War Room

by Michael Holley

  The Foxboro streets were a mess and the standstill traffic planted the seeds for road rage, yet every Patriot made it to work on time except for four guys: Gary Guyton, Derrick Burgess, Randy Moss, and Adalius Thomas. They would soon be known in the media as the Tardy Boys. When they checked in late at the office, they were sent home. Guyton, Burgess, and Moss didn’t have much to say about the punishment, but Thomas did. He had long been at odds with the coaching staff, going back to the previous season. It got worse in October when he was a healthy scratch for a game against the Titans. When asked about being inactive and his role going forward he replied, “Ask Bill. He has all the answers.”

  In early 2007, Belichick had returned from the Pro Bowl excited about Thomas’s intelligence and versatility. Later that season, Thomas handed out T-shirts with HUMBLE PIE emblazoned on them, a tribute to Belichick’s style of keeping players grounded and focused on the next game. But the joking had ended a year later, and by December 2009 no one was getting what was expected. Thomas was not the playmaker the Patriots thought he was, and they didn’t use him all over the field like he thought they would. Being sent home for lateness due to a snowstorm seemed to insult his pride and intelligence. His next-door neighbor Ty Warren had taken the same route to work from nearby North Attleborough and gotten there in plenty of time. But Thomas didn’t want to focus on the stories of the forty-nine teammates who made it. He complained about the weather and the gridlocked traffic and quipped, “What do you do? It’s not The Jetsons. I can’t jump up and just fly.”

  His strongest comment came when he seemed to address Belichick directly: “Motivation is for kindergartners. I’m not a kindergartner. Sending somebody home, that’s like, ‘You’re expelled until you come back and make good grades.’ Get that shit out of here. That’s ridiculous.”

  There were four games left in the season and in Thomas’s Patriots career. The Patriots were headed to the play-offs, unlike the Falcons and Chiefs, but like those teams, they were going to look back at the 2009 season and be inspired to remodel.

  While the Chiefs were just a bad and slow defense in the middle of December, giving up at least 34 points in five of their twelve games, and the Patriots were good but not great with an 8–5 record, the Atlanta Falcons were stuck in a place that mortified their general manager. They were average.

  Thomas Dimitroff was more competitive than anyone realized, and it’s part of the reason you really had to know him before he allowed you to watch a game with him. The Falcons’ owner, Arthur Blank, was similar in that way, so they often watched games together and even commiserated over them, win or lose, on Sunday nights. Sometimes they’d talk on the phone and Blank would say, “Why don’t you come over?” Dimitroff would make the two-mile drive to Blank’s house and they’d relive the afternoon again.

  The Falcons were 6–7 after losing at home to the Saints on December 13. The week before, in a game that was part homecoming, part purging, and part plain-old gawking, the Eagles had come to town with Michael Vick as their backup quarterback. Vick had been released from a federal prison in Kansas in May and had a brief, respectful conversation with Dimitroff in June.

  “Hello, Michael. This is Thomas Dimitroff, general manager of the Falcons.”

  “I know who you are,” Vick had replied.

  “I wanted to call and tell you that we’re relinquishing your contractual rights.”

  Vick, still suspended by the NFL at the time for his dogfighting and gambling activity, thanked him for the personal call and they both hung up. Even with a player who was clearly out of the Falcons’ plans, Dimitroff wanted to stick to his policy of being direct and honest with every player who was part of a team transaction. The move to release Vick was not a surprise, and after being reinstated by the commissioner, the quarterback landed in Philadelphia.

  His return to Atlanta, nearly three full seasons after he had last played there, proved what a provocative figure he was in the city. Dean Stamoulis, the Russell Reynolds consultant whom the Falcons hired to help them move forward after Vick, was amazed at how Blank and team president Rich McKay continued to refer to the quarterback. “Even in the darkest days of the franchise, Arthur and Rich clearly felt that Michael was still a good kid who did something wrong,” Stamoulis says. They had company, in the stands and in the organization. When Vick walked on the field before the game, he saw Reggie Roberts, the Falcons’ director of football communication.

  “I know you’re pissed at me,” Vick said, putting an arm around the man who’d written several press releases on Vick’s behalf, trying his best to clean up issues the former franchise star had created.

  “No, Michael, I’m not,” Roberts said. “I believe in forgiveness. I love you.”

  The Atlanta crowd was undecided when the game started, some cheering and some booing, but when Vick ran for a touchdown and threw for another in a 34–7 victory, all he heard was applause. As much of a showman as he was during his years with the Falcons, Vick had never been able to lead them to back-to-back winning seasons. In fact, no one in team history had. That would have to be the modest goal for the rest of the regular season, and it’s something that bothered the GM much more than he was willing to admit publicly.

  In his two seasons as an Atlanta executive, Dimitroff had already done many things that were the opposite of his Patriots teachings. He scouted and built for a 4–3 defense, and he had actually tried building a bridge between football operations and marketing and promotions. There were times in New England where the football operations people were often skeptical of anything the marketers suggested. The way Dimitroff felt about a winning record with no play-offs was purely New England. It was a reason to yell and challenge and demand more from everyone.

  The Patriots didn’t make the play-offs in Dimitroff’s first year working there, 2002, and he noticed how angry and tense people were well after they had been eliminated from play-off contention. A day after the final team meeting of the year that season, Belichick had a legal pad with his top team priorities circled. He’d also given special projects to the assistant coaches, challenging them to see things that would prevent them from the hell of being play-off observers.

  Dimitroff’s obsession was equal to that in January 2010. The Patriots had been embarrassed in a wild-card game by the Ravens, the first home play-off loss for Belichick and Tom Brady in New England. The Chiefs had won their final game of the year to go 4–12. Dimitroff’s Falcons, meanwhile, had gone 9–7 with a late three-game winning streak. Although he appreciated the phone call from Pioli in which his friend told him he should be proud of how the team finished, Dimitroff longed for the days when the play-offs were just the beginning of the journey, not the destination.

  All three teams were going to have to do fairly dramatic things for the 2010 season to be different from what they’d watched in 2009. For the Chiefs, it was going to be the continued strengthening of their staff, which would extend to a stronger roster. For the Patriots, it would be reclaiming a locker room that heard a lot of talking from Adalius Thomas during the season and was going to hear more talk from Randy Moss in the future regarding his contract. For the Falcons, it was going to be a combination of tweaking and spending a lot of cash. There would also be a constant reminder from the GM, something he’d written to himself in a list of notes on his iPad: Be true to yourself; be bold.

  9

  Let’s Make a Deal

  Bill Belichick didn’t wait tables after college. He didn’t pursue a career in music, write the first few chapters of his novel, or backpack through Europe trying to find himself. As soon as he graduated from Connecticut’s Wesleyan University in 1975, when he was twenty-three, he went straight to a job in the NFL. Since that start with the Baltimore Colts, where his $1,300 annual salary was just 15 percent of the national average, he’s spent every day of his working life in the league.

  Longevity and experience certainly don’t mean everything, but they do allow you to exhale and think clearly when major decis
ions need to be made. They’re also reminders that no matter how disappointing a particular year may be, like 2009 was for Belichick, there’s probably something in your thirty-five-season treasure trove labeled HOW TO FIX IT. After all, Belichick is the only active head coach with victories against Chuck Noll, Bill Cowher, and Mike Tomlin, or every coach the Pittsburgh Steelers have had since the NFL/AFL merger in 1970. He’s seen the arrival of six expansion teams and he’s seen six teams move, including one, the Browns, that he was coaching. He’s been around so long that the man who hired him out of college, Ted Marchibroda, was the same man who replaced him as head coach twenty-one years later when the Browns left Cleveland and became the Baltimore Ravens.

  Based on what the coach had already seen in his career, his 2009 Patriots weren’t a team in need of an overhaul. What they needed for future improvement was a good rewiring job. Their final game had been in January 2010, when, after fifteen minutes, they found themselves trailing 24–0 in a home play-off game.

  The Patriots literally have a “Needs Book” on every team in the league, which includes everything from which fourth corner is likely to be replaced in the off-season to which prospects visited leading up to the draft. One day after the eventual 33–14 loss to the Ravens, Belichick began writing in the most important Needs Book the Patriots had on their Foxboro shelves: their own. Belichick was able to write with conviction and specifically say what needed to change, from new bodies to new soul.

  While there wasn’t a single redeeming thing from the play-off loss, the team-building challenge that followed was something that excited and even regenerated the coach. There isn’t a definitive line between Belichick the Coach and Belichick the Builder, because he’s equally passionate about both tasks. He’s a student and admirer of the process, and his love for it all, from the big picture to the minutiae, is probably why he’s never complained of burnout or hinted at taking a break. Noll, for example, was coasting toward the end of a Hall of Fame career in his fifties and was happily retired by fifty-nine. But by the time Belichick celebrated his fifty-eighth birthday, on April 16, he was filled with his usual zeal about the upcoming draft and seemed to have a firm grasp on what would make the Patriots better in 2010.

  One of his first moves had been solidified more than a month earlier, in the first week of March, when he re-signed a draft pick he never expected to have. The Patriots had selected University of Miami defensive tackle Vince Wilfork with the twenty-first overall pick in 2004, although that was far from the original plan. On the morning of that draft, Belichick and Scott Pioli had both agreed that Steven Jackson, a running back from Oregon State, would be their pick. But as the draft moved into the early teens and the Bears, expected to take Wilfork at 14, went with Tommie Harris instead, the Patriots were forced to reconsider.

  They loved Jackson, but they couldn’t allow someone with Wilfork’s ability to slip by them. They took him at 21 and tried to flip their other first-rounder, number 32, and get themselves back in the midtwenties so they could take Jackson, too. But at least three or four teams had the same thought and the Rams, slotted to pick twenty-sixth, were able to make a deal with Cincinnati and move up two spots to grab Jackson at 24. The Patriots stayed at 32 and selected Georgia tight end Ben Watson.

  As the Patriots expected, Wilfork had turned into a star. When they studied film of him at Miami, there wasn’t a single play of his performing the two-gap technique that they were going to ask him to perfect in the pros. Yet he learned to do it quickly, and along the way he came to have a better understanding of Belichick as well.

  “When I first got there I’d say, ‘Hey, Coach.’ And sometimes he’d speak and sometimes he wouldn’t,” Wilfork says. “I remember asking one of the guys, ‘What’s up with Coach? He doesn’t always talk.’ And the answer I got was, ‘You’d better be glad. If he starts talking to you, that probably means there’s gonna be a problem.’”

  Over the years, as Wilfork developed into one of the best nose tackles in the league, worthy of the March 2010 contract that earned him an $18 million signing bonus, he found that the player’s analysis had been far too cynical.

  “Let’s face it,” Wilfork says with a laugh, “there are two Bills: There’s the coach who can be an asshole, and he knows it, and there’s the man I get to see, who’s nothing like what you see in the media. I know I can talk to him about football, but I usually don’t. We talk about personal things, family things. He’s a very smart guy and he gives good advice, but he’s a great listener. I really feel that I can talk to him about anything.”

  Belichick knew that Wilfork was one of the essential Patriots, along with players such as Tom Brady, Jerod Mayo, and Kevin Faulk. They were part of a trustworthy veteran core who didn’t need to be hounded into doing extra film study or getting to the weight room early. They did that on their own and encouraged teammates to do the same. To simplify everything Belichick had written in his 2010 Needs Book, the key was to find good players with those same traits. Some of the good players the Patriots wanted were in-house and were re-signed, like Wilfork, Faulk, and cornerback Leigh Bodden. Some of them were veteran free agents without flash, similar to ones the Patriots had signed at the beginning of their run, like Alge Crumpler and Gerard Warren. And others could be found during an event that Belichick had studied for years, so much so that no one in the league was as consistently active during it as he was, nor, in some cases, as willing as he was to wait for his players. It was the draft, probably the single biggest reason he’d had a ten-season stretch in which his teams won at least ten games eight times.

  As far back as the 1990s in Cleveland, he and Mike Lombardi had begun talking about ways to build a streamlined system in which college and pro scouts had the same grading scale and were therefore speaking the same language. The building plan was interrupted when Belichick was fired, but the idea began to be resurrected in 1997 when he went to the Jets and had an office next to Pioli’s. When they left New York for New England in 2000, Belichick and Pioli refined and burnished the system until it truly became what Belichick had imagined. Anyone who has ever programmed a system knows that no matter what firewalls and fail-safes are in place, it can still break down. Belichick had been around long enough to see that, too. He had received a fair amount of resistance from at least one of his coaches at the time, Brian Daboll, and a few strong voices on his scouting staff when it came to the 2006 draft. Laurence Maroney was taken in the first round and Chad Jackson was taken in the second. The Patriots moved up for Jackson, and in the spot they vacated, Green Bay took receiver Greg Jennings, who had more catches in his first four NFL games than Jackson did in his career. Chad Jackson: the definition of a system breakdown.

  “He was a better athlete than he was a football player,” Belichick says. “He was an exceptional athlete, had some football skills, but the athletic skills didn’t all translate over to the football field. Some of the things that we asked him to do weren’t really his strengths. They were more weaknesses for him, actually. We weren’t able to get to his strengths in our offensive system, so it was a bad fit and it was, to a certain degree, I’d say a misevaluation.

  “I don’t think Chad really understood how to use some of the exceptional athletic ability that he had, and in a lot of cases he made it not as difficult for the defenders to cover him as he could have. But over a period of time he still was never really able to do that. He was never able to convert his athleticism to attacking the defense or defender.”

  Belichick hadn’t listened to the anti-Jackson chorus in Foxboro before the 2006 draft, and four years later, the new challenge for Belichick was to avoid costly mistakes like Jackson and to do it in an organization with fewer people willing to confront him. Even Pioli, who had known Belichick for more than twenty years, admitted that it’s easy for self-doubt to creep in when you have an opinion that is the opposite of Belichick’s. The respect for his knowledge and his résumé automatically gives you pause when you have a counterpoint to his point. But wi
th that said, Pioli still had his disagreements with Belichick, as did Thomas Dimitroff, Charlie Weis, Eric Mangini, and Romeo Crennel. It was business, rarely personal. The question going forward was whether that checks-and-balances resistance, on the coaching staff and in the personnel department, still existed in Foxboro.

  By 2010, Belichick had spent so long thinking in the system, teaching it, tweaking it, communicating in it, practically living in it, that the entire draft process had become an enjoyable obsession for him. He was addicted to the strategy and possibilities of it, the same way some people are hooked on Tetris or Grand Theft Auto. He had already been compulsive about draft homework, diving into it with a tireless rigor and curiosity so he could have a feel for first-and seventh-rounders alike, and then the NFL did him a favor.

  For the purpose of increased television ratings, the league decided that the draft would be a three-day, mostly nighttime event starting with Thursday in Eastern Standard prime time. Round one would be on Thursday at seven thirty; rounds two and three would start at six on Friday; and rounds four through seven would be completed by Saturday evening. It was perfect for Belichick: more time to strategize, plot, and scheme; more time to figure out, for the current year and the next, how to accumulate draft picks that other teams would see as attractive trade bait.

  “My philosophy is that you’ve got to know the whole draft,” Belichick says. “Now, if you’re picking at thirty-two, do you need to know the top-ten players? Do you need to know Matt Ryan vs. Joe Flacco? Well, you’re not going to draft a quarterback and they’re not going to be there anyway, so no. But you might want to move up in the first to take someone else, so I think you’ve got to know to a point, ‘If one of these three guys happens to be there at, say, twenty-two or twenty-three, then we’ve got to be ready to get on the phone and see if we can make a deal.’ And if you can’t, I think you always have to have the philosophy that you have to pick. You might want to get out of the pick and you can’t, so you always have to have a card to turn in.