War Room

by Michael Holley

  Penalty flags were picked up and fired into the crowd. Helmets were thrown. Accusations of special treatment, as well as demeaning treatment, were tossed in all directions. Before all that happened, there was a bizarre sideline exchange between Rodney Harrison and Ravens head coach Brian Billick. After a Patriots interception, Harrison ran by Billick and made a comment about Baltimore quarterback Kyle Boller. Billick responded by blowing two kisses at Harrison. After the game, Ravens cornerback Samari Rolle claimed that an official dismissively called him “boy” because he was upset with Rolle’s questioning of his calls. All of the Ravens seemed to suggest that America had more love than hate toward the Patriots, because the Patriots, in their eyes, were the people’s choice. “It’s hard to go out there and play the Patriots and the refs at the same time,” Baltimore cornerback Chris McAlister told reporters afterward. “They put the crown on top and they want them to win.”

  Whatever the reason, the Patriots had a nation’s full attention as they stood four games away from an undefeated regular season. They smashed Pittsburgh, 34–13, after a young Steelers safety, Anthony Smith, guaranteed that the Steelers would win. In a nondescript rematch of the season’s first game, where the story of the year originated, the Jets became the first team to hold the Patriots to fewer than three hundred yards of total offense. Mangini knew what it took to slow down players he had practiced against and coaches with whom he had practically lived for six years. But New England and its 265 yards still moved to 14–0, and pushed the Jets to 3–11, with a 20–10 victory. The Patriots weren’t sharp against the Dolphins and had four turnovers, but their record bulged to 15–0 in a runaway, 28–7.

  One regular-season game remained, in Giants Stadium, and it was accessorized with two controversies. The NFL Network was supposed to have exclusive broadcasting rights to the Saturday-night matchup between the Patriots and New York Giants. That had been the plan for the entire season, although as the Patriots piled up wins the broadcast schedule drew more attention.

  The problem was that the network reached just forty-three million TV households, fewer than half of what was available in the country. There was a chance that the biggest season finale since 1972 would be missed by the majority of the nation, including fans in Boston and New York. The issue was becoming heated and political, until Roger Goodell made a political move: The commissioner announced that the game would be seen on three networks, NBC, CBS, and the NFL Network. That usually happened for breaking news and presidential debates, but the commissioner understood what was at stake.

  As for the game itself, the debate around New York was whether the coach everyone wanted to fire the year before, Tom Coughlin, should go all-out in the final game of the year. The 10–5 Giants already knew they would be in the play-offs, win or lose, and would be going to Tampa to play the Buccaneers. Should they go for the knockout punch against the perfect Patriots and risk injury? What if they got into a competitive game against the Patriots and showed too much of what they could do to the Bucs, who had already started scouting them?

  Coughlin weighed all the possibilities and decided to go for it. New York may have wanted him out after the Giants’ average 2006 season, in which they finished 8–8 and lost in the first round of the play-offs, but the call he made against the Patriots was a sound one. And in the third quarter, it looked like a brilliant one. The Giants were ahead 28–16, and Eli Manning had already thrown three touchdown passes. Before the game, Eli had talked with his big brother, Peyton, who built him up by demythologizing the Patriots and explaining just how beatable he thought they were. Eli looked comfortable for most of the game, but the Patriots owned the final nineteen minutes. Laurence Maroney scored on a short run with four minutes left in the third quarter. It was a big moment for Maroney, but it was deceptive for what was happening in the game. The Giants were shutting the Patriots down on the ground but getting sliced by the pass. It was 28–23 after Maroney’s score, and 31–28 after Tom Brady and Randy Moss had cosigned a piece of history with eleven minutes to play.

  Brady entered the game with forty-nine touchdown passes and Moss had twenty-two touchdown receptions, both tied for the best marks in history. They set individual records on the same play, when Moss perfected the most universal pickup play of all time, Go long! and caught a Brady spiral that resulted in a sixty-five-yard scoring play. For the flourish, Moss caught the 2-point conversion from Brady as well. It was close to over about seven minutes later when Maroney scored again, on another short run, to make it 38–28. The final was 38–35.

  Sixteen wins without a loss was never the goal, and as the Patriots liked to say, sixteen wins in the regular season doesn’t buy you anything. But the Buckingham Palace guards of the NFL, usually stoic and quick to underplay their achievements in a game, had to celebrate this one. They hugged each other and laughed on the sideline, and they celebrated even more in the locker room and on the short plane ride back to New England. On December 29 in metropolitan New York, they had gotten a forty-eight-hour head start on Dick Clark and the revelers in Times Square. That’s when a ball would drop and millions of people would resolve to be perfect at something. The Patriots had already done it. They had scored 589 points, entered the end zone seventy-five times, and converted 74 extra points, all league records. There had been warts, but they played the schedule presented to them perfectly.

  Their final game was one the entire nation had seen, on three TV networks. It was the first time in forty years an NFL game had been shown by three distinct broadcasting companies. Which meant, on the Patriots’ second trip of the season to Giants Stadium, cameras were a part of the story. But this time, the more cameras they saw the better they felt.

  While parts of the Patriots’ 2007 regular season had been described as controversial, with Spygate, all it took was a glimpse to the south to see just how minuscule their problems were. Sure, the Patriots had been fined and scrutinized and had even lost a first-round pick. But they weren’t part of an organization in which the star player had been charged with and convicted of dogfighting and interstate gambling, resulting in a twenty-three-month prison sentence. Nor did they have to worry about a head coach, hired in January 2007, spending exactly eleven months on the job before deciding he had to get the hell out of there, even if there were three games left on the 2007 schedule.

  The Atlanta Falcons were one of the few NFL teams that didn’t give a damn about Spygate. With Michael Vick’s imprisonment and Bobby Petrino’s in-season departure for the University of Arkansas, they had their version of hell on earth to worry about. When the 16–0 Patriots were enjoying their bye week prior to the divisional play-offs in January 2008, the Falcons were looking for an identity. General manager Rich McKay was going to become the team’s president, meaning that the Falcons were absent a head coach and GM. They were interested in, teased by, and down the aisle with some of the biggest names in the NFL. They thought they had an agreement with Bill Parcells, but he went to Miami instead. Bill Cowher was rumored to be a target, but he chose to stay with his lucrative, once-a-week TV gig. Pete Carroll had established a dominant program at Southern Cal, where McKay’s dad, John, had won four national titles in the 1960s and ’70s. Carroll was said to be interested if he could coach and pick the players, but that plan never materialized.

  On and on the search went for the large Falcons search committee, with name after name being thrown into the mix. Finally, the Falcons decided that they’d go with an up-and-coming GM. The name most mentioned was Tom Heckert, a highly regarded GM in Philadelphia. Thomas Dimitroff was also a candidate, but he had a few things working against him. The perception in the scouting world was that he would never make it as a guy who had to go to the office every week. He was too Boulder, too snowboard and mountain bike, too free-spirited and work-at-your-own-pace. But that was perception. The bigger issue was reality: The Falcons were having a hard time getting permission to interview Dimitroff.

  There was a small window in which the Falcons could interview
candidates involved with play-off teams. They were making little progress with the Patriots, mostly because Bill Belichick was not convinced that a legitimate GM’s job was available. He wondered if Dimitroff would have final say over personnel, or would he be working under McKay? Plus, he didn’t want to lose one of his top personnel employees only to see him go to the Falcons and be swallowed up in office politics. After nearly a week of being blocked by Belichick, there was a conversation between the owners, the Falcons’ Arthur Blank and the Patriots’ Robert Kraft, and permission was finally granted. It was clear that the job was one where the GM would pick the players, but when that had been established, there wasn’t much time for the Falcons to interview Dimitroff face-to-face.

  On January 4, a Friday, Dimitroff got some bad news from Nick Polk, one of the Falcons’ search committee members. They had simply run out of time. An interview, logistically, was impossible because members of the organization were spread across the country. Dimitroff got off the phone, told Angeline the latest, and said, “That’s too bad.” He then thought about it longer and called Polk back. “I really want to interview for this job,” he said. “How about a webcam interview? Can you ask Mr. Blank if he’d be open to that?”

  Blank, one of the most successful businessmen in the country and a cofounder of the Home Depot, loved the idea. He admired the stability and success that teams like the Eagles, Colts, Steelers, and Patriots had, so he was especially interested in speaking with candidates from those teams. He had also heard a lot about Dimitroff’s smarts and his “look.”

  “I guess at that time Thomas’s hair was even longer than it is now. And I’m not sure he had a blue streak in his hair, but I think it was described to me as kind of like a blue streak,” Blank says with a smile. “If you drew up a picture of what a guy from Boulder, Colorado, would look like, in a stereotypical way, it would be what was described to me about Thomas. In the case of Home Depot, we prided ourselves on building a company based on unique personalities and overachievers. So the fact that he apparently looked a little different and thought a little different about the world didn’t bother me. He had a lateral view of things and I liked that.”

  Dimitroff knew about Blank, too. He knew Blank and Bernie Marcus’s Home Depot story, how they had been fired from their jobs in 1978, come up with a concept for giant stores that would span at least sixty thousand square feet, and watched those stores become overwhelmingly popular in just a couple years. He also knew about Blank’s fashion sense, which was known to be supreme even when Blank was a New England college student at Babson. So as he prepared for his noon web interview on Sunday the sixth, Dimitroff staged his wardrobe and his house.

  He owned a few ties, but they were from Jerry Garcia’s line. He just didn’t see his Grateful Dead meshing with Blank’s Gucci. He asked Angeline to buy him some appropriate ties and a dress shirt. He owned one suit, so he could go with that. As his wife shopped, he rearranged some furniture and made sure that the view behind him included a map and looked professional. Just before noon, Angeline returned with a pressed shirt and a tie that would fit in Blank’s collection. Of course, when the interview began, Dimitroff was overdressed and the dapper Blank could be seen on camera in a sweat suit.

  It didn’t matter. The day before, the Falcons had received a hard copy of Dimitroff’s PowerPoint presentation, so they were quickly engaged in conversation. Dimitroff and Blank clicked. They talked football, children, nutrition, leadership, work-family balance, and even snowboarding. They were disconnected a few times via webcam and they reconnected to talk some more. When the webcam became a pain they talked on the phone. Noon became two o’clock and two o’clock became four.

  When the interview ended, the Falcons huddled with one another and Dimitroff called Scott Pioli.

  “How did it go?” Pioli asked.

  “I think it went well,” Dimitroff answered. “We talked for four hours.”

  “Four hours, Thomas?” Pioli said. “You must have done great.”

  He found out just how great it was less than a week later, a day before the Patriots would try to continue their perfect season against Jacksonville. It was Friday the eleventh, and he and Angeline were going to dinner that night. The timing was impeccable, because shortly before they left the house Dimitroff received a phone call from Blank. “You’ll be going to dinner tonight with the new GM of the Atlanta Falcons,” he told his wife, and they shared a long embrace. He had a medley of quick thoughts, from how he’d have to move from his beloved Boulder, to how his salary had just more than tripled, to what his father would have thought of all this. He imagined Tom Dimitroff looking down on him and saying, “Well done, son. Well done.”

  In a truly perfect world, Dimitroff thought, the Falcons would have given him the job after the Super Bowl so he could enjoy his final weeks as a Patriot in a memorable season. But there was too much work to be done, from hiring a head coach to figuring out how he was going to find a quarterback to replace Vick. In just a couple days, he had gone from being a Patriot and having Tom Brady and his fifty touchdown passes to being a Falcon whose two quarterbacks, Joey Harrington and Chris Redman, had seventeen combined TD passes in 2007. The job switch happened so quickly that he didn’t have time to say good-bye, face-to-face, to all the scouts he supervised. It’s not like another job where you stay and give your two-week notice. He was gone. He talked with Pioli, of course, and responded to a congratulatory e-mail from Belichick.

  The good news for Dimitroff was that his suddenly old team, the Patriots, would make quick work of Jacksonville in the playoffs, 31–20. It was good because it allowed the Patriots to advance to their fifth conference championship game of the decade, and it freed up one of his coaching candidates, Mike Smith, who was Jacksonville’s defensive coordinator.

  Unlike the previous year, when everyone anticipated another Colts-Patriots classic, the AFC Championship Game didn’t generate national excitement. The more dramatic story line would have included Indianapolis making yet another wintry play-off trip to New England, with a chance of ruining a perfect season. But the Colts had their own problems and were upset at home by San Diego in the divisional round, an upset that sent the Chargers to Foxboro.

  The Chargers and Patriots had a bit of a history from the previous year. After a play-off loss to the Patriots, when the Chargers were the conference’s top seed, LaDainian Tomlinson had said the Patriots “showed no class” in victory and added, “Maybe it comes from the head coach.” In the same game, Mike Vrabel had taunted Chargers quarterback Philip Rivers, telling him that he and his teammates knew that he “would never be Drew Brees,” and Rivers had called the Patriots’ Ellis Hobbs “the sorriest corner in the league.”

  Any Tomlinson-vs.-the-Patriots-defense theme ended in the first quarter. The running back had a sprained medial collateral ligament, but the team didn’t announce the injury to the media. So when he carried the ball just twice before spending the rest of the day on the sideline, he became a natural split-screen subject with his quarterback. Rivers had hurt his right knee against the Colts and had actually torn his ACL. He had arthroscopic surgery six days before the conference championship, just to give himself a chance to play on Sunday. He dragged his right leg up and down the field against the Patriots, clearly affected, and he earned his opponents’ respect.

  No one in New England knew it, but their quarterback was hurt, too. Brady’s throws were as inaccurate as they had been all season, and he threw three interceptions. His worst throw, in judgment and location, was at the San Diego two. A decent throw, or run for that matter, would have allowed the Patriots to exhale in a closer-than-expected game. But he lobbed the ball right into the middle of the defense, and it was intercepted easily by cornerback Antonio Cromartie. New England eventually won, 21–12, but consecutive win number eighteen hid some problems that would be exposed two weeks later.

  In the middle of celebrating, no one was going to question two play-off defenses, the Jaguars and Chargers, adjusti
ng to Moss and limiting him to just a single catch in both games. It would be far too negative to suggest, after a 122-yard rushing effort in the conference championship, that the Patriots couldn’t expect to get that from Laurence Maroney in the Super Bowl. And it would have spoiled the party if someone had pointed out that all the mismatches seemed to be over, with the games becoming much more competitive and the points tougher to come by. It may have had something to do with Brady hurting his right foot, which was affecting his ability to move and throw with his usual accuracy. It would become a big story a couple days later when he’d be spotted by a SoHo photographer, on his way to see supermodel girlfriend Gisele Bündchen, wearing a protective boot and limping.

  All of that could be dissected later. The Patriots were once again AFC champions, which was an answered prayer for many red-cheeked and frostbitten New Englanders. The forty-second Super Bowl, to be played on February 3, wasn’t just at a site that was somewhere a lot warmer than Boston and Providence and Nashua, New Hampshire. It wasn’t just somewhere out west where the Patriots and Giants would play for the NFL title. The game would be held at the University of Phoenix Stadium, right in the middle of the desert.

  Over the years, people in New England have come to understand the differences between newspapers and magazines during Super Bowl week. It was the magazines that threw the great parties, teeming with movie stars, pop singers, pro athletes, and people whose names were on the tip of your tongue. It’s the Maxim and Playboy and Sports Illustrated and ESPN The Magazine parties that Super Bowl fans want to crash, just for a chance to brush shoulders with the celebrities who might be there.