And yet, what made that day the best of the season is what happened later on, less than an hour away at Fenway Park. The Red Sox were back in the American League Championship Series, but trailing 5–1 in the eighth inning and four outs away from falling behind to the Detroit Tigers 2–0 in the series. But they also had the bases loaded, with David Ortiz at the plate. I casually tweeted out something about Ortiz hitting a grand slam here, because that’s what Ortiz does. And that’s exactly what he proceeded to do, to tie the game.
What took a turn into the almost supernatural was that as the ball sailed into the bullpen, Tigers right fielder Torii Hunter made a play for it, flipping over the wall with his feet in the air. Next to him was Boston Police Department officer Steven Horgan, working a security detail. Horgan threw his arms up in the air, forming a “V” that perfectly matched the “V” of Hunter’s legs.
I was working for a media site whose slogan is “VIVA LA STOOL.” Within hours, T-shirts with the perfect image of Horgan’s arms and Hunter’s legs, with the “I” and the “A” inserted, were coming out of the printer and paying the bills.
Almost as important as the universe printing us money was the fact that the Red Sox pulled the game out and made a series of it. In fact, they won the ALCS, setting up a rematch of the 2004 World Series against the St. Louis Cardinals.
This time, St. Louis made more of a series of it, extending it to six games, but the result was the same. The Red Sox won. Ortiz was transcendent. Hitting an otherworldly .688, slugging 1.188, and with an impossible OPS of 1.948, he was on his way to winning the World Series MVP.
Boston was having yet another duck boat parade, this one taking extra care to stop at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, where Red Sox players reverently laid down the World Series trophy, draping the Sox jersey with the 617 area code on the back they’d carried with them all year over it. Without a doubt, the emotional impact of that atrocity committed back in April was a part of the celebration that day, for the players as well as for the city.
That made eight titles in all four major sports since the Patriots had captured that first one in 2001. The ironic thing was that the Patriots themselves were the team suffering the longest championship “drought.” If they were going to put an end to it, they had their work cut out for them.
Fortunately, their finest moment was still to come.
It was another November, another TV-ad-revenue-rate-setting prime-time matchup between the league’s premiere quarterback rivals. This time, it was the same old Tom Brady, but a new and improved Peyton Manning, now in a brand-new package.
Manning was with the Denver Broncos and well on his way to shattering virtually every single-season passing record in the books, including Brady’s 50 touchdown passes in 2007. It was the 14th time the two quarterbacks faced each other, and all things considered, probably the best game of them all.
Though you wouldn’t have known it if you just watched the first half. On a frigid night at Gillette with what in golf we call “a two-club wind,” the Broncos managed to play flawless football. Manning completely humiliated the Patriots’ defense on the way to building up a 24–0 halftime lead. Yet, maybe still embarrassed by all the empty seats in the place as Brady led the comeback against the Saints, nobody left. Fans not only stayed in their seats, but they also stayed in the game, making noise, suffering through the temperature and the wind chill, and being a factor in the game.
Defensively, the Patriots settled in and forced three Broncos turnovers in the second half. Offensively, they scored on five straight possessions. Julian Edelman could’ve been nominated in the MTV Video Music Awards Breakout Performer category thanks to his 110 yards and two touchdowns as the Pats scored 31 unanswered points.
Eventually, the Broncos tied it up, sending the game into overtime. That was when Belichick did what diabolical geniuses do sometimes. He pulled out the Conventional Wisdom playbook coaches had been using since time immemorial, carefully tore out the pages marked “Overtime,” and slowly wiped his butt with them.
After winning the coin flip, the Patriots’ team captains said, “We’ll take the wind.” They decided to kick off with the wind at their backs rather than take the ball first. Bear in mind, this was under the old overtime rules, which were strictly “Sudden Death.” If you score first, you win. In other words, Belichick was handing the most prolific scoring offense in NFL history the ball, knowing that a field goal on their opening drive would be Game Over.
Denver didn’t score on their opening drive. Or on their second drive. As a matter of fact, the Broncos couldn’t get anything going in those elements. And on the fifth possession of overtime, Stephen Gostkowski kicked the game-winning field goal, set up by a botched punt in which Broncos safety Tony Carter saw the ball bounce off his arm as he tried to get out of the way. Rugby player–turned special-teams ace Nate Ebner fell on it at the Denver 13-yard line. Two Brady runs up the gut, and that was all she wrote.
The return man on that punt? The one whose job it is to call off his teammates and just let the ball roll around uselessly on the ground? Wes Welker.
The Patriots had not only won a game against their biggest threat in the AFC, but they did it by overcoming a 24-point deficit. It was the biggest comeback in franchise history and a record that felt like it would stand forever.
Because honestly, who comes back from more points than that, ever?
For all the Patriots’ efforts in that 24-point “We’ll Take the Wind” comeback, those bag job calls at the end of the Jets and Panthers games ultimately cost them home field in the playoffs to the Broncos. The road to another Super Bowl would travel through Denver.
The Pats were the No. 2 seed, which gave them a bye and a home game against Indianapolis. As was the case the last time they faced these new Colts, the game was virtually noncompetitive, in all phases. Indy was utterly incapable of stopping the run, especially LeGarrette Blount, who tore through them for 166 yards and four touchdowns. In all, New England’s backs had 235 yards on the ground and six TDs. Defensively, they dismantled Luck with four interceptions and three sacks. It was clear that the Colts were going to need to make massive changes if they were ever going to compete against the Patriots.
The one thing New Englanders were most counting on as the team headed to Denver for the AFC championship game was weather. As in severe, crippling, January Rocky Mountain weather not fit for man or beast. In other words, Patriots weather. The kind Peyton Manning never fared well in, especially not now that he’d missed an entire season to go overseas and get the kind of medical treatment on his neck that isn’t legal in the United States.
What we got instead was perfect weather for the Broncos. Denver Visitors Bureau weather. It was 60 degrees and sunny, with no wind. Had the game been in Foxboro, it would’ve been dark, wet, and nasty. But instead they were playing this one in the photo on the front of the tourist pamphlet for the Sundance Film Festival.
The Patriots kept the game close for a while—on the scoreboard, anyway, which is the only place where they didn’t appear to be getting dominated. Until one Denver snap where they ran a “Rub” play, or two receivers crossing the field in opposite directions where the goal is to shake one of the defenders in all that traffic and get a receiver open. On this play, Denver’s Wes Welker slammed into the Pats’ best corner Aqib Talib, knocking him out of the game and ending his season. From that point on, the defense was essentially defenseless.
The Broncos put together a drive of over 7 minutes that resulted in a touchdown. They took a 13–3 lead into the half and on TV I said if they put together another drive like that and get seven points out of it, the game will virtually be over. They then went out and did better. The drive to start the third quarter actually took 7 more minutes off the clock and gave Denver a 20–3 lead. That was two drives resulting in 14 points that ate up almost an entire quarter of the game. There was no coming back from that.
In the aftermath, Tom Brady took a lot of heat for being outpla
yed. For sure he didn’t play well enough to win, but the reality is he was not terrible. He never turned the ball over and completed 63 percent of his passes. But he didn’t do what Manning did, which was put together one of his best postseason games ever, with exactly 400 yards passing and two touchdowns against a depleted Patriots defense. In baseball terms, Brady pitched a quality start, while Manning pitched a complete game one-hit shutout.
The worst part—aside from the fact that this made Manning now 2–1 against Brady in AFC title games and was sending him to the Super Bowl—was having to swallow the fact that the key hit of the game was delivered by Wes Welker. And not even Welker in his prime. This Welker was clearly battling age, drops, and concussions. He was wearing a comically oversized helmet that made him look like The Great Gazoo from The Flintstones, that little floating alien that only showed himself to Fred and was supposed to be a funny running gag but was really a sign of deep and dangerous psychosis. That Welker had come back to bite the team that gave up on him in the ass.
Bill Belichick, for one, was in no mood to be gracious and magnanimous about it. In fact, in his presser the next day, he wouldn’t even refer to Welker by name. He used his best “tell your mother” voice that moms and dads use when they’re not speaking to each other. “I think it was a deliberate play by the receiver to take out Aqib,” he said. “No attempt to get open. I’ll let the league handle the discipline on that play, whatever they decide. It’s one of the worst plays I’ve seen.”
To the world, it was sore loserness of the highest order. To Patriots critics, it was further proof that the Patriots organization had lost its way and now gone a decade without winning “anything.” To New England fans, it was yet another bitter ending to a season at the hands of a franchise we despised.
Fortunately for us, inside the Patriots organization this loss signaled that the time for some bold and dramatic moves to get this team back to Super Bowl contention was now.
28
Chaos Theory
There’s a concept in philosophy and science writing known commonly as “The Butterfly Effect” which, if you didn’t understand Jeff Goldblum’s very quirky, Goldblumy explanation of it in Jurassic Park, basically explains how everything in our world can have an impact on something else. Fully explained, it claims that a butterfly can flap its wings and have an impact on weather halfway around the world. We are all interconnected in a way that events we think have nothing do to with us can have a dramatic impact on our lives. A meteor striking Earth 65 million years ago wiped out the dinosaurs and gave mammals a chance to rule the planet. One wrong turn by Archduke Ferdinand’s driver put him in the path of an assassin and set off World War I. Hulk Hogan’s simple gesture to shake The Rock’s hand got him to turn on New World Order at WrestleMania X8 and become good again. Or how that guy in the Bible did that thing that saved a bunch of people’s souls. (Note to self: Learn some Bible references.) The point being that there are forces in the universe we can’t control that have major impacts, good and bad, that can change the destinies of all of us.
In 2014, it was two acts of hideous domestic violence that did not involve the Patriots, but which ultimately affected them more than the guys who actually committed them, or the ones who enabled them.
In mid-February, TMZ released security camera video from outside an elevator at the Revel Casino in Atlantic City. The footage showed Ray Rice of the Ravens dragging his unconscious girlfriend Janay Palmer out of the elevator and into the hallway like she was a bag of laundry. It was horrifying. No one knew how she’d been knocked out, but no reasonable human being needed to in order to know that however it happened, it had to have been terrible.
As the story hung out there, NFL commissioner Roger Goodell insisted he was taking it very seriously and promised a full investigation. What he didn’t mention were the other factors, ones that were less about how a 206-pound world-class athlete might happen to find himself in an elevator with his knocked-out fiancée. Factors like Goodell being tight with Ravens’ owner Steve Bisciotti or about his golf trips to Augusta National in Georgia as Bisciotti’s guest. About the Ravens’ deal with M&T Bank buying the naming rights to their stadium and hiring Rice as the bank’s spokesman.
Instead we got, after what Goodell called a thorough investigation, a two-game suspension for Rice. Across the country, almost unanimously among anyone who wasn’t a Ravens fan, it was an outrage. The first reaction among practically everyone was that there were players in the league, such as the Cleveland Browns’ Josh Gordon, getting suspended for four games for smoking pot.
Rice’s defense was no defense at all. He claimed he never hit Janay, he was simply defending himself, and there was wrong on both sides. The Ravens arranged a press conference in which she took “responsibility for my part in the incident,” sounding like the victimized, battered wife from a Lifetime Original Movie. Later she admitted the team’s public relations and legal staff told her what to say, all of which was made a hundred times worse by the bombshell that dropped next. The tape from the security camera inside the elevator was leaked, and it was every bit as damning as anyone could have imagined. Janay takes a step toward Ray, he hauls off with a clenched fist and slams her in the temple, driving her head into the handrail, and she is clearly unconscious before she hits the floor. Again, this was a guy I had once seen rip through 11 Patriots defenders for over 80 yards on the first play of a playoff game, so I never bought into the alibi he couldn’t defend himself against his girlfriend. But this was nauseating.
For the NFL, it was what the trendy politicos of the day liked to call “bad optics.” The guy in that video, sending this tiny, drunk woman through the air and pounding her head into a metal bar, had gotten a two-game suspension. There was ’splaining to do.
Goodell made an attempt to ’splain it in a way that was disastrous.
He insisted he had tried his best to get the elevator video, but was unsuccessful. He spoke in his worst robotic monotone, repeating bullet point phrases over and over like “I didn’t get it right” and “we need to do better” and improving the “process.” He looked weak and feckless and for all the world like he tried to help out one of his owner cronies and it backfired when that second tape came out.
The next issue Goodell completely botched involved Vikings’ running back and former league MVP Adrian Peterson, who was under investigation by social services in Texas for abusing his four-year-old son, one of six children he’d fathered in different states. It was alleged that Peterson had beat the child with a wooden “switch” on his backside until the boy’s scrotum bled.
Peterson didn’t deny it. In fact, he said he was doing what his father did to him and felt he was just disciplining the kid. He even mentioned that he had a “whooping room” for the express purpose of doling out the punishment. Goodell did nothing, claiming he needed more evidence before he could rule on it. On September 12, Peterson was indicted by a grand jury on the charge. That’s when the commissioner sprung into action. Which is to say, three days later he sort of slinked into near-action. He put Peterson in the Time-Out Chair of the NFL’s Exempt/Commissioner’s Permission list, keeping him away from football until he could figure out what to do.
Regardless of how Janay Palmer and the four-year-old came out of these matters, the damage to Roger Goodell could not be undone. At best, he looked like he had no moral compass, treating felonies like misdemeanors and misdemeanors like capital crimes. At worst, he looked like an enabler who’s willing to disregard victims of serious crimes for a great round of golf. Either way, it felt like you could take the Hall Monitor at any K–4 elementary school and put her in charge of discipline in the NFL and she’d show a better sense of right and wrong than this guy who was reportedly making close to $40 million a year.
While all this was unfolding, still blissfully unaware of how any of this could Butterfly Affect his own team, Bill Belichick was pulling off some of the shrewdest moves of a career full of them. In fact, he was doing that on
e thing I love to see most out of my fictional heroes: he was taking his enemy’s greatest weapon and turning it against them. Think John McClane blowing up Hans Gruber’s men with their own detonators or Frodo destroying the One Ring. It was glorious.
For years, the best weapon the New York Jets had developed was cornerback Darrelle Revis. He was more than just the guy they were promoting as the best Jets player since Joe Namath, if not better. Because Revis is arguably the best businessman of any player in NFL history, willing to do whatever is necessary to maximize his earnings. On more than one occasion he held out on his contract with the Jets until they gave him what he wanted, then made it clear he wouldn’t rule out doing it again.
Eventually, the Jets ownership said enough was enough. Over the objections of Rex Ryan, every player on the roster, and virtually every Jets fan everywhere, the team made the very Patriots-like decision to trade Revis to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the 2013 season. The Bucs subsequently signed him to the richest defensive back contract in history, six years at $96 million, though none of it was guaranteed.
The Bucs’ general manager at the time was Jason Licht, a former Belichick protégé, who, having learned from the best, philosophically didn’t see the point of tying up so much salary cap money on one guy whose team just went 4–12. So on March 12, he announced that Revis had been released. Within hours, he was signed by the Patriots.
The impossible had happened. Belichick had just landed the consensus best defensive player of his generation, a guy who still had five years left on his contract, for nothing. He had signed a free agent who was not a free agent. It was like walking into a bank and coming out with big bags with dollar signs on them without robbing the bank. There were no guns. Not even a note for the teller. The manager just told you to take what you wanted and handed you a handy desk calendar on the way out.
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