Edelman was one of those players, like Vrabel and Troy Brown, that Belichick dreamed up during his free-verse writing sessions. They were players that had primary positions, but they could theoretically be plugged in anywhere. He was a prospect worth watching.
Yet it seemed for every player who arose like Edelman, there was another valued one saying good-bye. In June, there was the expected announcement from Rodney Harrison. He was retiring. He had missed time with significant injuries in three of the previous four years, and he was now better at describing his time away than fighting to get back. He admitted to losing his all-consuming hunger to play football, and he had already been hired to bring his verbal punch and candor to NBC’s football studio show.
As Belichick prepared to write again, the endeavor seemed tenuous. There was a lot of institutional knowledge and instincts leaving; what was actually coming? Was the established culture that secure where it could remain stable despite the changes?
“In the biggest games, in any situation and on a weekly basis, his production was phenomenal,” Belichick wrote. “Rodney embodies all the attributes coaches seek and appreciate: toughness, competitiveness, leadership, selflessness, hard work, intensity, professionalism—and coming from Rodney, they are contagious.”
After all, there were many “normal” things in the locker room that weren’t necessarily normal in other places. Harrison was among those who were there for the installation of things that were now taken for granted. The players, for example, were coachable, maybe because some of their toughest coaches were their peers. All of their competitions were based around improving team performance.
They gave out that mental error belt to prevent mistakes in the game. They challenged one another to get to work early and interrogated players who tried to leave early. They took the punitive nature of being late for meetings away from the coaches and handled it themselves; if you were the last one sitting down, no matter what time it was, you were late. In fact, Harrison learned that lesson when he first arrived from San Diego. He and others became enforcers of that rule and many more. They checked one another’s plates for fatty foods.
Fried chicken again today, huh? No wonder you’re making so many mistakes in the game.
They joked. They easily crossed racial lines while socializing. They crossed spiritual lines in the cafeteria; there were times when Heath Evans, a Christian, would have debates with Robert Kraft, who is Jewish, about the Old and New Testaments. That was the culture and it had led to the creation of the atmosphere, yet it wasn’t consciously created. It came to be spontaneously, and now many of its custodians and caretakers were moving out.
The changes weren’t glaring at the beginning of training camp. Some of the scenes there appeared to be normal. Belichick’s friend, musician Jon Bon Jovi, was asking about the new coach of the Jets, Rex Ryan. He was the Jets’ fourth head coach since Belichick arrived in New England. In June, Ryan had targeted Belichick and said he hadn’t taken the job to “kiss his rings.” Belichick had certainly heard his share of hyperbole over the years, so he barely reacted when he answered Bon Jovi, “I think they’ll play hard for him.”
Kraft, meanwhile, approached his friend Seymour. He asked the giant standing next to him, “Is this the best group of players on paper?” Seymour hesitated. He respected the owner and had taken one of the most significant trips of his life with him. He and his wife, Tanya, had gone to Israel with Kraft and his wife, Myra. The Seymours had been baptized in the Jordan River, an incredible experience for both of them. He knew he could have given Kraft a better answer than his “It’s up there…” But there was so much uncertainty. His contract situation was unclear. Some of his teammates, who were under contract, were unproven. It was hard to tell how, or if, this team would come together.
Once again, goodness, it was coming apart. It felt like corporate America with its sweeping buyouts of senior employees. Seymour was a key part of the franchise’s stonework, but there was chipping and shifting in the mortar. And dramatic breakaways. Maybe some careful observers could see it coming, with the way they watched Tedy Bruschi limp around the field. He’d had surgery on a knee in 2008, and when you’re thirty-six years old, an injury from 2008 still throbs and pokes and taunts in 2009.
Bruschi knew he wasn’t the same player. He and Roman Phifer had a lot in common, including their love for watching film. They’d sit in the meeting rooms and pick up tells and insights that other players didn’t always see. Bruschi was such a student that he would instruct his linebacker coaches to double-check what they were teaching him. “Is this what was covered in the meeting?” he’d say as they wrote on the board. He wanted to be sure he was practicing the proper technique because “I know what happens around here when you get it wrong.”
But there were other problems in August 2009. He didn’t like the way he looked on film. He thought he was slow and stiff. Phifer had said the same thing about himself four years earlier when he decided it was time to stop playing. Phifer was with McDaniels as a member of the Broncos coaching staff, watching films and making them as well. A couple of years into retirement, he had attended a meeting of retired players and was startled at the debilitating issues they’d had as a result of playing in the league. Hip and knee replacements. Depression. Dementia. He was determined to do something and raise awareness. He helped produce a documentary called Blood Equity.
Beyond the medical issues, walking away from football created another void. “We’ve been a part of a team all of our lives,” Phifer says. “If we don’t find another pack, we struggle. We’re like wolves. Football and everything it provides, it’s a tough act to follow. You can get bits and pieces of it in other places, but you can’t replicate it.”
Bruschi’s new pack was going to be on TV. After thirteen years as a football player, he was walking away. Only his teammates and coaches knew just what a creative and instinctive player he was. It didn’t translate to Pro Bowls. No, it was much more impressive than that. He created a playing style at middle linebacker that the coaches accepted but did not teach; he taught himself.
He once overheard a conversation that teammate Ted Johnson was having with their old defensive coordinator, Al Groh. Johnson was taller and heavier than Bruschi, and he had once hit a Dolphins guard with such ferocity that the player’s helmet split in two. He was a big, physical thumper. After one of those thumping games, Groh said to Johnson, “That’s the way we want it done.” Bruschi mentally shook his head. He couldn’t play that way. He was too small. He’d use athleticism and mind games instead. He’d take a lineman on early, but slip him later on in the game.
He was a poet with his teammates, putting his hand on their shoulder pads before games and looking into their eyes. “You good? Family is good? Bills are paid? All right, let’s play ball.” He negotiated his own contracts. He saw his parents file for bankruptcy when he was a kid, so he was preoccupied with buying a home and immediately paying it off, with no mortgage. Bill Parcells once told him after practice, “I’ve lost some players to drugs, but I’ve lost more to the IRS. I think you’re going to be in this game a long time; do you have an accountant?” Bruschi went back to his apartment that night and called a lawyer he knew in Arizona. “We need to get an accountant.”
An original, through and through. It’s why Belichick took his words about Bruschi to the cameras. Television stations in New England carried the announcement live, and everyone was stunned when Belichick became emotional as he honored the linebacker.
“If you ask me to sum up how I feel about Tedy Bruschi in five seconds,” the coach said, pausing and holding back tears, “he’s the perfect player.” He paused again, trying to pin the tears down. His voice shook. He repeated the compliment and more: “He’s the perfect player. He has helped create a tradition here that we’re all proud of. The torch has been passed, and we’ll try to carry it on.”
It was going to be hard to carry it on. By all measures, the team wasn’t as smart as it had been in previous
years. It wasn’t as tough. It wasn’t as respectful. It wasn’t the Patriots.
The biggest blow of the season came one week before the games actually began. It was a Sunday morning, September 6, and Seymour was at home. He was away from his phone for a while, and when he finally got to it he saw that he had five missed calls and a text from Berj Najarian at the office. Belichick wanted to speak with him. He suspected nothing. What he heard on the phone was puzzling.
“Al Davis made a trade for you,” Belichick said. “And you’re now a member of the Oakland Raiders.”
“I was like, ‘Huh?’” Seymour says now. “I talked to my wife, my mom, my agent. And that was really it. There had been no speculation of that happening, no hint of it, so it felt really abrupt. The kids had just started school. We had a new house. We were entrenched in the community. Honestly, it took a minute to process it. I just couldn’t jump up and leave like that.
“For a couple of days, I didn’t talk to the Raiders or the Patriots. I saw a lot of wordplay about ‘whose property’ I was and who ‘owned my rights.’ I didn’t like the way it felt, and I didn’t like the way it sounded. From a personal standpoint there for a couple of days, I had to do what was best for my family.”
Seymour was a month away from his thirtieth birthday, and he was still recognized as a dominant player. The Patriots had acquired Oakland’s 2011 first-round pick for him. So in terms of locker-room accounting in 2009, the Patriots had traded away Seymour’s dominance and smarts and in turn received a promissory note for 2011. As brilliant as the Belichick-Brady tandem was, there was no way to overcome the losses of the Seymour trade immediately. The NFL didn’t work that way, not even for Belichick and Brady. Seymour was a rare talent, and everyone around the league knew it. The Patriots had good reasons for trading him when they did, planning, as always, for future cap flexibility. Yet they might have known, looking at their own internal writings, that they’d never again have a defensive lineman like him.
When he finally reported to Oakland, he viewed things differently.
“It was a lot deeper than football,” he says. “I went to a team that personally needed me. There were a lot of young guys out there who had money, but no guidance. I was out there to lead men. I personally felt a lot of satisfaction. And as a defensive lineman, there’s no better place to be nasty and tough than the Raiders and Al Davis.”
Seymour was surprised when the eighty-year-old Davis approached him and started describing plays he’d watched the lineman make at the University of Georgia. “He was such a football guy,” Seymour says.
That simple phrase said it all because, back in New England, the Patriots didn’t have enough of them. Football guys. You knew them when you saw them, when you heard them, or in the case of Belichick, when you coached them.
Brady was the same as he had always been. He stayed in the pocket more, and that brace may have been the only thing he’d ever worn that didn’t look stylish on him. He still had the mind of an engineer, deconstructing how a defense functioned and then coming up with a plan of attack with Belichick and O’Brien. He was comfortable enough to go into Belichick’s office, notebook in hand, and share his observations from his film study once a week. These were one-on-one business meetings, with one careful observer, Brady, reporting what he saw to a man, Belichick, who is just as careful if not more so. There weren’t a lot of surprises revealed. In many cases, they were confirming what they already knew.
The trend for the Patriots was disturbing. They were a good team at home; they couldn’t close out games on the road. They lost their first matchup to Ryan’s Jets, with the new coach playing up the rivalry by leaving a voice mail for season ticket holders. The message: Be loud. The Patriots scored just 9 points in that game. In their first trip to Denver against McDaniels and the Broncos, they had a 10-point lead early and a 17–10 lead in the fourth quarter. A fumble, a missed field goal, and a taunting penalty later, they lost in overtime. They won big at home over the Titans, but Adalius Thomas was inactive for it. One of the team leaders, Thomas had missed practices in the previous week and Belichick wasn’t happy about it. He also wasn’t happy with the way Thomas was playing. He was making no impact plays, so he sat. Belichick and Thomas were headed for a confrontation.
Conflict was the New Patriot Way. Even Belichick didn’t seem like himself at times. In Indianapolis, the Patriots lost a game when they had a lead late and the head coach decided to go for it on fourth-and-two from the Patriots’ own twenty-eight. The theory was that he was trying to end the game so Peyton Manning wouldn’t have a chance to, but a couple of TV commentators suggested that it showed a lack of faith in the New England defense. Those commentators were named Rodney Harrison and Tedy Bruschi. He loved them, obviously, but when they were on TV he’d use what they said to inspire his current team.
“I’ve heard it said that I don’t have confidence in you, which is a bunch of bullshit,” he told the team the next day. “If you guys don’t think I have confidence in you, I don’t know what you’re doing every day… ignore the noise.”
When the Patriots played the Saints in November, New England was 7-3. New Orleans was 10-0. It wasn’t even close. The road-weary Patriots barely competed, which led to Belichick’s admission to Brady on the sideline, “I just can’t get this team to play the way it needs to.”
It was a bold confession from Belichick because his teams had routinely played well in December. But going into this December, the Patriots had won only a single road game in the United States. They got a win over Tampa, but that was in London. And they weren’t always great at home, which Thomas could attest to when he was nine minutes late for a team meeting and Belichick sent him home. The linebacker protested the move and Belichick shelved him for the rest of the season. Amazingly, he’d never play in the league again.
Belichick had come into the season believing that some adjustments were what the team needed. But it was a lot more problematic than that. Too many players were trying to win on their terms, which didn’t always include an attentiveness to winning football. The Patriots needed to get back to those players. Thomas and his supporters were going to be cut loose; Belichick was going back to his football roots.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TIGHTROPE
When Alge Crumpler got the phone call in March 2010, he was sitting on a couch in his suburban Atlanta home. He’d spent the previous season in Tennessee, primarily as a blocking tight end. As he told the caller, Bill Belichick, he considered himself “damn near retired” at thirty-two years old. He’d sat on that couch a lot lately, so his listed playing weight of 262 was no longer accurate.
Belichick told Crumpler that he wanted him in New England because he didn’t have a tight end on his roster; Crumpler told Belichick that he was 320 pounds and that he’d love to give it a shot in New England. He needed to stop first in New Orleans, the home of Mackie Shilstone, trainer for tennis star Serena Williams and many others.
“Coach,” Crumpler said, “I can’t walk into that building until I’m in shape.”
Belichick thanked him for being honest, welcomed him to the Patriots, and hung up the phone assured that at the very least he’d added a conscientious professional to his 2010 team. The 2009 Patriots won the division, the seventh time in nine years that New England could say that. But it was a counterfeit Belichick team. It wasn’t good on the road, it wasn’t infused with a passion for self-correction, and it became the first Belichick squad to lose a play-off game at home.
“We have no mental toughness,” the coach said to Tom Brady as the two of them stood on the sideline during that embarrassing November defeat in New Orleans. It was an immense admission, not only because it was early in the fourth quarter of a game, but also because he said it to a player. There was no mind trick involved here. He said what he said to his quarterback because he trusted him and knew he could relate. “We can’t play the way we need to play it… I just can’t get this team to play the way we need to play.”
There was an advantage to the continuity, obviously, but it also carried the trap of complacency. The league didn’t pause for anyone, not even coaches on their way to the Hall of Fame. Belichick had suggested to his staff that the Patriots were predictable and thus easy to defend offensively. It took him less than thirty seconds, with no film necessary, to explain how to stop them: Take away Moss over the top, bracket slot receiver Wes Welker underneath, and they were done. In Belichick’s view of things, a real offense was one that could prominently feature a hybrid tight end. Big. Fast. Intimidating. The problem was that he didn’t have one.
Belichick and Brady Page 21
