Belichick was furious that he had not been given the opportunity to interview for the Patriots job and was unwilling to play a pawn in his mentor’s game of brinksmanship against Kraft. Belichick spent only one day as Jets head coach before writing on a napkin, I resign as the HC of the NYJ.
If Parcells’s breakup with the Patriots was a messy affair, Belichick’s divorce from the Jets was a true War of the Roses. The team refused to let him out of his contract, so Belichick filed an antitrust lawsuit against the franchise and the NFL. After weeks of demands and counterdemands, the coach finally dropped the suit when the Jets and Patriots came to a compromise on compensation. Kraft had just about given up on his dream to hire Belichick and was close to striking a deal with Jacksonville Jaguars defensive guru Dom Capers when Parcells called Kraft’s secretary one evening and told her to tell the owner that “Darth Vader” was on the phone.
“I told him [Kraft] there was a way we could do this, but it wasn’t getting done for free,” Parcells later recalled.38
Robert Kraft agreed to give up a first-round draft pick in exchange for what he hoped was a first-rate coach. During his first appearance before the Boston media, Belichick admitted that the shopping list was long and that every phase of the organization had to be improved upon in order to build a winner. Most important, the culture had to change. When Pete Carroll ran the team, players who were disgruntled with the coach and his system could simply march up to the front office and seek asylum. This would not happen under Bill Belichick.
He needed to instill discipline, but he also needed the right players. The Patriots still had a core of stars and potential stars in Drew Bledsoe, linebacker Willie McGinest, and cornerback Ty Law. But the new coach was also looking for a different style of player, one who also had true grit and was easily coachable. He was looking for diamonds in the rough and would need to go mining for these unpolished gems in both free agency and the draft.
It was a tall order, however, and Coach Belichick would need help.
One of his first personnel hires was Dick Rehbein, a journeyman assistant coach who had worked with the Green Bay Packers and the New York Giants. Belichick put him in charge of his quarterbacks. Rehbein was excited to work with a talent like Drew Bledsoe, but first he had to write up the team’s insurance policy for the quarterback position. He took two scouting trips, one to Louisiana Tech to work out Tim Rattay, who was a top-ten vote getter for the Heisman Trophy in 1998, and another to Ann Arbor to watch Brady. Neither player was projected to be drafted in the first round, which worked for the Patriots, since they did not have an early pick. Belichick and Rehbein both liked Rattay because he ran a spread offense and had put up gaudy numbers for the Bulldogs. He performed as advertised during the workout, and the Patriots put him on the board as a projected seventh-round pick. The visit to Michigan was almost perfunctory at this point.
Rehbein went to Ann Arbor looking for a player he could mold into a durable third-string quarterback, but what he found was a young man who would alter the course of history for the New England Patriots franchise and the city of Boston. And he knew it right away. When the special teams coach returned home from the scouting trip he told his wife, Pam, “Twenty years from now, people will know the name Tom Brady.”39
Rehbein wasn’t deterred by Brady’s woeful performance at the pre-draft NFL Combine in Indianapolis, where he looked soft and ran a mule-like 5.3 forty-yard dash and scored a 33 on a scale of 0 to 50 on the Wonderlic, a test to gauge a player’s overall intelligence. His vertical jump was the worst for a quarterback in thirty-two years. The scouting report on Brady was filled with negatives: “Poor build…Skinny…Lacks great physical stature and strength…Lacks mobility and ability to avoid the rush…Lacks a really strong arm…Can’t drive the ball downfield…Does not throw a really tight spiral…System-type player who can get exposed if forced to ad-lib, gets knocked down easily.”40
The positives were few, but to Dick Rehbein they were a better indicator of Brady’s potential. “Very poised and composed…Produces in big spots and in big games…Team leader.”
Still, the quarterback coach needed to convince his boss Belichick and Bobby Grier, the team’s vice president of player personnel. While Grier would be fired two weeks after the draft as Belichick wanted to reshape the front office in his own image, before getting shown the door, the Patriots executive listened to Rehbein’s glowing assessment of Brady and made a call to Michigan head coach Lloyd Carr. Grier was the only NFL front office guy to reach out to Carr about his quarterback. The two men had worked together on the staff at Eastern Michigan and Grier valued Carr’s advice. Despite his early misgivings, Carr had become a true believer in Tom Brady and expressed some of the traits that could not be measured in a forty-yard dash.
“I told Bobby [Grier] that they’d never regret drafting him and that Tom had every intangible you could ask for,” Carr recalls. “I remember his first scrimmage as a true freshman, when I was interim coach and Tom wasn’t physically developed yet. The defense just knocked the hell out of him, and he kept getting up. He took a beating and kept standing in there throwing the ball, and that was the day the whole coaching staff realized just how tough Tom was.”41
Still, if Carr valued Brady’s toughness, why did he insist on platooning him with Drew Henson during his senior season? Bill Belichick had a hard time wrapping his head around that question.
“You say, okay, they don’t really want this guy as their starting quarterback,” Belichick said later. “They want another guy. What’s the problem here? It was a bit of a red flag there.”42
Another issue was the team’s relative stability at the quarterback position. When Belichick took over the team a few months prior, the Patriots had forty-two players on the roster and were $10.5 million over the salary cap. New England’s front office had to trim the roster to thirty-nine players to fit under the cap, and they already had three quarterbacks under contract, the twenty-eight-year-old Bledsoe, backup veteran John Friesz, and third stringer Michael Bishop. Could the Patriots even afford to draft a player like Tom Brady? What attracted Belichick and his coaches to the Michigan standout was his mental toughness, a characteristic that Lloyd Carr had put an exclamation point on during his phone call with Bobby Grier. Belichick particularly liked the way Brady would get thrown into games and lead the Wolverines back to victory.
The Patriots’ brain trust decided it would take him in the third round of the draft, should he still be available. Brady figured that he’d be drafted in the fourth round or so and had even relocated to Metairie, Louisiana, to train with Tennessee quarterback Tee Martin and other NFL prospects in hopes of refining his skills and adding value to his stock before the draft.
Like every other player entering the draft, Brady had no idea where he’d be going and didn’t know much about the Patriots other than the fact that the team was all set at quarterback. He hoped that on draft day he’d get a call from his hometown team, the 49ers, a team that failed to make the playoffs in 1999 after superstar quarterback Steve Young suffered a career-ending concussion. Brady participated in a local combine for San Francisco head coach Steve Mariucci and the team’s special adviser, the legendary Bill Walsh, and failed to impress the man who’d drafted Joe Montana, Tom’s idol. Brady and his father were sitting in the stands of Candlestick Park when Montana cemented his own legend by heaving the ball to tight end Dwight Clark in the end zone to win the NFC championship against the Dallas Cowboys, which propelled the San Francisco 49ers to their first Super Bowl appearance in 1981.
When it came to selecting a quarterback in the third round, the 49ers chose Giovanni Carmazzi, a six-two, 224-pound senior from Hofstra. Less than twenty miles south of San Francisco, Brady and his parents sat together in their living room watching the draft unfold on television and were stunned by the announcement.
“We had season tickets for the 49ers for twenty-five years and we were just hurt,” recalled Brady’s father. “We kind of took it personally
.”43
Carmazzi was just one of six quarterbacks called by then–NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue to elevate lowly franchises around the league as Brady continued to wait. He could watch no more.
The fourth and fifth rounds came and went. As draft picks were being announced in the sixth round, Brady told his parents that he had to clear his head so he grabbed his baseball bat and left the house. He returned later to learn that another twenty-two players had been chosen and still his name wasn’t called.
“I gotta get outta here,” he told his dad.
This time, Tom Sr. and wife Galynn tagged along as Tom began walking back up the street. The young quarterback was confronted with the potential reality that he’d have to give up his dream of playing professional football and join his father’s insurance practice.
What he didn’t know was that his name was still up there on the Patriots’ draft board. The idea of selecting him in the third round was quashed to address the team’s more immediate needs. Belichick wanted to boost the offense, so he picked a couple of linemen to protect Drew Bledsoe and a running back to strengthen the ground game. In the fifth round, the Patriots selected a tight end out of Boise State named Dave Stachelski, who would play only nine games in the NFL and none with New England. As they entered the sixth round, it no longer made sense to pass on Tom Brady. The Patriots selected the kid from San Mateo with the 199th pick, a pick that has since gone down as the greatest steal in NFL history. But at that moment no one knew it, no one except maybe Dick Rehbein, who called his wife immediately from the team’s draft-day war room.
“We got him,” he told her. “We got him!”44
Part II
Chapter Seven
Learning Curve
Tom Brady arrived in Foxborough without fanfare. He was invisible. There was no excitement surrounding the sixth-round choice and the only question tossed about by Patriots beat reporters was why the team had wasted a pick on another quarterback when they already had Bledsoe, a franchise player, plus two serviceable backups. Bill Belichick could ill afford a draft-day flop heading into his first season as head coach. But he didn’t see it that way. Belichick was methodical. He had set out to build a skyscraper one steel beam at a time. Like the coach, the afterthought draft pick from Michigan also had an eye toward the future. When owner Robert Kraft first met Brady, the quarterback was carrying a pizza box and looked like a kid strolling across campus on his way to class, not a legitimate NFL quarterback. Kraft couldn’t get over how skinny Brady was—a “beanpole of a kid” is how the owner remembers him. The rookie walked right up to Kraft and introduced himself.
“Hi, I’m Tom Brady.”
“I know who you are,” Kraft replied. “You’re our sixth-round draft choice from Michigan.”
Brady looked him right in the eye. “Yeah, I’m the best decision this organization has ever made.”45
The owner looked at him curiously. Kraft smiled, nodded, and walked away. He was amused at first, but there was something in Brady’s voice that stuck with the owner. He immediately called his son Jonathan and told him about the encounter he’d just had with the fourth-string quarterback.
“God, really? Was he cocky?” Jonathan asked.
Bob Kraft thought about the question. He didn’t believe Brady had a cocksure attitude. Most players have that. It was something else.
“I’m telling you. There’s something about the way he said it that I believe him.”46
The owner didn’t mention the conversation to the coach.
Brady was issued the number 12, a jersey number that held no significance for the franchise. It was a number that had been given to past quarterbacks like backup Matt Cavanaugh and even to a punter. No player had worn the number with distinction, but the rookie was determined to change that.
Jack Mula, a longtime agent and Patriots executive, recalled his first encounter with Brady at Foxboro Stadium shortly after the draft. Because the quarterback was a sixth-round pick, his contract was a standard late-round rookie deal, but Brady made it a point to go up to the business office on the fifth floor to meet Mula, who was then the team’s director of legal and business affairs.
“I just want to meet the man who is going to sign my contract,” Brady told him. Mula, a former agent who represented players for twenty years, said he’d never heard of a player going out of their way to meet folks in the business department. Brady also met with the team’s salary-cap analyst, and introduced himself to everyone on the floor. And he asked Mula to send him a copy of his contract.
“That stuff is always left to the agents,” Mula said. “He didn’t have to do that. He was just a kid, but he came up as a mature businessman. He knew it wasn’t the last contract he was going to be signing with us and he just wanted to meet the people up there.”47
In the late summer of 2000, Brady purchased a spacious condominium in Franklin, Massachusetts, from fellow Michigan Wolverine and star Patriots cornerback Ty Law, conveniently located just ten minutes from the stadium. This same condo was once owned by former Patriots quarterback Scott Zolak, and was later passed on from Brady to another Patriots signal caller, Rohan Davey. From the outside, a professional athlete buying a condo near his team’s facility may not appear to be anything out of the ordinary. But the NFL’s non-guaranteed contracts and well-earned “Not For Long” moniker keep most players living as renters until they are in a long-term second veteran contract—unless they’re a high draft pick with significant guaranteed money. That usually means first, second, and (maybe) third rounders. Brady’s decision to buy a home as a sixth-round pick on a roster with four quarterbacks was tangible evidence that his famous declaration to owner Robert Kraft wasn’t just bluster. Brady believed it, and made an unusual initial financial investment in himself.
Wisely, Brady took on rent-paying rookie roommates in the three-bedroom spread, adding fellow class of 2000 Patriots defensive end David Nugent from Purdue University, taken two picks after Brady at number 201, and tight end Chris Eitzmann, an undrafted free agent from Harvard University. First-year Patriots linebacker Matt Chatham, from the University of South Dakota, had been released by the St. Louis Rams prior to the start of the 2000 season but claimed by the Patriots for opening day. Chatham rented a cramped apartment in North Attleboro but became fast friends with the Franklin crew, crashing in the basement of the Franklin condo with regularity. He wasn’t a paying customer, but to this day Brady affectionately calls him “roomie.”
Coach Belichick had low expectations for the 2000 season. His players simply weren’t tough enough. “We’ve got too many people who are overweight, too many guys who are out of shape, and too many guys who haven’t paid the price they need to pay at this time of the season. You can’t win with 40 good players while the other team has 53,” he groused during training camp.48
The team stumbled out of the gate, losing its first four games. The offense led by Drew Bledsoe would score thirty points only once that season, during a December victory against the Kansas City Chiefs. The Patriots managed only five wins and finished dead last in their division, the AFC East.
The 2000 Patriots season is often overlooked in the meteoric rise of this franchise, but the shared experiences of that painful 5–11 campaign is the thorny bush that roster survivors had to crawl through to get to the luxurious promised land of Patriots Place as we know it today. Belichick was intent on finding his kind of players, and weeding out those that wouldn’t commit to his brand of smart, tough, and emotionally challenging professional football. “This ain’t Club Med” was a constant reminder that the coaching staff used to chide the players. The 2000 Patriots were known to practice longer, with far more physical practices, than was the NFL norm of the time—meeting at all hours of the day when players in other organizations were happily at home. This was Belichick’s litmus test. It was not like this elsewhere in the NFL. You had to want to be a part of this unique culture, or you would soon be gone. Adopt his vision of the football work grind, or quickly
lose the opportunity to play football for work.
And for Tom Brady, who survived as the rare fourth quarterback on that 2000 roster, the exhausting schedule that Belichick put before the players was never enough.
“Brady and I would stay out after practice a minimum of thirty minutes, where it’s just me running routes and him throwing to me…over and over and over again,” recalls former tight end Chris Eitzmann. “A lot of days we’d basically be out there right up until the next meeting, so sometimes it would be as much as an hour. It was fucking horrible. Brady just wanted to keep going and going and going. I wanted some extra work, too, because I was always on the bubble, but this was different. He’d move me around, split me out some, but basically he’d have me run the entire tight-end route package. We would just run them until I was dead.”49
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