6 rings: Reacting to the Patriots coordinators introductory press conferences
Episodes three and four of The Dynasty: New England Patriots dropped on Apple TV+ on Friday morning, continuing 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 Three: Borrowed Time:
– The episode title ‘Borrowed Time’ comes from an AFC Championship Game pregame Sal Paolantonio stand-up.
“For all of what the Patriots have been through this season,” said Paolantonio from the Heinz Field sideline prior to kickoff of the 2001-02 AFC Championship game. “To be playing for a chance to go to the Super Bowl, it has to come down to one of two things: Either the Patriots are a very good football team, or they’re living on borrowed time.”
It was the former.
– Brady injury lines up yet another QB decision for Belichick
Episode two of The Dynasty ends where episode three begins: with Tom Brady’s left ankle being crunched by Steelers safety Lethon Flowers with just under two minutes left in the first half.
“It was actually the third time that game that the same ankle got hit,” Brady said of the injury that knocked him for the rest of the game. “It was pretty sore but I was like, ‘Oh no no I wanna play.’ But at that point the coach decided, ‘You know what I think we’re just gonna stick with Drew.’”
“When I took the field all of a sudden things got really quiet,” Bledsoe explained of his feelings in that moment. “Obviously the entire world was thinking, ‘Okay this guy hasn’t played for a long, long time. That’s it, game’s over.’ But I was gonna compete my ass off in every way that I possibly could because the Super Bowl was so close.”
“To get that close and then not be able to go, I was never going to let that happen.”
Bledsoe came in for the injured Brady, completed 10 of 21 pass attempts for 102 yards and a touchdown, and took what he thought was his Patriots team to a berth in Super Bowl XXXVI.
“I can’t believe it, dude,” Bledsoe told teammate Tedy Bruschi, as he lined up yet another impossible quarterback decision for head coach Bill Belichick.
– Bill Parcells enters, detailing his exit from the Patriots.
In a flashback scene about the history of the team, Bill Parcells, Robert Kraft, Jonathan Kraft, and Drew Bledsoe reflect on Parcells’ four-year run as head coach of the Patriots, which ended due to a disagreement on personnel power between he and Kraft.
“I was rooting for Kraft because the way it was,” said Parcells on his reaction to Kraft buying the team in ‘94. “It was in a little bit of disarray. The prior owners, they weren’t willing to anty up for the good players. So when Kraft came in, I was hopeful he would be more supportive.”
“We finally got some success, but I felt like Kraft wasn’t always in line with the things that I knew to be in the best interest of building a team.” Parcells explained. “Kraft had no real background in football and in his inexperience, took the draft away from me and he gave it to somebody else. I felt like some people that were incompetent were making decision for the organization, personnel-wise, and I didn't like it. And I knew I wasn’t going back to the Patriots.”
New England made it all the way to the Super Bowl in XXXI in 1996 behind Parcells and quarterback Drew Bledsoe’s lead, and yet that was hardly the talking point in Foxborough. Instead, it was the fact that even though the Patriots had just won the AFC, their head coach was likely out the door.
“That was a frustrating thing for us as players,” Bledsoe said, describing the media circus surrounding the team that week. “For us to go to the Super Bowl after being the worst team in the league, you know that was a pretty big accomplishment, and that was not the story during the week of the Super Bowl. The story was whether or not Parcells was gonna go to the Jets.”
“When your team’s in the Super Bowl, you want all the energy focused on doing everything possible to allow the team to win,” Jonathan Kraft said. “That didn’t happen at that Super Bowl. All the oxygen was taken out of the room with Bill’s dalliance with the Jets.”
The Patriots lost 35-21 to the Packers, and Parcells was off to New York.
“It’s just like a friend of mine told me,” Parcells famously stated in his press conference announcing his departure from New England. “If they want you to cook the dinner, at least they ought to let you shop for some of the groceries.”
“With Coach Parcells, I didn’t feel he always put team first,” Robert Kraft says in the doc. “He was making decisions that were best for Bill Parcells, as opposed to the New England Patriots. I promised myself in the future, I would find a coach that truly put team first.”
– “Do Your Job” comes to light.
Five years after their Super Bowl XXXI appearance, the Patriots were back in the big game – this time behind the lead of Bill Belichick.
According to center Damien Woody, the head coach put together a heck of a Super Bowl week speech to the team that may have sparked the rallying cry for the impending dynasty:
“That Super Bowl week, I remember coming in and Bill addressed the team,” said Woody. “He said you know what, we’re all in this thing together. If you’re able to put aside your personal gain, for the team, and do your job. We’ll win. We will beat them.”
“Do Your Job” became the team’s moniker for the next two decades.
– Safety Lawyer Milloy and Bill Belichick switched hotel rooms during Super Bowl XXXVI week.
“We got down there at the hotel,” Bill Belichick said, telling a pretty hilarious story about the trials and tribulations of their Super Bowl XXXVI week in New Orleans. “My main thing with the players was, ‘Okay, we’ve got a lot of work to do, I just want to make sure everything’s okay. If there’s any problems, let me know.’ And Lawyer [Milloy] came over and was upset about his room.”
“Oh sh–,” Milloy laughed when asked about it. “Yeah man, we get to the hotel. My room was so small I think it came with an oxygen tank.”
Belichick wound up giving Milloy his room:
“That was the furthest thing from my mind and I just kind of said, ‘You know Lawyer look, you can have the head coach’s room, I don’t really care. And if that’s not good enough for you, that’s the best I can do. Here you go.’”
“And so the rest of the week,” Belichick said with a grin. “It was kind of, you know, ‘Lawyer is everything okay? Is your view okay? Your room good? You got enough space in there?’ So we kind of joked about that all week.”
“I think coach did that to kind of re-emphasize ‘team’ is always first,” Milloy explained. “And it kind of just set the tone for what was coming.”
– “The Patriot Way” started with Bledsoe.
Like “Do Your Job”, “The Patriot Way”, also became a moniker for New England’s two-plus decades of success. Linebacker Tedy Bruschi said that started with Drew Bledsoe during Super bowl XXXVI week.
As mentioned above, Belichick had yet another tough decision to make heading into the final game of 2001-02 with Brady nursing a sprained ankle and Bledsoe bringing New England to an AFC Championship game win. After watching Brady practice for a few days, he went with him.
“At the end of practice I got called up to Belichick’s hotel room,” Bledsoe described of how he found out he’d once again be benched. “He just sat down and he goes, ‘Tommy’s ankle looks good. We’ve decided that, you know, we can only get one quarterback ready to go and we’re going to go with Tom this week.’ Man, that was, that was a bitter pill. That was a bitter bitter pill to swallow.”
“As the case has been all year,” Bledsoe told the media in New Orleans that week, “I’ll do whatever I can to help [Brady] to play well in this game.”
“I mean Drew coulda messed a lot of things up,” Bruschi said of Bledsoe’s attitude that season. “But as frustrated as Drew was, he still was very supportive to Tom. That meant a lot for me to see. All this stuff Belichick says like doing your job and putting the team first, Drew was like, living that. I mean, there’s $100 million quarterback doing what’s best for the team.”
“That’s where I think ‘The Patriot Way’ started.”
– Belichick’s wherewithal to come out as a team changed Super Bowls forever.
For decades Super Bowl introductions, where players are individually announced over the loudspeakers of the stadium and to cable televisions across the world, were what you looked forward to when you played the game.
“When you’re growing up as a young football player, your moment that you dream of is when you get introduced in the Super Bowl,” said Tedy Bruschi. “They say your name, they say your number, they say your position, and you run out for the world to see.”
Ahead of Super Bowl XXXVI, Bill Belichick had other plans, opting for the Patriots to be introduced as a team.
“That’s how we got here,” players said in the tunnel prior to their run out. “We got here because we’re a team.”
“The impact that had,” Hall of Fame quarterback Steve Young once said. “Not just as a pro, but colleges, little kids … I’m glad you mentioned that because I remember seeing that and thinking to myself ‘That might be the most important moment we’ve seen in football in the last 20 years.’”
“Watching this I was thinking, ‘Holy sh–.” said Jon Bon Jovi, a longtime Patriots fan. “Here they come. My team.”
This decision changed Super Bowls forever, with many others following suit over the last 20+ years.
– The game itself was perfect.
Super Bowl XXXVI itself was a great one and while I won’t sit here and summarize the entire thing, Belichick’s game plan of, as John Madden explained, being more physical than the Rams and scoring in other ways aside from on offense, worked to a tee.
Ty Law called his first-half pick-six of St. Louis quarterback Kurt Warner “one of the easiest intercptions” of his career. “Those are the kind of interceptions that we typically drop cuz it’s like… ‘I know you ain’t about to throw that.’”
– The legend of the Patriots’ game-winning drive only gets better over time.
After the Rams came back in the second half to tie the game at 17, the Patriots got the ball back with 1:30 to play and on the TV broadcast, John Madden was basically begging them to play for overtime:
“You have to just run the clock out. You have to play for overtime now.
“I don’t think you want to force anything here, you don’t want to do anything stupid.”
“I don’t agree with what the Patriots are doing here.”
Ernie Adams, Bill Belichick and the team’s director of football research, basically took all of the credit for them going for it:
“We could’ve knelt on it and gone to sudden-death overtime,” Adams explained. “But then Bill came on the headset and said, ‘Okay Ernie, what do you wanna do?’ And I said, ‘Bill, we’re a little bit out of gas. If they get the ball again, I’m not real sure we can stop ‘em. I mean this drive is do or die. We need to try to go get Adam Vinatieri a shot to win it for us heer in regulation.’”
Drew Bledsoe’s attitude towards Brady ahead of the drive was also super cool.
“I go up to Coach Belichick and he says, ‘We’re goin,’ and he says, ‘Just take care of the ball!’” Brady said. “And Drew was kind of standing next to me and he kinda just shuffled in front of that and he says ‘F– that.’”
“I remember, you know somebody saying to Tom like, ‘Hey be careful,’” said Bledsoe. “Like no, we’re big underdogs in this game. Nobody expected you to be here, nobody expected us to be here. F– it man, go.”
Nine plays. 54 yards. An Adam Vinatieri 48-yard game-winner. Super Bowl champions.
– Tom Brady, Bill Belichick post-Super Bowl interaction is a good summation of their relationship.
“The next day,” Brady recalled after winning his first Super Bowl. “I remember getting in the car and Coach Belichick, and he got in and he was still f—- up from the night before. I could smell the alcohol. But I remember him saying to me, ‘Well, Tom, you had a pretty good year.’ And that was his way of complimenting me.”
That says it all.
– The legend of Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and Robert Kraft begins. And so does the addiction to winning.
New England, of course, went on to win two of the next three Super Bowls, starting their 20+ year run of dominance and their addiction to being on top.
“By that point,” former Boston Globe columnist Jackie McMullan explained, “Bill Belichick is a genius, the greatest football mind. Tom Brady is being compared to Joe Montana, his childhood idol. And Robert Kraft has become one of the most powerful owners in sports. Those three guys, they were on top of the NFL world.”
Long-time Patriots front office executive Scott Pioli, who was a part of the run alongside Belichick, explained what would go on to happen perfectly:
“It’s difficult to explain to people sometimes, but this game is like a narcotic. When you have success, every time you get a little bit, you want a little bit more. The highest highs that you feel each time that you win, you’re chasing that forever. There was this group of us that became addicts together, and we were actually enabling one another. And some of us know it, some of us don’t, and some don’t care. As time goes by, your relationship with the drug. It changes. After winning, instead of euphoria, it’s just a relief. And when you lost, it was– it was dark. You would do everything and anything to stop the fear of losing. Anything.”
Boom. Episode 4. Spygate.
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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