Five Rings

by Jerry Thornton

  Most people definitely knew. They included the entire Jets’ organization, down to every last player on the roster. And the one man whose opinion counted: Welker’s boss.

  Bill Belichick sent for him. If what I’ve heard is true, the two sat there in total silence for minutes, the coach just staring daggers at him while time stood still. Until he broke the silence with, “What the hell were you thinking?” Belichick’s issues were twofold, the first being that he never wanted his players or coaches calling out someone before a game and giving them the kind of bulletin board material his team used all the time. But more importantly, this was bringing Ryan’s family into it, which was crossing a line. In a controversial decision, he decided to bench the most important slot receiver in the league and his quarterback’s first option on most plays.

  However, this was the playoffs. So like a college team that has a star player commit some major felony before a big game, he decided to teach Welker a lesson by only benching him for the first series.

  Whether Welker’s benching (if you want to call it that) for one series was a factor in the game or not is something philosophers have argued about ever since. What’s not in dispute is that the Jets just flat-out had their heads in the game more than New England did, right from the outset. That first drive ended on a Brady interception, the first he’d thrown since before the leaves had turned in early October. The only reason Jets linebacker David Harris didn’t return it 70 yards for the touchdown was because Pats tight end Alge Crumpler chased him down to tackle him at the 12. And when New York kicker Nick Folk missed the field goal, it felt like they’d gotten this mistake out of the way and dodged a bullet. But on the next drive Crumpler dropped a touchdown pass and most of us started doing that Han Solo “I’ve got a bad feeling about this” thing.

  It only got worse when Mark Sanchez threw a touchdown pass to, of all people, LaDainian Tomlinson, who apparently preferred his revenge served cold. And again with the Pats facing a fourth and 4 on their own 38, when they called for the fake punt. It was a direct snap to protector Pat Chung, who didn’t catch it cleanly, dropped it, and was tackled for a loss. Four plays later, Sanchez was throwing another touchdown pass and it was time for full-on, five-alarm panic.

  And it just got worse. A New England touchdown and conversion made it 14–11, New York. But moments later, Jets receiver Jerricho Cotchery took a little checkdown pass and raced 58 yards to set up yet another Sanchez TD pass.

  While all this was going on, the Patriots’ offense was on life support, and the Jets’ defense was pulling the plug. For all Rex Ryan’s bluster that was way out of proportion to anything he had ever actually accomplished, he was capable at times of dialing up some brilliant defensive game plans. This was one of those days. Brady was under duress more and more as the game went on and the Patriots’ offense became more urgent. Using the complex pass rushes he had learned at his father’s knee, Ryan played schemes that sent extra blitzers at times, other times he faked the blitz in a way that had the Patriots’ offensive line accounting for a man that instead dropped into coverage, and at times had the Pats’ pass protection so confused that the Jets were getting to Brady, even though New England had the numbers advantage. Brady was sacked five times in all and seemed to be pressured dozens more.

  Meanwhile, everyone in the stands pinned their hopes on the inevitable Jets boneheadism that never happened. Sanchez never threw an interception on the way to the kind of efficient, mistake-free game that made Tom Brady into Tom Brady. He was 19 for 25, with not a lot of yards but three touchdowns and no turnovers.

  The Jets won, 28–21. After that 45–3 loss and the Wes Welker press conference, they were in no mood to play nice. Bart Scott owned the postgame. He immediately raced over to ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio to deliver an angry, defiant rant that included enough sound cuts to give some genius at Autotune the material to make viral video magic.

  All you nonbelievers

  Disrespect us

  Feel great!

  We’re pissed off

  (See you in Pittsburgh)

  Can’t wait!

  The 2010 divisional game might not have been The Super Bowl That Shall Not Be Named, but it was the next worst thing. The Jets had a second-year quarterback we’d called a “bust” and a second-year coach who loved the sound of his own voice as much as he loved ladies’ feet. But for the second straight year, they were going to the AFC championship game. The Patriots were not.

  It would be a long time before that last statement was true again.

  24

  Losers and Sore Losers

  As was becoming custom, the public reaction to that loss to the Jets was swift and brutal.

  After that playoff game, the Boston columnists and talk show know-it-alls fired all their bullets and then threw the empty guns. This wasn’t an example of the Patriots not taking care of the football and making bad decisions that cost themselves a win. This was, as it always was, the fault of their own (wait for it) . . . arrogance.

  Rex Ryan was the new hotness. Loud, talkative, friendly with the press, and the polar opposite of Bill Belichick. The Jets reflected their coach, who let them do and say pretty much anything they wanted to and seemed to be having fun. By contrast, Belichick’s team seemed too controlled. Too worried about what would happen should they step out of line, as Wes Welker had with his foot jokes, to actually enjoy playing football.

  They were coming off back-to-back seasons where they were one-and-done in the playoffs, and three straight seasons without a playoff win. 2011 became the time the critics started tracking how long it had been since they’d won a championship. Like one of those safety signs that count the days since the last workplace accident, it was, “Well, they haven’t won anything in six years.” Or worse, “They haven’t won since Spygate,” which was supposed to be proof that they couldn’t win unless they were cheating.

  One development that helped the region, if doing nothing for the Patriots themselves, was the Bruins winning the Stanley Cup. It was an incredible occurrence. The last time they’d won it was 1972, the great Big Bad Bruins teams of Bobby Orr, Phil Esposito, and my boyhood idol, goalie Gerry Cheevers.

  Then finally, with the other three teams in town winning championships and the Bruins on the verge of complete irrelevancy, they hired former Bruins Hall of Famer Cam Neely to run their operations. He built a team that was both talented and tough thanks to enforcer Shawn Thornton and goalie Tim Thomas, who won three playoff game 7s, two by shutout, including the Cup winner at Vancouver. Boston had its seventh championship in the span of 10 years.

  At the Red Sox home opener, the Bruins were honored along with the Patriots and Celtics. On the field they laid out a table with one championship trophy from each of the four major pro sports. To borrow a line from Ned Beatty in Rudy, it was the most beautiful sight these eyes had ever seen. And unthinkable as recently as 2000.

  Patriots fans needed it, too. Nothing else was certain during that 2011 NFL off-season—not even whether there would be a 2011 NFL regular season. With the league’s collective bargaining agreement up for renewal, the owners had locked out the players and no progress was being made on a new deal.

  Hoping to end the lockout and get back to work, the NFL Players Association filed a lawsuit in federal court. Some of the highest profile players allowed their names to be put at the top of it, including Peyton Manning, Aaron Rodgers, and Tom Brady. Their names were listed alphabetically, so the suit was filed under the title Tom Brady et al. v. National Football League. There’s no question Brady was doing a solid for his fellow union brothers, but it didn’t play well inside the walls of the NFL headquarters in New York. And it would not be the last time Brady’s name and the league he played for would appear on a federal court filing together.

  Within days, we got the news we’d been waiting for. The NFL and the Players Association had reached a deal, and virtually every report credited Kraft with being the one who brokered the peace. At a photo op to announce the ag
reement, Kraft was personally thanked by Colts’ center Jeff Saturday, who swallowed him up in the massive arms he’d used to recover a fumble for a touchdown against Kraft’s Patriots in the playoffs five years earlier. Both men wept.

  There was a reason why it was such an emotional scene, and it only had a little to do with labor peace. It was that while Kraft had been doing all this, his wife Myra was dying of cancer. In fact, she’d finally succumbed to it just three days before the announcement. I wrote at the time that she always seemed like more than just the wife who was OK with her husband impulse-purchasing a $175 million football team. From the outside, it felt like she was the moral center of the franchise, going back to the decision to renounce the draft rights to Christian Peter back in the 1990s, when she found out he had been accused of sexual assault, to all the charity work the team got its players involved in. Given the success of the Myra Kraft Foundation the family established in her honor, I’d say that was a fairly solid guess on my part.

  Belichick was not above doing something atypically Belichickian, either. In one day near the end of July, he swung two trades. In one, he traded a fifth- and a sixth-round draft pick to land Bengals Pro Bowl receiver Chad Johnson, who at the time was still legally going by the name Chad Ochocinco. The other sent a fifth rounder in 2013 to the Redskins to get a former Defensive Player of the Year, tackle Albert Haynesworth.

  Ochocinco wasn’t a terribly big shock. He was a talker and a self-promoter to be sure, though his antics were usually of the harmless, wacky hijinks variety—choreographed end zone celebrations and the like. Or the time he put on a Hall of Fame jacket with his name and “Class of ???” on the back. But there was no doubting that Belichick respected him as a player. Everyone had seen NFL Films footage of the two laughing it up before a game, with Belichick telling him, “Our whole game plan is to double you. ‘Double 85’ we call it.” It felt like a genius move, with the potential to turn into Randy Moss Lite, if Ochocinco could just fit into the offense as Moss had.

  He wouldn’t. Not even a little bit. Ochocinco was lost from the beginning. After a career in Cincinnati where he was simply told what route to run, ran it, and caught the ball when it was thrown to him, he found the Patriots’ offense a foreign language he never learned to speak. And rather than immerse himself in the Rosetta Stone CDs in order to become fluent, he just basically faked it all season. Nodding his head, pretending he understood, and laughing whenever everyone else laughed. In week 1 of the 2010 season, Ochocinco had 12 catches against Belichick’s defense. In the entire 2011 season, he had 15.

  One guy no one had any problems rooting for might have lost a few fans midway through the season. But then again, he probably made plenty more, depending on which direction your moral compass pointed. In October, Rob Gronkowski showed up on the Twitter feed of porn actress BiBi Jones. (You may remember her from her work in such adult features as Trouble at the Slumber Party, Mofos: I Know That Girl 8, and Fill ’Er Up.) In two photos she posted, she was wearing Gronkowski’s Patriots jersey. In one, he’s wearing a T-shirt, and in the other, he’s all Shirtless O’Clock. And in yet another that came out eventually, he’s holding his jersey but she’s topless, with her back tastefully turned toward the camera.

  The 2011 Patriots had problems that went beyond the failures of their two high-profile veteran acquisitions and adult film actresses. Their defense was just—and I’ll dig deep into the thesaurus to come up with the exact adjective to describe them—bad. The failure of all those defensive back draft picks to pan out was taking its toll. Years earlier the Patriots had worked Troy Brown out as a nickelback in case of emergency. Now they were putting Julian Edelman out there out of desperation—without nearly the results Brown gave them.

  Somehow, they only surrendered the 15th-most points in the NFL, which was a minor miracle when you consider they gave up the second-most yards. They had been playing a so-called “bend but don’t break” style for a long time. But this was stretching like that rubber tubing they make wrist rockets out of. Yet their firepower on the offensive side of the ball was such that the Patriots made it back to their first AFC title game since beating San Diego back in 2007. This time, hosting the Baltimore Ravens.

  This game, like a lot of Patriots-Ravens battles of the time, was brutal. It might as well have been fought in a back alley using broken bottles and trash can lids. The biggest lead all game was a brief time in the second quarter when the Patriots led 10–3. Vince Wilfork came up huge, with three tackles, three assists, and a solo sack of Joe Flacco in which he drove center Matt Birk backwards, picked him up like a club, and beat Flacco senseless with him. Maybe I’m exaggerating, but not by much.

  The physical nature of this one took its toll, with a very costly sacrifice upon the altar of the injury gods. Late in the third quarter, Gronkowski caught a pass only to be hauled down by our old nemesis, Bernard Pollard.

  Wrapping up Gronk’s lower legs as he struggled to fight for more yards, Pollard brought him to the ground in an awkward, twisting fashion. Gronkowski had to be helped off the field as the 70,000 in the stands did the “You again!” Pollard had officially become a hex to us, like that tiki that brought bad luck to the Brady Bunch in Hawaii.

  They had Julian Edelman lining up opposite Anquan Boldin, perhaps the second-best slot receiver in the game after Welker. Late in the game, with the Patriots desperately trying to hang on to a 23–20 lead, Boldin beat Devin McCourty for a 29-yard gain. On the very next play, Boldin caught another for 9 yards, but Edelman knocked the ball out. Unfortunately, the fumble went out of bounds with Baltimore retaining possession.

  One play later, Flacco hit Lee Evans at the goal line with a ball that fell incomplete, either because of a great pass breakup by the Pats’ Sterling Moore or an unforgivable drop by Evans. Either way, the Patriots were still up by three with under half a minute to play, Baltimore ball on the Pats’ 14.

  On fourth down, with the game clock stopped but the play clock running, there was chaos on the Baltimore sideline. Kicker Billy Cundiff was warming up, kicking into the practice net a good 40 yards upfield. He had to come sprinting out to attempt the kick that would send it to overtime. And he missed it. One kneel-down play later and the Patriots were heading back to the Super Bowl.

  It was the Mother of All Breaks, so much so that it was hard to process. I remember saying that it felt exactly like that part in Pulp Fiction when the kid comes out of the back room unloading his hand cannon at Jules and Vincent, and they take a second to check their bodies for bullet holes until they realize he’d missed with every shot. But a moment like this requires more than one movie reference, so I joined half of the football world in taking to Twitter to say, “Cundiff is Finkle! Finkle is Cundiff!” (If you don’t get it, dust off the VCR and load up Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.)

  The Ravens had completely lost their composure at a critical time. And not just Cundiff for missing the 32-yard kick. Everyone. Evans for dropping that pass. The coaches, none of whom went and got Cundiff on third down, ready to go. John Harbaugh for not using the time-out he had left. Everyone.

  Though we got a taste of how Harbaugh deals with the adversity that comes from losing a tough playoff game at New England: by accusing the Patriots of cheating him out of it. For real. He claimed there was a discrepancy with the stadium scoreboard, which he thought was showing it to be third down when it was in fact fourth. The fact that the NFL handles the game clock, down, and distance didn’t enter into it, apparently. Nor did the fact that there is a chain gang on both sides of the field holding a marker with a red “4” that can be seen from the back row. But none of that explains what he planned to do with that unused time-out for the rest of his life.

  John Harbaugh’s sore loserness didn’t matter anymore. The Ravens were in the past. The only thing that counted was the Super Bowl, and the potential for either epic revenge or a nightmare scenario that lay ahead. Because there would be no third option.

  Once again, they were facing the New York
Giants.

  25

  The Super Bowl That Shall Not Be Named II

  For Super Bowl XLVI, the Patriots were either going to even the score for that last Super Bowl, validate themselves post-Spygate, reboot their dynasty, and establish Belichick and Brady as the greatest coach/quarterback tandem of all time, or they were going to forever be known as the team that lost to Eli Manning and the Giants twice. There was also the added made-for-TV drama of this one being played at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, the home of the Colts. So it would be either Brady winning on the home field of his biggest rival, or Eli Manning winning on the home field of his brother.

  The Patriots-Giants rematch would never have happened if it hadn’t been for one, inexcusable bit of dumbness by San Francisco in the NFC championship game. With the Giants punting early in the fourth quarter down 14–10 and 49ers regular punt returner Ted Ginn Jr. out, backup returner Kyle Williams made the right decision to not try to field the punt. He then quickly opted for the very wrong decision to stand by and watch it bounce. Only to have the ball brush up against his leg, making it a live ball and one the Giants’ Devin Thomas grabbed, making it New York’s ball, first down at the Niners’ 29. And a few plays later, Manning was hitting Mario Manningham for a go-ahead touchdown. Had Williams jumped out of the way of the ball, or run away from it, or better yet, run up into the stands because there was no earthly reason for him to have been anywhere near a football he had no intention of touching, life would be very much different. But he didn’t. And the Giants eventually won in overtime.

  It was history repeating itself. There was a lot of that going on.

  For instance, once again, in keeping with tradition, the Patriots failed to score any points in the first quarter. Which I guess is only technically true, because after forcing a punt on the Giants’ opening drive, the Patriots’ offense took over at their own 6. And on the first play from scrimmage, Brady felt pressure from Justin Tuck and got rid of the ball to the deep middle of the field. The problems with the play were twofold. One, he didn’t have a receiver anywhere in the area, so it was ruled Intentional Grounding. Two, he was standing in the end zone at the time, so it was Intentional Grounding with a Safety Chaser. Two points to New York, and a free kick to give them the ball back.