War Room

by Michael Holley

  “The next one I did had twenty notes on them. The one after that came back with four. And then they weren’t sent back anymore. It was simple: If I was given something to do, I was expected to do it absolutely perfectly, as best as I could, every time I did it. And if I did those things right, I’d get something else to do.”

  McDaniels also got a chance to see Pioli in action, whether it was managing the scouts, constructing contracts, speaking with agents, or looking for in-season ways to improve the roster. Pioli had tried to improve the ’01 scouting staff as well by extending an offer to Thomas Dimitroff, trying to get one of his closest friends in football to scout for the Patriots.

  Professionally, the move would make sense for everyone involved. Dimitroff would be a perfect fit for all aspects of the Patriots’ culture. He was meticulous and efficient in writing his reports, just like his father had been. He believed in what he saw and didn’t waste a lot of words trying to convince a director, or himself, that he was right. (“Some people want to write a portion of The Iliad,” he liked to joke. “Let’s stick with crisp, descriptive words and not get lost in the verbiage.”) He trusted Belichick and Pioli more than anyone in the league, and he knew there was a better chance of sustained success in New England than with his organization, the new Cleveland Browns.

  The NFL had granted Cleveland an expansion team after the original Browns left town in 1995. Dimitroff had been working with the Lions at that time and eventually began scouting the West. Scouts are typically based in the region that they cover, so Dimitroff settled in the utopia for lovers of the outdoors and clean living, Boulder, Colorado. He left the Lions for the Browns in 1998, a year before the new Browns took the field, and continued scouting the West.

  It wasn’t coincidental that he decided to work for the same team that his father proudly called an employer. He thought of his father’s impassioned advice often, and he consciously thought of walking the same halls that the Bulldog had. He also knew that working for the Browns meant that, for job purposes, he would be in northeast Ohio for long stretches three different times during the season. He’d be in for two weeks during training camp and a week apiece for the December and February draft meetings. That would allow him to spend more time with his mother, Helen, who had decided that she didn’t want to have another companion after losing her husband. It had been five years since Tom Dimitroff had passed, but he was still a presence.

  Thomas Dimitroff told Pioli that the following season, 2002, would probably be a better time to work for the Patriots.

  The story lines with the Patriots began to change in December and January. Only hard-core members of the Bledsoe Fan Club thought he should be the Patriots’ starter. The offense, with 240-pound running back Antowain Smith as the hammer and receiver Troy Brown negotiating the slot and perimeter, clicked when Brady ran it. He also seemed to buy into the team mind-set that the starting quarterback was no different from a special-teamer who was clinging to the roster. He modestly deflected any suggestions that he was becoming an idol for teenage girls and their moms, too, due to his leading-man good looks. He parroted everything that the coaches and team captains said, repeatedly found nice words to share about Bledsoe, and tried to prove that he saw himself as just a piece of the operation.

  But as much as he tried, it was hard to slow down Brady Mania. If Brady was willing, advertisers were there for him, and they knew they could have him pitching almost any product on the market. America would buy a likable kid with a simple name. America would buy cover-boy handsome with a tinge of aw-shucks sensibility. America would buy a winner.

  Three days before Christmas, the Patriots played their last home game of the regular season. They had won four in a row, which made their record 9–5. They were facing the Dolphins, a team they hadn’t beaten since Belichick became their coach. The Patriots won, 20–13, and jogged around Foxboro Stadium for ten minutes afterward. They were probably going to the play-offs, although it wasn’t official. And even if they did, there was no guarantee that they would play at home. So as far as the fans and players knew, it was the last game in the stadium’s history. A new facility, Gillette Stadium, was being constructed next door and would be ready for the 2002 season. But the demolition of Old Foxboro, with its aluminum seats and Division 2 luxuries, would have to wait.

  “Our transformation was magical with the emergence of Brady,” Bruschi says. “That’s what happened. Before Brady got in there, did I think we were good? No. I didn’t think we were upper-echelon. I thought if Drew had a Pro Bowl year, it would give us a chance of getting out of that so-so group and also give us a chance in the play-offs. But when Tom came in, boom, we took off.”

  But that was just part of it. For some reason, the real-life Patriots continued to encounter situations that seemed torn from the pages of fiction, and the fiction writer was always pro—New England. The fiction, either inspirational or horror, depending on where you lived, was tangible on January 19 in Foxboro. The Patriots had won their division and secured the number two seed in the play-offs. It truly was a dark and stormy night as they played their divisional game against Oakland in five inches of snow. If not for handheld snowblowers, no one would have been able to distinguish the yard lines.

  The game appeared to be over with 1:47 remaining and the Patriots trailing 13–10. Brady hadn’t recognized his college teammate, Charles Woodson, coming on a corner blitz. Woodson struck Brady, the ball fell to the ground, and Raiders linebacker Greg Biekert smothered the ball, recovering the apparent fumble. The Patriots were out of time-outs, so all the Raiders had to do was call a few plays and run out the clock.

  Except one of the replay officials in the press box had called for a review of the play. On CBS, which televised the game, announcer Greg Gumbel said that the previous play had “pretty much sealed” the win for Oakland. As he looked at the replays during the review, which was unusually long, he didn’t see anything that changed his mind. But his broadcast partner, Phil Simms, alluded to an obscure rule that he couldn’t remember the name of and said it might give possession to the Patriots.

  During the delay, an ecstatic Woodson pranced around the stadium with his helmet off, acknowledging the crowd. But the longer the review took, the more sixty-thousand-plus fans believed that they had a chance, even if many of them couldn’t make a case for why they felt that way.

  “We thought the same thing that everyone else in the stadium thought: It was a fumble,” says Roland Williams, the Raiders’ starting tight end. “Tom Brady thought it was a fumble, too. Watch the replay and you can see his head sink. He was dejected. And then came the review of infamy. It makes you wonder if it was a personal vendetta against [Raiders owner] Al Davis. That review took so long that you had time to call your cousin, your auntie, and your girl.”

  The suspense built, almost in lockstep with the song that was playing at the time, Phil Collins’s tense and trancelike “In the Air Tonight.” Brady stayed on the field for most of the review, his helmet pulled low near his eyes, fresh snow accumulating on the crown.

  Remarkably, the play was overturned by virtue of the rule Simms couldn’t remember the name of: the Tuck Rule. In the view of the officials, Brady was initially attempting to pass, with his arm going forward. As he tried to pull the ball, or tuck it, back to his body, it was knocked free, resulting in an incomplete pass. When the Raiders heard the explanation from referee Walt Coleman, all of them had the look of bitter employees who had completed their jobs yet somehow found themselves still on the clock.

  They must have known it wasn’t going to end well for them, even though kicker Adam Vinatieri still had to make the most difficult kick of his career, a forty-five-yarder, to tie the game. He had certainly made kicks from that distance before, although all but one of the six kicks he missed during the regular season were in the forty-to forty-nine-yard range. The snow was the obvious hurdle, causing Vinatieri to alter his approach. His kick would have been perfect for Fenway Park: a low line drive headed for the
top of the manual scoreboard on the Green Monster. Vinatieri’s low and powerful kick pierced the snow and then got lost in it, a football competing with a New England snowstorm. Those in the crowd who couldn’t actually see it looked at the officials, and they signaled that the kick, which barely cleared the crossbar, was good.

  The rest of the night, and season, would be in the hands of storytellers and dreamers. Eventually, Vinatieri would make another kick, much easier than his forty-five-yarder, and the Patriots were on their way to the conference championship game.

  “I respect the hell out of Tom Brady for what he said after the game,” Williams says. “He was shaking guys’ hands and he said to a lot of us, ‘Good game… I fumbled.’ We got screwed. I don’t know if the NFL was against us or not, but I want you to think about something: We played back-to-back play-off games, against the Jets and Patriots, and our opponents had a total of one penalty. One! Is that even possible?”

  It was one of the topics the Raiders would debate on the way home. They called the back of their team plane “Club Taliban” for its collection of intimidating trash-talkers, card and dice players, and unofficial scouts who liked to tell you, through sips of alcohol, how you could have played better that day. Anyone who wanted to use the bathroom on the cross-country flight had to pass through that area. “It was a helluva ride,” Williams says. “At least we can all say we catapulted Brady’s and Vinatieri’s careers.”

  For Belichick and Pioli, who arrived in New England with a vision for decades-long excellence, the unexpected success of the Patriots was going to require open minds and discipline. They had to be open-minded because they knew the team had flaws. Both of them had virtually grown up with the New York Giants, one of them as a coach and the other as a fan, and they knew how true greatness was supposed to look. The Patriots had elements of greatness, but through and through, they weren’t there yet. The men in charge of building the roster knew that they would have to take second and third looks at free agents who were appearing to be more than stopgaps and veteran players who were playing far above what their capabilities were supposed to be.

  They’d also need to be disciplined enough to avoid getting swept in the region’s and, increasingly, nation’s emotions about the team. The Patriots were embraceable because of how they were perceived. They were a starless group, the story went, that was powered by heart, luck, and Belichick’s brain. If Belichick and Pioli made future personnel decisions based on local sentiment, they’d be tempted to keep the team as-is.

  New England was deeply in love with the team, even before it arrived in Pittsburgh and upset the Steelers for the conference title, 24–17. In that game, the literary theme was redemption, with Brady spraining an ankle and turning the game over to his backup, Drew Bledsoe. Bledsoe was so excited to play, for the first time since he had gotten hurt, that he practically skipped on the field. He didn’t throw passes as much as he launched them, the football coming out of his hand with such velocity that it seemed as if it were fired from a throwing machine. On one play, he even rolled to the sideline, in a Mo Lewis redux, and was popped as he went out of bounds. But this time he leapt up, smiling and clapping his hands. Usually buttoned-down and restrained, Bledsoe was more emotional than he’d ever been in his nine seasons in New England. He completed ten passes, one of them a touchdown to David Patten. After the game, he held the Lamar Hunt Trophy and wept.

  When the Patriots arrived in New Orleans for the Super Bowl, they may have been the only ones in the city looking forward to the actual game. Their opponent would be the last team they had lost to, the Saint Louis Rams, and it wasn’t supposed to be close. Leading up to the game, the general conversations were about the surreal New Orleans parties, the irresistible food at dozens of city restaurants, the approaching Mardi Gras season, and the fact that the Rams might be on their way to a dynasty with a second Super Bowl win in three seasons.

  Most of the Patriots were too confident to listen to the consensus of Football America, and a couple of them weren’t even in town to hear it. Because of the quick turnaround of traveling from Pittsburgh to Foxboro to New Orleans, Belichick came up with an idea. His coordinators, Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel, would stay in New England an extra day and prepare their game plans. That way, Weis and Crennel could focus on a normal workday, travel after work, and not have to worry about disrupting their routine and losing time.

  Belichick traveled with the team and then huddled with Ernie Adams, a man he had known since they were both teenage football players at Phillips Academy, a prestigious New England prep school. Adams had many roles for the Patriots. He sat in the coaches’ box on game days and had frequent conversations with Belichick about what he saw from the sky. He sat in on scouting meetings. He was a football historian-savant who, off the top of his head, could connect a formation from the present to a similar one that someone used in 1955. He was a sounding board and adviser, just another smart voice that Belichick could go to for opinions.

  With Belichick and Adams in one city and Weis and Crennel in the other, the group faxed ideas back and forth until they came up with a collaborative, Best of Our Ideas plan to upset the Rams. They had a blizzard of schemes and stats, but they would never present those to the team. Belichick, the son of a coach and a schoolteacher, knew how to make complex ideas simple. He was going to stress just a few things to the defense, with number one being stopping Marshall Faulk. They believed that he truly was the team’s quarterback, even though Kurt Warner played the position. They could learn a lot about what the Rams’ offense wanted to do by studying Faulk, so he was the key man for the week.

  The nation wasn’t buying it. As lovable as the Patriots were, Las Vegas saw a runaway coming. Oddsmakers installed the Rams as 14-point favorites. Many believed that it would be a mini-upset if the Patriots were still competitive by halftime. But the day before the game, Belichick sat in his work suite at the team’s French Quarter hotel, the Fairmont, and coolly answered, “Sure,” when asked if he saw a way of slowing the Rams down.

  “Oh, they’re definitely more talented than we are,” he said, leaning back in his chair. “And they’re fast. But think of a fast-break team in basketball. They usually don’t want to play a half-court game. They don’t want to be pushed around. It makes them a different team.”

  True to what they had become during the season, the Patriots began Super Bowl XXXVI unlike anyone else. For years, Super Bowl tradition had been solo introductions of team members. It might be your only chance to play in such a big game, recognized by a worldwide audience, so why not at least take off your helmet and let the world hear your name and see your face? The previous year, Baltimore’s Ray Lewis was introduced and took the opportunity to do an elaborate fraternity dance. But the Patriots, who had talked all year of the group being more powerful than the individual, chose to be introduced as a team.

  “It was us making a statement that this was how we were going to win,” Troy Brown says. “We had come together many times that season and become closer, from 9/11 to the death of [quarterbacks coach] Dick Rehbein. We didn’t think it was the time to be taking off our helmets and celebrating ourselves. We thought, ‘If you’re going to beat us, you’re going to have to beat us this way.’”

  “I knew it was over as soon as I saw that,” says Williams, the Raiders’ tight end. “They just destroyed everybody’s psyche with that move. Whoever came up with it was a freakin’ genius.”

  In the second quarter, all aspects of teamwork got everyone’s attention in the Superdome. Warner dropped back to pass and appeared to be surprised by Crennel’s defensive call. The Patriots were in a 46 defense, popularized in the 1980s by Buddy Ryan, the father of Patriots linebackers coach Rob Ryan. The call was Turkey Zero, and it left Vrabel with a free shot at Warner. He hit him just as he threw, causing the ball to float. Cornerback Ty Law quickly read the play, caught the ball while he was in stride, and ran forty-seven yards down the sideline for a touchdown.

  A couple of serie
s later, the “half-court football” continued. Rams receiver Ricky Proehl was hit hard by the Patriots’ Antwan Harris and fumbled. That led to another touchdown, Brady to Patten, and a 14–3 Patriots lead. Just as they had planned, the Patriots followed Faulk and pushed him whenever they could. Even when he didn’t appear to be the primary option on passing plays, Faulk got a bump or shiver from a defensive lineman or linebacker. It seemed to disrupt the Rams until the fourth quarter.

  The Patriots were on the verge of a blowout with ten minutes to play. The Rams had driven to the Patriots’ three, but Warner fumbled the ball into the hands of safety Tebucky Jones. Jones sprinted ninety-seven yards for what was thought to be a touchdown and 24–3 lead. But the officials had noticed Willie McGinest bear-hugging the game’s target, Faulk, and called holding. The Rams eventually scored to make it 17–10.

  Brady and the offense were having a hard time moving against the quick and aggressive Rams defense. They were the third-best unit in the league, and they seemed to know exactly what the Patriots wanted to do. They kept giving Warner and the offense chances to produce, and the offense finally delivered with 1:37 to play to tie the score at 17.

  By the time Brown returned the kickoff to the Patriots’ seventeen-yard line, there was just 1:21 to play. Both teams were out of time-outs. John Madden, a Fox broadcaster and Hall of Fame coach, went on the air and outlined what the Patriots should do: “With this field position, you have to just run the clock out. You have to play for overtime now. I don’t think you want to force anything here. You don’t want to do anything stupid. Because you have no time-outs and you’re backed up.”

  After a four-yard pass to J. R. Redmond, Madden continued.

  “I don’t agree with what the Patriots are doing right here,” he said. He stuttered a bit over the next thought, seeming to slightly doubt himself as he said it: “I would play for overtime. If I had good field position I wouldn’t. But in this field position I would play for overtime.”