They wouldn’t lose in the fall, when New Englanders picked apples and pumpkins and saw beautiful red, orange, and brown leaves hover on trees before blanketing the landscape. They wouldn’t lose in winter, when, as usual, local residents would be slammed with ice and snow and be ever so grateful for a high temperature in the 40s. They would be sun-splashed in the spring, wildly benefitting from the first-round pick they had gotten from Baltimore. Summer was for red carpet, live music, and the presentation of breathtaking diamond rings at Kraft’s house in Brookline. There would be yet another September with new faces coming in and familiar ones gone, and it would take nearly an entire October before there was anything other than a “W” next to New England. Actually, the seasons would change more than the Patriots. They became a machine. They wouldn’t lose again for a long, long time.
In corporate America, it’s called “branding.” Musicians and artists and writers call it “having a style” or “finding your voice.” The Patriots didn’t have a name for what they were developing. They just knew they had planted seeds for a system in which draft picks were “picks” in name only and always available to be traded; smart young employees would be schooled in the system and grow into coaches and scouts; players would be athletic and fast, of course, but smart and tough, too; and the unspoken trust, whether it was on the road with the scouts or in the locker room with the players, was that the job would be done at the highest level even when the boss wasn’t looking.
“Man, we had the formula down,” Tedy Bruschi says. “My locker was on the left, Willie McGinest’s locker was on the right, and there was the door in the middle of us. And as early as we got there and as late as we stayed, we saw everyone who walked in and we saw everyone who walked out. And everyone who walked in late got a comment, everyone who walked out early got a comment about what they did that day. We held them accountable as soon as they walked in the door.
“Me and Willie, I mean, we policed that locker room as soon as you walked in. If we smelled you, you know, we wanted to know what was in your hand. ‘What were you eating?’ ‘Did you bring in the McDonald’s bag?’ We wanted to know where you were going once you came in, did we have a meeting in one minute, or are you here to work out? Even if you were some veteran who had come in from another team, we didn’t care where you were from because we were establishing ourselves as world champions, and we felt like, ‘This is the way we do things around here. We’re going to teach you how to do it.’”
The policy didn’t go over well in the beginning for Harrison. Bruschi and McGinest were Patriots when Belichick was in New England the first time, in 1996, as an assistant coach. They remembered how things worked when Bill Parcells was the head coach and players, or anyone, had excuses for being late. Parcells would raise his eyebrows and say, “Oh, you have a response? Interesting.” His point was unmistakable: Don’t say anything.
It was clear that Harrison was going to be one of the Patriots’ elite players in 2003, despite what happened in the Buffalo game, but Bruschi and McGinest felt he still had too much San Diego in him. The team had come a long way since Andy Katzenmoyer casually strolled into a team meeting two minutes late in 2000. By 2003, watching the door was something Belichick didn’t have to do. The players would do it for him and turn it into a raucous yet lighthearted game when someone was even a hair late. Just by watching how Harrison carried himself, Bruschi and McGinest knew they could get under his skin, so they did it. But they did it because they saw something else in him and they planned to use it.
“Rodney was borderline arrogant when he first got to New England,” Bruschi says. “He felt like he was established in the league and had gone to the Super Bowl as a rookie. He was a very confident person, you know. I remember him coming in just about twenty seconds late for a meeting. He came in and we gave it to him, and he had a little bit of an attitude. He used to try to spout off to us, like, ‘You know, you’re not going to do that to me,’ or something like that, and we just kept giving it to him.
“And we had to do it with him over and over again until we said, ‘Listen, man, we’re trying to give you a message about how it’s done. It’s our way of giving you respect as a veteran but still letting you know this isn’t San Diego.’ He ended up falling in line, though, and being the same sort of enforcer that Willie and I were.”
They were all enforcers on the field, especially on defense, even though they weren’t getting the contribution they had expected. In just the second game of the season, Colvin reached down to recover a fumble and felt an awkward pain on his left side. He had a hip dislocation, a major injury that would end his season and threaten his career. The injury to Colvin meant that McGinest would be on the field more than anyone planned. But there wasn’t a drop-off from Colvin to McGinest, just as there wasn’t with the departed Milloy to the rookie second-rounder Wilson, who was drafted as a corner but was thriving at safety.
The theme of the 2003 Patriots seemed to be that someone, somehow, would find a way to win a game. Every other week, an oddity would contribute to the result. They won an October game in Miami, for example, because the Florida Marlins were preparing for the World Series. The Dolphins and Marlins shared the stadium, so the infield dirt was still intact amid the grass. Miami kicker Olindo Mare had two chances to win the game, but in both cases the dirt was a factor. He slipped on one and had the kick blocked by Richard Seymour. In overtime, he slipped again on the dirt and the ball sailed to the right. Brady then took the ball, on the dirt, and heaved a pass to Brown. He wasn’t known for his deep speed, but Brown had managed to get behind the safety and score on an eighty-two-yard play.
The win gave them a record of 5–2. Two weeks later in Denver, they moved to 7–2 when the play of the game was an intentional safety. They were in poor field position and believed that punting would make things worse. So they conceded the 2 points, took advantage of a good free kick and a bad Broncos offensive series, and won on a perfect pass from Brady to David Givens.
They won their tenth game, in Indianapolis, by a single yard. The Patriots led 38–34 in the final minute, and the Colts had driven to the Patriots’ one with twenty-four seconds remaining. On a second-down play, the Colts tried to execute a quick run to Edgerrin James to catch the Patriots out of position. But Mount Washington was occupying the guard-center gap. There was a mistimed fade route from Peyton Manning to Aaron Moorehead on third down. And on fourth down, McGinest bluffed as if he were going to do what he often did, jam a receiver at the line of scrimmage. Instead, he was blitzing and the Colts were running, so he met James in the backfield for a loss.
It was going to be that kind of season. They knew they would be in close, entertaining games. They also knew they would figure out a way to do the right thing. They studied along the way, and no matter where they were in the building, they had a lot of fun doing it.
Players loved to catch the Locker Room Police doing anything out of order so they could grill them for a change. McGinest was an easy target. He would doze off in defensive meetings, and if a player didn’t elbow him, defensive coordinator Romeo Crennel had a method of getting his attention. He would go over coverages in a low, controlled voice and then suddenly shout, “Boom!” to startle the head-nodders and nappers.
Coaches didn’t escape jokes, either. When Steve Belichick was in town from Annapolis, where he and his wife continued to live in the home where they raised Belichick, many of the assistants knew they had to be on their toes. The elder Belichick was a natural storyteller and jokester, so he would tease the staff about their fluctuating weight. He was eighty-four and still physically fit, so when he smirked and said, “I swear, this is the fattest coaching staff in the league. You get fatter every time I see you!” they had no comebacks. He was fun to be around, and the equipment staff liked to give him the latest Patriots gear they could find so he could add to his collection. At home, he had jackets from his son’s stops with the Giants, Browns, Jets, and now Patriots. Jokes aside, he was all football, an
d he’d talk it with anyone who had a question and was willing to listen.
The Patriots on the second floor of the stadium, in scouting, were as in sync as the players and coaches below them. Belichick had the final say on draft day; Pioli reported to Belichick and had all the responsibilities of a general manager; and the new director of college scouting, Thomas Dimitroff, oversaw the scouts and helped Pioli relax, even though Dimitroff’s primary residence was still two thousand miles away in Boulder.
Pioli and Dimitroff worked perfectly together. They understood each other and the type of scouting system Belichick was looking for. Their system was based on comparatives, Our Guys vs. the Guys in the Draft, so there were quizzical looks for any scout who described a player as a “first-round pick” or “backup safety.” There was a numerical system in place, with alerts built into it so an evaluator could quickly see if a player was height deficient, went to a small school, had an injury history, was a character concern, or had problems picking up schemes. The idea was to find players in the country who had a realistic shot of being better than one of the fifty-three players on the Patriots’ roster.
“I certainly took my lumps in New England, especially as a young scout,” says Jim Nagy, who joined the Patriots’ scouting staff in 2002 when he was twenty-seven. “It’s not an easy system to learn in the beginning. It took me a while to grade players and I really struggled. Was I grading them too high? Was I grading them too low? I’d say it took me about two years before I started to feel comfortable.”
Pioli and Dimitroff clearly had an advantage in professional experience and knowing what Belichick wanted, and so did Lionel Vital. Vital had scouted alongside Tom Dimitroff Sr. in Cleveland and Vital had been Belichick’s coworker in New York with the Jets. By the time he was in New England with Pioli and Dimitroff, communicating in the system was second nature to all three of them. They’d go deep into their shared reservoir to say who a player was or wasn’t, remembering obscure players like Romeo Bandison in Cleveland, how it was good value to get a starting nose tackle like Jason Ferguson in the seventh round in New York, and humbling one another by mentioning that a long-forgotten tight end named Dave Stachelski had been drafted before Tom Brady. It helped them get to that precise place they wanted to be: projecting what a player could be for them, not what he could be for the Colts or Bears. When Pioli and Dimitroff were together, their professional conversations ranged from players to the needs of the team to their different management styles.
Dimitroff was known for advocating on behalf of the scouts, so Pioli teased him and referred to him as the “union foreman.” Pioli had incredibly high standards for the scouts, probably because he was a perfectionist himself. He was so organized that he had developed a habit of keeping detailed notes on everything he did and every conversation he had. He neatly wrote the notes by hand, and when he had time he’d turn them into Word documents. He once joked, “Magic Markers saved my life,” so he always had dozens of them to help him maintain his color-coded system for notes and scouting reports:
• A green highlight is for something good;
• Pink is not good;
• Yellow is simply information;
• Blue is an incompletion or inconsistency that needs to be checked on;
• Red and blue ink pens are for miscellaneous thoughts, not necessarily good or bad.
A sloppy or incomplete report would irritate him to his core and was the quickest path to exasperating him. Dimitroff could approach him like no other, though, and in one of their frank conversations he told him that Pioli was missing an important color in his management stash: gray.
“When you’re managing any level above someone, there are management things that you’re dealing with, and pressure and responsibility, that no one who’s working below you understands,” says Pioli. “But Thomas did talk to me in a different way, and it forced me to change my style in certain situations. He’s the only guy who could come to me and say, ‘Scott, I think you need to back off these guys a little bit. Do you understand?’ I changed my style in certain meetings and how I approached the guys. I think there were times I was too hard-lined, and yes, there was no gray.
“I found that with Thomas as the director, I didn’t have to micromanage. On some things, I didn’t even have to jump in until the tenth hour because it was being taken care of. It was the first time where I could genuinely have a piece of my head and my heart that I could delegate, and it was handled.”
Pioli could call out Dimitroff, too. There were times when he told him that he was being too lenient with the scouts and wanted to see more pressure applied. It was a topic that they didn’t always see the same way. Pioli wanted the reports to follow a certain formula, and if they didn’t follow that script it got to him. One of the scouts who didn’t always do it Pioli’s way was Vital. He knew players as well as anyone, but he didn’t enjoy writing long reports and preferred to get straight to the “Can he play or not?” stage, without all the window dressing. Dimitroff had known both Pioli and Vital for years, so he heard and understood both perspectives. He was able to be an advocate for Vital and his style while also making sure Pioli, his boss, got the essentials of what he wanted from reports. Sometimes, Pioli and Dimitroff were just like brothers, venting in front of each other but never for an audience. Once, Dimitroff tried the calm and thoughtful tack while talking with Pioli, but the boss wasn’t having it.
“I hear you, Thomas, but it’s not happening,” he said. “Enough of your BS West Coast approach! I’m pulling back and doing things the way I know how to do them.”
They were laughing about the West Coast shot a couple days later. And if they couldn’t laugh about that, Jay Muraco usually knew how to get people smiling when he sensed that there was too much tension in the office. Muraco had worked with Pioli and Dimitroff in Cleveland as a volunteer in the scouting department. He was working for the Eagles when Pioli got the New England job, and he joined his old friend shortly after he heard the news that Belichick, Pioli, and familiar faces like Vital were running a franchise again.
Muraco knew how to loosen up both guys. Making fun of Dimitroff’s extensive, multisyllabic vocabulary, Muraco would go to Dictionary.com, find as many big words as he could, and send Dimitroff a lengthy e-mail that could basically be translated to “Please call the office.” For Pioli, he could just peek at him and know if he was near a boiling point. When that happened, he would act out a skit that Pioli loved, a Will Ferrell—Christopher Walken classic from Saturday Night Live. Ferrell, wearing a shirt two sizes too small, was a fictional cowbell player on Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” Walken was a legendary producer obsessed with the cowbell.
Muraco would rap on Pioli’s office door as if he had something important to say and then go into the routine.
“Guess what?” Muraco would begin.
Pioli, not catching on yet, would answer, “What?”
“I’ve got a fever! And the only prescription is more cowbell.”
It worked every time, and Pioli would roll.
They all had good reason for nonstop celebrations throughout 2003 and 2004. Anyone who entered the building was somehow feeding the machine, and the machine was producing historic results. The operation seemed glitch-proof. The players would come to work, get into energetic games of dominoes and backgammon in their downtime, and soak up whatever the coaches laid out for them in game plans.
They had a collection of diverse and charismatic personalities, which were usually hidden from the media because they all had been drilled that the agenda of the media was not necessarily the agenda of the Patriots. Brady may have been an idol outside of his office, but he was a one-liner target just like any other player or coach when he was at work. If Bruschi, McGinest, and Harrison were the enforcers, Mike Vrabel and Ty Law were the comedians. Vrabel turned the driest situation into laughing material and Law, as Colvin put it, “was Richard Pryor with a football player’s body.”
“It was just
a great group of guys,” Troy Brown says. “A lot of us had a little edge to us because we felt we never got the national credit for being the players we were. But we didn’t make a lot of noise. Some guys would run from the media. We understood the game and we understood our roles. In the receiver meetings, do you know what we talked about? The importance of blocking. Yeah, we liked to make plays and have the ball in our hands, but we had a group of receivers who understood that it wasn’t about who got the most catches and who was being featured in the game plan.”
Brown had to make the distinction between receivers meetings and others because he had become a twenty-first-century rarity in pro football. He played extensively on offense and defense. Two-way players were from the era of grainy black-and-white film and leather helmets, yet when the modern Patriots had injuries at cornerback, Brown played in the secondary. He was coached there by Mangini, who, despite the heated argument with Belichick, still had the coach’s trust and remained on the advancement track. Brown had the surest hands on special teams. And even though he didn’t feel he was ever the same after chipping a bone in his knee in the third game of the 2002 season, he was Brady’s default receiver.
The Patriots zipped through the 2003 regular season with a 14–2 record. After beating Tennessee and Indianapolis in the playoffs, they had a stunning fourteen-game winning streak going into their second Super Bowl in three years, this one in Houston against the Carolina Panthers.
In one of the quirkiest championship games ever played, with no scoring in the first and third quarters and binges in the second and fourth, the Patriots beat the Panthers, 32–29. Brady was the game’s MVP, but he had help all around. Vrabel made plays on defense and offense, scoring a touchdown after lining up at tight end. Brown and a pair of second-year receivers, Deion Branch and David Givens, consistently got open against man coverage. It was a source of pride for them since receivers coach Brian Daboll had reminded them that the Panthers didn’t think anybody could beat them in man.
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