Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  Belichick thought about his defense constantly. One day in late January, while he was driving from Foxboro to Annapolis to visit his parents, he was haunted by bad routes to the ball, missed tackles, and a lack of speed. And that was just on the field. The economics of his secondary were also impractical: He had large cap numbers for Lawyer Milloy and Ty Law, and an upcoming contract for Tebucky Jones, who was going to demand a salary much greater than his performance warranted.

  Normally, a 400-mile drive is perfect for untangling and problem-solving issues. But in this case, it was probably about 350 miles more than necessary. No question, there was going to be a makeover with the defensive backs. The options, through free agency and the draft, could be franchise-altering.

  There was one safety from Southern Cal that the scouts couldn’t stop talking about. His name was Troy Polamalu and, if it were possible, his play seemed to reflect both joy and fury. He was excitable and aggressive. More than that, the scouts gave him the highest possible special-teams grade, too. He was a Belichick guy if they ever saw one. But the Patriots had two first-rounders, numbers fourteen and nineteen, and the first pick was going to be used on a defensive lineman. It was unlikely that Polamalu would be available for the selection at nineteen.

  Things started to become clearer at the end of February. One of the best and most hated safeties in the league, Rodney Harrison, was released by the Chargers. He had once lost over $100,000 on a single hit, a helmet-to-helmet shot on Jerry Rice. He was big and aggressive, an underdog spirit housed in a linebacker’s body. Belichick wanted him. He’d figure out the secondary shuffle later, but he knew Harrison would fit as a Patriot.

  The team also got lucky with what became, inexplicably, a slow market for Rosevelt Colvin. In the language of Patriots scouts, he was a “projection” player, meaning that he had played one position in college and was expected to do something else in the pros. Tedy Bruschi and Mike Vrabel had done that, going from collegiate defensive end to pro linebacker. So had Colvin. He could rush and cover, he was twenty-five, and he was surprisingly affordable. The Patriots signed both Harrison and Colvin in March. They also added another cornerback, Tyrone Poole, who was released by the Colts.

  Milloy was watching closely. He knew his agents and the Patriots had talked about restructuring several times, and those conversations hadn’t gone well. Harrison had said he looked forward to playing with Milloy, but he was a player. That’s how players talked. The decision-makers saw players in terms of production and dollar signs. Besides, Milloy had been in Boston long enough to have an edge. He was often defensive and suspicious, especially now. Anticipating a fight, he changed agents and hired Carl and Kevin Poston, brothers known for their fierce, pro-player negotiating style. They also represented Ty Law, had gotten him that $50 million contract, and were opposed to any type of contract restructuring that even mildly resulted in a loss for a client. Milloy had no problems letting his teammates know each progression, or lack thereof, in negotiations.

  With that said, the new players were made for the Patriots’ competitive culture. Colvin was doing some work at the team facility one day when he saw Brady and the other quarterbacks going through some passing drills. They would take three or five steps back and zip footballs into a square that was surrounded by netting.

  “Ah, that’s nothing,” Colvin shouted when he saw the drill. “You’re supposed to be able to make that throw. You’re quarterbacks!”

  “Let’s see what you’ve got, then,” Brady challenged.

  “What are the stakes?” Colvin replied.

  They agreed on $1,000. The linebacker admitted that it was a fluke, but he had been able to hit the square from a farther distance than Brady. Pure luck. The next day, Colvin went to his locker and found a thousand one-dollar bills stacked neatly in the stall.

  In a way, Belichick and Pioli got the equivalent of a cash shower on draft day. It was their best overall work since their arrival in New England three years earlier. They played chess with their draft picks, and they played it so often and so quickly that they usually made their partners do something regrettable. It started before the draft, when they traded Tebucky Jones to New Orleans for three draft picks, the highest one being a third-rounder. They then took that third from New Orleans, number seventy-eight, and traded it to Miami for a 2004 second-rounder. In other words, they moved up at least fourteen draft slots simply by waiting a year for the pick.

  As the scouts had said for months, the Bledsoe first-rounder became a defensive lineman, Ty Warren, a three-hundred-pounder who was difficult to run against. The other first-rounder was sent to Baltimore in exchange for a 2003 second and a 2004 first. Already, then, the Patriots had two firsts and two seconds for the following season. They added potential starters in the later rounds with cornerbacks Asante Samuel and Eugene Wilson, as well as center Dan Koppen.

  It was a brilliant day of trading, but it was too dizzying to be seen that way by the local football columnists.

  “If the non-NFL draftniks are to be believed, and they have developed a deep reservoir of credibility over the years, the Pats didn’t come close to getting the best bang for their buck,” Kevin Mannix wrote in the Herald. At the Globe, Ron Borges continued his trend of healthy Patriots skepticism. “To paraphrase a statement once used by Ronald Reagan to defeat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election: ‘Is your team better off today than it was four months ago?’” he wrote. “How you answer that should tell you how you feel about what went on in Foxboro yesterday.”

  What went unnoticed was how the Patriots were beginning to affect their division. Before the draft, they made no effort to quell rumors that they were looking to move from the middle of the first round into the top five. They never considered it. Belichick didn’t think it made financial sense. But they didn’t mind the unfounded rumors; misinformation at draft time was good for the Patriots poker game. The Jets did move up, however, selecting a defensive tackle named Dewayne Robertson. They vacated the spot that Pittsburgh used on the dynamic Polamalu. The last-place Bills had already conceded their first to the Patriots. And Miami, in its desperation, had made the foolish your-third-for-our-second trade, a deal that would be vetoed in most fantasy football leagues.

  Not only was the team better off than it had been four months earlier; the division was worse. Belichick still believed that he needed a nose tackle, though, and he eventually traded for the most massive one available in comic-book character Ted Washington. He was six feet five inches, at least 375 pounds, and hilarious. He loathed the media, but he’d often recite one-liners for his teammates and try to convince them what a fashion model he was.

  The Patriots were feeling good about their direction, but that nagging piece of business remained. The Milloy situation still hadn’t been resolved. Anyone listening to the conversations between the respective sides, player’s and team’s, knew what was coming. It always begins under the guise of a business conversation. Then there is a stalemate. Then there is one insult, followed by a misunderstanding, followed by true conviction that a fair contract can’t be reached.

  Then there is the good-bye.

  So on September 1, five days before the beginning of the regular season, Belichick walked into a team meeting and broke the news. Milloy had been released. He said it plainly. There was no dramatic pausing, and the players didn’t sense that he was wrestling with this transaction. In fact, that was the problem for many of them. This was all business. Cold. Economical. But no one was willing to let it pass that easily.

  CHAPTER SIX

  THE PELTS OF SUCCESS

  It’s a strange thing to say, and most people wouldn’t want it to be said of them, but it was true: Bill Belichick was good at being called idiotic. Experienced, too. It was a claim that even the reality stars and entertainment villains couldn’t honestly make. Everyone knew that they were acting. They were just playing the character who, when confronted with scowls and slings, goes about his normal business, unaffected.


  Not Belichick. He wasn’t pretending to be the boss who could give sentimentality a sharp elbow on the way to an unpopular decision. He had done it many times, in multiple cities.

  The angry fans outside one of his 1993 press conferences in Cleveland had been real. They pushed, pounded, and tried to tip a trailer that they knew he was in and screamed, “Bill must go.” That was shortly after he had fired local hero Bernie Kosar, the quarterback who smiled with gritty Cleveland when it was fashionable to laugh at it. Kosar wasn’t a good player anymore, and Belichick said it. The fans didn’t like the message, the messenger, or his curt delivery.

  The president of the New York Jets had truly been a critic, albeit a passive-aggressive one, when he psychoanalyzed Belichick in front of the New York media in January 2000. His diagnosis was that Belichick was in “personal turmoil.” That was after Belichick had gotten all dressed up in a suit and tie to resign, when everyone thought he was there to accept the job. “The Tuna,” Bill Parcells, learned about the switch at the last minute and went back to his office. The headline writers went into a frenzy: BELICHICKEN, BRING BACK TUNA, and WE NEED TUNA, NOT TUNA HELPER.

  Rodney Harrison was appearing as himself in September 2003 when he commented, “This is supposed to be about winning games, and I can’t say we’re better without Lawyer. You’d have to be an idiot to think we’re a better team without Lawyer Milloy.” That was when the release of Milloy had gone public, when Belichick had every reason to feel like the loneliest man in New England. There weren’t many friendly spaces where he could go and have people sympathize with his way of thinking. The opinions about him were everywhere, in his own locker room and beyond, and they were forceful.

  Duplicitous. Arrogant. Megalomaniacal. Pond scum. And that was all from one Herald article at breakfast. Elsewhere, one popular thought was that it was only a matter of time before something like this happened to every Patriot. Another was that at least one team leader had lost his sense of devotion to the franchise since, indeed, it was the franchise that had kicked a player like Milloy “to the curb.” A straightforward angle was that Belichick’s move was a major distraction to a team trying to win. And those weren’t the reactionary analyses from the talking heads. They were in-house quotes from Tom Brady, Tedy Bruschi, and Damien Woody.

  This was the part of Belichick’s unusual talent, as it were, that frustrated so many people. He’d stand there and get crushed, without the expected or desired wince. He’d get ripped apart on sports-talk radio, in the sports pages, or just down the hall in the locker room, and it didn’t move him into a mode of self-advocacy or correction. Whether that was a personality flaw or a divine gift was for others to decide. Maybe this was one of the reasons he encouraged his assistants and scouts to logically disagree with him. He’d had entire metro areas angry with him, often well past the boundary of logic; having a few employees do the same in a conference room was, by comparison, a massage.

  The fear in New England was that he was in a crisis, the kind that would result in an inability to lead this particular team. After all, he had cut one of his captains just five days before the start of the regular season. And as bad luck would have it for the Patriots, not only had that captain joined Drew Bledsoe and divisional opponent Buffalo; the Patriots’ first game of the season was against Buffalo. It was going to be tough to move on from this when they’d have to relive it again in five days.

  “I understood the business side. But I think from a respect standpoint and a moral code of ethics, if it was going to go down like that, do it earlier,” Ty Law says now. “Give him an opportunity because he was a good soldier, a Pro Bowl player, and a team captain. The vocal leader of the defense. Plain and simple. No question about it. Do it earlier. He bled Patriots. If you look at the Super Bowl win, Lawyer is the only one who started to look for Belichick afterwards.

  “It hurt him. I got more upset because I could see how hurt he was by it. It was all over money. We were pissed. You didn’t do that to a team captain. He always had something to say, motivating the team. He was passionate. He loved the team. The way they did him at that time, that was some disrespectful stuff. It was bad. We tried to go on like normal, but it wasn’t normal.

  “Lawyer was the first situation where I was like, ‘They really don’t give a damn. This is a business for real.’ That was the real wake-up call. I thought, ‘Who’s next? That can happen to me.’”

  There were several reasons the head coach didn’t see things the same way the crowd did. For one, he saw his players in a way that they hadn’t seen themselves. Many of them, along with members of the media, continued to say that Milloy was the heart and soul of the team. Belichick saw a team that couldn’t be defined that simply. Over the span of his controversies, Belichick had heard “The Arrogant” before his name so often that it became a royal prefix. He was labeled arrogant for a range of things, including his unpredictable approach to team-building. He never paused to point out the irony: He was called arrogant for making uncommon decisions that built up this team in the first place, and now he was being called it for making moves that the masses either didn’t agree with or didn’t understand.

  He thought his team was superior to last year’s version, and that clicked into place for him less than two weeks before Milloy’s release. That’s when the trade for nose tackle Ted Washington was made. He was ecstatic to have an anchor like the thirty-five-year-old Washington, who confidently told his teammates that he’d retire if an opposing team didn’t honor him with constant double teams. He had the most predictable and accurate nickname in the league: “Mount Washington.” His listed weight should have been a range, anywhere between 365 and 390.

  This was also a quality of Belichick’s that was tough to grasp. While the conversation often focused on the players that the TV cameras follow, either for sound bites or highlights, Belichick spent a lot of brainpower under the hood of the team. A valid criticism was that sometimes he stayed under there too long with the mechanics, at the expense of occasional common courtesies. Many people who saw him daily noticed that he could go to subterranean levels with his thoughts, and he’d be so deep in them that he’d walk by without so much as a hello. Leading up to the opener, that weakness of his was actually a good thing because there wasn’t much that could be said that would reverse what he’d done. They just had to win some games.

  On a perfect September afternoon in western New York, it appeared that Belichick’s tinkering had gone too far. Milloy was energized wearing his familiar number 36 uniform, and the Bills’ game operations crew played up the drama by saving the safety’s introduction until the very end.

  Not only did he look like the same disruptive player that Patriots fans had seen in 106 consecutive games; he was making a case for another item on his résumé: defensive coordinator. There was absolutely nothing, not a single thing, that the Patriots did that the Bills weren’t ready for. The natural thought was that Milloy had arrived in Buffalo and poured out every detail that he had learned in fifty-one games under Belichick. Of course, that wasn’t the reality. But what difference did that make? This was an afternoon for instant story lines, not the steady rigor of a football season.

  The Bills won easily, 31–0. Brady threw four interceptions, one of them caught by a defensive tackle with a patriotic name and Patriot ties: Sam Adams. He wasn’t quite as big as Washington, but it was close. So imagine ol’ Sam Adams, whose father, Sam Sr., played for the Patriots in the 1970s, picking off a ball and running toward the end zone. Just before the goal line, the big man did a dance after which bellies and the stadium shook. It was hysterical. As afternoon turned into evening, Milloy was in the parking lot hanging out with tailgating Bills fans. He’d had a lot to say before he got there, and so did many others in Buffalo and Boston.

  “I got some stats now,” Milloy said after the game, referring to his lack of forced fumbles and interceptions the year before. “That was one of their tactics. They made sure I ended up with no stats and then they use
d it against me. Belichick is so worried about himself and his own stature. There’s more credit that goes to his game plan than goes to his players. He doesn’t play on the field. He had a game plan today, didn’t he? How’d it work out?”

  There was a reference to Milloy daily. Usually a new development would come along to knock the previous big story off its perch. Not this time.

  On Monday, Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy wrote that the Bills were division favorites and Brady “won’t be eager for a rematch with Takeo Spikes and Friends in Foxboro December 27th.” It was Ron Borges’s turn on Tuesday, and he not only sensed the void of Milloy; he questioned the effectiveness of the Brady–Charlie Weis offense. “Has the NFL caught up with Brady and Weis? Have defensive coordinators who get overpaid to devote their lives to solving these kinds of problems succeeded?” he wrote.

  Wednesday was relatively quiet. Oh, except for the rumor that Belichick had banned his players from attending a Milloy fund-raiser in downtown Boston. The team’s public-relations director hurriedly denied the rumor. It was safe to conclude, then, that the appearance of several Patriots at their ex-teammate’s night of bowling, wings, and airing of grievances was either inevitable or normal.

  Thursday was for analogies and apologies. Cris Collinsworth, on HBO’s Inside the NFL, compared Belichick to “a great doctor with a bad bedside manner. For him to completely misread the pulse of that team and not understand what Milloy meant to the locker room, I can’t believe he was that far removed from it.” Bruschi apologized for saying his all-out commitment to the team had wavered. He explained that he had been emotional when he made that comment and, now, there wasn’t another team that he ever wanted to play for.