War Room

by Michael Holley

  The Ravens take the great field position and turn it into a field goal, for a 13–7 lead. After getting the ball back, the Chiefs look sloppy. Cassel is called for an intentional grounding penalty, he’s then sacked by Suggs, and his eight-yard pass to rookie Dexter McCluster turns into a fumble that Baltimore recovers. The Ravens add another field goal and it’s 16–7. It’s still just the third quarter, but the Chiefs are crumbling. When Cassel gets back on the field, he throws another interception, and this time there are no more defensive stands to minimize the damage. The Ravens find the end zone this time, Flacco to Anquan Boldin, and it’s 23–7.

  It’s officially a meltdown.

  Dallas Pioli sits outside one of the Arrowhead suites, draped in a stadium blanket. Despite what Scott and the tailgating fans said before the game, it is bitterly cold, and that reality begins to sink in with the increasingly lopsided score. Dallas has been around the NFL her entire life. She has seen dozens of games like this in which her father’s or husband’s team didn’t perform as well as expected, and she has seen the brightest smiles of both men as they’ve cradled the Lombardi Trophy. She’s an expert on the NFL that few people see; she’s seen some of the all-time greats when their guards are down, when they’re sincerely speaking and not giving press-conference spin, when they’re in the family den truly celebrating or sulking over what happened at work. She knows that this is going to be a sulking night. She stays outside longer than most because she wants to be supportive of the team, but she’s also taking a few minutes to gather her thoughts and think of supportive things to say to Scott later.

  Inside the suite, Ralph Marchant is talking with his son, Louis, and two of Pioli’s closest friends from high school, Matt Spencer and Paul McHugh. Dallas eventually joins them and says, “Okay, guys. What should I say to my husband?” No one has any good answers for later or for what’s happening on the field. It is now a showcase between two teams playing in the quietest stadium in the league. The place has cleared, save for a few Chiefs loyalists and a couple hundred Ravens fans who have made the trip from Baltimore. The score has ballooned to 30–7. The Chiefs have produced just two first downs and twenty-five yards in the second half. Bowe hasn’t caught a single ball. If anything, this is quite the humbling reminder of what Pioli and his staff have to do in the off-season.

  The game is officially over, so Dallas and Mia and their weekend guests make their way to the small locker room where Pioli began his day. He has changed from his suit to jeans and a sweatshirt, preparing for a postgame tradition where he plays catch on the field with Mia. Pioli notices that everyone in the room is feeling sorry for him, and he tries to put them at ease by saying he knew all along just how much work the Chiefs had to do before they could expect to win games like these. It’s clearly a defense mechanism. He’s hurting, but he doesn’t want the pity.

  They all move outside and quickly see an emotional Jen Vrabel, who knows her husband better than anyone and is sure that this is the end of the thirty-five-year-old linebacker’s career. Many of the players whom Mike Vrabel won and bonded with in New England have been cut and traded, or they’ve retired and moved on to cushy TV jobs. The Piolis try to reassure Jen of Mike’s important contributions to the Chiefs. There are hugs and good-byes, and just before Scott and Mia head to the field, there is a voice from above. A few fans are leaning on a railing that overlooks the lot where cars and buses are parked. They recognize the general manager of the Chiefs and have something they want to say to him.

  “Thank you for the season, Mr. Pioli,” one of the young fans says.

  Pioli looks up and gives a respectful wave. He appreciates the support, but this is not how the story unfolds when he thinks of that winning celebration that both Missourians and Kansans can enjoy. He’ll play catch with Mia until she gets too tired and wants to go home. And in the morning, he’ll get back to work.

  On a Saturday night in Atlanta, a city that knows how to host a party, the best show in town promises to be at the Georgia Dome. The Falcons are the top seed in the NFC for the first time in thirty years, and they are a few minutes away from playing the Green Bay Packers in a divisional play-off game. As a huge American flag covers the field and sixty-nine thousand people shout their approval, Thomas Dimitroff notices that Stephanie Blank is trying to get his attention.

  “Aren’t you proud of this?” she says.

  Dimitroff nods to the wife of the Falcons’ owner and smiles at what he sees on the field. He’s proud of the Falcons for putting themselves in this position, and he’s proud of the fans for believing in what they’ve built in just three years. But he wants the same thing for the Falcons that Stephanie’s husband wants for his businesses. Reliability. Consumer trust. Greatness. Dimitroff came to Atlanta with a vision of how to build a winner, and spending time with Arthur Blank, one of the most successful men in the country, has only enhanced it.

  The general manager remembers the day when he was playing golf with Arthur at Augusta National. Dimitroff was wearing golf pants from a competitor of the golf retailer, PGA Tour Superstore, in which Blank has an ownership stake. When Dimitroff explained that he went to the PGA store and it didn’t have the size 32 golf pants he needed, Blank was on the phone within seconds. “If our general manager had that experience, how many other people did as well?” he said that day. “Let’s make sure we get more thirty-twos in there.”

  Blank wants to win desperately, and he’ll sort through the smallest details to make it happen. So will Dimitroff. Unfortunately for them on this night, so will the quarterback of the Packers.

  A few minutes into the second quarter, Aaron Rodgers finds receiver Jordy Nelson for a six-yard scoring play that ties the score at 7. Before anyone in the dome has time to have doubts, returner Eric Weems takes the Green Bay kickoff and returns it for a playoff-record 102 yards and a touchdown. Trailing 14–7 and starting from their own eight, the Packers glide through the Atlanta defense, with Rodgers completing five of six passes, and tie the score again five minutes later.

  There are a couple of developing problems. One is that this is not the Falcons’ game. They aren’t a shoot-out team, and if they’re forced to play this style the entire game they’ll be in trouble. There’s also the matter of Rodgers. He appears to be indefensible. He’s running like Michael Vick but throwing with more accuracy. He’s flashing the arm strength of a young Brett Favre but is making better decisions. He’s showing the ability to escape like Fran Tarkenton used to do, but his scrambles are efficient and controlled. He is pitching the football equivalent of a perfect game, and the feeling is that if the Falcons don’t have some type of score each time they touch the ball, they won’t be able to beat him.

  The Falcons’ first mistakes are made by Pro Bowl quarterback Matt Ryan. He has helped the team drive to the Packers’ fourteen, but a seven-yard sack takes the Falcons out of the red zone, and a third-and-long attempt to receiver Michael Jenkins ends with a Tramon Williams interception in the end zone. Ninety seconds later, after again completing five of six passes on the drive, Rodgers has the Packers celebrating another touchdown and a 21–14 lead.

  Dimitroff shakes his head in his box, a similar reaction to most of the people in the building. They’re witnessing one of the most spellbinding performances in league play-off history. But Ryan, with the help of back-to-back pass-interference calls, still has time to lead a drive that can end with at least a field goal before halftime. On a play from the Packers’ twenty-six, Ryan takes a costly nine-yard sack, which forces Falcons coach Mike Smith to use his last time-out of the half. With ten seconds to play, Smith and offensive coordinator Mike Mularkey want to run something quick that will get the team slightly closer for kicker Matt Bryant. But Williams has help over the top, and he’s waiting for Ryan to throw the out, the one pass Williams is sitting on. Ryan throws to the left sideline and Williams steps in front of it at the thirty, secures the football, and races seventy yards to the end zone. It’s 28–14 at halftime, which is bad news, and it’
s going to get even worse: The Packers will begin the third quarter with the ball.

  As the third quarter begins, everyone in the dome understands the unofficial rules to the game. If the Packers score on their opening drive, it’s over. It takes six and a half minutes for it to happen, and Rodgers repeats his scoring formula by completing five of six passes on the drive, but after the quarterback runs for a seven-yard score, it’s 35–14. And the best party in Atlanta, which had so much potential at eight o’clock, flops before ten.

  When it’s finally over, Dimitroff stands in the interview room waiting to hear what Smith has to say about the embarrassing 48–21 loss. The GM’s wife, Angeline, is sitting in one of the back rows of the room and spots him. “I’m sorry” she mouths from across the room, and leaves her seat to stand next to him. He has several family members in town, from Ohio and Canada, including his mother, Helen. The wife of a longtime coach and the mother of a pro executive, Helen had watched from a dome suite and said, “I don’t know who those guys are out there. They’ve got the uniforms of the Falcons, but those aren’t the Falcons.”

  Eventually Arthur Blank enters the room, and after a round of questioning from the media, Smith goes to his office to digest what he saw. He won’t like it, but he’ll appreciate the craftsmanship of Rodgers, who finished the night 31 of 36 for 366 yards, three passing touchdowns, and one rushing. But there was even more to the story. When Smith was an assistant coach, he would watch practice and make notes on his script when something stood out to him that he wanted to watch later. As soon as practice would end, he would hustle ahead of the other coaches so he could get back to the office to see if the film confirmed what he thought he saw. He did the same with Rodgers.

  “There were five instances when we had free defenders, unblocked, who had an opportunity to get Rodgers, and all five times he was able to get away,” Smith says. “I mean, five free defenders? That’s a lot for a game. I think there was just one throw of his that traveled more than twenty yards in the air, the entire game. So that tells you how precise he was of moving the ball and directing the team. There were some gains after catches, but as far as twenty-plus-yard throws in the air, he had one.”

  Outside of Smith’s office, Les Snead and Nick Polk allow themselves to get into a debate with sportswriter Pete Prisco over number one receivers in the NFL. Snead is the Falcons’ player personnel director and Polk is their director of football administration. One of Prisco’s points is that the Packers truly don’t have one and that Rodgers makes them all look better than they are. They go ’round and ’round before Snead admits why the topic is of any interest to him.

  “The only reason I’m having this conversation with you, Peter,” he says, “is that it’s keeping me from stewing over what I just saw.”

  It’s close to midnight, and soon Dimitroff will go back to a house full of friends and family members who will want to know what happened but will be too respectful to ask. Finding out what happened, talking about it, and fixing it isn’t just Dimitroff’s job. It’s an obsession. He knows the loss is going to feel even worse on Sunday morning. A top seed loses at home. By Sunday night, the Falcons won’t be the only team with that headline.

  When the Patriots and New York Jets played in Foxboro on December 6, it was 27 degrees with a wind-chill factor of 15. Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez stepped on the field for pregame drills and mentally checked out of the game before it started.

  “It’s too cold for football,” he said with both of his hands stuffed into the warmer around his waist. The Patriots won that game, 45–3, with Sanchez barely completing half of his thirty-three passes and throwing three interceptions.

  As he often does, Bill Belichick sat in his office after that game talking football with his youngest son, Brian. From the moment he was able to pick up a football and throw it, Brian had an interest in playing and dissecting the game, just like his father. Belichick was asked how the Patriots had so much success against the Jets’ defense. They had compiled 405 yards of offense and Tom Brady had thrown four touchdown passes. “You’ve just got to beat man coverage,” Belichick answered. “That’s what they play ninety-five percent of the time.”

  It’s six and a half weeks later, January 16, and the Jets have returned to Foxboro for a divisional play-off game. Rex Ryan, the most media-savvy head coach the Jets have had since Bill Parcells a decade earlier, opened his Monday press conference with a bold statement: The game would be won by whichever head coach was better, him or Belichick. Ryan provided a lot of sound bites during that session with the media, but he left out the most significant reason for his confidence. The biggest difference between his December game plan and the one he planned to use for the play-off game?

  His identical twin brother, Rob.

  Rob Ryan, a former Patriots linebackers coach under Belichick, had coauthored the best game plan of the season against the high-scoring Patriots. He was the Browns’ defensive coordinator on November 7, when they came out of their bye week and surprised the Patriots, 34–14. New England fell to 6–2 after that loss and then won eight consecutive games, scoring thirty-plus points in all of them. Rob Ryan couldn’t help his brother in December because he had his own business to worry about in Cleveland. But when head coach Eric Mangini and his assistants were fired on January 3, it freed up Rob to talk specifics with Rex.

  Cleveland had been the anti-Jets against the Patriots in November. The Browns threw a combination of two-, three-, and four-deep blitz zones at the Patriots and even went as far as coming up with completely different plans for the first and second half. Browns players must have heard it fifty times that week in practice from the coaches: “We’re not necessarily trying to come up with the perfect call; we just want to make sure Brady doesn’t know what’s coming. We can’t show a pattern or he’ll kill us.”

  Rex Ryan had shown an obvious pattern in December: man coverage. He had a different take after listening to the brother who once took his ACT test for him so he could go fishing instead. The Browns had been able to hold the ball for thirty-eight minutes against the Patriots, and they’d intentionally lingered on defense, too. Their logic was that they didn’t want to make it easy for the perceptive Brady to identify the middle, or Mike, linebacker. Rapid identification of the Mike allowed Brady to set the protection for the offensive line and break down a defense. The obvious advantage the Jets had over the Browns was that they were a much better team, so they could afford to take the essence of Cleveland’s strategy and tweak it to suit their superior personnel.

  Early in the play-off game, it doesn’t appear that the Jets’ defense is any more complex than it was in December. The Patriots have taken the ball from their own sixteen and driven to the New York twenty-eight. But Brady overthrows a screen to BenJarvus Green-Ellis—a pass he has made effortlessly hundreds of times, albeit this time it’s to a back not known for catching the football—and it’s intercepted by linebacker David Harris. It’s Brady’s first interception in an NFL-record 335 attempts. The Gillette Stadium crowd gasps at the interception, but even more surprising than the turnover is the fact that Harris is caught from behind by Alge Crumpler. The Patriots tight end is listed at 275 pounds but appears to be just as big as Jets left tackle D’Brickashaw Ferguson, listed at 307. The Jets miss a short field-goal attempt, and the Patriots begin to drive again.

  This time they move from their twenty-one to the New York seven. Brady places the ball perfectly in the hands of Crumpler, a former Falcon who used to be one of Michael Vick’s favorite targets. But Crumpler drops the ball and the Patriots get a field goal out of the possession. It’s the best they can do for a half, and the New York defensive strategy begins to reveal itself. The Jets have effectively created traffic jams in the middle of the field and challenged the Patriots’ receivers to beat man coverage on the perimeter. Often, they can’t. It’s a sluggish game, 7–3 Jets, with just over a minute left in the half. The Patriots have a breakdown so a fake punt is on although it’s not supposed to b
e. It doesn’t work, and the Jets take over the ball at the New England thirty-seven.

  Sanchez was clearly affected by the cold night in December, but a few more degrees and no vicious Northeastern wind has made a huge difference for him in January. He puts the Jets up 14–3 at the half by making a strong fifteen-yard throw to Braylon Edwards for a touchdown.

  Late in the third, the Jets still leading 14–3, Brady continues to look unsure. He has been sacked three times and is having trouble finding anyone, other than Deion Branch, who can get open on the perimeter. But the Patriots finally spring a big play over the middle when rookie Rob Gronkowski, whose ten touchdown receptions in the regular season were a team rookie record, catches a pass and gains thirty-seven yards. The play takes them from their twenty to the New York forty-three, and seven plays later Brady hits Crumpler with a ball that the big tight end holds on to for a touchdown. A successful two-point conversion makes it 14–11 going into the fourth quarter.

  The Jets, beginning with Ryan, spent the week leading up to the game saying what they were going to do in New England. It started innocently enough, with the made-for-the-tabloids bravado of Ryan. It got edgier later in the week when Jets cornerback Antonio Cromartie referred to Brady as “an asshole.” And after Wes Welker held a press conference in which he found creative ways to mention feet, a reference to Ryan’s supposed foot fetish, Jets linebacker Bart Scott warned, “His days in a uniform are numbered.” The constant talk got the attention of NFL executives, who instructed all playoff teams to be mindful of their rhetoric. You don’t have to work very hard to get a New Englander’s opinion on mouthy New Yorkers, so there was more local anticipation and intensity than usual for the game. But the local intensity had nothing to do with local fear. The December game had been all the proof that most fans needed that the Patriots wouldn’t lose this game to the Jets. They’d gotten open at will and Sanchez sounded and looked like he wanted to be next to a fireplace.