War Room

by Michael Holley

  During the drive, Belichick did most of the talking.

  “There are highs and lows in this business,” he said, “and this is one of those moments where you’re reminded that we all in this business don’t treat our families well enough. We don’t give them what they deserve. You know, the only people who are going to support you unconditionally are your family.”

  The recently married Pioli drove and listened. Belichick had given him a similar talk eight years earlier in Cleveland. But that one had felt more speculative and far-off. This was more relevant and pointed, especially since Pioli was going to have to learn to expertly balance professional success with family connections.

  His wife, Dallas, was Parcells’s daughter. Parcells had been in the business long enough to understand how to compartmentalize. From one perspective, Pioli was someone who had known Belichick for more than a decade and was loyal to him for bringing him to the NFL. Looking at it that way, of course Parcells was going to allow him the opportunity to advance professionally under someone who guided him through the business. As for holidays and family dinners and birthdays, Pioli and Parcells would give those the attention they deserved and keep them separate from their shoptalk.

  Belichick’s arrival in Foxboro, Massachusetts, was layered with significance. He had disagreed with Parcells many times over the years, but this was the first time the public got any hint of a rift. As a result, whatever he did in New England would now be viewed without a Parcells prism, and that hadn’t happened since he was in his early thirties, before Parcells became head coach of the Giants. There would be no assisting Parcells or cynical whispers that he was trying to be Parcells. His actions had said it all. The last person he wanted to pattern himself after was the man he had said, “No, thanks,” to in New York.

  He was certainly going to bring some of the Parcells familiarity back to the Patriots, with no tolerance for excuses and a disdain for employees with a sense of entitlement. But he would do it his way, and it would start with the clout given to him by Kraft. This was his team to build, in all aspects of football operations. He officially had the autonomy that Kraft hadn’t given Parcells. The only thing missing from Belichick’s return, four years after he had left, was a Welcome Home banner.

  “When Belichick took over in New England, there was a sort of purging of the Pete Carroll mentality,” says Tedy Bruschi, who had been coached by Parcells and Belichick in 1996, his rookie year. “You know, Pete had that ‘Everything’s going to be okay’ type of attitude. No, everything’s not going to be okay. It’s not going to be okay if you don’t do anything about it. And that’s the attitude that I always wanted.

  “I made the most of what Pete was trying to do. I felt like I was one of his guys, too, to tell you the truth. Because I would believe in the head man in charge and try to convey his message to the team. But a lot of guys weren’t hearing it. I truly believe you have to put pressure on professional athletes to get the most out of them. You have to threaten them with their jobs. Especially certain guys who get contracts and get comfortable—and add to that a coach who enables them—and they forget to work.

  “Pete never used pressure. He was a very positive-reinforcement type of guy. And that coming in after Parcells was a stark contrast.”

  At the end of 2000, a five-win season, the Patriots parted ways with twenty-eight players who had spent at least one game on the roster. Included in the cuts were popular left tackle Bruce Armstrong and four high draft picks from Grier’s classes. As for Grier, he was gone, too.

  Fortunately for Belichick, he had good instincts when it came to football guys. When he hired Pioli in Cleveland, he felt the best place for him was in scouting. Pioli quickly proved himself with his willingness to work at all hours, and by the time the Browns left for Baltimore, he was one of the best personnel men in the league. When he was with the Jets, he displayed an ability to recognize all talent, from the obviously great players to the ones who would be subtle pieces in the machine. He fully endorsed pursuing Seattle free agent Kevin Mawae and making him the highest-paid center in the league, but he also pushed for players in their late twenties and early thirties whom other teams had discarded. Those were the gritty players, such as Anthony Pleasant, Rick Lyle, and Bryan Cox, who had such impactful personalities that they could be team leaders whether they started or became specialists.

  In Cleveland, there had been more of a traditional boss-employee relationship between Belichick and the young man he hired in 1992, the twenty-seven-year-old Pioli. But in early 2001, with Belichick still clearly in command in New England, the working relationship had evolved into more of a partnership. Pioli was thirty-six and on the very short list of people whom Belichick trusted as advisers and confidants. Those who didn’t know Belichick well were occasionally intimidated by his curiosity. The coach would sometimes ask people around him what they thought, which could lead to nervous rambling from those who weren’t sure what the “right” answer was. But Pioli always knew the right answer: There wasn’t one. Belichick was just asking for opinions. He wasn’t trying to set people up. He might challenge a position that didn’t seem quite right, but overall he was generally interested in the football thoughts of people on his staff and how they saw certain situations.

  “I think it’s this way with a lot of leaders: There are certain people they’ll allow to disagree with them and continue to seek their opinions, and there are others they won’t,” Pioli says. “Bill never discouraged me. Because even when we disagreed and got into it, he never discouraged me from having a different opinion.

  “But there were a lot of times where, because of Bill’s personality, he would just ask questions. A lot of times he would just get your position on things and never tell you his. Now, this is why Bill is so different than so many people I’ve encountered in life, period: When he’s asking those questions, you know that every fiber in his body is about winning and doing what is best for the team, with no personal and/or selfish motive.

  “I knew him so well and trusted him implicitly; I didn’t even have to consider if there was a backroom game going on in his head. And that makes the work environment easy, man. You knew he was all about winning, doing the job well, doing it thoroughly, and being prepared.”

  There were times Belichick didn’t have to share his opinion with Pioli because their ideas were so similar. Pioli had Belichick’s trust, so when it was time to reshape the team in the spring of 2001, the head coach knew he had a man in personnel who had a sharp mind for free agency and the draft. He needed all the power and wit of the minds around him, because his team had finished last in the AFC East.

  Pioli found one of those gritty players with leadership potential in Pittsburgh. He was twenty-five, 260 pounds, and projected as a starting outside linebacker in New England. Those were the positives. What took some faith was the fact that he had played in fifty-one games in his career, started none of them, and had just eleven tackles in 2000. His name was Mike Vrabel. He was one of many linebackers who signed with the Patriots in the off-season, joining Cox, Roman Phifer, and Larry Izzo.

  Few people outside of football operations realized what was happening in Foxboro. The firm but flexible scouting system that Belichick had dreamed of a decade earlier was finally ready to be put into practice. In the early 1990s, he had asked for a system that was specific but not oppressively so. He asked for a grading scale that was easy to understand yet complex enough to reflect, for example, the value of an average offensive lineman who could play two positions vs. an above-average lineman who could just play one. He wanted to assign letters, numbers, and words that would accurately describe every player in pro and college football. In turn, he and Pioli could approach each draft and free-agency period with the best chance of scientifically building the team they wanted: bigger and stronger than most; tough enough to practice and play in the unpredictable weather of the Northeast; fast; infused with football smarts and passion.

  The system borrowed from other places,
but overall it was original, so it truly was creating another language. It had a basic overall grading scale, from 1 to 9. But arriving at that grade could be quite a process because some positions, such as safety, required a scout to consider as many as twenty-four different factors (from the ability to quarterback the secondary to effectiveness in deep zone coverage to catching skills). The three general areas from which grades were derived were called Major Factors, Critical Factors, and Position Skills. Most players were graded on Major Factors, which measure seven specific areas from athletic ability to personal behavior and toughness. The specifics of the other two categories changed depending on what position is being analyzed.

  What made such an exhaustive system fun was that it was built with football evolution in mind. It could be expanded or reduced to capture the changes and trends in the game. The emergence of pass-catching tight ends and slot receivers increased the value of those positions, while the opposite is true of fullbacks, since the position has been recently deemphasized. One of the things that made the system different was that it absolutely required a scout to know his college area or region of coverage in addition to each member of the Patriots’ fifty-three-man roster. All reports, without exception, were comparative and were based on what a given prospect could do vs. any current Patriot playing his position.

  In April 2001, the Patriots went into the draft knowing that they wanted to spend their first two picks improving the defensive and offensive lines. They had detailed descriptions for the type of players they wanted at defensive end and left tackle. Now all they had to do was hope they fell to them. Their first two selections were in slots 6 and 39, which is proof that they were a bad team, but Belichick was still able to find an advantage from those draft positions.

  “When you’re picking at number six, in terms of your draft preparation, I think that’s a relatively easy position to be in,” he says. “You’ve got five teams ahead of you, and you know who a couple of those players are going to be. So then, what’s left? And maybe it’s A or B, but you have a pretty good idea what you’re going to do. And then once you solidify that first pick, you know a lot of players will be gone when you pick at thirty-nine, and you know who those players are. I mean, not all of them, but certainly a big portion of them. So if you know who your pick’s going to be at six, and you’re not going to trade it, well, in the process now you’re way ahead of the game.”

  To Belichick’s point, three picks in the top five were locks: Michael Vick, Leonard Davis, and LaDainian Tomlinson. That left the Patriots sure they’d get the number one player on their board, six-foot-six-inch Richard Seymour from Georgia, a three-hundred-plus-pound defensive end. The fans wanted a receiver, but the Patriots were certain Seymour had All-Pro abilities and that he’d have no problems fulfilling any part of the system ideally at his position; he matched the team’s player description perfectly: “This player must have explosive strength and leverage to stuff an offensive lineman and win the battle for the neutral zone… He must be able to play with strong, fast hands… He must be able to knock the offensive line back and establish a new line of scrimmage… This is a disciplined position that requires discipline in technique and responsibility. Other defenders’ ability and production is tied directly to this player’s performance.”

  When Seymour came off the board and the draft unfolded, the Patriots realized they still had several players they liked when they got to 39. So they traded back in the draft, and when the tackle they wanted, Purdue University’s Matt Light, appeared to be on the Jets’ radar, they moved one slot ahead of them and picked him.

  The first two picks alone made it a successful and smart day of drafting and had already put Belichick far ahead of where he was with the Browns. He and Pioli had just picked two immediate starters with Pro Bowl talents.

  On September 23, 2001, the Patriots trailed the Jets by a touchdown, 10–3, in the fourth quarter. With five minutes to play, Drew Bledsoe rolled to his right and began to run upfield. He seemed to be indecisive. He couldn’t figure out if he wanted to run out of bounds and come up short of the first-down marker or stay in play and take on linebacker Mo Lewis.

  Bledsoe took on Lewis, and the rest is both sports and medical history. Lewis hit Bledsoe with such force that the collision led to a sheared blood vessel in the quarterback’s chest cavity. No one was aware just how severe the injury was until Bledsoe got to Massachusetts General Hospital and had to have blood drained from the left side of his chest. One of the doctors who treated Bledsoe said he had never seen an injury like it in a professional athlete. The Patriots lost that game, fell to 0–2, and decided to play the rest of the season with Bledsoe’s backup, Tom Brady.

  When Bledsoe recovered and was ready to take his starting job back, he was told that such a thing didn’t exist. He still had a job, just not one as a starter. He had signed a ten-year contract extension in the off-season that could be worth up to $103 million if he reached each roster bonus and incentive. He was a smart man, though, and whenever he asked Belichick about the job the answer was the same: The job was Brady’s. Bledsoe was the first Patriots star who believed that Belichick had swindled him out of a position, but he would have had more perspective if he could have seen the future or even considered what had happened with Bernie Kosar in Belichick’s past. Over the years, making tough decisions and replacing seemingly indispensable players would become the Patriots’ way of doing business.

  “I’ll tell you this story, and it’s mean and it’s, you know, the brutality of the NFL,” Bruschi says. “I didn’t know how seriously Drew had been hurt after that hit by Mo Lewis. I was driving home after the game by myself, talking to my brother on the phone. I told him, ‘It’s no wonder Drew got the crap knocked out of him. He’s been holding the ball too long all year.’ That’s the frustration I was having with Drew at the time, and we’re talking about a guy who was one of my good friends on the team. That’s just the way football is. It’s either you’re helping us win or you’re not.

  “Honestly, I saw Brady in there and thought, ‘Man, it’s time. It really is time.’ I saw that we had good players and were getting a foundation. I thought we could take that step and get better.”

  Brady-Bledsoe was a local story that became national when the Patriots started to put together some wins under second-year quarterback Brady. He had been the best and luckiest pick of Belichick’s first draft class in 2000, lasting until the sixth round and the 199th overall selection. He was a throwing and breathing reminder that sometimes karma and chance sneak into the scouting process, which is usually the realm of cold analysis and lots of cold cash.

  Belichick had no problem with that. He had been around long enough to remember lucky and unlucky breaks. He still recalls a player he wanted in the third round and was just ten spots away from selecting. It was 1995, his last year in Cleveland and Parcells’s next-to-last in New England.

  “I called Bill and said, ‘Look, we’ll move up ten spots and give you a fourth.’ It was a good deal. It was way more than what it should have been for that move,” Belichick says. “And Bill was usually looking to accumulate picks. He said, ‘It’s pretty good. Yeah, I think we might be interested in doing that. Let me think about it.’ So he called back and said he was going to stay and pick. He only saw one guy left who he really wanted. We saw one guy left, too. Once Bill turned down the deal, I knew he was going to pick him.”

  It was running back Curtis Martin, who played for the Patriots and Jets. He ended his career as the fourth-leading rusher in NFL history. Sometimes you just miss on Curtis Martin and land a quarterback named Eric Zeier instead. Sometimes you pick Adrian Klemm and Dave Stachelski before stumbling into Tom Brady.

  With all the 2001 focus on Bledsoe and Brady and their leading dramatic roles in The Franchise vs. the Near Freshman, it was easy to forget that similar battles for starting jobs were happening on defense, too.

  Bruschi had not begun the season as the starting inside linebacker. He was part of the r
otation, but a lot of the reps had gone to Cox and Ted Johnson. When they both got hurt, Bruschi stepped in and never came out. He would go to work on Wednesday mornings, eager to see the game plans. That’s where players found out everything they needed to know. If their numbers were listed on those pages in starting positions, they knew they’d be getting a heavy workload in the game. Each Wednesday, Bruschi saw a “54” in the space for starting inside linebacker. The coaches had continually told the players that they would go with whoever was playing best at the time, no matter what, and they were proving it by playing the best middle linebacker and the best quarterback.

  While the Patriots on the field were gaining confidence, the same could be said for upstart Patriots in the front office. Since his Cleveland days, Belichick had been a believer in developing young coaching and scouting talent. In 2001, he brought in an entry-level employee who would be used as a helper for coaches and scouts. Josh McDaniels was twenty-five and grew up in the birthplace of pro football, Canton, Ohio. His father, Thom, was a high school football coach who once led Canton’s McKinley High to an undefeated season and a national championship. That team was quarterbacked by Josh’s brother, Ben. Josh McDaniels had worked at Michigan State for one of Belichick’s best friends in coaching, Nick Saban. In New England, he was expected to do whatever Pioli asked in scouting, and he was also given an important and tedious coaching task that Belichick would carefully inspect.

  “I used to do what were called pads, which were the game breakdowns,” McDaniels says. “Everything you saw on film, you had to draw and put on those pads. It wasn’t easy and they took forever to get done. I remember the first time I handed them in to Bill, he sent them back with what must have been sixty sticky notes on them. ‘This is wrong… That guy wasn’t there… This was the halfback, not the fullback.’ On and on. And I thought, ‘Okay, obviously I have some work to do.’