War Room

by Michael Holley

  THE LEGACY OF BILL BELICHICK AND THE ART OF BUILDING THE PERFECT TEAM

  MICHAEL HOLLEY

  Dedication

  FOR MY SONS, ROBINSON AND BECKHAM

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title page

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  The Incubator

  CHAPTER 2

  The Patriot Way

  CHAPTER 3

  The Culture of Winners

  CHAPTER 4

  Losing the Core

  CHAPTER 5

  The Desert

  CHAPTER 6

  The New Falcon Vernacular

  CHAPTER 7

  New England Departure, Kansas City Arrival

  CHAPTER 8

  A Tale of Three Cities

  CHAPTER 9

  Let’s Make a Deal

  CHAPTER 10

  Shelf Life

  CHAPTER 11

  Three and Out

  CHAPTER 12

  The Mobile Dinner

  CHAPTER 13

  Chief Assembly

  CHAPTER 14

  Picking and Dealing

  CHAPTER 15

  War Room

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Photographic Insert

  About the Author

  Praise for Other Works

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  1

  The Incubator

  Bill Belichick, the dark-haired and youthful head coach of the Cleveland Browns, was full of ideas. Some, such as how he planned to limit the access of the media, were shamelessly lifted from the New York Giants, where he had spent a dozen years as an assistant coach. Others were original, simply a new coach’s vision of what he wanted his team to be. It was the Big Idea, though, that was most ironic for Belichick in 1991.

  The perception in northeast Ohio was that the thirty-nine-year-old coach, the NFL’s youngest, was not a strong communicator. People used his press conferences as all the proof they needed. The first-year coach would seem bored as he sat or stood before the media giving shrugs, eye rolls, and terse answers to lengthy questions. But behind the scenes, Belichick was making clear communication his top Browns priority. In fact, it was how he planned to reconstruct one of the NFL’s worst teams.

  He quickly noticed that the Browns’ pro and college scouts were not speaking the same language. There was one grading scale for evaluating the pros and an entirely different one for analyzing collegians. Even worse, in his opinion, there was no organizational identity. After all the scouting, who were the Browns trying to be? It seemed to him that there wasn’t a good systematic answer to the question, so that became one of his missions: Build one player-evaluation system, for pro and college players alike, that always provided an instant snapshot of who a player was and whether he was capable of helping the Cleveland Browns. When the system was perfected, the coach imagined, everyone in the organization would be able to glance at a couple of numbers and letters on a scouting report and know exactly what type of player was being discussed.

  The easiest part of the plan was that the architect knew what he wanted. He told Mike Lombardi, his player personnel director, that he envisioned a big, strong, fast team that was capable of performing in any weather. He wanted a team that wouldn’t be distracted by playing at least ten Rust Belt games each season: eight in Cleveland Stadium, which sat on the edge of the unpredictable shores of Lake Erie, and one game apiece in Cincinnati and Pittsburgh, both cold-weather cities with open-air stadiums that overlooked the Ohio River. He wanted a team that could answer the no-nonsense, gladiatorial style of the Steelers one week and then go to Houston, another divisional rival, a week later and not be confused by the unusual formations employed by the Oilers since they operated in a place, the Astrodome, where the temperature was always the same.

  It was good that Belichick brought Lombardi specifics. But building and programming a unique system was going to require some after-hours work for both of them. While Belichick had been the defensive coordinator of two celebrated Super Bowl—winning defenses in New York, including one the previous season, he had no interest in copying the Giants’ scouting manual. He liked parts of it, but at times he thought it was too rigid and unnecessarily eliminated good players from draft consideration. He admired the grading system that Gil Brandt, the longtime Cowboys personnel man, had instituted in Dallas. For Belichick, Brandt’s scale made the Dallas system tangible, so even if the Browns were looking for different players from the Cowboys, they could use the Dallas scale as a sketch for where they were trying to go.

  Lombardi was entering his fifth season working with the Browns when Belichick arrived, and he hadn’t met him before. He soon learned that not every idea Belichick had was one that he wanted to see in place the next day. He was a thinker who liked to deliberately weigh information, listen to a variety of opinions, and then make decisions. Those personality traits alone would ensure that his overhaul of the Browns’ infrastructure was going to take time. It would also be an extended process because the system he wanted was, in the words of Lombardi, “the equivalent of a race car that could be modified and become adaptable to any course you asked it to run.”

  There were also some generational dynamics that had to be taken into account with the restructuring. Belichick planned to rely on the smarts and experience of his veteran scouts, men who were evaluating players when he was still in junior high school. But there was also the reality that even with the best intentions, scouts in their midfifties and early sixties weren’t going to totally embrace a new way of doing business. That new way was fluid, and it might change two or three times in the next couple years before Belichick and Lombardi were comfortable with it. Scouts such as Dom Anile, Ron Marciniak, and Ernie Plank knew that their way worked, so it wasn’t realistic to ask them to buy into something that wasn’t even finished.

  What Belichick needed was the wisdom of the scouts he had, as well as an influx of young, bright employees who would be “raised” in the Cleveland system. It was yet another idea he had when he took the job. He believed in developing scouts and coaches by hiring them for entry-level positions and then seeing if they could graduate from unofficial apprenticeships. The thought was that true football intellect and hunger could be displayed even while doing grunt work. And if the young employees were good at one thing, they would keep taking on responsibilities until they found their rightful place in the organization.

  After the three-win team Belichick inherited won six games in 1991, the coach reached out to one of those gifted youth. Scott Pioli was a twenty-seven-year-old defensive line coach at Murray State, and Belichick offered him a $16,000-per-year job as a scouting assistant. The Cleveland job was a pay cut from Murray, where Pioli had once been so cash-strapped that he sold parts of his prized childhood baseball card collection so he could pay his less than $200 monthly rent. Pioli was a friend of a friend, and the report that Belichick got years earlier was that all the kid wanted was a career in football. He was an all—New England defensive tackle at Central Connecticut and he looked the part: He stood six feet tall, and even at ease, he appeared to have just finished three sets of bench presses.

  Pioli thought he wanted to be a coach toward the end of his college playing days, and when he first met Belichick, he soaked up whatever he could from the brain of the Giants’ defense. When he told Belichick he was commuting 120 miles each day from his hometown of Washingtonville, New York, to watch the Giants in training camp, Belichick told him he was welcome to sleep on the spare couch in the dorm room that Belichick shared with Giants assistant Al Groh.

  “He had absolutely nothing to gain by that relationship, or by that offer,” Pioli says. “He offered me something
that was truly no strings attached. I couldn’t do anything for him. Nothing. Zero. Zilch. The defensive coordinator of the Giants offered some kid from Central Connecticut a place to stay so he didn’t have to travel as much and could watch multiple days of practice and film? That told me something about the guy.”

  Five years after his first meeting with Belichick, Pioli now had a chance to work for him. He had the option of leaving tiny Murray in western Kentucky for the NFL stage, and there was a proposal from the 49ers, too. It really didn’t matter what was going on in San Francisco. He was already loyal to the head coach of the Browns and he was going to work for him.

  He would fit right in with the culture that was developing in the organization, with a hyper-focus on the job and no regard for the accumulation of hours spent working at it or thinking about it. While at Murray, Pioli had been so locked on and lost in his assignments that he was unaware of world events. Once, he had been on the road for three days recruiting, staying in cheap hotels and driving hundreds of miles in a car that had just a gravelly AM radio, when someone finally told him what the rest of the country had been buzzing about: America was at war in the Persian Gulf. He had no idea.

  Initially, Pioli brought the same singular intensity to his new job. But as driven as Belichick was about football and reshaping the Browns, he sometimes pulled Pioli, who was single, aside and offered advice on how to approach having a family in the uncertain NFL.

  “You’re going to get fired in this business,” Belichick told him. “You’re going to quit. You’re going to get fired and run out of more jobs than you can count. This just isn’t a business where you last. Sometimes it’s in your control, but most of the time it’s not. If you’re going to have a family, make sure you have someplace that your family can always call home. They need that one stable place, a place that they know they can go back to every year and it will be there forever.”

  Even then, with Belichick just one season into a five-year contract, he had a sense that Cleveland was not going to be that forever place. For his wife and three young children, the place to establish roots was already Nantucket, the small island south of the Massachusetts cape.

  Pioli tucked away the words. He was a long way from marriage and Nantucket, especially on that salary. Most of the time when he was at work, he had the echoes of a brief exchange with Belichick ringing in his head. He had tried to thank the head coach for the opportunity in Cleveland, and he was cut off before he could finish the thought.

  “Just thank me by doing a good job,” Belichick said, ending the conversation.

  For Pioli, that meant learning to do a few tasks at once and making sure all of them were as detailed as Belichick and Lombardi demanded. When he was required to drive players to the Cleveland Clinic for extensive physicals, he knew that he could be at the hospital anywhere from ninety minutes to three hours. So he would bring stacks of paperwork with him, and while he waited, he would alphabetize files; highlight key information from SportScan, the league news feed that was faxed to teams daily; and pull statistics from media guides. In between, he usually did some unconventional scouting and took notes: He always paid attention to how players interacted with doctors, nurses, and any other non-football people they came across at the clinic.

  He wasn’t always in work mode, and when he wasn’t you could hear it for five or ten minutes. He and one of the Browns’ volunteers in scouting, twenty-year-old Jay Muraco, became buddies instantly. They both appreciated a wide range of music as well as the prankster humor of the Jerky Boys. Whenever they put on a bit called “Car Salesman,” which makes a reference to an area close to Pioli’s hometown, they would laugh and anyone walking by would laugh with them. Even though there wasn’t a huge age difference between them, Muraco looked up to Pioli. Sometimes Pioli would give Muraco assignments and use the same guidelines that Belichick used on him: Do a good job, and there will be more to come. If not, well, we’ll move on to something else.

  “We had these sheet-metal tags for the draft board, and you had to manually put the names of the players on them with a sticker,” says Muraco. “One time Scott asked me to work on it, and I thought I did a pretty good job. But I looked in the draft room later and he was straightening everything I had done. I guess they were crooked. He asked me to help him out with other things after that, but not the tags.”

  Pioli’s job description was proving to be exactly what Belichick said it was: a little of this and a little of that. Sometimes he was the handyman who fixed the jammed fax machine; sometimes he watched film. He and other employees, some his age and some thirty years older, were so focused on turning around the Browns that there was no time to realize that the team’s office was filling with future stars. The problem was that the stars weren’t on the field. The coaching staff had Nick Saban and Kirk Ferentz. The scouting department had Terry McDonough, Jim Schwartz, and Lionel Vital. Ozzie Newsome, the former Browns tight end, was available to both groups as he tried to figure out which he loved more, coaching or personnel.

  “I’ll tell you what it was: It was a great football think tank,” Lombardi says.

  The Browns who played on Sundays were a different story, and there was some local disagreement over why the team had finished just 7–9 in Belichick’s second season. In the eyes of Clevelanders, the Browns shouldn’t have been so far away. They had played for the conference championship just two years before Belichick was hired, and they still had quarterback Bernie Kosar, the city’s most popular athlete. Kosar had a lifetime goodwill pass from the fans, as much for what he had said as how he played. He was a local boy, from just outside of Youngstown, who had gone big time. He played his college football at the other Miami, not the university three hundred miles from his hometown but the one fifteen hundred miles away in sunny Coral Gables. He led the Hurricanes to a national championship as a redshirt freshman and was a second-team All-American and fourth-place Heisman finisher as a sophomore.

  He was also smart. After just three years of college, he was a few courses shy of graduating. That’s when he got Cleveland’s attention: He stood up and told the nation that he wanted to be a Brown. The city was forever defensive about the recurring Cleveland jokes that everyone in other cities seemed to tell, so Kosar’s words made him a hero before he ever played a game. And when he fought the NFL and intentionally bypassed the regular draft so he could be eligible for the supplemental one, in which Cleveland had maneuvered for the first pick, he automatically gained a city full of protectors. Bernie was theirs. Any problems the Browns had would never be placed on Bernie’s shoulders.

  Except Belichick didn’t quite see Kosar, or the team, the way the city saw them. He didn’t think it was a fluke that the Browns had gone 3–13 the year before he got the job. He saw a roster that couldn’t easily be shaped into the type of team he told Lombardi he wanted. In Kosar, he saw an intelligent leader who was becoming more and more physically limited, especially with an ankle that was broken twice in 1992. Belichick didn’t say that publicly, at least not for a while, but it didn’t matter: If the average Browns fan had to blame someone for the team losing, and the candidates were Kosar and Belichick, everyone knew that was a landslide.

  But the task of restocking the Browns became a lot easier after the 1992 season. In September of ’92, a federal judge in Minneapolis named David Doty ruled that the NFL’s version of free agency was illegal. Before the ruling, the Browns and every other team in the league were allowed to designate thirty-seven of their forty-five players as protected. Even if a player’s contract had expired, his original team maintained right of first refusal on any contract offers and was obligated to receive compensation if a player signed elsewhere. It was called Plan B free agency, and Doty ruled that it was restraint of trade and violated antitrust laws. The ruling meant that true free agency would exist the next season. It was good news for bad teams like the Browns, who struggled to find thirty-seven players whom they actually wanted to protect.

  Through their first tw
o drafts in Cleveland, Belichick and Lombardi had been spotty. They had selected Eric Turner, a physical safety who fit the blueprint for what they were looking for, with the second overall pick in ’91. But their second-rounder, guard Ed King, was a bust. The next year was worse. The first four picks were Tommy Vardell, Patrick Rowe, Bill Johnson, and Gerald Dixon. Only one, Johnson, came close to being an impact player in Cleveland.

  That’s why free agency was so important for the Browns, and it’s why they set their sights on the biggest prize available. Reggie White, a Hall of Fame—caliber defensive end in Philadelphia, was a free agent on tour for the best fit and the best contract. Cleveland had one of the early high bids, surprising since team owner Art Modell would soon complain of financial troubles. But ultimately White, an ordained minister, said God led him to Green Bay and greenbacks, and he signed a $17 million deal with the Packers. The Browns’ major free-agent signing was more controversial and considerably cheaper: Vinny Testaverde, who lost a quarterback competition to Kosar when both were college kids in Miami, was coming to compete with him again. He said he was comfortable being Kosar’s backup in Cleveland, but the Browns weren’t thinking that way. They signed him to a one-year deal for $2.5 million, which was $1 million more than he made the previous season as a starter.

  Pioli’s first year in the NFL had been quite an education. He learned a lot about the constant tension between team executives and the media by following the way Belichick was covered. If it wasn’t already an open secret, it would be during the 1993 season: The coach had dramatically reduced the media’s access, so in turn he wasn’t going to get any slack from the press. They would have to praise through clenched teeth if Belichick’s Browns put together a winning season. Anything short of that would bring them back to the villain, for whom they already had scripts written.