Authors: Michael Holley
They are such good grandparents that their son ribs
them sometimes. “Believe me,” he said, “you want to be a grandchild in this
house.” Jeanette smiled. “Well, they’re all good kids.” She has pictures of
them throughout the house, including a couple on the refrigerator. When Bill
said that his son Stephen was going through a stage of
being cool, Jeanette pointed out, “And
you
didn’t think you
were cool at the same age?”
It was a typical trip home, and they
all wanted it to last longer. But it couldn’t, and they all knew why.
Belichick’s parents saw that look on his face after the loss to the Jets— that
game really stung him. As the wife of a coach and the mother of a coach,
Jeanette understands the demands of building a team and then guiding it. Not
much had changed. When he was sixteen, his mother could look at him and know
what was on his mind. He is fifty now, and she does the same thing.
He would have breakfast in the morning and then get ready to head toward
College Park. To think about self- scouting. To think about the tough but
necessary decisions that needed to be made.
B
efore they can know what they
need, they need to know who they are. This is one of Belichick’s core
philosophies, and it is why he was sitting in this Gillette Stadium room with a
binder, notebook, pens, and pages of football statistics. All the coaches were
there. Adams and Pioli were there. For a couple of days Kraft was there
too.
This was a team evaluation meeting where no
opinions were spared. It was just a bunch of smart guys talking football. But
instead of a bar top there was a conference table. And rather than pure
emotion—although there was emotion here—their conclusions were backed up with
numbers, trends, and anecdotes. Every Patriots player was up for discussion.
There were strengths and weaknesses for each one. There
were comments and sometimes statistics on his mental errors, his performance in
the weight room, his ability to be coached, his attitude, his ranking compared
with others at his position leaguewide and his ability to help the team next
year.
Emotionally, this was easier for Belichick to do than it was
for the position coaches. The head coach was not dealing with a group of six to
ten players to whom he may have grown close over the course of a season or two.
Belichick didn’t bring that type of closeness into it. He took the panoramic
view. If he saw a weak spot from overhead, he was more likely to fix it
aggressively. Business first. What he wanted to be able to gauge from these
meetings, simply, was whether a player still was a good fit for the Patriots.
If not, it was time to move on.
And it sounded as if everyone
wanted to do that with young tackle Kenyatta Jones. He had made 23 mental
errors—the highest number on the team—in 661 plays. His blocks graded out at 72
percent, the lowest on the team. His position coach was Dante Scarnecchia. If
the Patriots had been a college, Scarnecchia would have been tenured. He has
held a number of positions in his twenty years with the Patriots. Belichick
respects him and takes his analyses seriously. Scarnecchia reported that Jones
had poor practice habits, was late off the ball, and had questionable mental
toughness.
“There are days when that guy comes out to practice and
you just know that he ain’t gonna fuckin’ work,” Scarnecchia said. He said that
Jones’s effort at Miami in October “was one of the worst ten-play stretches of
any tackle in the league.” Belichick agreed. “He killed us that day. There are
stretches when he’s just brutal.” The only thing positive
they could say about him was that he was young—twenty-four—and that he enjoyed
facing good players. “He is your typical coach-killer,” Charlie Weis said.
“Most of his teammates have no confidence in him. All of the offensive linemen
know he can’t be counted on, and the quarterbacks know it as well.”
They still weren’t done with him.
Scarnecchia reasoned that
Jones may have had a self-image problem. “Not to get too fuckin’ psychological
here,” he said. He then questioned his own coaching, wondering whether he
should show some restraint and not ride Jones so much. “But,” he concluded,
“that would be very hard.”
Most people in the room—including new
quarterbacks coach Hufnagel—realized that Jones was the baseline. They realized
that no other player they evaluated was going to fall below that level. If so,
nonplay-off seasons were going to be the norm.
The entire tone of
the conversation changed when it was time to evaluate guard Damien Woody.
Scarnecchia liked him. Woody had made just 6 mental errors in 957 plays. He
graded out at 89 percent on all of his blocks, the highest number on the team.
“He’s tough,” Scarnecchia said. “He’s competitive. He’s durable. He’s good in
meetings. He accepts challenges.” Belichick added that Woody was tough. He said
more players like the team’s third- round pick in 2001 could learn from his
pain threshold. “Brock Williams
still
hasn’t recovered from a
high-ankle sprain,” Belichick said with a smirk, referring to the former
Patriots cornerback.
On some players, these men could sort through
the information without much of a debate. Some players they just saw the same
way. They all agreed that they needed to find a way to get
the ball to Kevin Faulk more often. And that the drop in Antowain Smith’s forty
times—from 4.44 in 2001 to 4.54 in 2002—was a concern. “I’m worried about it,”
Belichick said. Weis concurred: “This was a shitty year. He would let some
slapdick corner come up and tackle him after he gained one yard.” They loved
Matt Light’s improvement from year one to year two. As a rookie left tackle, he
had made 35 mental errors in 769 plays. His second year was much cleaner: 12
errors in 1,030 plays.
A few of them questioned the toughness of
Patrick Pass, who could play on special teams and at fullback. “This guy gets a
hangnail and you think you have to call the mortuary. He’s dead,” said Brad
Seely, the special-teams coach. Weis said there were lots of phrases for
guys—coach-killer, enigma—and all of them described Pass. “The only thing in
his defense—and believe me, I can’t stand the mother- fucker—is that the
quarterbacks like him. They ask me, ‘What about Pass?’ I don’t know
why.”
Belichick jumped in with an idea: “Let’s try to run him off
and see if he responds to that.” Ernie Adams said Pass was a good guy to make
an example of and that it was time to ship him out.
The strongest
reaction of the day shouldn’t have been a surprise to anyone. The subject was
defense, and Belichick had a real problem with some of the comments about line-
backer Ula Tuitele. The problem was that the comments were positive and
Belichick didn’t want to hear it. You could tell that he was on edge and that
this wasn’t about Tuitele as much as it was desperation to improve a defense
that couldn’t defend itself. This wasn’t about Tuitele as much as it was a late
response to Pepper Johnson’s comment that Larry Izzo had the potential to be “a
Bill Romanowski–type player.” Izzo was a Pro Bowler on
special teams; Romanowski was one of the top “SAM” or strong- side linebackers
in the league. “That’s a reach,” Belichick had told Johnson. Now he had to hear
several coaches praise Tuitele. It was too much for him to handle.
“I don’t know if we’re seeing the same guy,” he said. He asked Josh
McDaniels to turn out the lights. He went to the Pinnacle system, a
computerized library that contains every play that a coach can dream of
watching. If you want to see all the team’s plays that begin from the left hash
mark on third down, you can do it. The system helps keep track of
trends—percentage of plays run left, right, and up the middle—and it helps a
coach better understand a player’s strengths. Belichick wanted McDaniels to
show some clips of Tuitele. What he saw didn’t impress him. “The guy is slow as
shit,” he said. “I don’t see how we get faster on defense with guys like this
on the field. He wasn’t blocked. He just can’t run.” There was going to be a
twenty-minute break coming up, because now Belichick was about to explode:
“I’m tired of thinking our team is good against Detroit, Buffalo’s horseshit
offensive line, and Philly’s third-string offense. I don’t give a fuck about
that. We’re one of the bottom five teams defensively in the league. We suck at
stopping the run. We’re bad in the red area. And we can’t get off the field on
third down.”
It was time for that break. No one needed to guess
where the Patriots would be looking in free agency and the draft.
There aren’t many people who better understand
Belichick than Scott Pioli. This is what happens when your boss doubles as a
best friend: you know when he is venting, and you know when he truly wants
something drastic to happen. You know when he is being reasonable, and you know
when he is being unfair because of a bad day. You know some of his football
catchphrases like “That’s not what we’re looking for” and “It doesn’t get any
worse than that” and “Look at this ass- hole” (which is sometimes intended as a
compliment).
Pioli has seen Belichick’s growth as a
father, husband, manager, and coach. If Pioli were given 20 random questions
and told to answer them as Belichick might, he wouldn’t embarrass himself
with his responses. He knew, without it being said, that
his department would have to have its best year. He and his scouts were going
to be reshaping the infrastructure of the team. They were going to be
evaluating players and recommending that the Patriots either draft or sign some
of them. As a friend, Pioli knew how much the 9–7 season had hurt Belichick. As
an employee, he knew he was going to have to do something to prevent the hurt
from recurring. So when Pioli enters the second-floor conference room and
listens to the opinions of his scouts, he is carefully considering every point.
He is an intense listener and note-taker. There are times when the scouts are
reading their early draft reports aloud and they glance at Pioli to see if he
has any reaction. For a moment they are all back in junior high, trying to
satisfy a teacher with a probing eye and a red pen.
Pioli usually
is at the front of the room for these sessions. He sits in a black chair,
tilting and listening. He has copies of their reports in binders, and his pens
and highlighters are not far away. Away from here, his jokes are always good
and his one-liners come as often as blinks. (Nancy Meier, a personnel
administrator who has been with the Patriots since the mid-1970s, says Pioli’s
wit reminds her of a former New England coach. That coach happens to be Pioli’s
father-in-law, Bill Parcells.) Away from here, he has been known to ask younger
members of his department about slang, wanting to know the difference between
“bling-bling” and “ice.” But this place—which morphs into the draft room for
one weekend each April—is where he often points out inconsistencies,
oversights, and sloppiness. He circles in red and writes, “What are you
saying?” or “What does this mean?” or “This is weak.”
It is not always about wanting to be right—he will be
the first to tell you that he shouldn’t have pushed for the signing of Eric
Bjornson or the drafting of Jabari Holloway. For Pioli, it is about being
thorough so that his department can hold up its end of the deal with Belichick.
The coach wants players who can fit in or adjust to his system. Pioli is
responsible for making sure his men know what that system is, can communicate
in that system, can make comparisons to other players who have been or are in
the system, and can ultimately recommend players who might replenish the system
and reject those who don’t.
Belichick didn’t have a winning record
for four of his five seasons in Cleveland. Although several factors contributed
to the mediocrity—inheriting an awful team in the pre–free agency era and the
unprecedented distraction of an owner moving a franchise
during
the season—poor drafts and poor signings were part of
the problem as well. Pioli witnessed it himself. In his midtwenties then, he
was there with Belichick in the early 1990s, a Browns employee with little
money—he wouldn’t order cable TV because it was too expensive—and no authority.
He saw the way low-character, high-maintenance players could deplete a team.
He saw how a low-performing team could turn a city and organization against
you. Because of that, he understood why no one really stops thinking about
security in this business. Moments after the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI in
New Orleans, Pioli and his wife lay on their bed in the Fairmont Hotel. As a
raucous party began in the Imperial Ballroom, Dallas Pioli looked at her
husband and said, “We’re safe for another year.”
He agreed. It’s
not like a championship is worth a lifetime of grace and immunity. This is part
of the reason mistakes haunt him, even though he can walk
down the hallway and see photos and mementos of Super Bowl bliss. Some people
have photographic memories. Pioli’s memory is a leather-bound photo album,
going all the way back to Little League in Washingtonville, New York, in 1972.
He played for a team called the Royals then, and their record was 2–13. The
losses upset him so much that his parents threatened to remove him from the
league. He still doesn’t lose well. It is yet another thing he and Belichick
have in common. They don’t put their feet on tables and reflect on their
greatness. They are analysts, stalking themselves for loopholes and weaknesses.
When they find them, especially in retrospect, they want to perform autopsies
on the errors so they won’t happen again.
In the Jabari Holloway
case, for example, Pioli says he should have trusted his instincts. The tight
end from Notre Dame made him nervous as soon as Pioli found out why he was late
for practice.
Chemistry class.
“By your senior year,
football had better be a priority if you’re going to be an NFL player,” he
says. “And I don’t care about chemistry labs. You know what? You can come back
and get your grades. To me that explained that something larger was going on.
That there were other things in life clearly more important than football. He
could have done it some other way where it didn’t interfere with his football.
That bothered me.”
The Patriots drafted Holloway with their second
fourth- round pick in the spring of 2001. He didn’t last long. The team drafted
a tight end, Daniel Graham, in the first round in 2002. Holloway was released
and signed by the Houston Texans.
This is how
a segment of the Patriots’ program works. It is driven by a concept that is
rare not only in sports but in American society. The idea, in a country full of
social and entertainment options, is that the obligations of the job— and
devotion to and mastery of the job—are an employee’s top priority. The Patriots
are attempting to stack their roster with productive players who either think
that way now or are on the cusp of a conversion. They don’t want to be
paternalistic figures asking their players, “Did you put in extra film time?”
They want the kind of players who want to do it without being asked.
“I’m looking at it from an employer’s standpoint,” Pioli says. “What else
is this player going to have in his life that’s more important than football,
other than a chemistry lab? I can’t always put my values onto people. But here
is what I know: my job is to find players for a head coach who wants football
to be the most important thing in their worlds. I believe in it.
“I miss time with my family, my wife. Bill misses time with his children.
Not that football is more important, but we’ve got a job to do. Football is
going to pay a kid a minimum of $200,000 or $225,000 a year as soon as he gets
out of college. There’s summer courses to pick up grades; there’s the spring
semester.”
Pioli’s opinions, like Belichick’s, are so clear and
blunt that there’s little if any room for misunderstandings. In fact, it’s
written in the manual that all scouts must have a clear opinion. Neutrality or
passive-aggressiveness can get you fired. You actually get credit when you
logically disagree with the boss. “I want them to know their opinion is
important,” says Pioli. “As a matter of fact, it’s so important that part of the evaluation of you is going to be whether or
not you have one.”
Pioli isn’t the only one who realizes what is
at stake prior to the 2003 draft. His scouts do as well, and they don’t lack
opinions. They talk for hours so they can come to some agreement on a player.
They talk about every aspect of a player, from his body type to his favorite
movie. They have conversations about wide butts, big butts, high cuts, large
thighs, barrel chests, big bones, and stiff hips. Scout Jake Hallum describes a
player as having a “wood hauler’s ass”—which is good. One former Patriots
scout, Jason Licht, describes a player as being “stiffer than a wedding
dick”—which is not good.
They talk about diets: “I’m telling you,
Scott. This kid has always had poor eating habits. This kid has a sensitive
stomach. I don’t know if you’ve talked to his people.”
They talk
about lifestyles: “In reference to his marijuana use, I’m positive that he has
used in the past. …I knowthat football is important to this guy. I don’t think
he’s a dumb kid. We were talking about football, and he seemed to have a pretty
good grasp of it. He doesn’t really care about school; he wants to be a
football player.”
They talk about character: “He’s a book-smart
guy. He had some accountability problems early in his career with his classes
and labs and stuff like that. He wouldn’t call over and let ’em know what was
going on. So he would be late for stuff, but they got all that straight. And he
hasn’t had a problem since.”
One floor above the cafeteria, they
talk about the prospects who might replace a few players who are eating below:
“As far as Marc Edwards goes, I don’t think this kid has
the versatility that Edwards has in our system. I know that Charlie [Weis]
likes to split him out a little bit and leak him into the flat. I thought this
kid was a little too stiff to be able to do that. I do think he’s a draftable
guy, and I think he could help us in our running game.”
They talk
about their own waffling: “You know, I guess as we move along here we’re going
to have to nut up here and decide.”
Pioli has no problems staying
objective in most of these discussions, but sometimes he lends his personal
experiences to balance the arguments. The characterization of one player as
“aloof” and “not overly bright” gets his attention.
“Are the
people at the school saying he’s not smart?” he asks. “The guy’s got a 22 test,
which isn’t bad. Is it just because he’s—”
“No, no,” the scout
interrupts. “Mathematically he’s okay. But he has no communication skills. He’s
not a communicating type, but he can pick up numbers. So—”
“This
guy goes five years of school and gets in trouble one time. I’m saying, let’s
not kill him on that. Let’s not ignore it, but let’s not kill him on it. The
other thing is, he’s a Detroit kid. Let’s not kill him because of the way he
speaks either. Do you remember A. P. in 1992?”
“A. P.” is Anthony
Pleasant, a player who may not have become an All-Pro but who had a significant
impact on Pioli personally. Pleasant grew up in Century, Florida, a classic
one-stoplight town on the Florida-Alabama border. He went to college at
Tennessee State, arriving there as a six- foot-five-inch, 208-pound defensive
end. Pioli understands that if someone chooses to focus on or be distracted by
Pleasant’s deep southern accent, that person is missing a gem. He understands that the Pleasant story has to be a part
of scouting because the Patriots’ type of player can’t be based purely on
numbers.
The scouting manual emphasizes leadership in some areas.
How many players would be confident enough to gather all the black players
around him in training camp and say, “Do you hear white guys calling themselves
‘honkies’? No. So why do we call each other ‘niggas’? When are we gonna grow
up? There ain’t nothing positive about that word at all. From now on, we ain’t
gonna have that word used in here no more.”
Pleasant did that with
the Patriots and got immediate results.
Ten years earlier, in
1994, he began to change the way Pioli thought about spirituality. The Browns
were returning from a December trip to Dallas. Pioli noticed that Pleasant was
reading the Bible, and the men began to converse about it. They talked about
creation versus evolution and the big bang theory. This went on for the
remainder of that trip and several times afterward. Pioli would pose
philosophical questions to Pleasant, and Pleasant would give spiritual answers.
If Pioli stumped him on something, Pleasant would research and return with an
answer that satisfied him. Eventually Pioli went to church with Pleasant.
Toward the end of the service the preacher made an altar call, inviting anyone
to come forward for individualized prayer.
“The first time that
happened, he said he just got in a cold sweat,” Pleasant says. “You know, he
said he couldn’t move. He came back another Sunday, and he said, ‘I’m going up
this time.’ He went, and I could see how relieved he was. Now, I hope he can
have an impact on this organization. I hope he will
continue to grow and not be ashamed of his faith.”
S
cout discussions can go on for
at least eight hours a day during some of the draft meetings. And it’s not like
these scouts aren’t used to long days. All of them have sat in offices for
hours, watching film. They have been on the road for two weeks at a time,
football drifters who absorb as much information as they can before moving on
to State College or Lincoln or Corvallis. The best ones have developed sources
at each stop. They chat with head coaches as well as cops. They pay attention
to strength coaches, trainers, graduate assistants, and third- and
fourth-stringers who watch the stars when the stars may be oblivious to them.
They often check into their hotels at eight or nine
P.M
.
They power their laptops shortly after that, catching up on reports that will
be sent back to Foxboro. If they had time to hold court in sports bars, they’d
be the brainiacs of any joint in the country. That’s the case for dozens of
scouts around the league. A few of them who work for one of the national
services—National Football Scouting and Blesto— are amused at draft time. They
can see their verbatim reports in football magazines because, presumably, one
among them has sold the reports to an agent.