War Room

by Michael Holley

  “I went there and I made my mistakes, and I’ll learn from them,” he says. “And I hope that I can learn from them and be a better coach and a better person. I’ll never be able to express how grateful I was for them giving me the chance, at thirty-two, to go there and be a head coach. It was awesome.”

  Right after he heard the news, Belichick contacted McDaniels.

  “I remember he called me,” McDaniels says, “and this is typical of him. He said, ‘How’s Laura? Make sure she’s okay.’ And I remember he said, ‘Call your parents. Go see them. Make sure that they know that you’re okay, because I know that they’re going to go through this and feel terribly about it.’ He told me that if I went and made sure that they saw me and they knew that I was okay, then it was going to help them. And I did. I made the trip. I went right to Ohio, spent a week with my mom and dad, and it made all the difference in the world. Because my mother and father were, you know, they were upset. And I think that made a huge difference.

  “But that’s him. It wasn’t about, ‘Hey, what happened?’ Or, ‘I wish you would have done this, or you should have done that.’ It was personal. That’s what my relationship with him is like. I can’t speak for anybody else’s, but he’s always been that kind of influence on me. And to me it’s invaluable.”

  The good news for McDaniels was that his friends in Kansas City and New England were having success. O’Brien, who was essentially the Patriots’ offensive coordinator, was displaying his creativity and smarts with the remade offense. McDaniels and O’Brien had worked on the same staff, and they had remained in touch. The offense, incredibly, was operating at an efficiency that was on pace to be the second-best in Patriots history. New England was 10–2, with no losses since Cleveland, and racing toward the top seed in the conference.

  As for the Chiefs, they weren’t just trimmed down in training camp. They had a gritty mentality, too. Those who watched the Chiefs train at Missouri Western University could hear assistant head coach Maurice Carthon from anywhere on campus: “Come on, son! You’ve gotta catch the ball. Damn!” The other coaches on the staff who were coached by “Mo” when they played, Bernie Parmalee and Richie Anderson, often teased him and claimed he wasn’t nearly as rough on these Chiefs as he was on them. “Because they’d kill themselves if I was,” Carthon often replied.

  “Mo’s the best,” Haley says. “He creates soldiers at the running back position. He’s the best running backs coach in the league, and we’re very close. He’s got an extra instinct; there are times he’ll say something and I’ll think, ‘Uh, that doesn’t sound right to me.’ And you know, it’ll turn out to be right.”

  They received tough coaching from Weis, too. Weis was available to coach them because his career at Notre Dame had peaked in his first two years there. The school had been so excited by Weis’s quick start in South Bend that he was given a contract extension before he had completed his first year. It was a lifetime contract, and he seemed to be on the path to backing it up by accumulating more wins, nineteen, in his first two seasons than even the legendary Knute Rockne had. He got the team to two lucrative bowl games in his first two years as well, and then he hit a drought. He was Jersey-guy brash when he took the job, promising that Notre Dame would have an X’s and O’s advantage against most teams. But toward the end of his final season, 2009, he was saying that he’d understand if he were fired.

  He was fired, and it wasn’t long before he heard from Scott Pioli. Notre Dame, his alma mater, may have taken his job, but his provocative coaching style was still intact. That could be seen as early as August in the heat of Saint Joseph, Missouri. Weis sat on his motorized cart and critiqued the details of the Chiefs’ route running. “I wasn’t fooled by that for a second,” he would say to a receiver. “Why in the hell do you think a defensive back would fall for it?”

  The coaching was so good that Haley had many of the players become honorary coaches during the bye week. They wore visors, they broke down film, they coached technique. There were veteran coaches like Brian Waters and Mike Vrabel, and there were younger coaches like Tamba Hali and Brandon Flowers.

  Of course, the Chiefs weren’t without their issues. There were times Haley and the man he used to share an office with in New York, Weis, didn’t see the offense the same way. That was just one of the reasons Weis was looking to take a college job during the season and found one at Florida, where he would become the offensive coordinator as soon as the Chiefs’ season ended. Still, the product was rarely affected. The Chiefs were the kind of team that won games they were supposed to, save for a frustrating overtime loss in Oakland in November. They were in the embryonic stages of becoming what Pioli envisioned, yet they were 8–4, and it certainly appeared that they were going the same place as the Patriots, Falcons, and nine others: the play-offs.

  11

  Three and Out

  Ralph Marchant recognizes the look on the face of his college roommate, Scott Pioli. He’s seen them all in the past twenty-five, going on thirty, years, and none of them require an explanation. When you’ve known a guy since you were both teenagers, when you’ve won and lost big games with him, seen him be a knucklehead, seen him be a Friday-night scholar who wanted to study film when everyone else in the college crowd wanted to go drinking, laughed and cried with him, watched him humbly climb to the top of his profession, and celebrated Super Bowl victories with him, it’s easy to know what he’s thinking.

  It’s January 9, the morning of the Kansas City Chiefs’ first home play-off game in seven years. Marchant, sitting on a couch in the Piolis’ family room, notices that his friend is unknowingly pacing. Pioli is trying to make sure he has everything he needs before leaving the house and heading to Arrowhead for a game against a team, the Baltimore Ravens, that he knows is better than his.

  “You’ve got that look, like you’ve run to the field and forgotten your helmet in the locker room,” Marchant says.

  Pioli laughs and agrees with him. It’s the look of game day, along with the anticipation and stomach knots that come with it, and it never leaves as long as you’re a part of competitive sports. At Central Connecticut in the 1980s, when Pioli and Marchant were both on the defensive line, Pioli could have an impact on the game with his play. But now his battered white-and-blue college helmet rests on a shelf in his home office, and he knows he’s done all he can to help the Chiefs win in the postseason for the first time since 1993. No more drafting, trading, waiver wiring, or roster massaging. This is it.

  As soon as Pioli gets into his car for the drive to the game, he cycles through his playlist and finds the artist whose words frequently dance in his head. Bruce. “Youngstown” plays, and then “The Promised Land” as Pioli drives through the neighborhoods of Kansas City, a town he has grown to love. He points to grand houses, well-kept parks, and the breathtaking Nelson-Atkins Art Museum. The University of Missouri—Kansas City is nearby, and it’s where Beth Emery, wife of the Chiefs’ college scouting director, is a graduate student in studio art. Scott and Dallas have fallen for Beth’s oil paintings, with one hanging near their family room, and the local art scene in general. Although he would never bring it up in a press conference, Pioli has such dreams of what it would be like to win a championship for this region, and especially for the Hunts, that he sometimes allows himself to think of the perfect place in town to celebrate.

  But the Chiefs are a long way from that point. They won ten games and captured the AFC West, yet they were the only division champ in the league to have a losing record, 2–4, within their division. Along with Pioli, many of the current Chiefs assistant coaches were in New England nearly a decade earlier when another dismissed team was able to surge to the Super Bowl. Charlie Weis, Romeo Crennel, Anthony Pleasant, and Otis Smith were all in New Orleans when the Patriot mystique was born in February 2002. Pioli isn’t thinking about that now as a light snow falls and dusts the city roads.

  “Some of our players have never played in this,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t f
reak them out.”

  The players will be fine. What’s starting to get to Pioli is that soon he won’t be able to help his team. He’ll just be a guy in a black suit, white shirt, red tie, and Chiefs lapel pin, hoping for the best. As he drives toward the stadium, he stops to speak with a group of tailgating fans.

  “No matter what happens,” one of the fans says, “it’s been a great year.”

  “We’re not ready to go home yet,” Pioli replies.

  A few feet ahead, he speaks with another group and they all agree that it’s really not that cold outside. The temperature won’t crack 30 all day, and the wind chill will make it feel half as “warm.” They wish him luck and send him off into game mode. There’s no question he’s there now. A yellow moving truck is blocking the area where he usually parks, and it seems as if the sun itself is sitting there in front of him with PENSKE printed on it. He’s agitated that this, of all things, is preventing him from going inside and getting into his routine. When the minor traffic jam is untangled, Pioli is able to go into a small locker room that has two side-by-side dressing stalls with Chiefs-themed nameplates above them. One of them reads SCOTT PIOLI. The other one reads MIA PIOLI. Mia, wearing her bejeweled number 7 Matt Cassel jersey, will arrive later. For now, it’s time to see if the Chiefs are ready to play a group of Baltimore veterans who believe they are tough and talented enough to go anywhere and beat anybody.

  When both teams take the field, minutes before kickoff, they hear a wall of sound. This is why Arrowhead is called the loudest place in the NFL. It’s a football crowd with rock-concert pipes. It’s seventy-thousand-plus people who are truly from both sides of the tracks, Kansas and Missouri, and they cheer with a hunger that suggests they’re looking for good football and perhaps something life-changing, too. Joe Posnanski found that out when he was a Kansas City Star columnist for thirteen years. During football season, the top ten stories on the paper’s website would be dominated by anything related to football coverage: columns, game stories, sidebars, off-day stories, and notes. While Pioli had his share of “What’s your name again?” episodes in New England, Posnanski says it will never happen in Kansas City.

  “If the mayor was speaking one place and Scott was somewhere else doing the same thing, he’d outdraw the mayor a hundred to one,” he says. “I couldn’t possibly overstate how big the Chiefs are in Kansas City. There’s nothing like it. The Chiefs are the one thing that brings people together. Whether it’s the Kansas side and the Missouri side or the inner city and the suburbs, the Chiefs are the one thing that can unite everybody.”

  The fans are as loud as usual in the first quarter, but the Ravens still take the ball at their own thirty and drive all the way to the Kansas City one. They try to surprise the Chiefs with a third-down pass to tight end Todd Heap, but rookie safety Eric Berry sees the play develop, gets into position, and the Ravens have to settle for a field goal. It’s a small victory, although Baltimore was able to possess the ball for nearly six minutes. The Chiefs, meanwhile, take just forty seconds to run through their first three plays before it’s time to punt.

  Few people in Kansas City are aware of the depths of it, but there’s some tension between offensive coordinator Weis and head coach Todd Haley. They had their share of clashes during the regular season, but with Haley, that’s not necessarily a story. He has fought with some of his best friends while playing pickup basketball and once got into a scrum with his brother-in-law on a basketball court, even though they were playing on the same team at the time. It’s not that intense with Weis, but Haley hasn’t gotten to the total trust/comfort level with him that he has with his new defensive coordinator, Crennel. It wasn’t much of an issue during the regular season, when the Chiefs ran the ball more and better than any team in football. But Weis and Haley had already decided they’d be better off not working together. Before parting ways, they’d eventually have one more thing over which to disagree and debate.

  After driving from their own fifteen toward midfield, the Ravens run into a 275-pound problem. Chiefs linebacker Tamba Hali is able to get to Baltimore quarterback Joe Flacco, strip-sack him, and recover the ball at the Ravens’ forty-six. Two plays later, Jamaal Charles goes from running back to sprinter and bursts into the end zone for a forty-one-yard touchdown. There’s a what-if moment in every game, and the Chiefs face it early in the second quarter. They have the lead, the ball, and the thought that they are going to do what the Ravens believe most teams can’t against them: run. An offensive Raven doesn’t come to your mind’s eye when you think of the team, and players such as Ray Lewis, Haloti Ngata, Ed Reed, and Terrell Suggs like it that way. In another era, they’d be the kind of guys who’d go into bars and challenge anyone to arm-wrestle. But the Chiefs take the ball at their own fourteen and start to get into a running rhythm on the Ravens.

  Charles for eleven.

  Charles for eight.

  Charles for nine.

  As they eat up yards, the red-clad wall of sound with them for every foot, the Chiefs are inspiring everyone to think of the possibilities. If they score a touchdown and have Baltimore down 14–3, it will force the Ravens to play a game they really don’t want to. An eight-yard pass from Cassel to Thomas Jones has the Chiefs at the fifty, and it’s fair to say that they are controlling the game. But they lose control on the very next play, a Charles fumble, and Baltimore is able to hang on to the ball and the pace of the game. Remarkably, the Chiefs have yet another opportunity to take control just five minutes after Charles’s fumble. They were able to hold the Ravens and are once more driving, going from their thirteen to near midfield again. This time, though, the mistake is a mental one: On third and three, in an area of the field where the bold Haley might authorize a fourth-down attempt if necessary, left tackle Branden Albert is called for a false start. It completely changes the game situation, pushes the Chiefs back five yards for a third and eight, and when Kansas City can’t convert, it gives the Ravens life.

  Flacco takes his team from its own twenty to the Chiefs’ nine. He’s gotten them here by following a game plan in which the idea is to get tight end Todd Heap in situations where he’s matched up with linebackers. Heap was able to catch three passes for forty-six yards during the middle of the drive. Now it’s nearing the end, with a third and two with fewer than thirty seconds remaining in the first half. Flacco is able to fully complete his work with a nine-yard touchdown pass to Ray Rice for a 10–7 halftime lead.

  On all levels of Arrowhead, there are frustrated Chiefs. Pioli watched his old team in New England participate in seventeen of these play-off games. He understands that games in January and February generally are unforgiving when it comes to mistakes. You use the hammer when you have it, otherwise you find yourself locked in an uncomfortable game of chance. Pioli stands near the press-box elevators. His face is red, and he has so many thoughts about the missed opportunities in the first half that he doesn’t have a complete sentence for what he just saw. Downstairs in the locker room, things are more verbal. Haley is upset that the Chiefs’ Pro Bowl receiver, Dwayne Bowe, wasn’t targeted more. He caught seventy-two balls in the regular season, fifteen of them for touchdowns, but he was completely shut out in the first half. Haley thinks some of it was the Ravens’ defense, some of it was Bowe, and some of it was squarely on Weis. But as much as he disagreed with some of the things Weis was calling, Haley knew that there couldn’t be any in-game switching. On offense, at least, this was Weis’s game to call.

  One minute into the third, the Chiefs get a break. Cassel had tried to find rookie tight end Tony Moeaki across the middle, but the ball was intercepted by defensive back Haruki Nakamura. Charles stayed with the play, forced Nakamura to fumble, and recovered for the Chiefs. So now they are driving again with a fresh set of downs from their own thirty-two. On a third and nine, Cassel finds Charles for fifteen yards. On the next play, Jones runs for ten. They’ve got something here, this time much deeper than before. They have a third and two at the Ravens’ thirty-four.
Jones runs up the middle for a yard, and the rapid headset conversations about the fourth-down play begin.

  Haley is a believer in going for it on fourth down. He worked for Bill Parcells for seven years in two cities, and Parcells was as aggressive on fourth as any of his peers. Bill Belichick was an advocate of going for it on fourth down, too, so much so that he once did it from his own twenty-eight. Haley doesn’t need to be sold on going for it, although he doesn’t like the play that Weis is proposing. He’s told that it’s very likely the featured runner, Charles, will not just pick up the first but wind up in the end zone. Haley’s instincts tug at him and tell him to overrule the call. But he doesn’t. For a split second he thinks of calling a time-out, correctly sensing that a play like this can change the game. Still, as important as the play is, they are barely five minutes into the third, and you can’t be so casual with time-outs in a game this close.

  It’s fourth and one from the thirty-three. The Chiefs send their jumbo reinforcements to the field, with the six-hundred-plus pounds of Jon Asamoah and Shaun Smith. This is part of the deception. Weis wants the Ravens to think about the plunge up the middle, while the Chiefs’ true plan is to get Charles and his trackstar speed on the edge. If the Ravens don’t sniff out the play, Weis will look like a genius because no one on defense will be able to catch Charles if he gets a head start. Problem is, no one is fooled. Strong safety Dawan Landry sees that Cassel has flicked the ball to Charles, moving outside, and Landry is there instantly to blow it up. He tackles Charles for a four-yard loss. It’s one of the first times all day that there’s been a pause in the wall of sound.