The Patriots’ 2002 season ended, unofficially, as Belichick was driving home following a 27–24 win over the Dolphins. It was an awful feeling: The Patriots were 9–7 and needed help or else the Jets were going to take the division in a tiebreaker. There was no help coming, and Belichick could see that as he watched the first half of the Jets-Packers game from his office. His family and friends were there, but as the game got out of hand, he announced he was leaving. They could stay if they wanted, but he would be more comfortable sitting in postgame traffic, thinking of how to improve the Patriots in 2003. Some reinforcements were going to come, naturally, through the draft. But he already had a few free agents in mind, and it was going to take a lot of the owner’s money to get them.
Robert Kraft was more than a football fan who grew up in Brookline, Massachusetts. He was a lifelong football risk-taker. As a college student at Columbia, he would sneak out to play intramural football, keeping the news from his parents. Practicing their Jewish faith, Kraft’s parents didn’t answer their phone until after sundown on the Sabbath, and that’s when they learned that their son in New York was up to something: They received a call from the school and were told that he had been hurt in a game and needed knee surgery.
When he was twenty-nine, in 1971, Kraft bought his family Patriots season tickets. At the time they lived in a charming brick house on Gralynn Road in Newton, and the family tradition was that the Kraft children would swarm their father at the door as he entered the front foyer after work. He was a hero that day with his oldest son, seven-year-old Jonathan, as he opened his briefcase and held up the tickets. But the woman of the house, wife Myra, thought season tickets for a young family building its wealth was a stretch. The stretch became an elaborate chess game in the 1980s and early 1990s, as Kraft systematically put himself in position to buy the Patriots. The climactic moment came after the 1993 season, when the financially unstable franchise appeared to be headed to Saint Louis until Kraft, who already owned Foxboro Stadium, purchased the team for a record sum at the time, nearly $200 million.
The owner was invested in the team, by any definition.
Like everyone else in his organization in February 2002, he had the time of his life during Super Bowl week in New Orleans. He was the prince of the French Quarter. People he didn’t know treated him as if he was an old buddy from their hometown and they needed to buy a few rounds to catch up and toast the memories. They bought him drinks and called him “Bobby,” thankful that he presided over a franchise that had taken them on such an unpredictable journey. But historically, the Patriots’ 2002 season was as predictable as it was disappointing. Just three teams in the previous twenty years, the 49ers, Cowboys, and Broncos, had won back-to-back Super Bowls. Excluding the repeat champions, all of the Super Bowl winners in that period had combined to win nine play-off games the year after winning the championship.
Still, Kraft searched for answers in January 2003. During one of the coaches’ self-scouting meetings, Kraft quietly entered the conference room and took a seat by the door. The idea of the exercise was to rigorously analyze the strengths and weaknesses of each Patriot so everyone could understand where they were and where they needed to go. What was the point of diving into free-agency and draft needs if they weren’t tuned in to their own personnel? The coaches were talking about offensive linemen, and when they got to the young and talented Damien Woody, they had good things to say. Woody had been drafted as a center but often played guard, especially when the team was in the shotgun formation. They called him smart, tough, competitive, and durable.
Kraft was annoyed. He raised his hand, signaling that he wanted to speak.
“I have an issue with the analysis of Woody,” he said. “How do we say all those things about him and not mention his problems with shotgun snapping? It’s either something that he needs to work on or something he can’t do, but I think it should be mentioned.”
A couple coaches made eye contact with the owner but didn’t respond. Really, did any of them want to pick this issue as their battle point? A couple weeks earlier, still jolted by the non-play-off season, Kraft had left late-night voice mails for Belichick and Pioli, requesting a meeting to talk about why they thought the season unfolded the way it did. This clearly was not a case of absentee ownership. Just as quietly as he entered the room, Kraft completed his statement and walked out the door.
There were a few stunned glances just after he left, and then business continued as usual. There wasn’t an assistant coach in the room who was going to stand up and challenge the owner for questioning their reports. And the one man who could have done it, Belichick, understood Kraft’s thinking. The owner routinely negotiated a complicated pass in professional sports. He was able to regularly check in on football operations without meddling. He asked questions and threw out topics that could be debated, but he never made suggestions to Belichick about players he wanted to see signed or drafted. If there was a message to his visit, it was simply that he was paying attention.
All the Patriots coaches and scouts were used to animated debates, especially when they were trying to trim the fat and get to a bottom line. It was that time of year for the scouts, who were trying to bring the draft board into focus, and it was like that for the coaches, who were making their cases for players who should stay or go. One of the loudest and most uncomfortable arguments contained a bit of foreshadowing. It pitted Belichick vs. Eric Mangini, a thirty-two-year-old coach who had aced all of the projects Belichick had given him in Cleveland, New York, and New England and therefore advanced through the system.
Mangini was in charge of the secondary, and a few times during the season he seemed to take it personally when Belichick picked apart players whom he had coached. He was close to safety Tebucky Jones, and Jones happened to be one of the players with whom Belichick had a problem. Belichick liked for his scouts and assistant coaches to have opinions and voice them, but this would go beyond that. It would be an argument that didn’t have an easy, agree-to-disagree exit button. Belichick had been disgusted by his defense, which had given up just 10 fewer points than the Houston Texans, who were in their first year of existence. He was embarrassed by it. He was on edge. He almost dared someone to make a case that he didn’t think could be made: that Victor Green was fast and that Jones could tackle. Mangini took the bait.
Belichick sat at the head of a conference table and Mangini sat three or four seats away to his right. Pioli was in the room, too, along with the coaches, and many of them followed the points and counterpoints with their heads. It was like watching a profane match of verbal tennis. While Mangini held his ground making the case for Green’s production, citing his team-leading three fumble recoveries and one touchdown off an interception, Belichick’s argument was unassailable when the film came on. Green seemed to take forever running from Point A to B. He was tough and determined, and both men agreed on that. But it was clear, no matter how much Mangini protested, that he wouldn’t be coaching Green or Jones, and maybe not even fan favorite Lawyer Milloy, in 2003.
The argument wasn’t going anywhere fast, so someone suggested that they should all take a break. During the break, a couple of people who witnessed the disagreement shook their heads, whispering that Mangini had been too aggressive and crossed the line. Perhaps he had, but it was nothing compared to what Belichick vs. Mangini would become in the future.
On the other hand, Kraft’s input was pointed yet always measured. He was one of the richest men in America and had dominated the paper products industry, but he wasn’t afraid to ask football people questions that he didn’t know the answer to. He would sit in on squad meetings and take notes. He worked at truly learning the ins and outs of the game. He occasionally challenged and questioned his football operations people in January and February, and in March he did something else: He sprang open his checkbook.
In 2003, the top available free agent was twenty-five-year-old linebacker Rosevelt Colvin III. He had what every team in the league was loo
king for: size, speed, and the ability to rush the passer. He was smart, too, sounding very much like a young man who had been raised by educators. His father, Rosevelt II, was a longtime science teacher in the Indianapolis public schools. His mother, Bessie, was a music teacher whose piano playing could be heard anywhere from school plays to local commercials.
The Patriots saw Colvin as someone who could give them a pass-rushing threat off the edge. Pleasant had done that, for other teams, when he was younger. And although Willie McGinest had the talent to do it, he was thirty-one and the team had left him unprotected in the 2002 expansion draft. If Colvin came to town, he’d likely be taking McGinest’s starting job. But Colvin didn’t appear to be a financial match for the Patriots. They weren’t known for setting the market on a player, and it looked as if that was what it was going to take to land a linebacker who had a gift—getting to the quarterback—coveted by the entire league. When Colvin visited New England, he began to understand why the Patriots were known more as football purists than entertainers. He was picked up from the airport in a dusty 1989 Taurus, and when he got to the stadium he was given a tour in darkness.
“I remember seeing the weight room, the locker room, the meeting rooms, all with the lights off,” Colvin says, laughing. “When I finally sat down with Bill and Scott, they quizzed me on what I was doing in certain situations on the field. And after that, Bill put on some old Giants film and we watched L.T. [Lawrence Taylor] and Pepper Johnson. That impressed me, man. This was about lineage. Bill and Romeo Crennel had coached L.T., who pretty much trademarked the game. These guys knew what they were talking about.”
The unadorned approach to football appealed to him. He signed for seven years and $30 million, a reasonable contract relative to the projections, which were millions of dollars higher. A little more than a month before the draft, the Patriots were starting to carry out the plans that had been shaped by meetings, both cool and tense; scouting; and thorough film study. Rodney Harrison, a former San Diego Chargers safety with the temperament of a middle linebacker, signed a day after Colvin. At the very least, Harrison would be the replacement for Jones and maybe Milloy if the Patriots couldn’t get him to take a pay cut and make his salary more cap-friendly. That was unlikely to happen for the proud Milloy, especially since he would be asked to take less money as the Patriots were spending it on his position. Free-agent cornerback Tyrone Poole signed next, most likely to replace thirty-seven-year-old Otis Smith, and eventually the much-debated Tebucky Jones was traded to New Orleans for draft picks in 2003 and 2004.
The maneuvering continued the night before the draft. In the NFL’s version of easy money, the Patriots traded one of the picks they had gotten from New Orleans, a 2003 third, to Miami for a 2004 second. On the morning of the draft, game day for the scouts, the team’s cafeteria was abuzz over what might happen in a few hours. The Patriots had a minimalist approach when it came to access to the draft room, so the majority of the scouts wouldn’t be in there when decisions were made. They had their own unofficial session over scrambled eggs, bacon, and toast, excitedly going over the best players they had interviewed and worked out over the course of the year. Through a combination of instincts, gossip, and knowing the men they worked for, a couple of scouts had correctly predicted who the Patriots would pick with the first of their two first-rounders: Ty Warren, a defensive lineman from Texas A&M. Warren had played in a scheme similar to New England’s, and he had excelled at tackle and end. He also had the profile the team was looking for: mature for his age and serious about football. When the team brought him in for a predraft visit, he wore a jacket and tie. The team had interviewed other players who didn’t seem as prepared for the moment as Warren was.
For Belichick and Pioli, their weekend of drafting was full of shifting and computing. They’d field an offer from one team, quickly weigh its pros and cons, and then take a phone call from someone else and see how that deal matched up. They traded up one spot with Chicago to secure Warren. They traded away their second first-round pick, at number 19, to Baltimore in exchange for a second-round pick in 2003 and a first-rounder in ’04. They then took the second they got from Baltimore and, concerned that corners were coming off the board too quickly, moved up five spots to take Illinois cornerback Eugene Wilson. After selecting Wilson, they moved up again in the second to take receiver Bethel Johnson, Warren’s teammate at A&M.
They were excited to move up in the fourth, too. There was a kid from Central Florida, Asante Samuel, whom defensive assistant Josh McDaniels had loved while working him out. McDaniels said the kid, a cornerback, loved playing against the best competition in the country, a sign that he would perform better than usual in big games. In the fifth, Belichick reacted as if he had been promised crème brûlée and simply got vanilla ice cream instead. Pioli had been high on a center from Boston College, but Belichick sighed when he officially picked Dan Koppen. He’d be more excited in a few months, when he’d see Koppen in training camp and watch him emerge as a first-year starter. Finally, in the seventh, the team got lucky and drafted Tully Banta-Cain, a defensive end from Cal-Berkeley who probably should have gone in the fourth.
It wasn’t just that the draft weekend had been as smooth as they had planned; the previous couple months had been exceptional. Since Belichick and Pioli were hyper-conscious of the budget, they knew they still had some negotiating to do with Lawyer Milloy. He hadn’t been great at safety in 2002, and his cap number for 2003 was well over $4 million. There was no way the Patriots were going to pay that, especially since they had signed Harrison. They knew it, Milloy knew it, and so did the entire team.
“You know Lawyer,” former Patriots receiver Troy Brown says. “He’s going to say what’s on his mind. He was pretty open about his situation. It came up a lot during training camp. We all knew the team wanted him to take a pay cut.”
What no one knew was how far the team was willing to go.
Players who had been part of the 2001 championship team were starting to get that same Super Bowl feeling in the summer of 2003. The defense had been switched to the one Belichick preferred, a 3–4, and a fourth-round pick had been sent to Chicago for one of the best and surliest run stuffers in the game, nose tackle Ted Washington. He was exactly what the defense needed up front, a one-man mountain range who couldn’t be budged and never could be blocked one on one. He was loved by his teammates, but he scowled when approached by reporters, grunting out reluctant answers to questions. He liked to hear jokes as much as anyone, yet he would shush the room when he believed the coaches were saying something that no one should miss.
With the new free agents and draft picks, the Patriots looked as strong as any team in the league at the start of the 2003 season. They just had to be strong without the vocal and emotional Milloy, one of their defensive captains. On the second day of September, a Tuesday morning, Belichick walked into a team meeting and said something that floored and then infuriated the Patriots: Milloy had been released. There was a wave of rustling and mumbling in the auditorium, while some players were too confused to say anything. The emotions ranged from What? to Why now? to What are we doing? to Damn, they’re cold.
“I remember a lot of guys saying, ‘How could they do this?’ or ‘I can’t believe they’d do something like this.’ Emotions were running high that day and that entire week,” Brown says. “I was going into my eleventh season, so I kept saying and thinking, ‘Man, this is the NFL. You just saw what happened to Drew Bledsoe, didn’t you?’ I’d remind guys, ‘Eventually, this is going to happen to all of us.’”
It was an unusual week. There wasn’t a lot of small talk before meetings or practice. For a few days, there was an unofficial line with coaches on one side and players on the other. This one stung, mostly because it was so out of place. For all the conversation about Bledsoe, players could understand that he was traded in the offseason. A couple years earlier, receiver Terry Glenn, a former top-ten pick, had been traded during the off-season. But this was no tra
de, it was in season, and it couldn’t be viewed as another transaction.
A couple of defensive players organized a meeting in which they lectured the young players on saving their money and understanding exactly what type of short-term business they were in. After venting a bit more, they started to get back to their competitive selves and think about how they were going to make the best of the week and season. Their season opener was against a divisional opponent, Buffalo, which had Drew Bledsoe at quarterback and a safety they had picked up in midweek, Lawyer Milloy.
The game wasn’t an accurate snapshot of what either team was. The Patriots were a wreck, with Brady throwing four interceptions. The Bills danced as much as they played, with Milloy playing air guitar after some of his stellar plays and a defensive tackle bigger than Washington, Sam Adams, actually high-stepping into the end zone with an interception and doing a duck walk after a sack. The final score was 31–0.
On a Sunday afternoon when everyone in western New York was a preacher with “Poetic Justice” as the sermon, no one would have believed what was down the road. Maybe even the Patriots wouldn’t have believed that after their loss to Buffalo, on September 7, and another loss in Washington three weeks later, they wouldn’t lose again.
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