That added a layer of intrigue to the critical question for the Patriots, because it was an issue on the ground. Could their culture absorb and correct a character like Corey Dillon? And even if it could, why would it want to?
It was the major topic of draft weekend when the Patriots took the easy second-rounder from Miami and traded it to Cincinnati for three-time Pro Bowl running back Dillon. In terms of reputation, he represented an athlete that the Belichick Patriots had tried to weed out, not bring in.
People said he ran angry, and that made sense because that was said of him away from football, too. He was angry. Once he’d been arrested for fourth-degree domestic assault. Another time it was for driving under the influence and driving with a suspended license. A staggering nine other times, as a teenager, it was for various offenses.
“The thing about Bill is that he not only knows what kind of players fit his system, he can get in people’s heads,” Lionel Vital, the longtime scout, says. “He’s the best in the business at working with personalities; Bill can work with anybody. He’ll reach you. If you’re a different bird, he’ll reach you in his own way.”
Belichick traded for the twenty-nine-year-old back, believing that the change would revive him and that the locker room would restore him. If Belichick and Pioli were correct, they’d have themselves an All-Pro running back. If they missed, they would move on from him. The cost of doing business in this case, a second-round pick, wasn’t even a factor, since the Patriots owned four draft selections among the top ninety-five slots.
They hadn’t just been helped by the extra pick from Miami. They also owned Baltimore’s first-round pick, twenty-first overall, in addition to their own pick at thirty-two. Their idea was to draft running back Steven Jackson at number twenty-one, bring him along slowly, and then have him in position to take over as the lead back when Dillon’s inevitable decline began in a few years. But the draft took a strange turn. Jackson was still available as the picks got into the teens, but so was a superb nose tackle from the University of Miami named Vince Wilfork. For all the draft homework that the Patriots had done, this was a surprise. They thought he could go to Chicago at fourteen, but the Bears took a defensive tackle named Tommie Harris instead. Wilfork was officially a slider.
Belichick knew that as much as he loved Jackson, he’d take the nose tackle over the running back. He already had a back; but with the departure of “Big Ted,” the coach needed a young player who could be groomed for the dirty work of interior line play. So as the draft marched on to fifteen, sixteen, and seventeen, the Patriots were on the phone. They were trying to package their second first-rounder with another pick so they could be in position for Wilfork and Jackson. It didn’t work. The Rams moved up for Jackson at number twenty-four, leaving the Patriots with Georgia tight end Ben Watson.
The euphoria of the Patriots’ good fortune selecting college players didn’t last long. Two days after the 2004 draft, there was a tragic story in Columbia, South Carolina, a domestic dispute that ended in a murder-suicide. According to police reports, Richard Seymour Sr., fifty-one, fatally shot his girlfriend, thirty-six-year-old Coretta Myers, and then shot himself. His son, twenty-four, was out of town when he heard the halting news. He didn’t recognize the man described in the reports, and he spent hours upon hours in counseling and prayer and reflection, trying to grasp it.
They had spent so much time together, at home and at work. They shared everything. He had been there on draft day. He had been there for the birth of his grandson, another male in the family carrying his name; the child was nicknamed “RJ.” The elder Seymour, proud and smiling, had been in New Orleans for the first Super Bowl title, in Houston for the second. He had shown his son how to work hard with no excuses, as they both carried bricks in the blazing South Carolina summers. And now he was gone.
“We were best friends as I was growing up,” Seymour says now. “He’s the one who taught me the game of football. When it happened, and it took a lot of great books and great people to help me get to this point, I tried to look at the blessings and the foundation that he had given me. He’d been able to spend time with his grandkids. We’d spent time together at Super Bowls.
“I’ve always been strong in my faith, and everything went back to that. From a spiritual perspective, everything happens for a reason and you try to pull the good from anything that happens to you. I thought, ‘I have a wife and kids and mom, and they’re looking up to me. I can’t crumble.’ There’s a passage in the Bible, Second Chronicles, that says, ‘The battle isn’t yours, the battle is the Lord’s.’ I did try and have tried to stay mindful of that.”
As the Patriots began training camp, Seymour was there and he looked the same. But the tragedy had changed him, and not just by shrouding him in sadness and, at times, leading him to feel sorry for himself. It also strengthened his faith. He believed, more than ever, that the ability to play football was larger than the NFL and truly “an opportunity to give God glory,” as well as, he says “God building me up for my story to tell.”
On the field, there was no pending controversy. Law had been seen and heard on multiple media outlets in the spring, but he was a different man in the summer. He said he wanted to finish his career with the Patriots and that he had no problems with Belichick. Law was instinctive on the field, and his reversal with Belichick proved that he was the same way away from the game.
He wasn’t going to win a PR fight with the head coach in New England, and neither was anyone else. The coach had power, championships, a winning record in debatable decisions, and the overwhelming support of ownership and the fans. He had not only changed football in the region; he’d changed the contents of sports debate. Many conversations about Belichick’s unusual moves often devolved to shrugs and the phrase “In Bill We Trust.”
“From the experiences I’d seen with Drew and Lawyer, I conducted myself the way that I did accordingly,” Law says now. “Maybe it wasn’t always right, but I was trying to think, ‘Hey, this is business. This is where I have the leverage and this is where I may not have the leverage. I’m going to conduct myself this way and know my worth even if the Patriots don’t.’
“I had a man-to-man conversation with Coach Belichick. I admitted it then and I can admit it now: I could have handled things differently. Sometimes emotion takes over. You get caught up in it. I’ve always been one who takes someone at their word. It could be something simple like, ‘Ty, we’re going to work this out.’ I’ll take you at your word; we’ve got the basis of a deal. And when things changed I just said, ‘Liar.’ I used that particular word because I thought that I was lied to. There were no promises made, but I thought I was lied to. I could have used a different choice of words and not done it as publicly.”
These days, the scathing analyses were for the other three sports teams who had yet to deliver what Belichick and the Patriots had. The Red Sox, for example, had spent wildly in the offseason and had hired a new manager, Terry Francona. They’d even had the gall to trade Nomar Garciaparra, the franchise shortstop who was friendly with Ted Williams and hit like Joe DiMaggio. Theo Epstein, the Sox’s youthful general manager, admitted that he was so unnerved by his franchise-altering trade that he took Ambien so he could sleep. Even with all the activity, the Sox were ten games out of first place in mid-August.
All the attention was on the Patriots a month later when they unfurled their second championship banner at Gillette Stadium. Elton John, a friend of the Kraft family, was performing along with Mary J. Blige, Lenny Kravitz, Destiny’s Child, and Toby Keith. On the field, the entertainment was almost guaranteed to be satisfying due to the opponent: the Colts.
Both organizations tried to be diplomatic about it publicly, but they couldn’t stand each other. Polian had helped shape three franchises into championship contenders, the Bills, Panthers, and Colts, but he’d never been a part of a Super Bowl champion. One of his best teams, the 1990 Bills, was slowed down just enough to earn rings for the Giants and their de
fensive coordinator, Belichick. It wasn’t just that Polian and Belichick were opposites. Both of their franchises were, from the facilities they played in (outdoors versus a dome) to the players they scouted (bulkier for the Patriots versus leaner for the Colts) to the quarterbacks who led them.
In Brady’s first two seasons as a starter, no one thought to compare him to Manning. He was seen as a quarterback who stayed out of the way, one who respectfully turned the game over to his defense when he got into trouble. Manning was the line-of-scrimmage control freak, conducting and directing, making sure everything was just right before he allowed one of his precious plays to be activated. His father had been an NFL quarterback. Just five months earlier, his younger brother, Eli, had been selected first overall in the draft. He was royalty, and Brady was the grinder.
That perception began to change in 2003, when the Patriots became that winning machine, on the strength of the defense and Brady. He was not a quarterback of extremes; he was inclined to give the game what it needed. Manning put up dazzling statistics almost every game, and those numbers promised to shine brighter due to the politicking that Polian had done on his behalf in the spring. The Brady-Manning debate always followed a pattern: It would be about quarterbacking in the beginning, winning in the middle, and by the end it was often a contentious and judgmental conversation about what a person found most valuable, individual award tours or excellence within a collective.
As usual, the first Patriots-Colts game of the season was decided in the fourth quarter. It actually had some humor to it. Colts kicker Mike Vanderjagt was known for his strong opinions and self-confidence, and had even criticized Manning and head coach Tony Dungy for not showing enough emotion. They kept him around because of his talent, as he had made an NFL-record forty-two consecutive field goals. With twenty-four seconds to play and the Patriots leading 27–24, Vanderjagt lined up for a forty-eight-yard attempt that would have sent the game into overtime. Moments before the attempt, he looked at the Patriots sideline and rubbed his fingers together, indicating that this one was easy money. He kicked it, the ball sailed to the right, and one streak ended while another one survived.
The Patriots had won their sixteenth game in a row.
It was only September, but people talked about the postseason when they analyzed the Patriots. Everyone, including their rivals, knew it wasn’t worth pretending that someone in the AFC East could challenge them. Since that was the case, the team knew but never publicly acknowledged that there would be at least one game at home in January, maybe even two. The only mystery was how high this winning streak would go.
It reached seventeen in the desert, with a messy win over the Cardinals. Turnovers annoyed Belichick, and the Patriots already had five in two games. The positive thing was that they were displaying a dimension that had been missing for two years. Dillon got the ball twice as often as he had against the Colts and more than doubled his production: thirty-two carries, 158 yards. He was going to be a problem for some teams. Clearly, there were moments when defenders turned down opportunities to tackle him. The next game was in Buffalo against the Bills and their new head coach, Mike Mularkey. The new guy tried to motivate his team by purchasing copies of Patriot Reign, a book in which Belichick had been quoted dismissing the Bills’ offensive line as “horseshit.” It gave the Bills a jolt, but not enough of one. They lost, 31–17, and the Patriots’ streak reached eighteen in a row.
Back at home, the Patriots were scheduled to play the Dolphins, the worst team in the league. Sometimes Miami was able to make things difficult for Brady, and there was some truth to that in this game. The quarterback completed just seven passes, but two were for touchdowns, and the Patriots had their NFL-record nineteenth consecutive win. They hadn’t lost a game in 377 days. Their celebration was low-wattage. Richard Seymour and Rodney Harrison doused Belichick with ice water and the head coach, staying in character, wasn’t too flowery in victory.
There was a palpable anger, which had been hammered into depression, lingering over the region before the game with the Seahawks on October 17. It had nothing to do with the Patriots. The Sox were in the American League championship series against the Yankees again, and it had been a disaster. They were coming off an embarrassing 19–8 loss in game three, trailed the series three games to none, and were now in sweep-prevention mode. They hadn’t won a World Series title in eighty-six years, but they were the Sox, and they still had the ability to affect the moods of everyone. The Sox made you paranoid, always waiting for the slapstick moment when you learned that there was a cosmic joke being played and that it was on you. The Patriots were the opposite. Efficient and steady, they won again, for consecutive win number twenty.
From a New Englander’s perspective, the world changed after the Patriots beat the Seahawks. Later that night, the Sox avoided the sweep against the Yankees with a succession of unlikely occurrences: They trailed by a run in the ninth, down three games to none, facing all-time great closer Mariano Rivera; a batter walked; a pinch runner got a steal; a single tied the score; and a slugger who had been signed for just over $1 million a year earlier, David Ortiz, hit a two-run homer in the twelfth to win it. They won again the next three nights, too, including Curt Schilling’s bloody sock game in game six and a blowout in game seven, completing the most improbable comeback in sports history. The Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy was the author of the 1990 book The Curse of the Bambino, detailing the Sox’s post–Babe Ruth absurdity. He wrote that the curse wasn’t over until the Sox won the World Series. The region disagreed. Streets were filled with revelers on the night of the twentieth and well into the morning of the twenty-first. Finally, it seemed, the baseball team was on the verge of tasting what the football team had already done twice.
Fittingly, consecutive win number twenty-one for the Patriots came against New York. The 13–7 victory over the Jets was a reminder of how quickly things can change. In the tabloid “Belichicken” days, the Jets had four first-rounders, Bill Parcells as general manager, and no indication that Belichick would have a clue of what to do on his own with the keys to a franchise. Parcells was long gone from New York, and although he was now coaching in Dallas, the consensus was that his quirky defensive scientist, “Little Bill,” died a few years back in New Orleans. Belichick had outgrown the nickname and was now the premier strategist in football.
Sometimes, though, strategy gets crushed by injuries. And runs out of luck, too. The Patriots went to Pittsburgh on Halloween, and the Steelers were eagerly waiting. One of their running backs, Jerome Bettis, had been watching the Patriots on TV a week earlier, rooting for them to win so that the Steelers could be the team to snap their streak. He got his wish, and it wasn’t even theatrical. Dillon missed the game with a foot injury, and the drop-off was so pronounced that the Patriots managed just five yards rushing all day. They lost 34–20. Streak over after 398 days.
If there is such a thing as a good weekend for a loss, this was it. It followed the most expensive, mind-altering, life-changing sports party in Boston history. The Curse of the Bambino was officially over—the Boston Red Sox won the World Series. And it was as if the attendees from the Patriots’ first two parades agreed to merge. The official parade count was 3.2 million people, and the celebration didn’t just rock. It rolled. Literally. In the interest of public safety, Mayor Menino introduced the “rolling rally” for champions. The idea was to ride the duck boats through the city, touching all aspects of it, but not gathering at one main stage. The Patriots deserved some credit for this festival for, among other things, teaching the city how to parade, twenty-first-century style. Of course, with the third Boston celebration in four years, the corporate types got involved. So it wasn’t just a rolling rally; it was a rolling rally sponsored by Budweiser, Verizon, Home Depot, Dunkin’ Donuts… Several businesses got on board and figured, after eighty-six years of waiting, why should the city have to pay? Corporate gifts to the city totaled $750,000.
Everyone had a good time two weeks later whe
n the Sox brought their elaborate World Series trophy to Gillette Stadium. It was November, the weather was turning, and the thought was in the air: What if the Patriots won it again and starred in a rolling rally of their own? It wasn’t a wild thought. The Patriots had just that single loss, to the Steelers, and looked better than they had last year. Their constant winning had turned the region into a bunch of expectant champions. When the Sox pursued free agents in the offseason and moved on (or tried to move on) from stars previously thought to be untouchable, it was expected. That’s what Belichick would do. When a Celtic or Bruin talked about himself more than the team, or complained about his contract, the expectation was that management had to handle it swiftly and convincingly. Because Belichick would do that.
It was all over the locker room, where players had mastered the art of thinking and speaking like Belichick when the conversation was on the record. It was all over boardrooms and schools in the city, where kids copied the coach’s slovenly chic look, a gray hoodie with the sleeves cut off, and CEOs and CFOs explained things with It is what it is and That’s not what we’re looking for.
The expectation reached its highest point at the end of the season, with the Patriots finishing 14-2 for the second consecutive season. There were some natural motivators in place, too, which promised to make the play-off games interesting. One of them was that the Patriots did not have home-field advantage throughout the postseason. The 15-1 Steelers did. The other was the Polian-Manning effect. As predicted in the spring, the renewed emphasis on penalizing defensive contact had wildly benefitted the Colts. Manning was the runaway league MVP, with a league-record forty-nine touchdown passes. The Brady-Manning debate had become a regionalized thing; everywhere else, overwhelmingly, Manning was seen as the best quarterback in football.
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