On this team, a wide receiver wasn’t guaranteed to get the same amount of targets every week. Here, defensive tackles would sometimes exit a game with a tackle or two, applauded by the coaches and met with indifference by the media. You have to be secure in your talent on teams like these because you’ll be known as a football player’s football player, and sometimes even they would miss what you were doing.
“This is what we started to do: We slowly accumulated winning stat guys as opposed to the high-sack, high-interception guys,” former Patriots linebacker Matt Chatham says. “Willie McGinest, Mike Vrabel. Those guys are way more valuable if they get eight sacks rather than sixteen. Dominating the edge, getting on the tight end, blowing up wide receivers and never letting them get into the pattern. That’s way more valuable than sixteen sacks.
“I think that the world thinks that the sixteen-sack guy is more valuable, but the Patriots don’t think that, and you can get into the economics of this: The sixteen-sack guy costs twice as much as the other guy. And once you get to a certain point, it’s saturation. It’s just sixteen plays and when you play five hundred snaps, it’s not that important. It just isn’t. Who are the best rerouters among outside linebackers? Who are the best edge-setters? Does anyone in the media know that?”
It wasn’t just the media in 2003. The Patriots’ first play-off game was against Tennessee and McNair. On the coldest day of the year, with a game-time temperature of four degrees and a windchill of minus ten, the Patriots got into a frostbitten street fight with the Titans. There were no comfortable moments in the game, whether it was warmth or aesthetics. Consecutive win number thirteen was secured when Tennessee receiver Drew Bennett dropped a ball on fourth down. A catch would have put the Titans in field goal range. Instead they lost, 17–14. And one of their guards, Zach Piller, guaranteed that the Patriots wouldn’t win the Super Bowl.
The next week, the Patriots were visited by the other side of the split MVP award, Peyton Manning.
This was what it meant to be a Patriot; winning had to be satisfactory enough, because the hype and awards weren’t always going to be there. Brady should have known that better than most. He had grown up watching Montana, his generation’s symbol for winning. Montana had won his first Super Bowl at age twenty-five, but he didn’t win his first MVP until he was thirty-three. Sometimes it took a while for people to catch up.
The president of the Colts, Bill Polian, watched the conference championship from the press box. Members of the media could see and hear him pounding the table and cursing. He hated what he was seeing out there. As Chatham mentioned, there were lots of jams and reroutes by linebackers. Lots of instances where receivers were obliterated at the line of scrimmage before they had a chance to give Manning a clean target. The Patriots called it suffocating; Polian called it holding.
“Throw the flag!” he bellowed several times.
He was an influential member in the league when it came to shaping policy, and so was head coach Tony Dungy. The Patriots weren’t going to be able to play like this during the 2004 season. But that season hadn’t arrived yet, and Manning still had to try to pass his way to the Super Bowl. He seemed surprised at just how good Patriots corner Ty Law was. Four interceptions later, three of them to Law, and the Patriots were conference champions.
The fourteen-game winning streak didn’t hover because they hadn’t been coached to think that way. Belichick was all short-term focus and living in the moment. The criticism never distracted him, and he encouraged them to follow his lead. “Ignore the noise,” he’d often say. It needed to be ignored. The Patriots were scheduled to meet the Carolina Panthers in Houston, and some wondered how their offensive line, without the injured Damien Woody, would be able to block the Panthers. Warren Sapp, the Pro Bowl defensive tackle, went on national TV and said that it couldn’t be done, and he singled out Patriots backup Russ Hochstein.
“He couldn’t block either of you two,” Sapp told ESPN’s Michael Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser.
Even on the day of the game, with the Patriots in position to claim their place among the greatest teams in pro football history, there was noise. Some of it came from the Panthers, who wanted the Patriots to know that they weren’t afraid of them or their mystique. Some of it came from Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson, who performed at halftime. The nation and the FCC were shocked when America was exposed to Jackson’s breast. The game itself, entertaining as it was, couldn’t compete with the conversations about nudity and multi-million-dollar fines.
Still, Hochstein and his friends on the offensive line found a way to block the Panthers. Brady threw the ball a season-high forty-eight times and wasn’t sacked. He tallied 354 yards and three touchdown passes. He ceded the stage, briefly, to allow Adam Vinatieri to kick another winning field goal, this one from forty-one yards. The 32–29 win, the fifteenth in succession, had been like so many others. Close yet convincing. Dramatic yet locked into the same ending.
That’s what their team was for the season, and that’s what they were going to be as long as they continued to win. In a way, Brady and his teammates had been correct to lament the release of Milloy. Tough decisions would have to be made to ensure more parades, more rings, and more kid-like moments when they’d press their fingers on the shining Lombardi Trophy and see all their fingerprints winking back at them.
It was natural to become emotional in these moments and want to keep everybody. So the players were angry when it was time to say good-bye, because that wasn’t their strength. They weren’t big-picture economists the way their coach was. It was a necessary and basic trait for those who wanted to be dynastic architects. Be clear, be thorough, be decisive, be bold. Be unpopular. And, sure, be a heartbreaker as well. A big parade was certainly awaiting the Patriots again in Boston. So was another tumultuous, controversial offseason.
CHAPTER SEVEN
ROLLING
There were many similarities between this outrageous regional party and the previous one, two years earlier. Just like the last time, having a car in downtown Boston was useless. The roads surrounding the parade route were closed as the day’s traffic patterns were all made on foot. Once again, some children and their parents decided that school on this Tuesday afternoon was optional, ignoring the advice from Mayor Tom Menino, who had said of the kids, “They can go home and watch it on the news at six o’clock.”
The mayor said it and, based on the numbers, everyone did the opposite.
This time the crowd was slightly bigger, from 1.2 million New Englanders in February 2002 to 1.5 in February 2004, but the dancing was just as strong. Ty Law had dominated this postseason, just as he had the last one, and the cornerback once again convinced Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and Robert Kraft to show a wild side. Tedy Bruschi saw the moves of his coach and quipped, “If I was a member of the scouting department, I would say he’s a little stiff in the hips.”
The biggest difference could be seen and heard in Brady. He had been very much in the background the first time around, playing the happy-to-be-here role to the hilt. He was a star now, riding in the lead duck boat with Belichick, Kraft, and the latest Lombardi Trophy. He now had two Super Bowl titles, two Super Bowl MVP awards, and a career record of 40-12, including 6-0 in the postseason. He’d gotten the blessing of “The Godfather,” Bill Walsh, who’d said that Brady was “as close to Joe Montana as anyone I’ve ever seen.” According to People magazine, he was beautiful; according to roughly half of the people here, he was beautiful and a dream-ender because word had just leaked that he was dating actress Bridget Moynahan. In nearly three full seasons as a starting quarterback, he had gained access to a space that New Englanders were hesitant to open. It’s the legends’ suite of Bobby Orr and Bill Russell, Ted Williams and Larry Bird. And now, Tom Brady.
“We’re baaaack,” he announced in a singsong to the crowd, and the mass of them roared in return. What he didn’t say, and what they all understood, was that they were back and still getting stronger. They would b
egin the next season as the best team in a disintegrating AFC East. They’d be looking to extend their fifteen-game winning streak, and they’d do it led by a twenty-seven-year-old Brady.
Still, some of the differences were hidden by the excesses and joys of the parade. Law was charismatic and funny in front of the crowd, but he was starting to believe that it was time for him to play somewhere else. People would soon be shocked to learn that it wasn’t the first time he’d had that thought. He was a few weeks away from revealing that he’d asked Belichick to put him on the expansion draft list two years ago. Law had the same agent as Lawyer Milloy, and the safety’s abrupt September release had been on his mind for months. If they could do that to a captain like Milloy, why wouldn’t they do it to him, especially since his cap number was twice as large as Milloy’s?
Law was still under contract, so whether he could return or play for a new team wasn’t up to him. The talent drain had begun, however, for some of his coaches and teammates. Rob Ryan, who had coached Patriots linebackers, left to become the Raiders’ defensive coordinator. In a major blow, he was followed there by Mount Washington. The big man saw an opportunity to cash in for the last time in his career, and the Raiders were willing to pay twice as much as the Patriots.
One of Belichick’s favorite students, Bobby Hamilton, also departed for Oakland. Once frustrated by the inability of his interior defensive linemen to play the correct technique, Belichick inserted the undersized-by-comparison Hamilton for proper demonstration. Indeed, as Jerry McDonald observed in the Oakland Tribune, Hamilton was just a winning player, one who “shows up in the jewelry box more than in the boxscore.”
Another coach on the move was Jon Hufnagel, recruited by the Giants to be their offensive coordinator. Hufnagel had coached Brady and the quarterbacks, and his impressive résumé had begun when Josh McDaniels was in elementary school. Belichick still believed that McDaniels, a three-year apprentice, was more qualified than anyone in the league to replace Hufnagel and become Brady’s tutor and confidant. McDaniels was twenty-eight, just sixteen months older than his quarterback. His promotion created an opening for a new coaching assistant, and the job went to a rocket scientist. Matt Patricia had an aeronautical engineering degree and the credentials to develop aircraft and space stations. Instead, he toted an inflatable mattress to his closet of an office in Foxboro, hoping to prove himself to Belichick.
The polite thing to say to someone charged with managing the postchampionship exodus is, Well, it’s a nice problem to have. And that’s partially true. If the downside to winning a Super Bowl is navigating some tricky financial and emotional obstacles, most people in the league would take it. Their reasoning is simple and usually correct: The Super Bowl is difficult to get to, let alone win; do everything possible to win it, and figure out the damages in the morning. It was that type of desperation that led some general managers to trade away future assets for a chance to win right now. It’s why some coaches, feeling the pressure from their owners and general managers, opted for short-term solutions rather than a panoramic view of the team and franchise. Honestly, it’s why some players got their rings and then started looking for the cash piles.
Belichick was on the other side of that reasoning, though. When he was an assistant coach with the Patriots in 1996, he would often run into team president Jonathan Kraft at five a.m. They’d either be in Foxboro in the stadium weight room or, if they were on the road, some hotel’s fitness center. Sometimes their conversations would last forty-five minutes to an hour after the workout and Kraft, who has an MBA from Harvard, would listen to Belichick school him on maintaining excellence in the league. He’d talk about financial discipline, the strength of the draft, finding undervalued players, and the importance of the lower half of the fifty-three-man roster. Belichick didn’t buy the premise of the system. He thought, even with a salary cap, that you could build a winner that could consistently be in the championship conversation.
“He clearly got it,” Kraft said of Belichick years later. “It was certainly different than talking to Bill Parcells and Pete Carroll. It was on another plane, another dimension.” Parcells and Carroll may have thought of the game in multidimensional ways when they coached the Patriots, but they didn’t have those talks with the younger Kraft. His sense was that their expertise was in coaching the game, not coaching it along with a deep understanding of the game’s finances.
From a player’s perspective, there were two paths for free agents with Super Bowl rings, and the discount path was the road less traveled. The Patriots’ best offensive lineman, Damien Woody, was faced with his own free agent decisions shortly after the parade, and one of them seemed obvious.
“Let me ask you this,” he says now. “If you work for a good company and another company comes along and says, ‘We’re going to double your salary,’ what are you going to do? Some of my teammates were upset with me, but I told them that I enjoyed what we accomplished together. We won our rings, but are those rings going to pay my bills when my career is over? I’m thinking, ‘I have my whole life to live, not just my life in football.’”
Woody and Brady were the same age, and the lineman had been among the quarterback’s trusted group of protectors since Brady took over the job in 2001. Woody had gotten used to Brady’s complete authority of the huddle, how he would tell the team what was going to happen and then look at each guy “as if he was looking right through you and into your soul. He’d give you that look like, ‘Are you going to bring it?’”
But with that said, the Detroit Lions were calling and they had millions of dollars to spend. The only problem was that they were awful. They’d won a combined ten games the previous three seasons, a win total that the 2003 Patriots had reached by November. It didn’t matter. They offered Woody $31 million, the largest deal ever for an interior lineman. So after getting a $9 million signing bonus, a $2 million first-year base salary, and a $500,000 roster bonus, Woody was a Lion.
Belichick already had plenty to consider, and the flight of Woody complicated the to-do list. It was clearly money season in the NFL, for linemen and everyone else. It got Law’s attention and, on a Saturday morning in March, Patriots fans were surprised to see the following headline trumpeted from the Globe: LAW OUT TO END DAYS AS A PATRIOT. The fun-loving cornerback had sat down with beat writer Michael Smith for wings and drinks. The only question after reading the story was when did Law find time to eat? He had an arsenal of memorable one-liners in each paragraph. “I no longer want to be a Patriot,” he asserted. “I can’t even see myself putting on that uniform again, that’s how bad I feel about playing here.”
Law’s teammates always said how entertaining he was, and linebacker Rosevelt Colvin referred to him as football’s Richard Pryor. Law was just starting to warm up. He compared himself to a stock: “I’m Coca-Cola. I’m Microsoft. You know what you’re going to get. Yeah, it’s going to have its ups and downs, but I’m steady. And I’m the best. I’m just like that good ol’ stock that you can depend on. I ain’t that type, like Enron, to sit there and blow up, and next thing you know, you’re bankrupt.”
He said Belichick and Scott Pioli lied to him and therefore he was “drop-dead serious” about wanting out. “I am willing to pay them to let me go,” he told Smith. “I told them, ‘Instead of you paying me a $7 million salary, I’ll pay you.’”
Based on Belichick’s history of doing business, there was a good chance that Law would remain on the New England roster despite his fighting words. The reasons were simple: production and economics. Salaries were rising for all free agent players, and they could sometimes be astronomical for great players. Law was a great player, and he was under contract. Belichick didn’t just thoughtlessly move on from talented, high-salaried players; any transaction would have to make sense. Releasing Law didn’t. Yet the player still seemed to be searching for the phrase that would jab the most.
All of this was stunning and infuriating to Patriots followers. They had embraced the selfless
identity of the team and, in heavily collegiate New England, the brainy profile of Belichick and his players was valued deeply. The Jerry Maguire NFL, all about the money, was for other teams. They were different.
But Law’s unburdening was just a preview of things to come. The Patriots weren’t always different, and they didn’t always seek team-first guys. Belichick and his staff had engaged in innumerable discussions about who the team was and what risks it could afford to take. It had several pillars of performance and leadership, standing firm throughout the locker room. Brady was one of many. He was joined by Bruschi and Troy Brown, Richard Seymour and Rodney Harrison, Willie McGinest and Roman Phifer, Law and Larry Izzo and Adam Vinatieri. Belichick had been correct when he rejected the popular thought that Milloy, or anyone else, could solely represent the heart and soul of this team. It was too varied for that, and its power was derived from multiple sources, many of them overlooked.
There was a new question going into the 2004 season, and it had nothing to do with Law saying, “The team I’ve busted my ass for the last nine years doesn’t realize or can’t see that they’re not giving me the proper respect or the contract that I deserve.” Belichick knew that he wasn’t going to trade or release Law, and that training camp was four months away. He was going to let him talk. He didn’t offer a single word in response. Nothing. Even when Law said that the coach “lies to feed his family,” Belichick was silent. Because that wasn’t the big question for 2004.
Neither did it have anything to do with Bill Polian and Tony Dungy, from the rival Colts, lobbying the league. Polian was a team-building wiz with a volcanic temper. He had watched most of the 2003 conference championship with his teeth and fists clenched and his veins bulging. He and others were convinced that defenses were getting away with holds, so the offseason priority was to tailor the game to passing offenses.
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