Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  Four years later, Law found himself in a different financial world. He signed a $50 million contract with the Patriots, which included a $14.2 million bonus. He wasn’t going to stay in the condo for long, and he found the perfect buyer when Brady was drafted. Like Brady, Law went to school at Michigan. He knew how competitive one had to be to thrive in Ann Arbor, so the quarterback from his alma mater got his attention. Law remembered his own fight to play immediately at Michigan. He had asked to go one-on-one with future first-round pick Derrick Alexander in practice. When Alexander caught a short pass, the freshman corner said, “Is that it? You’re supposed to catch that. That ain’t nothing. Where I come from, it’s the best two outta three.” He broke up the next pass and intercepted the third. He quickly became a starter.

  In the pros, Brady was unlikely to be as bold in his first year as Law was in his. Once, Bill Parcells challenged veteran receiver Vincent Brisby to humble the talkative rookie. Brisby and Law went one-on-one in a drill, a drill that Law dominated. He celebrated by ripping off his Nike cleats and saying to his teammates, “Anybody got any goddamn Reeboks? Because this is my planet.” Law was a hard worker, and he respected Brady for always being in the weight room. Plus, he was a Michigan man. He was going to make a special condo sale to Brady.

  “I knew he wasn’t making any money. I said, ‘You know what, I’m going to leave all the furniture for you,’” Law says now. “I left all the furniture, TVs, pool table, everything. I left him everything, move-in ready. I said, ‘Just bring your bags, man.’ Sold it to him for like a hundred grand less than what I could have gotten. I had just signed this new deal. He was a Michigan guy. And I saw the kind of work that he put in. This dude worked hard. I didn’t know if he’d ever get on the damn field. But he worked hard.”

  This was part of life in the NFL now for Brady, hanging out on Cherrywood Lane and trying to hang on to a roster spot. Brady was the fourth quarterback, Nugent was a long-shot defensive end, and of the six tight ends the Patriots listed on the depth chart, Eitzmann was sixth.

  They had fun, though. They’d shoot pool in the basement and have what they would call a house tournament playing an old Nintendo football video game called Tecmo Bowl. Nugent and Eitzmann had become wise to one of Brady’s signature moves while losing: throwing one of the controllers at a wall to reset the system. He liked to win at pranks as well. One day he and Eitzmann approached a napping Nugent and drew all over his face with Magic Markers. They then put on boxing gloves and hit the sleeping giant until he came to. The belly laughs came from Nugent’s reaction. He immediately got up and decided to go to the grocery store. He casually walked the aisles there with his face covered in elaborate markings, wondering why he was getting so many odd looks.

  When they all went out together, Eitzmann would get the superstar treatment. He had gone to school locally, after all, and he had been the subject of several articles in training camp. Brady would watch at restaurants and gas stations when fans would approach and ask for his roommate’s autograph.

  In a way, Brady and his friends were actually going back to school in the NFL. Anyone who was going to play for Bill Belichick had to be willing to engage in detailed study. He had to know his own playbook and the tendencies of his opponent’s, too. Despite what the public thought of it, Belichick knew that the team wasn’t a few complementary pieces away from a championship. This was a top-to-bottom renovation job, and it needed to happen physically and psychologically.

  The first thing everyone had to realize was that Belichick’s perspective of what made a team good was different from theirs. He didn’t see the game the same way as his players, his bosses, or even Patriots fans and media. One side, either his or theirs, had to change because the only common ground they had was the will to win. The disagreements would eventually come in the How To.

  “It’s hard to fool the players; you just know good coaching when you see it,” says Damien Woody, who was a second-year Patriots center in 2000. “Bill came into that first training camp and you could see his plan being executed. He was on top of everyone. It didn’t matter who you were, he was coaching you up hard. I had played the year before, but I felt like I was seeing a different NFL. I knew it was going to be tough. He was clearly weeding some guys out.”

  He liked and appreciated the transcendent abilities of stars, but he did not have a star system. He didn’t promote players simply because they were first-round picks or even his picks. He didn’t hold on to players just because they had the reputation of being good. It’s one of the qualities he had in Cleveland, and it was a clear-eyed way of looking at team-building, a method eloquently and emphatically endorsed by Bill Walsh, the man who built the 49ers.

  “I have seen coaches who are simply too sentimental, who allow themselves to be too maudlin about ‘breaking up the old family,’” Walsh told the Harvard Business Review in 1993. “They are going to lose sight of the bottom line. And there is another kind who are severe, tough, and hard-hitting. But they sacrifice the loyalty of the people around them. In that situation, people are always afraid that they are going to be the next to go. These coaches rarely have sustained success.

  “Somewhere in the middle are the coaches who know that the job is to win, who know that they must be decisive, that they must phase people through their organizations, and at the same time they are sensitive to the feelings, loyalties, and emotions that people have toward one another. If you don’t have these feelings, I do not know how you can lead anyone.”

  Walsh made those comments in the first days of the salary cap and free agency era, so the essence of them was true, although Belichick understood that he would have to tweak some methods to fit the modern NFL. He believed in seeing and building football teams in equally solid thirds. Financially, it meant that the Patriots would never have a top-heavy salary cap at the expense of the bottom half of the roster. On the field, it meant that the fans would be deeply dissatisfied if they expected him to pluck fleet receivers in the first round to help out Bledsoe. He thought a quarterback’s more important weapons were dependable offensive linemen, intelligent play designs, and solid receivers who could get open, catch, and stick their noses into blocks every now and then.

  A former special-teams coach, he was a passionate advocate for the men who held the job he used to have and was compelled to have his best players be involved on “teams.” He was probably the only guy who, when speaking of former New York Giants great Lawrence Taylor, emphasized how dominant LT had been in “the kicking game.” His Patriots would never view being on teams as a demotion or an afterthought again. They would learn to see the creativity and game-changing potential in them like he did.

  This was still a business, and a deep-pocketed one at that, so some of the things Belichick stood for were going to require significant trust from his players, and a relatively quick payout of wins. For example, he wasn’t concerned with the statistics that often launched defensive ends and linebackers into the Pro Bowl, although, for a player, those stats could be valuable leverage for a new contract. His position was that he valued winning, and the team, over everything else. Winning, the team, and the present.

  “I think I understood him very early,” says former Patriots linebacker Tedy Bruschi. “It was short-term focus. It wasn’t new to me, but it was new to a lot of people. We had a lot of players who were thinking, ‘I want to win a bunch of Super Bowls.’ He wasn’t talking that way. I said, ‘I get this guy.’ I get it. I don’t think I’ll be going out to eat with him or anything like that, but from a very early point I understood it. I just need you to show me how to win. I mean, I’ve got a wife at home; I’ll be good. I don’t need you to love me. If it happens, that’s great.”

  Belichick didn’t want his organization to be the first to run to free agency and set the market; rather, he spoke a new language, referring to players who had “good value” and “position versatility.” He emphasized conditioning and doing it together in Foxboro. He brought a boat anchor into the
locker room to illustrate just how much extra weight the team was carrying. At a certain point daily, he was a media coach; he reminded his players to know what was important to the media (inside information and tension), to know what was important to the team (winning and inside information), and to know when to end conversations with the dead end of clichés.

  Of course, there would be homework.

  One of the frequent visitors to Cherrywood Lane, a linebacker named Matt Chatham, created a niche by studying and figuring out ways he and his teammates could apply what was learned. It began simply enough when Chatham and others, under the direction of assistant coach Pepper Johnson, were part of a subset they called the Ghetto Dogs. They were members of the scout team, and it was their responsibility to simulate the upcoming opponent.

  “We would have to watch double the amount of film as everyone else,” Chatham recalls. “We would have to emulate different players and teams. They’d say, ‘This week you’re James Farrior.’ You’d have a list of notes of things that the player did and they’d want you to do it that way in practice. So they’d say, ‘He’s a guy who bites really hard on play-action, so every time you see this play, do it that way. You want to give the quarterback a good look. You’re not reading it as you, you’re reading it as them. Play how they play and not how you play.’ Now, you’ve got to learn all your stuff, too, because you want to be on the team. So you’re watching film of you being him and you being you.”

  There were oral presentations from the Ghetto Dogs as well. They were expected to document their film study and then share all relevant information with the team. Imagine transitioning from college stardom to giving book reports in the pros. They were a helmeted research department. At times, the thought would sneak up on Chatham: Does this even matter? Are they really paying attention to this stuff? The question was answered over a sequence of film sessions when Chatham noticed that a Buffalo Bills player was doing the same thing each time there was a running play. One hundred percent of the time, it was the same. “This is the most ridiculous tell I’ve ever seen,” Chatham said to himself, and made a note of the detail. He shared the information with Johnson, who in turn had him share it with the defense. Chatham was good at film breakdown, so good that he had just studied himself into a job.

  “They became more comfortable with me,” he remembers. “Every Friday I would come in and give a presentation to the entire defense, generally on tight ends and tackles. It’s something that gave me equity in the room. It kind of became my thing.”

  For Belichick and Brady, the 2000 season was about training, mental and physical. Belichick had gotten such a late start on the job that his ideas of what his team was going to be didn’t match up with the personnel that he had. That was true of his players and his coaches. His offensive coordinator was Charlie Weis, an imaginative and acerbic Jersey guy, who had worked with Belichick in three organizations. Belichick trusted Weis and knew that he could coax the maximum out of what truly was a meager offense.

  On defense, he needed someone who could teach what he wanted done, even if all the players weren’t capable of performing what they had learned in the classroom. Belichick agreed with Walsh’s point that it was important for employees within football operations to be empowered. There were coaches that he liked and hired, such as twenty-nine-year-old Eric Mangini and one of Buddy Ryan’s thirty-eight-year-old twin sons, Rob. He also had brought in a twenty-five-year-old coaching assistant, Brian Daboll, who had been recommended by Nick Saban. Belichick envisioned the coaching assistant slot as sort of an immersion program. The position would be held for a year or two, and then there would be a graduation to either coaching, scouting, or, in some cases, both.

  “There was a lot on his plate that year,” Bruschi recalls. “We’d be on the sideline during the game, and he’d be talking to us on defense. I’d be thinking, ‘Bill, you’re the head coach, man. Big situation here in the game. You gonna punt that?’ In the beginning, it was just base stuff. He wanted to make sure that we got it. I can’t tell you how many times I heard him say, ‘Set the edge.’”

  Brady’s progress was measured strictly in-house, and most of his teammates had little reason to pay attention to what he was doing. He still wasn’t the backup, nor was he the backup to the backup. It was fair to say, in September and October, that the rookie was effectively experiencing a redshirt year. He was expected to know the playbook and add some muscle to his thin frame. That was about it. Those who were paying attention noticed that he had the same curiosity as Belichick and competitiveness equal to anyone on the team. Members of the defense would taunt him when they intercepted him in practice. He’d talk back and then, after practice, he’d want to know, “What did you see? What did I give away?”

  The Patriots had begun the season with four losses, won two consecutive games, and then bookended those with four more defeats in a row. They were just 2-8, once again the worst team in their division, after a November loss in Cleveland.

  There was fan frustration with just about everything: the poor record, the dullness of the team, being stepped on by the 6-4 Jets, Bledsoe’s interminable patting of the football, and, honestly, the performance of the other Boston sports teams. The Bruins had traded Hall of Fame defenseman Ray Bourque the previous season and, in the fall of 2000, had fired popular coach Pat Burns. The Celtics were learning, painfully, that the energy and charisma of Rick Pitino wasn’t enough to revive the franchise, and that the young team actually was regressing under the president-coach with the $50 million contract. The Red Sox’ streak of running in place, paternalistically held back by the Yankees, had reached eighty-two years. There was a different twist to the misery every fall, and this year’s story was that the Yankees had lost fifteen of their final eighteen games and still finished two games ahead of the Sox to win the division… and yet another World Series title.

  What fans started to grumble about was entertainment and hope from the Patriots, especially since Bledsoe had hurt the thumb on his throwing hand. Belichick continued to give Bledsoe starts, although there was a public push for a young backup. No, there weren’t any requests for Brady. The exciting name was Michael Bishop, a Heisman Trophy runner-up while in college at Kansas State and an absolute rock-star performer in Patriots preseason games. He was all freestyling dynamic motion in the summer games, outrunning all who chased him and flicking the football, with perfect spirals, farther than any quarterback the Patriots had. The season was already lost, and there was nothing an inert Bledsoe could do to save it, so why not?

  It was a popular sentiment, which is why the controversy of undercards going into a game surprised so many people. The constant studying and body sculpting had paid off for Brady, who had moved up in the crowded quarterback rankings. He was now third on the depth chart, still behind Bledsoe and John Friesz, but in front of Bishop for good.

  Bishop was furious and wanted to be released. Instead, two weeks later on Thanksgiving, he got a chance to watch Brady play briefly in a blowout loss to the Lions. Brady was back in Michigan, once again trying to scale an intimidating depth chart. But those were the only parallels. As a teen, eighteen and away from home for the first time, his disappointment led him to consider running from the situation. He was mentally and physically stronger now, and maybe even a little outrageous in his ambitions.

  Bledsoe wasn’t just one of the Patriots’ stars; he was one of the most recognizable personalities in New England. He was the highest paid player on the team and had endorsement deals with a local pizza company, a local truck dealer, and a local bank. He was geographically and symbolically a long way from the Chestnut Ridge condos and Cherrywood Lane. He and his wife had just built a nine-thousand-square-foot mansion in Medfield, with a $10 million price tag. Bledsoe was well liked, too. His baritone was the smart and articulate radio voice of the Patriots after wins, and the humble and well-balanced one after losses.

  He was a former number one overall pick, just like division rival Peyton Manning, and the
obvious truth, so obvious that it didn’t have to be spoken, was that New England would collapse without Bledsoe just as Indianapolis would without Manning. But this was just the type of situation of which Bill Walsh had spoken seven years earlier.

  “Most people don’t realize it, but the players who get all the attention are usually the ones on the downside of their careers,” the coach warned. “Ironically, the organization is often paying the most money to the team members who are on the descending curve as players. When players are starting to wind down their careers but are still playing effectively, you have to remind yourself how to use them. You have to gauge how they practice, what you ask them to do on the field, what kinds of situations you use them in, how much playing time they get. These are all factors that ultimately lead to the point where you judge that a younger player could do the job as well. That younger player is on an ascending curve on the arc. That is when you have to make your move.”

  What Dick Rehbein, the first-year quarterbacks coach, had seen from Brady in February was now apparent to the rest of the coaches in November and December. Brady had something. Maybe it was the element of surprise. He drove a canary-yellow Jeep that he had bought in Brockton, so there were a thousand jokes about the California kid in the sunny Jeep. Yet there was toughness just below the appearances, and an ever-present willingness to compete and win. It could be heard with the thud on the shared condo wall. It could be seen with a broken Ping-Pong paddle after a loss that he thought should have been a win. It could be felt, by a few, with the pursuit of that top job.

  He was a climber. Eitzmann, the roommate from Harvard, certainly had seen his share of those in the Ivy League. So when Brady made that subtle move from fourth to third on the depth chart, the ascending player in flight, Eitzmann thought of a conversation they’d had in the summer. They were at a small college in Rhode Island then, staying late after their second practice of the day. Eitzmann was worn out, by the heat and the workload, and Brady continued to push. He asked for one more route. He made the argument for one more drill. One more, one more. Finally, the quarterback who had never played a down in the NFL looked at Eitzmann and told him what was going to happen.