Cassel led them downfield, having to spike the ball on three different plays to stop the clock, before finding Randy Moss along the edge of the end zone as time expired to tie it up. He’d never touch the ball again, as Favre led the Jets on a 14-play scoring drive to win it in overtime. In the Dolphins game, he totaled 415 yards, threw three TDs, and rushed for another on the way to a 48–28 win.

  A few weeks later, he led them to a 49–26 win over the Raiders in which he only had 218 yards, but still somehow managed to have four touchdowns among his 18 completions.

  In the middle of all this came yet another loss of one of the crucial components in the Patriots Super Bowl machine. During the bye week, Troy Brown announced his retirement. The man some people (I slowly raise my hand) were regularly calling “Mr. Patriot” was done. The press conference where he said good-bye was an emotional one, but the emotions were all the good kind, where the sadness was tempered with the knowledge he’d done more in his career than anyone could’ve dared hope. Where the only regret was that his team couldn’t send him off the way Michael Strahan had, only with a fourth ring.

  “You can’t outrun Father Time,” Brown said, adding that he was a free agent on four separate occasions but turned down offers in order to stay with the team that drafted him. “The only colors you’ll ever see on my back as a football player, that’s the red, white, and blue of the New England Patriots, and I’m proud to say that.”

  Belichick recited plays he’d made that won championships, like his punt return to midfield in the snow that started the Tuck Rule drive.

  “Nobody thought that Troy could go deep. Nobody thought that he could make the big plays,” Belichick said. “But all he did was make plays, just kept making them.”

  Robert Kraft called him “the consummate Patriot.”

  The war of attrition claimed yet another multiple-ring winner when Rodney Harrison went down with a season-ending shoulder injury. When he was getting carted off the field, his arm immobilized and his other fist in the air, there was something different about him, a sort of finality to the look on his face. It had a Maximus-being-carried-out-of-the-arena at the end of Gladiator feel about it. And it wasn’t anyone’s imagination: that was the last game he’d ever play as well.

  So the Patriots put on a run at the end of the season, winning their last three games to finish 11–5. But it wasn’t the best year to be 11–5. Most of the time, that’ll win you your division and on rare occasions get you a bye week in the playoffs. In 2008, it got you sent home. They needed a lot of other games to fall the right way for them in order to make the playoffs. Too many, as it turned out. Miami won the AFC East on the fourth tiebreaker.

  It was only the second time since Brady took over the starting duties that the Pats failed to win the division, the other being 2002, when they lost a tiebreaker to the Jets. The quarterback on that team and the ’08 Dolphins was the same man: Chad Pennington, the first quarterback taken in the 2000 draft. So maybe the Jets were right to take him over Brady after all.

  If nothing else came out of that lost season (and nothing else did), at least Matt Cassel had proven himself worthy of being a starting NFL quarterback. Obviously, it wouldn’t be in New England, but he was now an asset that could be traded in return for a huge haul in draft capital. I’d lived through some of the dark days of Patriots history, when they’d do what all bad franchises do eventually, which is pin their hopes on the backup QB from a great team. The logic was that he could be really good, but maybe just has the misfortune of playing behind a great starter. It’s that thinking that once gave us the likes of Marc Wilson from the Raiders and Hugh Millen from the 49ers, potential saviors who turned out to be false prophets. Now it was some other team’s turn.

  One thing Belichick wasn’t lacking was willing trading partners—two in particular, who were intimately acquainted with Cassel, having scouted, drafted, and worked with him: Scott Pioli and Josh McDaniels.

  Pioli had just left the Patriots to take the GM job with the Kansas City Chiefs. McDaniels was hired away by the Denver Broncos, making him the youngest head coach in the NFL. Both men had done it the right way, moving on to great career opportunities without burning any bridges with their former boss, in the most professional, non-Mangini way possible. And both wanted Cassel.

  Ultimately, it was Pioli who landed him, in exchange for Kansas City’s second-round pick. It was not a bad haul, given the fact that Matt Cassel had been the 230th draft pick. (By way of comparison, Alex Smith was the No. 1 overall pick by San Francisco, and a few years later the Niners were trading him for . . . Kansas City’s second rounder.) Even so, I actually expected more in return. I dug deep
into several other trades for similar talents and the going rate seemed to be at least a first rounder and sometimes more, which made me think it’s entirely possible Bill Belichick accepted the second in order to do a solid for a longtime assistant and friend, as well as give Cassel a landing spot that would be good for his career.

  That’s a theory that made all the more sense given the stunning news that dropped a day later. The Patriots had made another deal with Pioli—this time, for Mike Vrabel.

  Even though most Patriots fans were trying to condition ourselves to not being shocked by any of Belichick’s personnel moves, this was a shock. Vrabel was one of those guys you expected would someday get the teary farewell press conference treatment, with the coach talking about his clutch moments and the owner using the word “consummate.” He was an every-down player who made the difficult move from outside linebacker to inside when the defense was thinned out due to injuries and ineffectiveness. Hell, he was up to eight career receptions for eight touchdowns. And now it seemed like he was just a throw-in on the Cassel trade.

  There were two popular theories on the Vrabel deal. The first was that Belichick was sticking to the principle that it’s better to move on from a player one year too early than one year too late, and he was sending him to a place where the GM had built-in respect for him, as he had with Cassel. The other theory was far more sinister.

  Vrabel was the Patriots’ union rep. In that role, he was getting more and more outspoken. He complained about how ticket prices had gone up 25 percent but the players’ salaries weren’t going up by any percent. Then he mentioned Patriot Place, the shopping, dining, and entertainment mecca Robert Kraft was building on the land around the stadium, suggesting the players had a hand in creating all that and deserved a piece of the action. That’s the kind of talk that used to make the old industrial revolution bosses send in the Pinkertons to bash a few lessons about free market capitalism into some skulls. But whether it played a role in shipping him out of town, none of us knows. What we do know for sure is that Vrabel always remained on good terms with the organization, sending recommendations for them to draft various players when he went on to coach at his alma mater, Ohio State. So no hard feelings there.