Authors: Michael Holley
By noon he was on
Northwest flight 9965. The team was leaving New Orleans for Boston, where there
would be a downtown parade the next day. Belichick sat near Pioli on the plane,
and they compared their lists for the expansion draft. Their Lombardi Trophy
wasn’t even twenty-four hours old. But shortly after takeoff, they had already
begun thinking about how they could win another one.
The man at the front of the room hates giving
this speech, although he has never lacked the confidence to give it. Anyone who
knows him can tell you that. Bill Belichick hates to stand there, his entire
team and coaching staff before him, and talk about the phenomenon of
intelligent men— some of the same men who only nine months before had been
champions of their sport—playing dumb football. Or, as he said after the 28–10
loss to the Green Bay Packers, “We have a lot of smart guys in this room, but
on the football field we play like a bunch of fucking
morons.”
If you are one of the players flinching at
the harshness of these words, you might as well begin packing. There is no way
you are going to last as a New England Patriot. This is one of the reasons
the Patriots’ college scouts are asked by their bosses, “Can
this player handle tough coaching?” What they really want to know, without the
euphemism, is whether a prospect can deal with being “motherfucked” when things
are not going well.
Most of the players in this auditorium could.
They had to. This is a profession where political correctness never caught on.
There is no liaison in Human Resources who monitors the way your supervisor
talks to you. The players know their head coach can be profane, even when he is
not angry. He has an extensive vocabulary—expletives not included—but he stores
it like a precious sports car when he is here. He knows ambiguity doesn’t work
in the NFL. Some people may not like his brand of bluntness, but at least they
understand it. That’s what’s important in this business where misunderstandings
lead to losses and layoffs.
He has visions of how football teams
should be built and how the games should be played. He is secure enough to
allow these visions to be inspected, four or five times per year, for soft
spots and holes. There is frequent self- scouting and self-analysis, his
version of 3,000-mile checkups to see if everything is running well. He prefers
to have advisers and scouts with strong opinions, and at times he demands that
those opinions be stated. As with his preparation for the Super Bowl, he will
ask the football people closest to him—Scott Pioli and Ernie Adams—what they
think, unafraid to hear ideas that are inconsistent with his own. He does the
same thing with his assistants and other coaches he speaks with by phone. There
are times when he talks strategy with his friend Nick Saban, the head coach of
Louisiana State University. Saban will explain how he approached a play or
situation at LSU, and Belichick will shake his head and
say, “That makes a lot of sense. Why didn’t I think of that?”
It’s
hard to find something that irritates him more than a lack of preparation and
thought. When potential free agents arrive in Foxboro, one of the first things
they’re shown is the computer system. They are told that the video guys—Jimmy
Dee, Fernando Neto, and Steve Scarnecchia—are on the second floor. They are
reminded that they can better understand their responsibilities simply by
walking up a flight of stairs or clicking a mouse. Jimmy Dee is used to
cornerbacks asking for tapes on wide receivers and safeties asking for
breakdowns on tight ends.
There are actually written tests—no
multiple-choice here—in which players show their position coaches that they
have grasped the key points of the week. Prior to the Green Bay game, the
quarterbacks were given a six-page test with some of the following
questions:
The final
question—not including the “What year was Bryant Westbrook drafted?” bonus—was,
“What will you do this week in order to lead your team to
victory?” It may have been on the quarterbacks’ test, but it was understood
that the question was for everybody.
At this Monday meeting,
October 14, it is apparent that watching the game tape has annoyed Belichick.
He likes to see a correlation between what has been taught and practiced and
what happens on the field. He hasn’t seen enough of it. He didn’t see it in San
Diego when LaDainian Tomlinson ran for 217 yards, and he didn’t see it the
previous day in Foxboro, when Ahman Green ran for 136. The Patriots are 3–3,
one of the most penalized teams in the league, and terrible at stopping the
run. “You want to sum up the season in one play?” he says. “I’ll tell you what
it is: Tim Dwight coming from 15 yards behind Tomlinson,
outrunning
Tomlinson, knocking our ass out of the way down the
sideline, and then Tomlinson goes in for a touchdown. That one play. He’s
playing at one speed, at one kind of effort, and we’re playing at another
one.”
Belichick still is several weeks away from a healthy
personnel disagreement with defensive backs coach Eric Mangini. He still is
several weeks away from conceding—in a production meeting with CBS—that the
constant references to and expectations from Super Bowl XXXVI have made this a
stressful season for his team. Right now, though, he doesn’t want to talk about
the complex psyche of a defending champion.
“It’s really
embarrassing,” he tells the team. “It really is. It’s embarrassing. Can’t hit
the snap count. Can’t line up on side. There are fucking holding penalties in
the defensive passing game every week for key conversions. There are holding
penalties on offense, giving the ball away like we don’t give a shit about it.
Just turn it over to ’em. Leave the ball lying on the field
there for five seconds while they come from 30 yards away to recover it. It’s
just dumb football, fellas.”
He stands in the front of the room.
They sit in black, theater-style seats with cherry-wood desktops swinging from
the sides. If this is their movie, he is their unsparing critic. If this is
their classroom, he is their hawk of a teacher.
“I’ll tell you one
other thing too,” he says. “I’ve read a couple of comments. Now, I don’t spend
a lot of time reading the paper. I really don’t. But I do watch a little about
what we say and what we think. I’ve seen a couple comments here, some of the
players talking about we need to get our ‘swagger’ back. Our attitude back….”
They have been around him long enough to know that he is about to debunk a myth.
You can hear it in his pronunciation of the word, the way he spits it out in
the light so everyone can see how ridiculous it is.
“You know
what? We didn’t have a ‘swagger’ last year. If you fucking think about it, we
didn’t have a swagger. What we had was a sense of urgency, a sense of urgency
about playing well, being smart, and capitalizing on every opportunity and
situation that came our way….It wasn’t about a fucking swagger. You can take
that swagger and shove it up your ass, okay?”
He is a versatile
man, one who can easily navigate the disparate worlds of NPR and rated-R. He
attended Phillips Academy, the same prep school as U.S. presidents, Pulitzer
Prize winners, Academy Award winners, and the architect who designed Central
Park. He attended Wesleyan University, the same college attended by federal
judges, directors and writers of popular movies, governors, and a lyricist for
the Grateful Dead. He could have wielded power in their
worlds, but he always wanted this one. He always wanted to know football as
well as his father the coach and to know teaching as well as his mother the
language instructor.
He always wanted to be here, a football
answer man at the front of the room. Coaches who have worked with him have
acknowledged that much: he either has the answers or knows where to find them
quickly. If you listen to what he has to say, if you play it the way he asks
you to, you’ll be in position to fulfill the prophecy. He doesn’t see the game
in four quarters. He sees it as a series of situations—could be four, could be
twelve—where he tries to force the other coaches to declare what they are doing
before he declares what he’s doing. That’s part of the plan all week, finding
all areas where he can tilt the field so his team has some type of advantage.
There is no debate that the other team has strengths. What he and his staff try
to deduce is the source of the strength and whether there’s any repetition, so
to speak, that makes a team look stronger than it really is.
If he
were interviewing somewhere, he would ace that old standard question, “What do
you know about our company?” Oh, only everything. He tries to go to the root of
teams, systems, and coordinators. He is looking for obvious trends as well as
clever ones. All of that, along with swift recognition of what a team is
attempting to do, could be the difference in the game. In his mind, “halftime
adjustments” is one of the worst clichés of all. You’re always adjusting,
declaring, bluffing. Wait until halftime to do all that and you may be out of
it already.
During the week he takes a private investigator’s
approach to Sunday’s game. He is watching tapes, talking on the phone to anyone
who may have a morsel of insight, meeting with Ernie,
meeting with Scott, meeting with the coaches, meeting with head trainer Jim
Whalen, and studying practices and practice tape. He finds time to get on the
treadmill, talk with his wife and three children, and grab a Styrofoam bowl of
something from the Gillette Stadium cafeteria. It almost doesn’t matter what’s
in the bowl. Whatever it is usually has a lot of salt added to it.
No one questions how much time he puts into this. No one questions how
much he sees and remembers. (Talk about a memory: once, in dreary Buffalo, he
and Ernie actually tried to count the number of times they’d seen the sun in
western New York.) And no one speaks on the rough days when he goes in front of
a group of men and tells them what he saw and what he is seeing.
When he asks right tackle Kenyatta Jones how long he is going to continue
to get his ass kicked on a play called “Toss 38 Bob,” everyone knows he is
really asking the team the same thing he is asking Jones. It’s one of his best
devices. He knows how to craft critiques in such a way that they go from being
personal evaluations to collective ones, and suddenly everyone feels
accountable.
“Do we have to see that again next week, and the week
after that? When is it going to get fixed? When? When are we going to run ‘Toss
38 Bob’ at least for no gain? Forget about gaining yardage. When are we going
to run it at least back to the fucking line of scrimmage?
“How
long is that shit going to take? When are we ever going to see—well, we did see
one last week by Givens—but when are we going to see a chip on kickoff
coverage? When is that going to happen again? When are we going to chip on
coverage, help our teammates out, and free someone up on
one of those returns? Two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, I don’t know. But the
sooner we get that shit fixed, the sooner we start doing it right, the better
things will be.”
He doesn’t leave it like that. He never does. The
obscenities are never the last thing the Patriots hear in their meetings. The
essence of Belichick is that he is a problem solver. Since he has already
clearly identified the problems, he is now here to offer solutions. The
solutions are easy to follow. He tells his players he needs to see more effort,
more concentration, and more discipline when it comes to doing their jobs. It’s
easy. Do what he asks you to do and you’ll always have a chance.
O
n a November afternoon in 2002,
Pioli was sitting in his Gillette Stadium office. There were several times
during the day when the entire room rattled, as if it were located next to a
subway station. The unexpected eruptions—from vehicles passing in a nearby
concourse—smothered the music coming from Pioli’s CD player. He was listening
to Dave Brubeck, with Miles Davis on standby. Pioli had been on the phone all
day.
One of his first calls was with Lions president
Matt Millen. They talked about cornerback Jimmy Hitchcock for a while. The
Patriots had released him and the Lions had picked him up. But since Hitchcock
failed his physical— “Was it the ACL thing, Matt? When he came out of college,
he never had an ACL”—the Lions had let him go too. Pioli told Millen that he’d
like to visit with him on Thanksgiving, when the Patriots would be in Detroit.
“I know you have some insight and I’d love to hear your
thoughts,” Pioli said into the phone. “I’m sure there are some similar battles
we’re fighting.”
The Patriots were 5–5, coming off a 27–20 loss at
Oakland. Ten games into the season, their deficiencies were apparent to casual
fans and experts alike. They were old. They were slow. They couldn’t stop the
run. And they couldn’t help referencing the year before. Pioli was on the phone
so much because he was trying to do something to make it better. He had college
tapes to view and draft reports to read, yes. But he also had to do something
about right now.
He was trying to work out a deal with agent Brian
Levy, who represented a linebacker named Jashon Sykes. Sykes was on the
Broncos’ practice squad, which technically made him a free agent. Sykes was
twenty-three, stood six feet two inches, and weighed 236 pounds. Pioli thought
he could help the Patriots that year and next. He planned to tell Levy that
when they talked again, but here was another phone call getting in the
way.
“Let me see what this is all about,” he said. “This is
Scott.”
“Hey, Scott, this is Jason. How you doing?”
“Good. Thanks, Jason.”
“Sorry to bother you. Just wanted to
bring to your attention. I didn’t know if you guys were looking for a kickoff
specialist or not. But I have a kid—”
“Jason, are you working with
someone?”