Coaching Confidential: Inside the Fraternity of NFL Coaches (11 page)

The Jets knew Kraft wanted Belichick, and as soon as the season was over, Kraft faxed in the request to interview him. By that time, the Jets had activated the clause in Belichick’s contract, and he was their head coach with three years remaining on his contract. The Jets denied Kraft permission. “We put in a request to talk to him, and I think as soon as we put in the request, Parcells resigned,” Kraft said. “He didn’t preempt me. We had it in. Parcells didn’t want to coach without Belichick. I’m not looking to beat up Bill, but he didn’t want to lose him.”

What the Jets didn’t know right away was that Belichick desperately wanted the Patriots job. On the day after the season ended, Belichick, now the Jets head coach, turned down media requests after Parcells’s official announcement. The Jets said it was because Belichick wanted it to be Parcells’s day. Parcells promised he would never coach again and encouraged reporters to write it on their chalkboard. Of course, with Parcells, it was always wise to keep an eraser handy. The next day, the Jets called a press conference to introduce Belichick as their new head coach.

The auditorium where the Jets held their team meetings on the second floor of Weeb Ewbank Hall was filled. This was to be Belichick’s coronation. Despite his failures in Cleveland, in New York he was known for constructing the defenses that helped the Giants win two Super Bowls and for helping Parcells clean up the mess Kotite had left behind. Nobody in New York cared what happened with the Browns.

Belichick walked to the podium and began to read from a
handwritten note. He was resigning as the “HC of the NYJ.” He had held the job for twenty-four hours.

Belichick stunned Gutman with his decision shortly before addressing the media in a rambling twenty-five–minute address on January 4, 2000. Hess had passed away on May 7, 1999, and the sale of the team to Woody Johnson for $635 million would be official one week after Parcells and Belichick quit. Belichick was concerned about working for a new owner. He was concerned about Parcells remaining as the general manager and being in his shadow. Parcells in essence had quit because of the uncertain ownership situation. Now Belichick was doing the same thing with a couple of other issues: He wanted to work for Kraft. He was tired of Parcells having a career crisis after every season.

“We all know how Bill is,” Belichick said. “Sometimes he reacts emotionally to a loss or a bad season or a series of bad performances. Every time Bill says that, I take it with a grain of salt. It’s been like that for the last twelve, thirteen years.”

After Belichick made his decision public, he exited the auditorium at the Jets facility. Gutman then took the stage and unloaded on Belichick. “We should have some feelings of sorrow and regret for him and his family,” Gutman said. “He obviously has some inner turmoil.”

Two hundred miles away in Boston, Kraft was keeping a close eye on this latest Jets drama. “Steve Gutman thought Belichick was having a mental breakdown,” he said.

He was not. He just wanted out. He made an unsuccessful bid to get the final three years of his contract with the Jets overturned by the NFL—Parcells was called as a hostile witness—after Commissioner Paul Tagliabue ruled that he could not coach another team without the Jets’ consent.

Kraft was in his office in downtown Boston. It was January 25, and the season had been over for nearly a month. Former Jaguars coach Dom Capers was the fallback candidate for the Patriots.
Kraft didn’t think he was going to get Belichick. In addition to Tagliabue ruling against Belichick, a judge had refused to issue a temporary restraining order that would have allowed Belichick to take another job after Belichick’s attorney, Jeffrey Kessler, filed an antitrust lawsuit against the Jets and the NFL. Kessler was well known as an attorney for the NFL Players Association who was adept at giving the league a hard time. After losing his bid for the restraining order, Belichick dropped the lawsuit. His immediate coaching future was now in Parcells’s hands. Could Parcells strike a deal with Kraft to set Belichick free? If not, he could make him sit. It was ironic that Parcells still controlled Belichick’s fate because that was one of the reasons Belichick left the Jets.

“I’m in my office, and they said someone is calling, and they say it’s Darth Vader,” Kraft said. “So I knew exactly who it was.”

It was Parcells, of course, and it was the first time he and Kraft had spoken in three years. The Jets had named long-time Parcells assistant Al Groh as their new head coach one day earlier after Johnson was unable to talk Parcells into rescinding his retirement to return to the sidelines. Now with all the leverage after the ruling by Tagliabue and the courts, Parcells was ready to deal. He and Kraft negotiated Belichick’s release. The Jets received the Patriots’ first-round draft pick, and the teams exchanged lower-round picks. “The Border War is over between the Jets and Patriots,” Parcells declared.

Belichick got into his car and drove to Foxborough to close the deal. Kraft was already being second-guessed. “When I was waiting to hire Belichick, I was getting calls from the league office and my own internal organization saying you are seeing things here that no one else sees,” Kraft said. “But it was my instinct.”

There is little debate that “Little Bill” is an acquired taste. He is not for everybody, just as Kraft painfully found out that “Big Bill” is not for everybody, either. One of Belichick’s first hires was Scott Pioli to run the Patriots’ personnel department. Pioli worked for Belichick in Cleveland, and accompanied the team to
Baltimore in 1996. Belichick brought him to the Jets during that interim period in 1997 when he was the head coach and Parcells was the supposed consultant. One day at the Jets complex, Pioli started chatting up a woman named Dallas, who said she was there on business for an electronics company.

As they were talking, Parcells came out of the head coach’s office.

“Oh, I see you met my daughter,” Parcells said.

Pioli was floored. Dallas’s last name was Parcells.

They started dating during the 1997 season, but Parcells didn’t find out until after the season. Friends in the Jets’ front office warned him about dating the boss’s daughter, but Pioli was smitten. Scott and Dallas were married on June 11, 1999. Kraft naturally was not initially thrilled when Belichick told him he wanted to bring along the man who married the enemy’s daughter.

“It shows you how I trusted Belichick when he wanted to bring in Parcells’s son-in-law,” Kraft said. “I trusted him to do it, although at the time, it was not something I was in support of.”

Pioli was the most important part of Belichick’s infrastructure. Belichick had the final say, but Pioli was not afraid to present the counterargument. The Kraft-Belichick marriage turned out to be one of the best owner-coach relationships in football history. Belichick turned out to be a combination of Parcells and Carroll. He’s tough like Parcells and a control freak like Parcells. Publicly, he’s cranky, but with Kraft, he’s open and honest. He doesn’t have Carroll’s outgoing personality, but he respects his boss the way Carroll did.

“Whatever I want to know, I know,” Kraft said. “Is he forthcoming? He knows what I want to know, and he tells me. He’s smart because he knows it’s in his interests, especially if something doesn’t go right. Bill will leave me voice mails at eleven, eleven thirty at night, on his way home. Then I’m speaking to him at six in the morning. That’s six days a week. That’s just what it is.”

Belichick had Kraft’s complete backing, and Kraft gave him
the power he had taken away from Parcells and never gave to Carroll. But Patriots fans felt they had the wrong Bill when Belichick went 5–11 in his first season in 2000. He had drafted Michigan quarterback Tom Brady that year in the sixth round, the 199th player taken overall. Kraft had signed Drew Bledsoe to a ten-year $103 million contract in March 2001. Brady was an afterthought. Why not take a chance on a kid who had started some games at Michigan and showed at times he might have the “it” factor? The investment was minuscule. The first time he met Kraft, the rookie told him, “I’m the best decision this organization has ever made.”

Brady had a terrific training camp in his second year in 2001. There was speculation that Belichick wanted to start him over Bledsoe in the season opener against the Bengals but backed off. The Patriots lost in Cincinnati. The second week of the season was postponed because of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The Patriots’ next game was against the Jets. Late in the fourth quarter, Jets linebacker Mo Lewis crushed Bledsoe near the sidelines. Bledsoe was sent to the hospital with severe internal bleeding in his chest. Brady was impressive in taking over for Bledsoe on the Patriots’ final possession in that game, but New England still lost. At 0–2 following his 5–11 first season, there were rumors that Kraft was going to fire Belichick.

But Brady saved Belichick and turned Bledsoe into the NFL’s Wally Pipp. Brady got red hot and had the Patriots rolling by the time Bledsoe was ready to return. Belichick stuck with Brady, the Patriots won the Super Bowl over the heavily favored Rams, and Bledsoe was traded to Buffalo the next spring for a number one draft pick.

Those were great times for the Patriots. Kraft had set the standard for how to run a franchise. He opened a new $325 million privately financed state-of-the-art stadium on the land he owned next to Foxboro Stadium after nearly moving the team to Hartford
when he had been unable to get a deal done in the Boston area. There were even backs on the seats at the new place. The Patriots won the Super Bowl again after the 2003 and 2004 seasons, giving them three in a four-year period. Belichick was a genius. Brady was the new Joe Montana. Belichick might be uncomfortable socially, but his relationship with Kraft worked.

“Basically, similar philosophy relative to team building, organizational structure, things like that,” Belichick said.

The Patriots lost in the divisional round in Denver and in the AFC championship game in Indianapolis the next two years. Disappointing? For sure. Embarrassing? Not really. The embarrassment would come during the season-opening loss to the Jets in 2007. Eric Mangini was a coach Belichick handpicked in Cleveland when he was working in the public relations department and then hired with the Jets. When Belichick returned to New England in 2000, he brought Mangini along with him from New York, and Mangini worked his way up from secondary coach to defensive coordinator.

Belichick was Mangini’s role model and mentor. They had gone to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, a generation apart. After the Patriots’ loss to the Broncos in the 2005 playoffs, the Jets hired Mangini as their head coach. He was just thirty-five years old. Belichick was furious. He hated the Jets and felt that taking the job was not the proper way for Mangini to show his gratitude. They stopped talking, and their postgame handshakes—Belichick had perfected the no-look dead fish—were more anticipated than the Jets-Patriots games.

Belichick had developed the rules-breaking program of having one of his video guys tape the opponent’s defensive coaches hand signals sending in the alignment. It was for future reference when the teams would meet again. Belichick would decode the signals and use the tape to his advantage, for whatever it was worth. Two problems: it was against NFL rules, and Mangini
knew about it. He knew where all the camcorders and tapes were stored. Now that he was with the Jets, it didn’t work to his advantage to allow Belichick to tape his defensive signals. The Jets blew the whistle on Belichick during the first game of the 2007 season. NFL security confiscated the video camera of New England video assistant Matt Estrella while the game was going on.

It was dubbed Spygate, and the scandal had such a long shelf life that you can’t tell the story of Belichick’s career without bringing it up. Commissioner Roger Goodell fined Belichick the maximum $500,000, the most a coach had ever been fined. He fined the Patriots $250,000 and took away a first-round pick from New England in 2008. Belichick was fortunate Goodell did not suspend him.

“Everybody has their idiosyncrasies, but if there is trust, that’s the key in business, in marriages,” Kraft said. “You build a sense of trust so you go through rough times. Look what happened with this bogus thing with the Jets. I stood by him pretty darn good. That was rough.”

Why was it bogus? Kraft hesitates.

The restaurant is buzzing with activity. It is noisy. It was the most humiliating time in his Patriots ownership. He pauses before answering.

“How much do you think that helped us?” he said. “How much of a surprise was it to Mangini and [Jets GM Mike] Tannenbaum?”

It was against the rules. “You know how many teams steal signals? That’s bupkis,” Kraft said. The Patriots claim they caught the Jets illegally videotaping them in 2006 at Gillette Stadium. “We kicked them off our roof,” Kraft said. The Jets insist the Patriots had given them permission to tape from that location.

The Jets had been on to Belichick’s taping years earlier. Head coach Herm Edwards saw the Patriots’ camera fixed on him and defensive coordinator Donnie Henderson during a game in 2004 at Giants Stadium, and they started waving to it. Clearly, Edwards wasn’t concerned about any information Belichick might
be pilfering. Edwards and Belichick were friends. He never talked to him about it. He laughed it off.

Kraft questioned Belichick about his use of the videotape.

“How much did this help us on a scale of 1 to 100?” Kraft said.

“One,” Belichick replied.

“Then you’re a real schmuck,” Kraft said.

Mangini was fired by the Jets after the 2008 season and immediately was hired by the Browns to be their head coach. After two seasons he was fired by Cleveland and went to work for ESPN. Nearly five years after turning in his former boss, Mangini had deep regrets. Belichick had given him his break in coaching, he won three Super Bowl rings as an assistant in New England, and Spygate not only destroyed his relationship with Belichick but created discussion whether the championships were tainted.

“If there is a decision I could take back, it’s easily that decision,” Mangini said on ESPN. He knew too much and didn’t want Belichick cheating against him. That’s as far as he wanted it to go. It went much further. “Never in a million years did I expect it to play out like this,” Mangini said. “This is one of those situations where I didn’t want them to do the things they were doing. I didn’t think it was any kind of significant advantage, but I wasn’t going to give them the convenience of doing it in our stadium, and I wanted to shut it down. But there was no intent to get the league involved. There was no intent to create the landslide that it has become.” It also put any coach who might consider hiring Mangini on his staff in a difficult position. Could he trust Mangini not to turn on him the way he turned on Belichick? Mangini did the right thing shutting down Belichick’s taping operation, but as coaches like to say, the execution was poor. Coaches are a tight-knit fraternity and Mangini turned in one of his brothers.