6 rings: Behind THE DYNASTY with Author Jeff Benedict
The first two episodes of Apple TV+’s The Dynasty: New England Patriots officially dropped on Friday morning, setting the stage for the 10-episode docuseries recapping the greatest run in sports history that took place in Foxborough, Massachusetts.
Here are some rapid reactions, nuggets, and takeaways from Episode Two: The Snow Bowl:
– The Patriots went the ‘best player available’ route when drafting Tom Brady
Every year when the NFL Draft comes around, there’s debates, discussions, and a constant back and forth about two philosophies: drafting for need at a position, and drafting the best player available – regardless of position.
When the Patriots drafted Tom Brady, on April 16, 2000, with their second of three sixth round picks (199), they went with the best player available:
“In the draft that year, one of the places we knew that we didn’t have an immediate need was quarterback,” former vice president of personnel Scott Pioli explained. “You know we drafted a bunch of players ahead of him but when we got to the sixth round, we’re looking at the board and [Tom] Brady’s over there by himself and we’re like, ‘What’re we doing? Yeah we don't need a quarterback, but he was the best player available.’”
Good choice.
– A look at Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft’s first conversations with Tom Brady.
Bill Belichick to Tom Brady, in what looks to be never-before-seen footage, when calling him to say he was being drafted by the Patriots: “Congratulations… We’re excited to have you. Sorry to have you wait so long.”
Robert Kraft on his first interaction with Tom Brady: “I remember a young, skinny, bean pole kid comes over and he says, ‘Mr. Kraft, I want you to know I’m Tom Brady,’ I said, ‘I know who you are. You’re our sixth round draft choice out of Michigan.’ And he– I’ll never, I can still see the look now, I’ll never forget. He said, ‘Yes, and I’m the best decision your organization has ever made.’ I’m looking at him like, ‘...Okay.’ From your lips to God’s ears. Let’s see.”
– Ernie Adams arrives, and he loves the media!
“The scribes.”
That’s what Patriots long-time football research director, Ernie Adams, calls the media who cover the team that he worked for in Foxborough for over 20 years.
“It’s just a lot of people that don’t have a clue what they’re talking about, frankly,” he explains in Episode two. “But there are some experts in New England about football, and they all work in the coaching staff for the Patriots. If you’re not in the building, you don’t really know.”
– It sounds like the Patriots personnel department knew they preferred Brady over Bledsoe before Bledsoe’s injury.
“My job– and I’ve been here two years, my job is to make the decisions for the football team,” Bill Belichick told the assembled media in Foxborough when announcing that Tom Brady would start over Drew Bledsoe for the remainder of the 2001 season. “That’s what Mr. Kraft’s paying me to do, and that’s what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna make the decisions that I think are the best for the football team. T-E-A-M as in team. I can’t make them for an individual, or a group. I gotta do what’s best for the entire team.”
“Going forward, Tom will be the starter and that’s the way it’ll go. He’ll be the starter. Unless there’s an injury, I don’t see him not being in there.”
While Belichick technically made this decision following the Patriots’ 24-17 loss to the Rams in Week 10, it sounds like he and his staff preferred Brady over Bledsoe well before the former franchise QB ever got hurt. Scott Pioli cites a decreased pocket presence as the reason why they preferred Brady.
“Earlier in his career,” he explains. “Drew was as very good quarterback– at times great. But he got hit. A lot. After dozens, and dozens, and dozens of vicious hits, Drew had started becoming human.”
According to Pioli, Ernie Adams likened his deterioration in the pocket to “a wildebeest under attack.”
“As coaches, we knew that we had a problem,” said Pioli. “With Tom, he was the guy that we thought, and truly believed, was the answer.”
– Brady and Belichick’s relationship begins to blossom – over football.
“Tom understood his role on and off the field, how to help the team. He prepared extremely hard individually, on his fundamentals, his techniques,” Belichick explained as the episode dives into he and the quarterbacks relationship, and how they studied the game. “Tom, I feel like, got the best out of me because he was so well prepared that I felt like I had to keep up with his preparation.”
“I think Coach saw something in me that he could work with,” Brady said. “We had quarterback school and it was me and Coach Belichick We’d sit in there and we just were football junkies. From morning, noon, night. That’s all we did was talk about football.”
They also both know they made the other better:
Belichick: “I loved working with Tom every day. Seeing the game through the quarterback’s eyes and understanding what he saw, I think those are the things that helped make me a better coach.”
Brady: “Coach Belichick taught me so much. I could not be the player I was without him.”
– Brady takes the Bledsoe hit against Buffalo, and gets right up.
At about the halfway point of episode two, following Patriots center Damien Woody praising Brady for being one of the guys and drinking beers with his lineman, it shows the quarterback taking a hit against the Bills that’s eerily similar to the one his now-backup Drew Bledsoe, took against the Jets in Week 2.
“Alright baby. Let’s go get ‘em,” he said after he got right up.
Now is it fair to get after Bledsoe for having internal bleeding? Of course not. But it shows the toughness Brady exuded from the moment he touched down in Foxborough.
“As we went on, Tom was getting tougher. Not just physically, but mentally,” linebacker Willie McGinest explained of his quarterback. “ But you can’t just turn that on during the game, you’ve got to practice that.”
He brought it every day.
– The weather at The Snow Bowl (a.k.a. The Tuck Rule Game) was quite rare that New England winter.
In what was to be the last game to ever played at the old Foxborough Stadium, the Patriots welcomed the Oakland Raiders to town on January 19, 2002 for owner Robert Kraft dubbed it “the most memorable game in the 30-year history of the [stadium].” There also happened to be a blizzard that evening.
“I remember driving to the game and it starts spitting snow as I’m going down, and I just had a great feeling,” said Ernie Adams. “We loved playing in the snow. Looking in hindsight, of course, it’s the only snow we got all winter, that evening, when we needed it. It was like the weather gods just dialied it up for us right over the field.”
“I remember walking out on the field pregame thinking, ‘Man. We are gonna shock the world today.’”
– Gamesmanship at its finest.
“The snow just came continuously and we tried to clear it by the rules, but as little as we had to,” owner Robert Kraft explained, with b-roll footage of stadium workers snowblowing the 10-yard lines.
“I know I’m not supposed to say that,” he said with a chuckle. “But that’s the truth.”
– Tom Brady didn’t think the Patriots had a shot in the fourth quarter. Until Belichick changed his mind.
That “it’s not over ‘til it’s over” mentality that Tom Brady and the Patriots displayed throughout his career in Foxborough? The reason many have called him “The Comeback Kid? He seemingly didn’t have that early on– and he learned it from Bill Belichick.
“I looked up at the scoreboard,” Brady said of his attitude down the stretch. “Down 10, you know against a great team, in the fourth quarter of the game. And the feeling that we had, judging by the way we played, I mean there was no way we could do it.”
“But coach came over,” he continued, “and was like, ‘Come on guys. We still got a shot at this!’ He said, ‘We’re going no huddle. We’re just gonna, kind of, pick up our tempo.’ Going out on the field, I remember looking at the guys and saying, ‘You’ve gotta have the best game of your life for me.’”
The spark was lit. Brady led the Patriots on an immediate scoring drive, ending it with a rushing touchdown, a spike, and a roll into the snow, and pulled his team within three points.
– The Tuck Rule.
Oh yeah, this “Dynasty”? It almost never was. Brady was stripped by Raiders cornerback Charles Woodson with 1:50 left in the contest, with linebacker Greg Biekert recovering the ball, and all but sealed the deal on New England’s season.
“I was so pissed,” Brady remembered. “I ran off the field and I thought, ‘F–. That’s it. That’s the season.’ And I just– I couldn’t believe that, you know, I fumbled the ball to lose the game.”
But then, as Pioli said, “Sometimes God tells you: ‘You ain’t in control.’”
Referee Walt Coleman reviewed, and overturned, the play citing the infamous Tuck Rule, which read as follows:
“NFL Rule 3, Section 22, Article 2, Note 2. When [an offensive] player is holding the ball to pass it forward, any intentional forward movement of his arm starts a forward pass, even if the player loses possession of the ball as he is attempting to tuck it back toward his body. Also, if the player has tucked the ball into his body and then loses possession, it is a fumble.”
“I mean it felt like a fumble to me, and it looked like a fumble to basically everyone else,” Brady explained. “Except that’s not the way the rule was written, so. We didn’t write the f– rule!”
“God bless Walt Coleman and The Tuck Rule,” said Robert Kraft.
– Adam Vinatieri = clutch.
You’ll see.
Make sure to follow Mike on Twitter @mikekadlick, and follow @WEEI for the latest up-to-date Patriots and Boston sports news!
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