War Room

by Michael Holley

  After the game, there was the expected confetti raining from the top of the stadium, early-edition newspapers with SUPER BOWL CHAMPS in bold letters being displayed on the field, and all-night parties in the team hotel and elsewhere. It was a celebration, but the team-builders in the group were still thinking of what was next. It wasn’t as if the scouts could go to the parade a couple of days later in Boston; they were going to be spread across the country, still trying to find players. And while Belichick and Pioli would go to the parade and wave to millions of happily frigid New Englanders, the vision, the big picture, always tugged.

  “For whatever reason, what stood out more than the parties and parades was the reality of how far behind we were,” Pioli says. “[Bill and I] missed the Senior Bowl, we missed the East-West game, the Combine’s around the corner, and there’s no time. And the thing is, it’s just this obsession of wanting to have sustained success. One of the regrets is that we didn’t celebrate enough.”

  How do you celebrate and still find time to make unemotional decisions? The Patriots didn’t. The process began immediately, with Antowain Smith being released a week after the win over the Panthers. Smith had timed much slower in 2002 drills than he had in 2001, and he was slower in 2003 than he had been in ’02. His regular-season production slipped so much that by the time he left, he had given the Patriots roughly half of what he had in ’01, when he ran with power and passion. Damien Woody, their best offensive lineman, was a free agent and left to sign a huge deal with Detroit. Big Ted Washington, who was thirty-six, got a four-year contract with $5.5 million in year one from the Raiders. Some coaches left as well. Rob Ryan became the Raiders’ defensive coordinator, and in the subsequent coaching reshuffle in New England, Josh McDaniels was promoted to a plum job. He was the new quarterbacks coach, replacing John Hufnagel, who became the Giants’ offensive coordinator. McDaniels was twenty-seven, twenty-five years younger than Hufnagel and just sixteen months older than two-time Super Bowl MVP Brady.

  The Patriots gave their idealistic machine its first major test a week before the 2004 draft by throwing the equivalent of limestone into the gears. They took the freebie second-round pick they had gotten from Miami and sent it to Cincinnati for the lead running back who would replace Smith, Corey Dillon. He was everything they said they weren’t: high-profile, high-maintenance, high-risk. Dillon was one of the most talented backs in football, but he had ended his Bengals career by throwing his jersey and cleats into the stands, signaling to all how he felt about his future in the city. He also had been questioned by police in a domestic violence incident with his wife, but upon investigation, both of them said it had been a misunderstanding.

  In New England, it may have been an early sign that the Patriots believed they could bring anyone into their system and have him be transformed. They believed that their structure and their players would keep Dillon in line. Technically, the running back was part of their 2004 draft class. They would indoctrinate him as to how things are supposed to be, just as they would for the two rookies they took in the first round. One of them, Vince Wilfork, was a shock. He had been projected to go in the top fifteen, but some teams were nervous that the University of Miami nose tackle wouldn’t be able to control his weight and that guaranteed millions would relax rather than inspire him. But the Patriots were happy to take him at number 21, the pick they had gotten from Baltimore, and eventually watch him take over the role that Washington had held for a memorable season. Sometimes talk of sustained success is all about philosophy and theory. Sometimes it becomes even easier to understand, and it’s as simple as watching a young star who shouldn’t be available fall into your lap.

  The Patriots had experienced mere good fortune during the run to their first championship, winning nine consecutive games to close out the regular season and play-offs. But as impressive as that streak was, it wasn’t as mind-bending as what they had put together during the 2003 and 2004 seasons.

  Going into a Halloween game in Pittsburgh in 2004, they had won twenty-one games in a row, an NFL record. They hadn’t lost in 419 days, or since the shutout in Buffalo. They were 6–0 and looking like early favorites to win their third championship in four years. The Steelers temporarily stalled the championship talk with an overwhelming performance. Dillon, who was having a great season, was unavailable for the game, so that allowed the Steelers to hold the Patriots to just five yards rushing. The Steelers were ahead 31–10 in the third quarter and won easily, 34–20. Not only was the streak over for the Patriots, but if both 6–1 teams continued to plow through their schedules, the Patriots would eventually have to return to Pittsburgh for the play-offs.

  If the Patriots’ theme for 2003 had been “Find a Way,” 2004 had an undercurrent of “Last Run.” They were like a successful band, producing hit after hit but reaching a creative point where guys felt it might be time to venture out on their own. Really, the coaching staff and front office were full of stars, and it was only a matter of time before Charlie Weis and Romeo Crennel would be head coaches. Pioli had already turned down offers from other teams, and more teams would come knocking. Even the relative kid coaches, Mangini and McDaniels, had the skills to be coordinators, either in New England or elsewhere.

  There was no question that this would be the last time that the giant and selfless collective, from players to coaches to scouts, would be together for a championship run. Belichick already had begun to think of contingency plans just in case he lost Weis and Crennel at the same time. There were always things you planned for, like coaches taking new jobs, players departing for other places, and fresh-faced rookies coming in to learn the culture. But this was football and it was real life, too. Surprises happen. Minds change. Health fails. The urgency of 2004 was tangible yet unspoken, so through November and December it felt like normal business. After the loss to the Steelers, the Patriots went on another streak, six straight, before having a lapse in Miami. For the second year in a row, they finished the regular season 14–2, meaning they had won thirty-one of their previous thirty-five games.

  Playing right into a self-motivating, popular, and hyperbolic Patriots refrain— “Nobody believes in us” —the nation was infatuated with Peyton Manning and the 2004 Colts before they played the Patriots in the divisional play-offs. The Colts had scored at will during the regular season, finishing first in the league, and had scored 49 points in their wild-card game against Denver. Manning was league MVP for the second consecutive year and had thrown a league-record forty-nine touchdown passes. He had a lot working in his favor when he looked at a battered Patriots secondary that was missing his nemesis, the injured Law. Instead he saw players with which he and a country were unfamiliar: second-year corner Asante Samuel; rookie Randall Gay; a wide receiver dressed up as a cornerback, Troy Brown; and a corner whose name was a constant tribute to the artistry and showmanship of 1970s R&B, Earthwind Moreland.

  Several minutes before the game started, January in New England took over. Snow began to fall, making the subfreezing atmosphere even more miserable. The Colts were at their best indoors in their domed stadium, where they could set the temperature. But as the wind made the snow swirl in Foxboro, a security guard approached Tedy Bruschi before kickoff and suggested something else was at work.

  “Bob Kraft must have a pipeline to the Man Upstairs,” he said, pointing to the heavens.

  The Patriots had snow, defense, and Dillon on their side. The Colts were bothered by the weather, and it truly seemed to freeze their offense. It was slower and more robotic than usual. Manning seemed to be thinking constantly about the secondary. It had those no-names and Harrison back there, so it was worth taking a shot. But then again, was it? Their technique was sound and they were protecting the deep part of the field. Why throw into coverage?

  Meanwhile, there was Dillon. He may have been limestone in April, but he was January’s locomotive. He punished the Colts when he ran, initiating contact and then lowering his shoulder into the chest of defenders. He was a big ma
n with the ability to make people miss. But on this day, he didn’t seem to want to; crashing into linebackers in the cold was more fun. He rushed for 144 yards, allowing the Patriots to control the clock and increase the pressure on Manning each time he had the ball. But with their three turnovers and the discipline of the Patriots’ defense, the Colts had their lowest offensive output in two years.

  The final was 20–3. Bruschi was emotional in a TV interview immediately after the game. “We play,” he said over the din of the postgame crowd. “We don’t talk; we play. You want to change the rules? Change them. We still play. And we win. That’s what we do.”

  He was referring to the previous year, in the conference championship game, when the Colts said that the Patriots were holding rather than defending against them. Before the 2004 season began, the league’s competition committee announced that illegal-contact penalties would become more of a “point of emphasis” during the season. It was a warning that the officials would be calling the game more closely to eliminate aggressive defense after receivers were five yards from the line of scrimmage. It didn’t escape the Patriots that Colts president Bill Polian, as smart as he was fiery, was influential in shaping policy. Polian was a brilliant team-builder and an opinionated football man, and could often be heard in press boxes before he was seen. It was hardly a coincidence that his head coach, Tony Dungy, was a member of a subcommittee that endorsed the new focus on and monitoring of defenses.

  There was at least a culture clash between the Colts and Patriots and likely a silent disdain, too. They both won a staggering amount of games, but they couldn’t have been more different doing it.

  They scouted different players, with the Colts going faster and smaller to the Patriots’ stronger and bigger. They played different defenses. The Colts relied on the consistency of the Tampa 2, a zone that was designed to both stop big passing plays, with the “2” representing the safeties protecting the deep part of the field, and encourage a fleet of players to get to the football at warp speed. The Patriots used multiple defenses, often changing their defensive fronts and going from zone to man. They liked hulking linebackers, ideally in the 255 to 265 range, fast enough to catch you and big enough to wear you down, physically and mentally. The quarterbacks, Manning and Brady, were their generation’s great sports debate, following in the tradition of Mantle-Mays, Wilt-Russell, Bird-Magic, and Marino-Montana. As for the contrasts between their head coaches, Dungy and Belichick, the list could fill a psychologist’s legal pad.

  They were different, sure, and they’d be seeing a lot of each other in the next few years. But in January 2005, all that mattered to the Colts was that they were once again going home because of the Patriots, while their biggest rival had yet another chance to win a Super Bowl.

  For all the big plays that had happened in the season’s previous eighteen games, from forcing red-zone turnovers against the Colts in game one, to Adam Vinatieri throwing a touchdown pass to Brown in game seven against the Rams, to Harrison, in the conference championship game in Pittsburgh, intercepting a pass and returning it eighty-seven yards for a touchdown during a 41–27 win over the Steelers, big plays were not the definitive, mind’s-eye snapshot from the Super Bowl in Jacksonville. The unforgettable photo was of a thirty-one-year-old father at peace on the field, backpedaling and then falling backward onto the natural grass of Alltel Stadium, letting two of his sons playfully tackle and pin him.

  Bruschi’s pregame moment hours before the Patriots played the Philadelphia Eagles was appropriate, for reasons obvious and unseen. In February 2005, the linebacker was similar to several of his coworkers. Many of them had changed since the first Super Bowl. They were still in love with the game, but they loved their young families more. They still got their work in, but when possible, they manipulated their schedules so they could find space to be family men. For others, there was step-back awe and appreciation of what had been accomplished since New Orleans in 2002 and thankfulness for being able to share those moments with people they loved. As expected, some of them would be moving on. Weis had taken a head-coaching job at his alma mater, Notre Dame, and would go into full-time recruiting mode after the Super Bowl. As soon as the game was over, Crennel would be introduced as the new head coach of the Cleveland Browns.

  Belichick was there with the man who taught him the fundamentals of the game, his father, Steve, still passionate about football at the age of eighty-six. Pioli was there with his wife, Dallas, and the couple now had a daughter, Mia, who was one and a half years old. Years earlier Dimitroff, true to his character, had been in a Boulder bike shop when a friend of a friend introduced him to a strikingly beautiful young woman named Angeline Bautista. She was smart, too, working for an educational publishing company. Initially, she wasn’t interested in dating him. But now, he was five months away from marrying her.

  So much had changed in just three years. Who could know where they’d all be in the next three and if they’d ever get back here again? As easy as it was to do so, you could never take it for granted.

  Belichick had grown so comfortable with his team leaders that there wasn’t much on the field he didn’t trust them to do. “He’d listen to our suggestions,” Rosevelt Colvin says. “I can’t imagine that anyone could make adjustments as quickly as Bill, but sometimes he would overthink it. We’d say, ‘Why don’t we just go to our base stuff and beat them that way?’ and sometimes he’d say, ‘Okay.’”

  “Belichick taught us a lot,” Bruschi says, “but I also think we taught him some things. He was grateful learning from us, too. I’d share with him how I liked to see things done from a player’s perspective, and he’d listen to us and see the way we worked. I think he developed along with me and with Brady. There are incredible examples of players developing and coaches developing as we got better. I think I’m one, Brady’s one, and Bill’s one as the head coach.”

  They knew they had a good plan against the Eagles, and despite how much they protested the role of favorite, they knew they were the better team. A couple days before the game, Belichick went to Bruschi and Vrabel and put in a defensive wrinkle that they hadn’t practiced much all year. The play was called “Dolphin,” and the plan was for Bruschi and Vrabel to alternate shooting the gaps. Belichick gave them the freedom to decide which one would shoot from series to series, with his thought being that the scheme would give Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb a moment of pause. The two linebackers shrugged. That was Bill. Besides, they liked the mental challenge of handling any last-minute twists he threw their way.

  Philadelphia scored the game’s first touchdown, but it was clear there was going to be a problem for the Eagles all evening. They were going to need to pass their way to a championship, because like they had done with Faulk, the Patriots identified a running back, Brian Westbrook, as the key to the Eagles’ offense. He was a dynamic receiver as well, but they were determined to take him away as a runner. The Patriots didn’t think McNabb was accurate enough as a passer to be able to dissect their defense enough to win.

  The Eagles weren’t as good as the Patriots, but they weren’t pushovers. It was 14 apiece in the third quarter, and the game wasn’t officially in control until the fourth, when Vinatieri made a short field goal for a 24–14 lead with more than eight minutes remaining. Strangely, McNabb and the Eagles seemed to lack what the 2004 Patriots had all season: urgency. They were deliberate as they marched to the line of scrimmage. They huddled rather than run an upbeat, two-minute offense. They seemed to carefully examine and parse each play before they ran it. The crowd of seventy-eight-thousand-plus was decidedly pro-Eagle green, and the curses and catcalls grew louder by the play. When the Eagles finally scored a touchdown, with 1:48 left, it was too late.

  For the third time in four years, the Patriots had a 3-point victory in their final game of the year and were champions. Receiver Deion Branch, in just his third season, tied a Super Bowl record with eleven receptions and was the game’s MVP. The win allowed Belichick to capture hi
s ninth consecutive postseason game, tying the great Vince Lombardi’s record.

  As Belichick was hugging his father, with Steve proudly wearing his blue Patriots cap, Bruschi doused them with water and embraced them both. Alert photographers caught the moment, and it became one of the priceless photos of the week in Jacksonville. There had also been a small huddle with three men who had crisscrossed the Northeast, working together for both New York teams and New England. Belichick, Weis, and Crennel had grown together as coaches, teaching some of the NFL’s best players and producing flawless game plans when the lights were brightest and they had to be at their best. This was the sixth Super Bowl for Belichick and Crennel, the fifth for Weis.

  They locked arms and hugged.

  “Hey,” Belichick said to them. “It’s over.”

  It would never be as good as this again.

  4

  Losing the Core

  On February 15, 2005, nine days after the Super Bowl, Tedy Bruschi was in his home, about forty minutes south of Boston, when he awoke from a football dream. He had fallen asleep around one A.M., watching a replay of the Patriots’ conference-championship win over the Steelers. In the dream, he was attempting to tackle Steelers running back Jerome Bettis. But as he lay awake at four, his arms were in the air and his muscles were contracting. He got out of bed to go to the bathroom, but his legs were wobbly and he nearly crashed into the windows that were to his right.

  He didn’t realize it until several hours later, but he was having a stroke.

  Later in the morning, just after ten, his wife, Heidi, made a calm 911 call. When EMTs arrived at the house, they sat one of the stars of the three-time Super Bowl champs on the stairs; gave him a quick vision test, which he failed; and then strapped him to a stretcher and carried him to an ambulance. He was crying when he left the house, unsure of what was happening to him and confused about the lack of vision in his left eye. A few seconds later he heard the pitter-patter of small feet on pavement, running toward him. Soon he saw his two oldest sons, Tedy Jr. and Rex, eager to give him hugs. He told them he loved them, and they, too young to understand what was happening, told him to “have fun” wherever he was going.