Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  In getting his team prepared for the wild-card game in Indianapolis, Ryan was deftly able to compliment Manning while also sneaking in an uppercut on Brady and the Patriots. He said nobody in the league studies like Manning and added, “I know Brady thinks he does. I think there’s a little more help from Belichick with Brady than there is with Peyton Manning.”

  He knew what he was doing.

  If there was a team the Patriots and their fans hated more than the Jets, it was the Colts. And if there was anything that annoyed a Patriots fan as much as a reference to Spygate, it was the notion that Manning was better than Brady. Ryan wasn’t concerned about that. He was already revealing part of his New England game plan, if the Jets made it that far: Hit them in an area where they are trained not to hit back… in the public, pregame arena.

  It turned out that Ryan was onto something. Jets-Colts turned into a bruising, low-scoring game, and that’s not the way the Colts were built. Trailing 16–14 with a few seconds left in the game, the Jets lined up for a thirty-two-yard field goal.

  “You watching this, bruh?” Deion Branch said to teammate Vince Wilfork.

  “Yes sir,” Wilfork replied. “If the Jets win this, we’ve got our work cut out for us.”

  And they did. The Jets, 17–16 winners over the Colts, were headed to Foxboro for a divisional play-off game.

  “This is about Bill Belichick versus Rex Ryan,” Ryan said at the beginning of the play-off week. “There’s no question. It’s personal. It’s about him against myself, and that’s what it’s going to come down to. I recognize that he’s the best and all that, but I’m just trying to be the best on Sunday, and I plan on being the best coach on Sunday. That’s what it is. I recognize that my level has to come up, and he’s going to get my best shot. He’s going to get everything I have on Sunday, and if he slips at all, we’re going to beat him.”

  Ryan got the first step in the Talking Game, and he and his players continued with the comments daily. The Patriots were strongly encouraged, and flat-out instructed at times, to do their talking on the field. Over the years, they had dealt with a pregame talker or two, but not a chat room. Some of the comments were personal, yet the Patriots were told to keep their mouths closed. Someone told Ryan that Brady had been at a Broadway show, Lombardi, instead of watching Jets-Colts and he cracked, “Peyton Manning would have been watching our game.” Cornerback Antonio Cromartie gave an interview in which he profanely said he hated Brady. Ryan returned again, saying that Brady had taken a shot at him by pointing to the Jets’ sideline. The talking had become so commonplace that three days before the game, one of the brashest and most outrageous talkers ever, Reggie Jackson, went on a New York radio show and told the Jets to “shut up and play football.”

  That wasn’t going to happen. Since the Patriots were barred from speaking directly, Welker had a subtly subversive idea. He was friendly with Ryan, and he frequently included the Jets coach on a group text with Mike Smith, Welker’s college roommate. Smith was interested in coaching and was in his first year as a Jets intern. The trio teased one another throughout the season, sending playful texts about defenders who were going to cover Welker (Ryan wrote that he’d use a nose tackle) and how unstoppable the Patriots’ offense was. There had been an online video circulating about Ryan, apparently role-playing with his wife and focusing on her feet. The usually talkative Ryan didn’t offer much when he was asked about it by New York media members.

  Welker, though, used the incident to talk about the play-off game. He never smiled, winked, or changed his tone of voice when he answered several questions with increasingly out-of-place foot references.

  Reporter: What is Tom Brady’s postseason value?

  Welker: It goes without saying, the guy is who he is and he does a great job of making sure everyone is on the same page and putting their best foot forward…

  Reporter: How do you convey a sense of urgency to younger players for the postseason?

  Welker: It’s a play-off atmosphere and you can’t just stick your toe in the water…

  Reporter: What makes Revis so good?

  Welker: I think he is very patient. He has good feet…

  It went on for nine minutes, and Welker didn’t break character once. Not even when he gave the biggest clue that he was just going to find any way possible to mention feet.

  Reporter: How is the team handling the play-off atmosphere at practice?

  Welker: We’re really moving forward and we’re going out there being good little foot soldiers…

  Many of Welker’s teammates loved it. But it didn’t matter what the players thought of it. One man, Belichick, wasn’t even slightly amused. On Twitter, Jets center Nick Mangold answered Welker by using the receiver’s rhetorical device:

  “Wes Welker is a great player. He’s really taken advantage of watching film. If we don’t keep a Spy on him, he could really open the Gate.”

  On game day, the humor was gone from everyone. The league had notified both teams to stop talking, probably spurred by Bart Scott’s statement that Welker’s “days are numbered.” It was a play-off game trapped in the middle of a cultural war. No matter what happened after this game, the winning team here, on January 16, 2011, was going to refer to the result constantly. It’s just what happened between Boston and New York.

  Minutes before game time, a rumor started to circulate on the field: Welker was going to miss the first series as a disciplinary move for his comments about Ryan. Crumpler was among those who didn’t agree with the move.

  “I still can’t figure out the Wes Welker not starting thing,” he says. “I felt that when Wes made his comments, it was kind of the icebreaker that we needed. The first play of the game I was always next to Wes. A lot of people were trying to figure it out.”

  The Patriots were trying to figure out the Jets. New York was holding down the number one offense in the league, and Brady’s interception streak was snapped in the first quarter. The Patriots looked bad. It didn’t help that Crumpler dropped a touchdown pass in the first quarter. “Still can’t believe I didn’t catch it,” he says. They didn’t get the touchdown, but they got a field goal, and those were their only points of the half. They trailed 14–3.

  Crumpler got a touchdown in the third quarter, and the Patriots were successful on the 2-point conversion to make it 14–11. It was becoming that kind of day, though, and New Englanders knew the feeling. The devastating upset. The opponent who was thought to be overmatched but refused to play the part. The young quarterback, Mark Sanchez, who is supposed to be overwhelmed by Belichick. Instead, he was beating man coverage with poised and precise throws. They answered everything the Patriots did, and 14–11 suddenly became 21–11. After a Patriots field goal made it 21–14, it quickly became 28–14.

  They were running out of time. The Patriots, 14-2 and dominant, were at home and staying there.

  “That was a weird game, man,” Branch says. “Clearly, this was a team that shouldn’t have been able to hold our jocks. We lost that game. We had so many mental errors throughout the course of it. And then there was the stuff with Wes… who knows what we could have done if we had won it?”

  They lost it. And losses to New York teams in the postseason are always scarring, always some New Yorker’s retort to settle an argument.

  “This was not your garden variety postseason elimination. Losing to the Jets is worse than losing to the Lakers,” Dan Shaughnessy wrote in the Boston Globe. “It might even be worse than losing to the Yankees and that is because of the lack of class demonstrated by the Jets in the days and months leading up to yesterday’s epic showdown. The Jets are all about smack talk. They hurled insults at New England for a week. Then they came to Foxboro and backed it up.”

  All the awards didn’t matter now. Brady was going to be the unanimous MVP and Belichick the Coach of the Year. It was a better team than last year’s. More talented. More professional. Less needy. And the same play-off result: one game and out.

  Who kn
ew what next year was going to bring? The commissioner, Roger Goodell, had sent out warnings for years now concerning the lockout. It was finally time for it in 2011. As disheartening as that was, more pressing matters of the heart were around the corner.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CONSCIENCE AND CONFLICT

  The scenes of victory were tough to take, and therefore it was time to get out of Gillette Stadium quickly on January 16, 2011. A lot of Patriots felt that way, and it had everything to do with expectation. This was all their fault. They had helped raise a generation of New England sports fans who had a hard time accepting that some team could actually enter the building for a play-off game and exit with a win. The fans and players didn’t think they’d ever watch a Jets linebacker, Bart Scott, actually pretend to be a jet plane after a win: arms extended, gliding in for an interview landing, and then touching down on the ground.

  Once Scott got there, he addressed a message “to all the nonbelievers.” He was critical of ESPN analysts and former players Tom Jackson and Keyshawn Johnson, who had both picked the Patriots to win convincingly. He pointed out that the Jets were the third-best defense in football and the Patriots “can’t stop a nosebleed.”

  That wasn’t supposed to happen here in the postseason. This was the place where opposing players, even the MVPs, seemed to get stage fright. Peyton Manning came here in back-to-back years and totaled one touchdown and five interceptions in two losses. LaDainian Tomlinson came here with the Chargers, carried the ball twice in the cold, and then called it a day. The Jacksonville Jaguars, a twelve-win team, came here and suddenly couldn’t block. They gave up four and a half sacks… to one player, Willie McGinest.

  But last year, the Ravens had visited in January and left with an easy play-off win. Now the Jets, the chirpy little brother, had finally won a fight that mattered. They were going to the conference championship game after their 28–21 win and the Patriots had another game to debate during meals in the cafeteria. That really was a part of the culture that they had created, and most of the NFL would have thought them crazy if they’d been able to listen to some of their breakfast and lunch conversations. They had multiple rings, yet they’d sometimes wonder about the ones that got away.

  Richard Seymour was on the other side of the country, in Oakland, and he still did it. He thought about the Mannings, how the Patriots had Peyton down by fifteen in the conference title one year and how he had Eli in the grasp in a devastating Super Bowl loss the next. “I feel like we could have won six,” he says. Team president Jonathan Kraft did it. The veteran tight end, Alge Crumpler, was amazed when he sat with Kraft eating breakfast and heard him mention the “four or five” Super Bowls that they could have won. Imagine hearing that when you’ve never won a Super Bowl or even played in one. Deion Branch had gone away for four years, and when he got back he slid right back into the habitat that he’d left. He knew it was going to be a tough game against the physical and talkative Jets, but it took a while for reality to settle in.

  “Not to be a spoiled brat,” he says now, “but I couldn’t have been happier the next week when they went to Pittsburgh and got their butts beat.”

  It was appropriate that a startling loss to the Jets happened at the beginning of the year. It was a reminder of the suddenness of things. The Patriots were used to the traditional interruptions of their football culture: trades, holdouts, free agent departures, coaching changes, retirements. But no player in the league knew what to expect from a lockout, not even the ten- and fifteen-year veterans. The last time the NFL had a strike, in 1987, Tom Brady was ten years old. Since then, whether the commissioner was Pete Rozelle, Paul Tagliabue, or Roger Goodell, the league had figured out a way to at least give the appearance that everyone was satisfied with a robust revenue pool.

  That wasn’t the case this time. Goodell became the commissioner in 2006, and he and the owners quickly made it obvious that they wanted to renegotiate a deal that they had just agreed to with the players. They had been preparing for this fight for five years, which most coaches and players didn’t have the luxury of doing. The lockout was happening as scheduled, and it meant that everything would be frozen except for the draft. There would be no contact between players and coaches; players would not be allowed to work out at team facilities; there would be no signings, of free agents or draft picks; franchises would not pay for their players’ health insurance; and, the ultimate leverage of ownership, players would miss sizable game checks if the lockout extended into the season.

  Any player who considered himself naïve was about to get a baptism. This was going to be a slog. Really, from a player’s perspective, it was going to be a fight against giants, seen and unseen. The players knew that the owners were wealthy because common sense and public information told them so. But when they asked owners to provide years’ worth of detailed financial information, the owners refused. Yet as early as 2009, the small-market and publicly owned Green Bay Packers provided a glance of what the players were up against.

  The Packers reported that their revenues were just over $20 million, which was a loss from the previous season. But their annual report also showed a “Preservation Fund” of $128 million, to be used in case of a lockout. In everyday terms, it was a piggy bank. Green Bay, the smallest market in the league, had $128 million plus the split revenue of a $1 billion DirecTV deal. If the Packers had that much, what was being stored away in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and New England?

  Tom Brady’s celebrity had earned him many things in his dozen-year career, but this was new. Along with fellow quarterbacks Drew Brees and Peyton Manning, he was the lead plaintiff in the players’ fight to stop the lockout. The antitrust suit was called Tom Brady, et al. v. National Football League, et al. It was good for the players to have Brady as the face of their cause. He was the reigning MVP and the most successful winner in the league. He wasn’t likely to speak much with the media during the dispute, if at all, but if he did, he certainly wouldn’t say anything that would be interpreted as a gaffe. Even if his name happened to be in the lead for symbolic purposes, it was proof of his evolution in the past three years.

  He had returned from his knee injury in 2009 with greater purpose. That was the positive part. His receivers, backs, and tight ends also learned how impatient he could be if they weren’t doing what was expected. He had urgency. The game had been taken away from him for a year, and for the first time since his early days as a Patriot, he was a watcher. When it was time to come back and play, he wasn’t tolerant of silly mistakes. Careers are short. Take advantage of what you can, when you can.

  Maybe it was just a coincidence, but 2009 was also when he became more involved in the Players Association. Winning the Comeback Player of the Year award that season wasn’t his biggest accomplishment. It was managing to be close to Kraft while planning to oppose him in court; it was being a passionate and informed union guy, but also being perfectly aligned with Belichick in team policy; it was being adored by millions, being paid millions, and sometimes getting special treatment by the coaching staff (he rarely practiced on Wednesdays during the entire 2010 season), and yet remaining grounded, tremendously respected by the rank and file.

  He may have held his own and looked the part when he was plotting against the league’s suits, but that really wasn’t his game. A month and a half into the lockout, he wanted motion. The real kind, on the field, not the legal kind, to be filed.

  Brady and his coach were identical in that way. They could be physically thousands of miles away from the stadium and football, but it was always in them. They weren’t the folks who would say, “This is what I do; it’s not who I am…” Yes, it was precisely who they were. Brady was a perpetually curious A-plus student. Belichick was a tireless teacher, always thinking ahead of a lesson or an illustration that would keep the star student, and others, engaged.

  Belichick and Brady craved action. The lockout was a slow death for both of them. And, per NFL rules, they weren’t allowed to talk with each
other about it. One thing Belichick could do was get ready for a favorite event that was still happening—the draft. The coach’s birthday was officially April 16, but it should have been the first day of the draft. He looked more at ease in the war room than he did on a golf course.

  “It’s a team-builder’s league,” says Louis Riddick, an ESPN analyst who played for Belichick in Cleveland. “Bill understands the profiles that he wants each player to have. He’s got a specific profile of how he wants everything done, and there aren’t many guys like that. He knows how he wants film corrected. How treatment, rehab, and weight training should go. How he’s going to run practices and the practice squad. The profile of players by position, physical build, and mental makeup.”

  On his unofficial fifty-ninth birthday, April 28, it was once again time to see what he had learned from his draft homework. It was also time to get the payoff from that 2009 trade of Richard Seymour to the Raiders. Oakland finished 8-8 in 2010, so that middle-of-the-pack record left the Patriots with a corresponding first-round pick, number seventeen overall in the spring. They also had their own pick, number twenty-eight, but they were willing to trade it.

  Belichick had no idea when he’d be able to coach a new left tackle, but he knew he needed one. Matt Light had been protecting Brady for a decade, and Light was getting close to retirement. There were two tackles the Patriots loved, Tyron Smith of Southern Cal and Nate Solder of Colorado, and they knew they wouldn’t get Smith. He went ninth overall to Dallas, and Solder was scooped by the Patriots at seventeen. After that, it was the type of waiting that Belichick could appreciate: waiting for the phone to ring. The Patriots got what they were looking for shortly after, when New Orleans asked about twenty-eight. The Saints were willing to give up next year’s first as well as this year’s second. The extra second-round pick became running back Shane Vereen. An extra second for next year was created when the Patriots called Al Davis and got him to accept a 2011 third-rounder for a 2012 second.