But what was it? Why did Belichick put so much at risk for something with such a minimal payoff? Only time would tell if it was his secret weapon, but the reasonable voices in the symphony knew that he didn’t have to do it, which made his decision to do it so infuriating. He had created a raging, complex, multidimensional beast.
When Goodell sorted out the information, he slammed Belichick with a league-record $500,000 fine. He fined the organization $250,000. He took away a 2008 first-round pick. He ordered all tapes and notes in the Patriots’ library to be handed over to him. Some critics complained that Goodell hadn’t been harsh enough, arguing that a suspension should have replaced the draft pick. But the commissioner, an economist himself, knew how to hit at the knees. Belichick’s understanding and manipulation of draft picks had helped him suffocate the AFC East and set the Patriots’ foundation. The penalty was crushing.
When asked for specifics about the incident, both Mangini and Belichick offered no insight. Belichick released a statement that suggested he’d had a different interpretation of the league’s memo. His position was that he was never taping for use in that particular game. Even so, the league found the practice of taping coaches objectionable.
The rules for the 2007 season needed no special interpretation: It was Football America versus the Patriots. Last one standing wins.
The Patriots, talented and extra temperamental now, got a sprinter’s start. The first game after Spygate, against the Chargers at Gillette Stadium, Belichick was shown on the video board and received rousing applause from most of the sixty-eight thousand fans. They cheered all night in another 38–14 win. It got silly the next week with another 38 against Buffalo, and then back-to-back 34s against the Ohioans, the Bengals and Browns. It was Patriots lotto. Call out a number higher than 30 and see if it’s reached. How about 48 against the Cowboys? Raise that to a 49 in Miami. You really want to show off? Try accepting the worst field position possible, force yourself to have three scoring drives of eighty-five yards or longer, and score 52 at home against Washington.
That was good for 8-0 at intermission, and America needed some halftime adjustments. Honestly, the Boston thing was becoming burdensome. The football team wins in a blowout by day and the baseball team sweeps through the World Series at night. The Sox were champions again, winners of eight consecutive Series games between 2004 and 2007.
Brady’s numbers were more absurd than those. He was completing 74 percent of his passes, and he’d already set his career high with thirty touchdown passes. His sack and interception numbers were nearly identical, three and two respectively. Moss had unveiled a modest touchdown celebration, in which he parted his hands, signifying that he could still split and get behind a defense. He had done that dance, to the delight of his teammates and fans, eleven times.
The return trip to Indianapolis ended with another Spygate swipe and Patriots win, the usual daily double. Colts coach Tony Dungy had used an analogy linking Belichick to Bonds, so there was no surprise postgame when Dungy got the Mangini treatment from the Patriots coach. The final score there was actually football-like, 24–20.
Not many people nationally had to like what the Patriots were doing, but they couldn’t resist watching and talking about it. Not all of their critics believed that they were cheating, yet it was still shorthand for all of the things they detested about the team. They were as villainous now as they had been embraceable in 2001.
“Bill Belichick sickens me,” Rick Telander wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times. “And, no, it’s not because his New England Patriots have won three Super Bowls in the last six years or that he’s widely saluted as a sports ‘genius.’ This is not about jealousy, envy or anything that has to do with his ratty sweatshirts or suspect personal skills or coldheartedness (ask longtime Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson, currently brain-damaged, about Belichick’s empathy)… This video-camera sideline recording of the New York Jets’ defensive signals was no ‘mistake’… It was a conscious, overt act of deception and a blatant middle finger to the essence of fair play.”
That was going to be the story for many, no matter what the dizzying results on the field.
A four-touchdown half for Moss in Buffalo; a clinched division title in November; a good-fortune win in Baltimore, where former Dolphins coach Don Shula openly rooted against the Patriots in the Monday Night Football booth. Ravens defensive coordinator Rex Ryan called a timeout a split second before his team had made a game-ending stop on fourth down. After that, three easy wins over the Steelers, Jets, and Dolphins.
They were 15-0 returning to Giants Stadium for the first time since this lopsided race began. America, yes, the whole country, had decided to take them on and they hadn’t backed down from the challenge. So who was the underdog here, a nation of millions or one team called the Patriots? A superficial reading had the United States losing on all cards. After all, everyone was watching this game because Goodell had declared it worthy of three networks. He didn’t want there to be a chance that anyone would miss it. For a team that was so disgraceful, America found the Patriots irresistible.
The former Patriots were watching, too, and were rooting for the team to do something that was realistic in high school and college but certainly not the pros. “Nobody ever sets out to go sixteen and oh,” Deion Branch, who was watching from Seattle, says. “Sixteen and oh is crazy. I can’t imagine what those guys were thinking week to week. I was proud of them.” Branch, in a different offense with the Seahawks, could still identify what the Patriots were doing. The principles of the system were the same, but instead of David Patten as the “X” or downfield receiver, it was Moss. A younger version of Troy Brown, Wes Welker, was now in the slot. Fast receivers who could alternate between the slot and perimeter, where Branch used to be, were now named Donté Stallworth and Jabar Gaffney.
Roman Phifer, two years into retirement, was able to sit back and hear some of the conversations about the team that was marching through the league. It didn’t take long to take the national temperature. “People just do not like the Patriots outside of New England,” he says. “Usually it’s people who don’t understand what it takes to get to that level. They look for excuses for why you were so good. They always try to tarnish it.”
That was the theme for many former Patriots, either on other teams or out of the league. It wasn’t just the current team being questioned. They felt an attack on their careers and their rings. They were insulted.
“I’ve never once seen a tape of somebody else’s walk-through or practices. I didn’t know what the hell they were talking about,” Ty Law, who was in Kansas City at the time, says now. “I was really oblivious to the situation. You’re not going to take away my Super Bowl interception. I was thinking, ‘You all are full of shit.’ I thought it was just a thing because it was the Patriots and Bill Belichick. They wanted to stick it to us somehow or some way.”
The other numbers, not just the ratings, said that the Patriots were winning. They had won all fifteen of their games, and with flair. Brady had thrown forty-eight touchdown passes, and Moss had caught twenty-one of them. There were over one hundred catches and one thousand yards from Welker, whose new team in New England had as many wins as his old team in Miami had losses.
So what was the problem? There was nothing discernible against the Giants, who played well in a 38–35 loss. Brady finished the regular season with fifty touchdown passes, one for each state in the country. He was thirty years old and was finally going to get an award, the MVP, that he’d deserved years earlier. Moss’s twenty-third touchdown reception, a league record, came on Brady’s fiftieth touchdown pass.
There was nothing wrong with 16-0, a miraculous achievement in any year, and especially one in which there were open calls for authentication. The problem wouldn’t be obvious until after there were two play-off wins over the Jaguars and Chargers, setting up a rematch against the Giants in the Super Bowl.
The Patriots, as sublime as they were, should have known the rules bett
er than anyone. Never let your opponent define what the game is about. Throughout the season, as the games got tighter, the Patriots put more pressure on themselves to be perfect. They had always been able to use different media reports for an Us versus Them straw man, but it wasn’t a straw man this time. It was real, and as much as they tried to reflect the steel and indifference of their head coach, it got to them; it turns out that more than a few of them wanted to be liked.
As the game got closer, Spygate, the insatiable dragon, started breathing again. Senator Arlen Specter told the New York Times that he wanted a congressional investigation, and the Boston Herald reported that it had a source who claimed that the Patriots taped the St. Louis Rams walk-through before Super Bowl XXXVI. At a time when they should have been focused on the history they were going to make in Arizona and the game they were going to play against the Giants, they were thinking about their critics. Belichick met with his captains the day before the game and asked them if he should mention the Herald report to the entire team. The captains told him no, although they could acknowledge that going through the entire season with their hands up was exhausting.
This was not their style, their fight, or their game. All of those regular-season numbers were gaudy, but the old Patriots were never concerned with the numbers. They were the first ones who would point out that the definition of success was championships, not sending three offensive linemen to the Pro Bowl, or league records from the quarterback and one of his wide receivers.
They should have known, early, that something was amiss. The Giants defensive coordinator, Steve Spagnuolo, had hoped to keep the Patriots’ offense in the twenties for the entire game. He wanted to be realistic, and that number was just about right. But at halftime it was 7–3, Patriots, and the Giants were dominating the line of scrimmage. There was no need to concede the twenties. Playing like this, the Giants might be able to keep the game in the teens and win it.
It was a scoreless third quarter, and the Giants went ahead, 10–7, early in the fourth on a touchdown reception by receiver David Tyree. A touchdown catch in the Super Bowl is a highlight for most players, but it would be far from Tyree’s most significant play of the night. With just under three minutes to play, finally, the most feared duo in the league connected. It was Brady to Moss, on a short touchdown pass, for a 14–10 lead. On the sideline, Tedy Bruschi hugged teammate Junior Seau, thirty-nine, who had never been this close to a championship. In his previous Super Bowl appearance, a dozen years earlier, his team never had a chance. That night, against the 49ers, it was due to Seau’s Chargers’ lack of talent. On this night, his team was the favorite but didn’t have a chance, either, with some of the things that were happening in the final minutes.
The definitive play was a third-and-five with seventy-five seconds to play. New York quarterback Eli Manning appeared to be lost in the arms of Richard Seymour and Jarvis Green. He escaped, though, and threw a long pass downfield. In one of the most extraordinary plays in Super Bowl history, Tyree reached above his head, trapped the football against his helmet, and brought the ball to his body for a thirty-two-yard reception. All the while, Rodney Harrison tried to swat and wrestle the ball away from him.
America was rallying.
“I haven’t watched the game to this day,” Seymour says. “If you think about all the things that happened, from almost getting Eli in the grasp, to Asante [Samuel] almost getting a pick, to Tyree catching the ball on top of his head. If you think about all that, you have to say that they deserved it. I played in four Super Bowls and we won three of them. But it’s the one that you don’t get that you agonize over.”
With Tyree’s catch, the Giants had great field position but not a lot of time. With forty-five seconds remaining, they converted a third-and-eleven that gave them the ball at the Patriots’ thirteen-yard line. The Patriots’ best cornerback was Samuel, and this was his last game in New England. He had agreed to sign the franchise tag in 2007, but he had been assured it wouldn’t be applied in 2008. The Patriots liked his ability to cover, although they questioned his versatility due to his discomfort with playing left and right cornerback. He was more at home on the left side, which is why five-foot-nine corner Ellis Hobbs, who was playing with shoulder and groin injuries, was matched up with six-foot-five-inch receiver Plaxico Burress.
“I thought that for who he was on the team, The Guy, The Cover Corner, Franchise Tag Corner, Asante should have been on Plaxico,” Law says. “And I’d tell him that. He was my young pup. I was a mentor to him when he was there in his young days, playing behind me.
“Everybody in the stadium, everybody at home, knew where the ball was going. You’ve got a six-foot-five receiver down in the red zone. You knew it was going to be a fade. Everybody knew that. Hobbs bit on the worst move I’ve ever seen in my life. It’s no need to bite on something like that because you know it’s a jump ball situation to Plaxico Burress. Asante should have went over there and said, ‘Ellis, I got this. Take the other guy. We gonna win or lose the ball game on me. I’m getting the big bucks, I’m gonna show everybody that I’m the best.’ You didn’t have to ask that with Deion Sanders. You didn’t have to ask that with me. You don’t have to ask that with Darrelle Revis.”
It wasn’t just Samuel. Everyone had a moment or two from the game that would be mentally played and replayed, over and over, for weeks, months, and years. As Law said, Burress put a move inside on Hobbs and then ran to the corner of the end zone. It was an easy completion for the winning touchdown.
The Patriots had their first loss of the season, 17–14. They were 18-1, ridiculed for that loss, and suspect-in-perpetuity until they could win another Super Bowl, something that 40 percent of the league had never done.
The early days had been easier. America had caught up to them, finally, and won.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THE OUTSIDERS
One of the things that drew Tom Brady’s teammates to him was that he never said the things that they were thinking. Once, for example, Mike Vrabel had been talking with reporters about the Patriots and their ability to overcome injuries to Rodney Harrison and Matt Light.
“Those are great players,” Vrabel said that day, “but nobody is too good to be replaced around here.” He quickly corrected himself. “Well, besides Tom.”
They all knew it was true, and they also knew it wasn’t a part of Brady’s personality to say it. Not even while joking around in the locker room or during a guys’ night out. He was a natural observer and team-builder, quickly diagnosing what the situation needed and then delivering it. He was gifted, and it went far beyond his knowledge of the game and his photogenic face.
When a lot of people started to talk and be concerned about identity theft in 2004, Visa wanted to make that the centerpiece of a thirty-second commercial that would air in 2005. The idea was to “talk about layers of security without getting too deep in the weeds,” says John Van de Brook, who worked on the spot for six months. It was the perfect situation for Brady. This was an opportunity to do a commercial and involve his teammates. So five of his offensive linemen became the five layers of security sitting around a table in a fancy restaurant in full pads and helmets, while Brady played the handsome bachelor out on a date who was constantly surrounded by their “security” and one-liners. It was his commercial, technically, but it had played out exactly the way he wanted.
“It took us three or four hours to shoot the commercial, and Brady and the guys were cracking up the entire time,” Van de Brook says. “Lots of laughs and jokes. It was clear that he loved his linemen. Brady was great and affable, but he was not the star of that spot. The strength was in the interaction of the linemen, their warmth and humor.”
Off camera, he wasn’t even good at playing the demanding superstar of a Visa commercial. Contractually, he had the right to request whatever he wanted in his greenroom. He chose Gatorade and Skittles.
That same year, DirecTV wanted to do a commercial with Brady.
“He c
alled me and said, ‘Let’s go do this commercial,’” says Deion Branch. “It didn’t surprise me at all. That’s just Tom. He wants to be one of the guys.”
It wasn’t an easy task, mostly because it required cooperation by Brady and his teammates. It had been simple in 2000 when he was a backup, and in 2001 when he was an emerging star and not yet the leader of the team. But what about now, in February 2008? He needed to be an interactive leader for many reasons, beginning with a basic point: The majority of the team hadn’t seen him when he was just Tom, hanging out by his locker and teasing Damon Huard for carrying what appeared to be a purse. They didn’t all know him, the real him, so part of his quarterbacking was to guide them away from the celebrity and toward someone who had a lot in common with them.
This wasn’t the old days anymore. The Super Bowl loss to the Giants was illustrative of just how fast the league moved. When Brady walked off that field in Arizona, he was one of just nine Patriots who had been around for all three Super Bowl titles. He was going to be thirty-one at the beginning of the season, and thirty-one meant he was old enough to hear some of his teammates say that they had been watching him play since they were in high school. It was a good reminder that his leadership style couldn’t be a disengaged I’ll just lead by example.
That had never been his way, even when he was their age. There was dexterity to his intelligence, so he was comfortable in multiple settings. New teammate Christian Fauria, six years older than Brady, noticed his maturity in 2002. Fauria was married at the time with two young children, and Brady was single and twenty-five. They were hanging out at Huard’s house, and Fauria’s wife, Rhonda, began breastfeeding their infant son. Instead of being awkward, Brady initiated a conversation about breastfeeding and the benefits of it.
Belichick and Brady Page 18
