War Room

by Michael Holley

  “Really, it’s just knowing the draft from A to Z. And not just the top of the draft or the end of the first round. Because if you want to move within the draft, you’ve got to understand where you’re moving to or what you’re moving from.”

  Belichick talked about trades so much because, he says, “I think teams know we’re open for business.” He didn’t make trades for the sake of it, although it sometimes appeared that way to fans who were used to counting down with the clock and waiting for the commissioner to announce the newest Patriot. If Belichick could pick up an extra choice and still come away with players he had targeted for a specific section of the draft, he’d almost always do it.

  As he left his Gillette Stadium office and climbed one flight of stairs to the draft room for round one on April 22, he knew he was in a strong position. His team held four of the first fifty-three picks: the twenty-second pick in the first round and three second-rounders. When possible, he liked to come out of a draft with extra picks for the following year. Part of his work had already been done in that category with the 2009 trade of Richard Seymour, which brought back a 2011 first-rounder from the Raiders. So, preferably, an extra second-or third-rounder for 2011 would be ideal if someone made the right offer. He also went into that room confident that he knew how the league perceived the player he wanted to pick in the first round.

  “It’s such a process, and part of it is knowing what the league thinks,” he says. “We have players on our board and we look up there and say, ‘We’re probably higher on this player than any other team in the league.’ You see mock drafts out there and the player is not mentioned in the first round. In any of them. Scouts talk, and you kind of get a feel that no one else sees the player quite like we do. On the flip side, there are guys that we might take, say, in the third round and we know someone’s going to take him in the first. So, again, it comes back to homework.”

  Belichick settled into his chair, in a room where the trading spirit remained but a familiar face was no longer there. It was the second draft in a row without Pioli, which meant it was just the third time in the previous nineteen seasons that Belichick and Pioli weren’t on the same team. The pairing had been so dynamic and slightly taken for granted that when Pioli moved to Kansas City, portions of his duties were split between four employees: Nick Caserio moved from director of college scouting to director of player personnel; Jon Robinson became the new college scouting director; Jason Licht became director of pro personnel; and Floyd Reese, a longtime general manager with the Titans, became a senior adviser primarily in charge of negotiating contracts.

  The draft began and the first handful of picks went as expected. Belichick had his mind on defensive backs, and the first one to come off the board was safety Eric Berry, who went to Pioli’s Chiefs at number 5. The Browns took the first corner, Florida’s Joe Haden, at 7. There were just a couple wrinkles in the top fifteen, and none of them affected the Patriots. The Jaguars took a defensive tackle from Cal, Tyson Alualu, at 10, higher than most people projected. And in a draft so thin on true pass rushers that teams were willing to stretch to invent them, the Eagles traded up to 13 to select Brandon Graham, a defensive end from Michigan.

  Through nineteen picks, the draft had unfolded the way the Patriots wanted. Tim Tebow, whom Belichick and Caserio had taken to dinner in Boston’s North End just three weeks earlier, was still there. Belichick believed the Florida quarterback was rising in other draft rooms, and he knew there was some mystery about the Patriots’ interest, so that meant there might be a market for Tebow when the Patriots picked at 22. Oklahoma State receiver Dez Bryant was also on the board, and the Patriots knew that Dallas coveted him and that created a trade market as well. Most important, the man Belichick wanted all along, Rutgers cornerback Devin McCourty, was still available.

  “I think a lot of people had McCourty in the second round,” Belichick says. “Right or wrong, I think that was kind of the league’s take on him. There weren’t a lot of people willing to step up and take him in the first round. That was my sense of it. So if you don’t feel there’s that big of a market for the player, you can back off a bit if you have the chance and accumulate picks.”

  As pick 22 approached, the phone rang and the ID let Belichick know there would be a familiar voice on the other end. The ringing line flashed “Denver.” Josh McDaniels wanted Georgia Tech receiver Demaryius Thomas and was willing to swap pick 24 for 22 with a fourth-rounder, pick 113, to go with it.

  Deal.

  As pick 24 approached, the phone rang again. It was the Cowboys. They were offering a third, pick 90, for the right to move up from 27. They also wanted the Patriots to give them a fourth, pick 119, which was fine since New England had just acquired a more valuable fourth minutes earlier. It hadn’t been much of a gamble to move down from 22 to 27, and if the Patriots really wanted to test their theory, they could have moved behind the Jets at 29, too. The Needs Book predicted the Jets would take a corner, and Belichick thought New York had Boise’s Kyle Wilson rated higher than McCourty, but why risk it? The Patriots selected McCourty at 27 and walked away from round one with the player they wanted and two extra picks they hadn’t owned at the beginning of the night.

  The next day, for rounds two and three, the Patriots made so many deals that a family tree was needed to keep up with the origin of the picks. While tight end Jermaine Gresham had been drafted by the Bengals in the first round, the Patriots believed Arizona’s Rob Gronkowski was better. The problem was that back surgery had caused him to miss the entire season, and if he hadn’t he might have gone in the top fifteen. The Patriots thought that Baltimore might be interested in the tight end, too, so they moved from pick 44 to pick 42. It was one spot ahead of the Ravens and the deal, with the Raiders, cost them a sixth.

  “When you move back, it’s always easy to move up again if you need to,” Belichick says. “You should have enough to do it after the trades you’ve made.”

  The best deal of the night came with the sandwich pick of the Patriots’ original second-rounders, number 47. They’d already turned the first one, number 44, into 42. And their last one, number 53, was still on the board. So when Belichick saw at least a half dozen players whom he thought were comparable for pick 47, he indeed was open for business when Arizona called and dangled two picks, 58 and 89. He liked the value of the deal, and it gave him tremendous flexibility now in the third, where the Patriots suddenly had back-to-back picks that they didn’t have a couple days earlier. It would put the team in position for a sweetheart of an offer in the next couple hours.

  There was no trading, surprisingly, of pick 53 and Florida defensive end Jermaine Cunningham was selected. But the status quo didn’t last long. The recently acquired pick, 58, was on the move again, and it was headed to the Texans in exchange for picks 62 and 150. The Patriots wanted another Florida player, Brandon Spikes, to play inside linebacker for them and he was taken at 62. As for pick 150, it usually didn’t work this way, but they had a plan for it. To them, the pick said Zoltan Mesko.

  “Normally when you trade back in the second and pick up a fifth, you’re not thinking about a specific player in the fifth,” Belichick says. “You don’t know who’s going to be there. It’s just value. But we really felt Mesko would be there in the fifth and we said, ‘Okay, we might get him in the sixth, but he’s really the only punter we would draft. So even if it’s a round early, we’re going to take him in the fifth and go with him as our punter.’”

  Toward the end of the second day of the draft, with the Patriots and the rest of the league thinking about closing time and resetting for the morning, the black office phones in the draft room rang again. This time it was Carolina. The Panthers had gone 8–8 in 2009 with veteran Jake Delhomme as their starting quarterback. Once upon a time, Delhomme had put a scare into the Patriots in one of the most entertaining Super Bowls ever played, XXXVIII. But the Panthers saw his miserable eight-touchdown, eighteen-interception season and decided it was time to go young.
They had twenty-five-year-old Matt Moore as his backup, and they had drafted Notre Dame quarterback Jimmy Clausen at pick 48. They had their eyes on pick 89, one of the few remaining picks that could be traded in the third round (the rest were compensatory picks and could not be moved). The Panthers wanted a quarterback. Kind of. They liked Appalachian State’s Armanti Edwards, who was a record-setting quarterback in college, but he was being projected as a receiver in the pros.

  Anyway, the Panthers were willing to trade their 2011 second-rounder for 89. It was too good to walk away from, and not just because the Patriots already owned pick 90. Even if all the Panthers’ dreams were realized in 2010 and they won the Super Bowl, the Patriots would still move up twenty-five spots, from 89 to 64, just for being willing to wait. But the Panthers weren’t going to win and they knew it. Head coach John Fox was in a lame-duck situation, and there was an air of desperation to do something.

  That’s where longevity and experience paid off for Belichick as well. He didn’t have to worry about the classic GM-vs.–head coach debate, with one man planning for the long term while the other fights for right now, knowing that he’s judged on the present and this year’s wins and losses. For Belichick, with hands in both fields, he was able to have a more balanced view of things. He’d loved New England since he was a teenager, and there was no desire to bolt from the Patriots. He agreed to the deal, satisfied with the players he’d selected and confident that he’d like what was coming to him in the future, whether that future was the next day or the next year.

  On the final day of the draft, the Patriots got to cash in on the fourth they’d gotten from Denver. At 113 they took Florida tight end Aaron Hernandez, whose talent alone was first-or second-round quality. But many teams thought he was a character risk and let him slide to day three. The Patriots figured they could get Hernandez straightened out and with multiple picks, they felt they could take a gamble.

  Another draft had been completed, with teams from Foxboro to Atlanta to Kansas City excited about what they had done. The day after the draft, the Patriots finally released Adalius Thomas, ending a bitter relationship that had begun with such promise. After all the moves by all the teams, no one would know for sure what it all meant until the players took the field, which, coincidentally, was scheduled to happen during training camp with the Patriots and Falcons. It didn’t happen often, but sometimes teams practiced together to break up the monotony of camp. The Saints were also scheduled to hold practices with the Patriots in Foxboro.

  In August, the Patriots headed south to the Falcons’ immaculate facility in Flowery Branch, Georgia. With stately brick buildings and carefully landscaped fields, the complex looked like a small college campus. It was the Falcons’ daily home, and they had built dormitories on site to make it camp-compatible as well.

  Both teams appreciated the change in routine, from players to ownership. Arthur Blank had often asked Thomas Dimitroff about Belichick, and Dimitroff told him that the Belichick of press conferences didn’t do him justice. The owner was skeptical until he chatted with Belichick one day and was surprised to be greeted with a hug and a string of one-liners. Dimitroff and head coach Mike Smith shared plenty of laughs with Belichick as well, although both general manager and head coach found themselves inching toward Tom Brady so they could see how he practiced and share some insight with Matt Ryan.

  “It was an eye-opening two days for me,” Smith says. “I saw an intense player who was in control of every offensive piece on the field. Everything that was happening on offense, from route adjustments to plays that were called from the coaching staff, he had a hand in it. I could see the trust level between the offensive staff and Brady, and the players and Brady. I thought it was very revealing.”

  Dimitroff had made some comparisons to Brady, traits-wise, when he was studying and writing an evaluation of Ryan. It surprised him during one of the practices when Brady headed his way and struck up a brief conversation. He told him he was impressed with what he and Smith had done with the Falcons and he said that he was a Matt Ryan fan as well.

  “There are some quarterbacks who have a unique way of ripping the team with an element of positivity to it,” Dimitroff says. “There are guys who try to do that and it flops, and the team just has a disdain for the quarterback. But Tom and Matt, with their seriousness, passion, and competitiveness, they’re special. They’re just people you want to be around.”

  Although it was still football practice, the joint Falcons-Patriots work session had felt like a vacation. When it was over and both teams resumed normal business, it seemed that the season opener suddenly hovered. The Falcons would open in Pittsburgh, and the Patriots would be home against Cincinnati.

  As Dimitroff prepared for the season, trying to be in a dozen places at once, he missed a call placed to his cell phone. It was Belichick. The coach left a voice mail that surprised and humbled Dimitroff. They had come a long way from a head coach—groundskeeper dynamic, and even a head coach–director of college scouting relationship. It was one team builder to another, showing admiration. Belichick wished the team luck going into the season and, he added, based on how the team was built and conceived, he thought the Falcons’ season would turn out just fine.

  On the first Saturday in October, seemingly a lifetime away from spring and the 2011 NFL draft, Dimitroff stood in his office and admired a board. The names and early rankings of the top college players in the country were listed there, and Dimitroff stared at the neatly labeled magnetic strips as if transfixed.

  A friend from Boulder, ex-racer and current bike shop owner Doug Emerson, was visiting for the weekend and Dimitroff explained to him how the board came to be ordered, or stacked. He then talked about the athleticism of two of the nation’s most gifted receivers, Julio Jones and A. J. Green, and that’s when it became apparent to Emerson just how riveted Dimitroff was by the players and the process.

  “Dude,” Emerson said, beginning to chuckle. “You’re such a nerd!”

  And Emerson, who’d had two-hour talks with Dimitroff on the bike paths of Colorado, the subjects ranging from literature to politics, had seen just a glimpse of it. Two months earlier, during a break from practice and the punishing Georgia sun, Dimitroff had called the scouting staff into the draft room for an informal session. He wanted to be sure everyone was clear on what he meant when he said he was looking to add explosive, “urgent athletes” to the Falcons. The staff proceeded to have nerdy arguments about what was and was not athleticism.

  The general manager, a wordsmith, was known for coming up with handles that would make his thoughts portable and memorable. When he first got to the Falcons, he said that he and head coach Mike Smith were on a “malcontent inquisition.” When a member of the organization loosely and frequently referred to the Super Bowl in a newspaper interview, Dimitroff’s in-house response was that the organization had to remain “semantically responsible” when publicly talking about winning championships. The new catchphrase, “urgent athleticism,” qualified as a true obsession.

  As he paced his office and studied that board, Dimitroff openly wondered what it would take to put the Falcons in position to select one of those receivers. He had focused on offense in his first draft, taking Ryan and left tackle Sam Baker. In his second draft, he went defense by selecting tackle Peria Jerry in the first, although Jerry got hurt and missed most of the season. He added to the defense in round three, taking Missouri linebacker Sean Weatherspoon because of his speed and ability to cover. For his fourth draft, he was thinking about getting into position for one of those alpha receivers. “If there was a way to trade some of the lower-round picks and move up, I’d do it,” he said. “If you’re telling me the cost to significantly move up is lower-to-middle-round picks, then why not? I guess I look at it differently than a lot of people.”

  In Dimitroff’s third year as GM, the entire organization was looking to define itself with greater expectations. The team had paid millions of dollars for a soulful marketing camp
aign, “Rise Up,” with a rousing video of a mass choir singing behind actor and Falcons fan Samuel L. Jackson. For Dimitroff, rising up had to be more than consecutive winning seasons. He already counted on that, and he wanted Atlanta fans to feel the same way, even if that hadn’t been anyone’s reality in the first forty-two years of the franchise. The next step was to win big games and continue to add the right kind of impact players to the roster.

  Dimitroff challenged himself and his staff to build a team that was a consistent contender, filled with enough “captain-characteristic” players as mainstays. When he took the job, he brought along a color-coded scouting matrix that would bring even more specificity to the scouting process. It could be read quickly, and a series of numbers, four 7.5s, for example, told a precise story of what kind of player he could expect to see on film. The numerical snapshot also included a dot, with green the mark for a captain and black for someone who would go in a high-risk, skull-and-crossbones column on the team’s board. High-risk didn’t just mean an arrest or an expulsion from school. High-maintenance could equate to high-risk, too. Dimitroff was conscious of the locker-room mix and knew that one too many “me” guys could undermine years of planning. He was a political liberal and he could tolerate a lot of different things, but he wasn’t going to employ players who required so much special management that they’d distract coaches and other players from focusing on their jobs.