Belichick and Brady

by Michael Holley

  “I just want to share with you what I’ve learned over the past week,” he says. “I’m embarrassed to talk about the amount of time that I put into this relative to the other important challenge in front of us. I’m not a scientist. I’m not an expert in footballs; I’m not an expert in football measurements. I’m just telling you what I know. I would not say that I’m Mona Lisa Vito of the football world, as she was in the car expertise area, all right?”

  As appreciated as his My Cousin Vinny reference is, and as much sense as he makes with regard to plausible reasons for fluctuating football measurements, he has to know that the mistrusting public has one foot firmly planted in the Spygate archives. That’s always the case with the Patriots, whether they are accused of a new scandal or not. That is the unwritten penalty of Spygate, the football spirit incapable of being exorcised.

  “At no time was there any intent whatsoever to try to compromise the integrity of the game or to gain an advantage. Quite the opposite, we feel like we followed the rules of the game to the letter in our preparations, in our procedures, all right, and in the way that we handled every game that we competitively played in as it relates to this matter.”

  He has given hundreds of press conferences over the years. Maybe even he has developed that skill that journalists have, to recognize the moment when the conversation will change because something unexpected has been introduced. Belichick does exactly that, opening a gate for some reporter to walk on through when he says, “We try to do everything right. We err on the side of caution. It’s been that way now for many years. Anything that’s close, we stay as far away from the line as we can. In this case, I can say that we are, as far as I know and everything that I can do, we did everything as right as we could do it. We welcome the league’s investigation into this matter. I think there are a number of things that need to be looked into on a number of levels, but that’s not for this conversation. I’m sure it will be taken up at another point in time.”

  He was right. The league had a lot to explain with its timeline, its paper trail, and its protocol for measuring air pressure. But that was for later. He had just mentioned something that got everyone’s attention. We try to do everything right. We err on the side of caution. The Patriots’ reputation is one of envelope-pushing and line-stepping. It’s why the league was leaving them unprotected in a sense, refusing to correct a three-day-old story by Chris Mortensen that it knew to be inaccurate. The veteran ESPN reporter was told that eleven of those twelve footballs were two pounds per square inch beneath the legal limit. It wasn’t true. Nor was it ultimately true what David Gardi, the league operations director, wrote to the Patriots the morning after the conference title game, saying that one of their footballs measured as low as 10.1 PSI.

  But… Spygate.

  That had always been in the walls of any Patriots discussion. A conversation about Belichick or Brady, a conversation by Belichick or Brady, somehow circled back to that. It’s the opposite of their early days together, when they were winning three Super Bowls in a four-year span. They’d never lost a play-off game, never been touched with a hint of real scandal, and their narrative then was valiant. They were capable of anything involving brainpower, ingenuity, composure. Ten years later, thousands of camera and hundreds of ball-deflation jokes later, they are the plausibly accused. They are capable of doing anything that’s thrown against a wall or behind an anonymous source. The cameras happened; why wouldn’t ball deflation? Why not bugging locker rooms? Screwing with opposing teams’ headsets? Manipulating the game clock? They were forever saints or sinners.

  Belichick tries to conclude his press conference in a conventional way. He has already stood up for Brady and everyone in the organization, including Jim McNally and John Jastremski.

  “This is the end of this subject for me for a long time, okay? We have a huge game, a huge challenge for our football team and that’s where that focus is going to go. I’ve spent more than enough time on this and I’m happy to share this information with you to try to tell you some of the things that I have learned over the last week, which I’ve learned way more than I ever thought I would learn. The process, the whole thing is much more complex—there are a lot of variables that I was unaware of. It sounds simple, and I’m not trying to say that we’re trying to land a guy on the moon, but there are a lot of things here that are a little hard to get a handle on. Again, there’s a variance in so many of these things, all right? So, I’ll take a couple questions and then I’m moving on.”

  Does he think all the questions are going to be about the rubbing of the footballs, laces, stitching, tackiness, raised and lowered PSI? Some are, and a very obvious one is not.

  “You said you always try to err on the side of caution and stay on the right side of the rules,” the question begins, “but with the videotaping it was clear that you were pushing the envelope on that. Is that something that changed that?”

  It’s been eight years since Spygate and eight years since he’d said anything about it beyond the original sparse written statement. That has finally changed.

  “I mean, look, that’s a whole other discussion. The guy’s giving signals out in front of eighty-thousand people, okay? So we filmed him taking signals out in front of eighty-thousand people, like there were a lot of other teams doing at that time, too. Forget about that. If we were wrong then we’ve been disciplined for that.”

  “But,” the questioner challenges, “that’s clearly not doing everything you can to stay on the side…”

  Belichick, who came out to talk science and air pressure, is now replying to Spygate. He is annoyed by the questioning, but if he thought about it he’d see that this is the same thing the NFL does. The league connects anything his organization says to something that he has already done, whether the events are connected or not. The commissioner is talking about Spygate four years after he made his ruling on it. It isn’t a leap to suggest that he and the people he represented, the owners, still have some resentment over Belichick’s defiance. The head coach got caught, showed no remorse, and then his team reeled off eighteen consecutive wins. Were there New Yorkers, in the league office, rooting for him to fail then? Are there now? When it comes to Spygate, there is no statute of limitations. There always is the presumption of guilt. He animatedly interrupts the attempted follow-up.

  “The guy’s in front of eighty-thousand people. Eighty-thousand people saw it. Everybody on the sideline saw it. Everybody sees our guy in front of the eighty-thousand people. I mean, there he is. So, it was wrong, we were disciplined for it. That’s it. We never did it again. We’re never going to do it again and anything else that’s close, we’re not going to do either.”

  There are a few more questions about air pressure. He’s clearly had enough. The NFL has already announced that its investigation into what happened with the footballs will be headed by prominent attorney Ted Wells and the league’s executive vice president, Jeff Pash. Wells is known as a legal superstar, with a long list of wins for those whom victory seemed difficult. He got an acquittal for U.S. Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan on grand larceny and fraud charges in 1987. A decade later, he got an acquittal for U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy, accused of receiving improper gifts. He was even on the side of Exxon Mobil in criminal and civil disputes. Now he is on the side of a client, the NFL, that will pay him millions of dollars to produce a report on air pressure. His work has already begun on that. Meanwhile, Belichick and his staff can finally begin the work of focusing on Seattle.

  In the time that Robert Kraft has owned the Patriots, the team has earned trips to seven Super Bowls. What Kraft doesn’t realize, as he makes his way back to Glendale for title appearance number seven, is the appetite for conflict coming from NFL headquarters. It doesn’t take much investigation to figure out that someone in the league office had tipped Chris Mortensen for his inaccurate air-pressure report. His story contained the same error, 10.1 PSI in one of the footballs, as David Gardi’s letter to Kraft ha
d. Earlier than that, there certainly was something that didn’t add up about the communication between the Colts and the league before the game. It seemed like a concern that should have also involved the Patriots beforehand.

  On January 27, Kraft and his son Jonathan were on the team plane to the desert as they learned that yet another leak had occurred in the supposedly confidential investigation. Jay Glazer of Fox reported that the league was focusing its investigation on a “person of interest” who was seen on camera taking the footballs into a Gillette Stadium bathroom. That person, still not known to the public, is Jim McNally. The Krafts finally caught on to what was happening, and it angered them. They could now see that the league had not been evenhanded in the early stages of the investigation. As the media awaited the arrival of the plane, the Krafts drafted a letter.

  The plane’s arrival in Arizona, the opening of the doors, and the greeters on the tarmac were all standard. All of that changed when the owner entered the sprawling resort hotel where the media awaited. He wasn’t interested in the usual winking, backslapping, and niceties of Super Bowl week. He read from his letter.

  “I want to make it clear that I believe, unconditionally, that the New England Patriots have done nothing inappropriate in this process or in violation of NFL rules. Tom, Bill and I have been together for fifteen years. They are my guys. They are part of my family. Bill, Tom and I have had many difficult discussions over the years. I’ve never known them to lie to me. That’s why I’m confident in saying what I just said. It bothers me greatly that their reputations and integrity, and by association that of our team, has been called into question this week.”

  He and everyone else in the organization remembered what it was like the last time they were here. He remembered that endless session with the league in February 2008, hours before the Patriots were going to try to win one more game and thus win them all. The good news was that he had been to multiple Super Bowls. What annoyed him, and his fans, was that these things tended to avalanche.

  “I am confident that this investigation will uncover whatever the facts were that took place last Sunday and the science of how game balls react to changes in the environment. This would be in direct contrast to the public discourse, which has been driven by media leaks as opposed to actual data and facts. Because of this, many jumped to conclusions and made scarring accusations against our coach, quarterback, and staff questioning the integrity of all involved.

  “If the Wells investigation is not able to definitively determine that our organization tampered with the air pressure in the footballs, I would expect and hope the league would apologize to our entire team, and in particular to Coach Belichick and Tom Brady, for what they’ve had to endure this week. I’m disappointed in the way this entire matter has been handled and reported upon. We expect hard facts rather than circumstantial leaked evidence to drive the conclusion of this investigation.”

  Despite what NBC had planned on Sunday, this was the real pregame show. It was the power source of the Patriots, Kraft, taking on the NFL’s representative of power, Roger Goodell. Kraft had been in the position of awkward dance partner, trying to support his coach and quarterback while also maintaining his status as one of the handful of owners who can move league mountains.

  He had always supported Goodell, even when the commissioner made statements that seemed contradictory. The real lesson, the sounds of silence from his fellow owners, hadn’t resonated yet. He would start to see those in the spring, the billion-dollar faces of self-preservation and the status quo. Soon enough he would learn that they would never dream of apologizing to him or the Patriots. Apologize? For something the commissioner had supported? No, no. Never that. Many of them were just like he used to be. Whenever they saw something that the commissioner had done, they either said nothing or cosigned on the dotted line.

  The only meritocracy left for the Patriots was on the University of Phoenix Stadium field for Super Bowl XLIX.

  There were just three Patriots players who were there in 2008 for one of the biggest upsets in NFL history: Brady, Vince Wilfork, and kicker Stephen Gostkowski. So at least there would be clear minds for this game against the Seahawks. Seattle annihilated the Broncos the year before, and there wasn’t any drop-off from the 2014 version of the team.

  “Two years in a row!” Seattle receiver Doug Baldwin screamed to teammate Ricardo Lockette before the game. “We proved that we belong! Let’s do this.” Baldwin’s words were layered. He was talking about the team belonging, and he was talking about himself and Lockette. They were both undrafted players, and those players regularly fought to forge an identity and simply be remembered. What better place to achieve that than the Super Bowl?

  Ball deflation and preparation had been on Brady’s mind more than usual. He had been in constant contact with John Jastremski since the news from the Colts game broke. He was initially hurt by the torrent of criticism that “Deflategate” brought to his lap. But leading up to the game, he was able to block out the speculation and commentary and zero in on what the Seahawks did well. He, Josh McDaniels, and Belichick were all in agreement that they needed an even quicker, even shorter passing game to be successful against Seattle’s speed and aggressiveness. He also knew, better than anyone on the team, how meaningful and personal a win would be for the team.

  “It’s our time,” Brady told his teammates. “It started seven or eight months ago, right? All for this moment, all for this moment. It’s about honor. It’s about respect. We win this game, you’re honored. Your kids are honored. Your families are honored.”

  In the first quarter, he played like a man who was happy, finally, to be facing a defensive line rather than a bank of microphones. One of his teammates, defensive end Chandler Jones, watched from the bench and said to Wilfork, “They can’t stop the crossing routes.” Although the opening quarter was scoreless, Brady knew there were points on the field to be had. “They haven’t stopped us yet,” he said to Edelman, bemoaning the missed chances.

  The Patriots scored six minutes into the second quarter, Brady to Brandon LaFell for eleven yards. Just before the two-minute warning, powerful Seattle running back Marshawn Lynch scored from the three to tie it.

  Brady found easy money with thirty-six seconds left in the half. He noticed linebacker K. J. Wright lined up one-on-one against Gronk. Wright was at a disadvantage, and even the Seattle sideline knew it. “They’re going to eighty-seven,” one of the players said, without a trace of panic. Brady lofted it high where only Gronk could get it, and the tight end showed how he really plays when he’s healthy in a Super Bowl. Twenty-two-yard touchdown and 14–7 lead.

  Sometimes classic games can be identified early, and that’s what this was becoming. It is also true that sometimes classic games are a function of poor plays, and that was the unfortunate Super Bowl story of Patriots corner Kyle Arrington. He was having a bad Sunday on the big stage, and Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson routinely looked his way when he needed a completion. He got one, and more, with eleven seconds left in the half. He hit Lockette with a twenty-three-yard completion, and Arrington made it worse by grabbing his face mask.

  Clock stopped. More yards. Touchdown to Chris Matthews on a back-shoulder fade just before the half.

  With the score tied at 14 and the third quarter beginning, Seattle receiver Jermaine Kearse had a scoop for his offensive coordinator, Darrell Bevell. “So, twenty-five got benched,” he said of Arrington. “Twenty-one is in the game now.”

  He was talking about Malcolm Butler, a player that most hardcore football fans had never heard of. His football journey was so unusual that it hadn’t always included football. He and Gronk were just one year apart, twenty-four and twenty-five, respectively. When Gronk was being drafted by the Patriots in 2010, Butler was working the drive-through at a Popeyes Chicken in Mississippi. He had been kicked out of Hinds Community College near Jackson, Mississippi, taken some classes an hour away at Alcorn State, and then traveled another two hundred miles to th
e University of West Alabama in a remote town called Livingston. The university’s motto is “Do Something That Matters.” Butler tried: He was undrafted, but the Patriots signed him in May 2014, and by August he had a football future and two nicknames. Players called him “Strap” due to his propensity for big plays and shutting people down in practice. Strap was sometimes called “Scrap” as well because of his willingness to scrap for the ball, his position on the field, his place on the roster. Doug Baldwin and Ricardo Lockette could definitely relate to that mentality.

  In a brief training camp update called “What We Learned,” a reporter for the Portland Press Herald in Maine singled out Strap/Scrap: “Malcolm Butler, an undrafted free-agent cornerback from NCAA Division II West Alabama, continues to make plays, a forced fumble and fumble recovery on the same play, and looks like he’s going to stick.”

  The problem in the third quarter was that the Seahawks, with the best defense in football, had surged ahead. A key play was an interception by Seahawks linebacker Bobby Wagner, who had been crouching in the zone unnoticed by Brady. “Dumb throw,” Brady said dejectedly as he explained his thinking to McDaniels. When Baldwin, nicknamed “Angry Doug” by his teammates, scored on a pick play (the back judge shielded Revis), it was 24–14. Richard Sherman, who had trolled Brady two years earlier, found a camera and held up two fingers, then four, and then two hands for a touchdown. He was either saying that the score was on Revis, number 24, or that the Seahawks had 24 points.