My favorite book is David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game, the 1981 classic that remains the best sports book ever written. What’s striking about his prose, even 37 years later, was how little he relied on quotes. He transformed a random Trail Blazers season into something of a sports novel, gaining the reader’s trust by wearing three different hats: Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter, amateur psychologist, and naturally curious sounding board. He didn’t need quotes. You believed him because he was Halberstam — the best at what he did.
Last Friday, ESPN’s Seth Wickersham wrote a Halberstam-like feature about the Patriots titled “For Kraft, Brady and Belichick, is this the beginning of the end?” Over the next 24 hours, Wickersham appeared on roughly 275 different platforms to promote/defend/explain the piece’s conceit. It maintained momentum through the weekend, even as certain sections were denied or rebutted, but by Tuesday, ESPN had shifted its attention to an NBA rookie’s idiot father in Lithuania.
One week later, it’s hard to decipher what was definitely true, exaggerated or outright wrong in Wickersham’s piece because, unlike with peak Halberstam, it wastes too much time on nonessential stuff, like the opening Brady-gets-pissed-off anecdote (that happens every year, by the way), or Brady’s complicated relationship with trainer/shaman Alex Guerrero. Wickersham’s biggest scoop: Apparently, Bob Kraft ordered Bill Belichick to trade Jimmy Garoppolo. Hmmmmmmm. Over the past 17 years, the Patriots owner never intervened on anything related to personnel, big, medium or small. At age 76, after five Super Bowls, Kraft suddenly started ordering the NFL’s greatest organizational asset around? Really?
The meeting ended with a clear mandate to Belichick: trade Garoppolo because he would not be in the team’s long-term plans, and then, once again, find the best quarterback in the draft and develop him. Belichick was furious and demoralized, according to friends. But in the end, he did what he asks of his players and coaches: He did his job.
What?
What????
In 2001, Belichick benched Kraft’s beloved $100 million quarterback to stick with a sixth-round pick. Kraft never intervened. Sixteen years later — after Belichick had traded Richard Seymour and Deion Branch, released Lawyer Milloy, dumped Ty Law, traded Jamie Collins and Chandler Jones, jettisoned Wes Welker, and allowed Adam Vinatieri to leave — Kraft finally decided to meddle? In his mid-70s? During the “Everything’s Gravy at This Point” stretch of the greatest professional football run ever? I know someone who spent time with Kraft last weekend; Kraft was more dumbfounded by the story than anything.
We couldn’t afford to keep both of them, Kraft kept saying. Why is this so hard to understand?
What a great question. Wickersham reported that the Patriots “repeatedly offered Garoppolo four-year contract extensions, in the $17 million to $18 million range annually that would go higher if and when he succeeded Brady.” That sounds wonderful, but they already extended Brady for cap hits of $22 million (2018) and $22 million (2019). Even if they released Brady in February, and explained it as, “We had to do it, he was starting to get weird like Tom Cruise,” Brady counts for $14 million in dead cap money in 2018, then another $7 million in 2019. (And by the way, they weren’t freaking waiving Tom Brady.)
Wickersham made the possibility of Brady’s release seem … realistic? Here’s what he wrote: “Brady’s two-year contract, with a $28 million signing bonus, was designed to set up 2018 as a key year, when the team could, in theory, look at a 41-year-old Brady and his $22 million cap hit and decide if it made sense to transition to Garoppolo.” In this case, “if it made sense” really means “if they decided to waive the greatest QB of all time after yet another MVP-caliber season so they could spend $32 million on the QB position in 2018 anyway.” Not happening.
But let’s assume the tidbit about Garoppolo’s extension was true, even if local reporters like Tom Curran disagreed. You’re telling me that Belichick, the most legendary cap-space hoarder we’ve ever had, was devoting 30 percent of his 2018 salary cap to two quarterbacks? Three of the top four highest cap hits next season: Matthew Stafford ($26.5 million), Derek Carr ($25 million), Joe Flacco ($24.75 million, and by the way, I’m sorry, Baltimore). Those numbers are ridiculous. Even more ridiculous? Forty million a year for TWO quarterbacks.
I don’t doubt the reporting itself, but what if Wickersham were misled or misinformed by a source? What if he became a little too consumed with spinning a certain narrative over presenting a balanced case? By word count alone, Brady’s controversial (and nauseatingly dissected) relationship with Guerrero was deemed by Wickersham to be 25 times more interesting than the following sentence, which the piece introduced and immediately abandoned: “[Belichick] had passed on dealing him last spring, when Garoppolo was in high demand.”
Damn. Do you realize how fascinating that particular decision was? And what it said about how Belichick is wired in general?
There’s Belichick in April, coming off a legendary Super Bowl comeback, coldly mapping out the team’s long-term future as always. There’s Garoppolo, the summa cum laude graduate from Brady University, under contract for peanuts for one more season. And there’s Brady, turning 40 in August, coming off possible concussions (we think) in back-to-back postseasons, having already played more career games than every legendary QB except two.
Including playoffs, Brett Favre played 326 games and stayed a year too long. Peyton Manning played 293 and stayed a year too long. By April 2017, Brady had banked 271 games. (He’s at 287 now.) You know Belichick — he’s all about getting out a year too early over a year too late. If Belichick had created The Sopranos, he would have killed off Tony at the end of Season 5. That’s just how he rolls.
If Belichick truly believed that Brady would play four to five more years, he would have flipped Jimmy for a 2017 first-round pick, then turned that pick into multiple picks, used one on Brady’s new successor, plugged some other holes and kept going. On to the next season. Nope. Belichick played the odds and decided, correctly, that he was better off prolonging a unique situation for as long as possible. He kept Jimmy.
Meanwhile, Brady spent the spring and summer getting goofy with the TB12/cookbook/lasting-until-he’s-45 stuff. Which, by the way, wasn’t anything that new. In October 2014, I wrote a long Brady vs. Manning column that included an anecdote about a buzzed Julian Edelman vowing to me that Brady would easily play into his mid-40s. One year later, during the Deflategate lawsuit, we learned that one of Brady’s buddies sent him this column. Not only did the then-37 year-old Brady enjoy it (“great story” — thanks, T.B.!), he emailed that buddy back, “I’ve got another seven or eight years. (Manning) has two. That’s the final chapter. Game on.”
By September 2017, with avocados, electrolytes and pliability emerging as the new generation of Patriots heroes, everyone else knew, too. Tom Brady intended to play until he turned 45. As he showed little slippage those first seven weeks, his talented backup remained buried in a 32-team league desperate for franchise quarterbacks. Even as Jimmy held a clipboard on the sideline, you could practically see his price tag rising with every Brock Osweiler pick and DeShone Kizer fumble. Belichick had no outs. Here were his six options.
1. Trade Jimmy.
2. Lose Jimmy next spring for a compensatory third-round pick.
3. Slap a franchise tag on Jimmy and prepare to pay $44 million for two QBs.
4. Brainwash Jimmy into signing an unrealistically cheap extension.
5. Hope Brady retires.
6. Poison Brady.
Complicating matters: Jimmy had stupidly hired Brady’s agent, Don Yee, making it impossible for any wink-wink deals. (Note to all the kids out there: Don’t hire the same agent as the dude you’re trying to replace.) By all accounts, Belichick never shopped Jimmy around; he knew what to do. Get him out of the conference, grab a high second-rounder, keep moving. He sent Jimmy to San Francisco.
Once they started playing Jimmy, guess who started winning. The Niners! Soon, I was getting emails like this one (from reader Kyle Munroe): “Would you trade one more Super Bowl in the Brady era for 10–15 years with Jimmy Dimples?”
(Thinking.)
(Fuck … would I?)
By Christmas Eve, after yet another Jimmy victory, my buddy Hench emailed me, “I think granting Garoppolo clemency was the first, only and final moment of altruism in BB’s career. He just couldn’t look at those sad eyes in meetings any more as he chewed up a player’s prime.”
Ha. That would certainly explain why Belichick offered Jimmy only to a coach he liked and respected over, say, Arizona or the Giants. And that would certainly make for a dramatic conclusion to Belichick’s Patriots dynasty: his one non-Vulcan moment unraveling everything.
But let’s work off the available evidence: 17 years of hardcore proof that Belichick cares only about competing for the next Super Bowl. He glosses over feelings, relationships, history, draft boards, emotions, everything. Just look at how he treated poor Wes Welker. Thanks for the 500-plus catches and sorry for all the concussions — we have Edelman now, you’re done. He’s the coldest sports figure I’ve ever followed. What was Belichick’s version of Danny Ainge shanking Isaiah Thomas in the Kyrie Irving trade? Wednesday. Thursday. Any day. He doesn’t care. He just wants to succeed.
My theory, trotted out on last Friday’s B.S. Podcast, was that the younger Garoppolo had won over everyone in the locker room — true, by all accounts, by the way — whereas the notoriously team-first Brady promoted himself in 2017 more than ever before. A decidedly entrepreneurial, live-like-me mantra fueled everything: the cookbook, TB12, and a new Facebook series launching this week. (You can do these things after you win five Super Bowls.) Only Brady had evolved into an A-list celebrity who was now 10 to 15 years older than every other Patriot. Really, he ascended his teammates. They didn’t hang with him; they revered him. Meanwhile, Garoppolo hung around the boys like Brady did once upon a time. First to show up, last to leave. Jimmy wanted his own team. Jimmy wanted to get paid. Jimmy’s time was clearly coming.
Even if Brady wasn’t outwardly threatened, what if “Who do you think is better — Tom or Jimmy?” was becoming a locker-room topic?
What if they had a couple of competitive practice moments that were skewed in a slightly dangerous, Dirk Diggler vs. Johnny Doe kind of way?
What if Belichick sensed some snippiness on Brady’s behalf, or just as important, Garoppolo’s behalf?
Belichick’s history in New England has always been, “We can win a Super Bowl, we’re not screwing around, I’m eliminating the problem.” That scenario seems infinitely more realistic than Kraft ordering a trade. Belichick despises in-season distractions more than he hates halftime interviews and combs. By October, maybe Belichick couldn’t risk whatever he was seeing with Jimmy. Maybe he eliminated the problem.
Even if that version isn’t worthy of a 24-hour Bristol car wash, it’s certainly a juicy story. I mean, the man set it up perfectly: 18 years of Brady, then 12 years of Jimmy … and by 2030, he could have retired by keeling over after his Super Bowl LXIV Gatorade bath. But the best quarterback ever dashed his plans by continuing to be the best QB ever. And so a football genius finally got checkmated by Father Time — and only because Father Time, for once, blew an assignment.
We’ll never know if Belichick regrets the trade; we have a better chance of finding out what his favorite sexual position is. There’s a slim (but not unrealistic) chance that he leaked the story to Wickersham himself, planting the seed so he could leave without enduring Brady’s inevitable decline. For every legend who retires early (Jim Brown, Barry Sanders) or right on time (John Elway), dozens keep going until their bodies crumble or they suffer some form of humiliation. That’s the real Father Time — it’s Larry Legend lumbering around in a back brace, Marino moving around like a mummy, Holmes battering Ali, MJ limping around in the Wizards locker room, Peyton waiting for one last contract that never came.
I once spent a year doing TV with Doug Collins, who coached Jordan during those two Wizards years. According to Doug, there’s nothing worse than coaching a great player who isn’t great anymore. Talent erodes; ego remains. You can’t coach it, you can’t manage it, you can’t navigate it. Belichick knows. Would he stick around for that inevitable one-year-too-long Brady season? I don’t know, and neither do you, and neither does Seth Wickersham. Unless Belichick leaked pieces of the story to him. (And I don’t think he did.)
Will the impossible Belichick-Brady-Kraft era ever get treated to its own version of Halberstam’s warts-and-all 1998 New Yorker essay about MJ’s final season? I can’t imagine anyone getting the access these days. Even that 1998 piece was flawed because Jordan pushed his big Halberstam interview to the summer, then canceled it altogether. Halberstam wrote around Jordan, interviewing twice as many people to cover that essay and the ensuing book, Playing for Keeps. It wasn’t quite the same. The access of those Breaks days was long gone. That 90’s version of Jordan remains a mystery, to some degree, as does the Brady-Belichick relationship.
Of course, Patriots fans don’t need help thinking about the finish line these days. We stunk last century almost as much as the Browns stink now. This century, we’re working on 17 years (and counting) with the GOAT coach and the GOAT QB. The Snow Game. Those Vinatieri kicks. Beautiful Day. 21 straight. Goal line stand in Indy. Cut that meat. Troy Brown as a nickel back. Spygate. Moss going deep for 16–0. Tyree. Pollard. Sterling Moore. Welker. Gronk. Edelman’s option pass. Our Love before fourth-and-3. Deflategate. Malcolm Butler. 28–3.
I remember hugging two Pats fans in the Superdome in 2002 — all three of us delirious — and it seems like 200 years ago. It was actually 16. That memory could have its own driver’s license soon. Only a handful of fan bases ever rooted for a truly great team. We were one of them. We still are. What a gift.
Let’s tackle the Round 2 picks …
You might remember me going 0–4 last weekend and getting killed like just about everyone else. Guess what? I’d make three of those four picks again. The Chiefs blew a 21–3 lead! The Jags gave up three points and somehow didn’t cover! The Saints absolutely should have covered! Bad beats happen! TRUST THE PROCESS! Somehow, I went 0–4 but made money thanks to Sunday’s Jags-Saints teaser that Cam Newton nearly ruined. I wouldn’t gamble on any of these Round 2 picks straight up, but here’s who I like.
EAGLES (+3) over Falcons
PATRIOTS (-13.5) over Titans
STEELERS (-7.5) over Jaguars
Saints (+5) over VIKINGS
Some caveats …
** Stay away from the Eagles game. Not only are seven different Manifesto rules are in play, but we’ve had only five home dogs in Round 2 since 1970. All of them were 2-seeds. As a 1-seed dog in Round 2, the Eagles are making history. And they know it. It took something magical to bring the “Nobody Believes In Us” Theory back to life … and his name is Nicholas Foles. There’s a reason nobody wants to bet on the Eagles.
** There’s a playoff doppelgänger for that goofy Eagles game: Ravens 13–Titans 10 (January 2009), when a 3-point dog with a killer defense scraped out an ugly home victory with a shaky QB. Joe Flacco’s playoff numbers that month: three games, 437 yards, one TD, three picks and a 55.6 QB rating. Would you rather have 2009 Flacco or 2018 Foles? Did 2009 Flacco ever earn an email like this one from Jon in Nashville? “Since Nick Foles is a farce at QB, I thought we could call him Farson Wentz the rest of the way as he ruins the Eagles season.” Please, don’t bet on Farson Wentz.
** In 2012, I decided that a January 2006 tilt between Chris Simms and Washed-Up Mark Brunell was the 21st century’s worst playoff QB matchup. Twenty-seven points, three picks, and 239 passing combined from two guys who started only three more NFL games? How are we topping that? Well, Blake Bortles and Tyrod Taylor combined for 13 points, 221 passing yards, and one pick last Sunday, as well as five different times when people asked, “Wait, is Bortles throwing with the right hand?” That we made it through four quarters without Tony Romo yelping, “WHY THE EFF DID I RETIRE????” was almost a miracle. But since Bortles and Taylor rushed for 115 yards combined, I think Simms and Brunell kept the belt. Close call.
** From James H. last Friday: “I read your column. You’ve been waiting all season to bet against Bortles … You didn’t. Run this email next week when you look back and realize that for some reason you actually bet on Bortles to cover his first playoff game and you lost.” I’m an idiot.
** Goofiest Pats-related email (courtesy of Fan in Huntington Beach): “All sports teams are like great bands that experience long periods of success, but struggle to stay together because of their own egos, groupies and management interference. The Patriots are Stillwater from Almost Famous. Consider Seth Wickersham as William Miller; Brady is obviously Russell Hammond; Alex Guerrero is his Penny Lane; Belichick is Jeff Bebe, the front man who believes everyone should bow down to him; Bob Kraft is Jimmy Fallon, the professional manager who wants all the credit for getting them to the next level. We are all the kids at the house party watching Brady the Golden God.” No.
** Pittsburgh is +400 to score the most points this weekend. Just throwing that out there.
** Multiple readers asked if Adrian Peterson was eligible for the Ewing Theory in this weekend’s Vikes-Saints game, and if so, which team would claim him. That’s cute. (The answer, obviously, is Minnesota.)
** Steve from Pontyclun, Wales, writes, “The next three Vikings games could be against the Saints (Bountygate, brutal Favre INT, game that changed OT rules); Falcons (Anderson missed FG, brutal loss in champ game); and Steelers (one of our two Super Bowl losses in New Orleans). As omens go, is this good or bad? I don’t believe in karma any more as it seems to be a one-way street of pain for the Vikes.”
Are you kidding me? That’s terrible! Throw in the whole “Nobody’s ever hosted their own Super Bowl” and “Nobody’s ever played three road games in the same stadium” facts, and there’s just a ton of weird juju going on.
Anyway, my one gambling pick of the week: $1,100 to win $1,000, six-point tease: STEELERS (down to -1.5), Saints (up to +11).
Seven reasons …
1. From Jason in Baltimore: “I listened to your Monday podcast with Sal. Are you seriously building a case to NOT bet against Bortles in the playoffs for a second consecutive week? We may never get this opportunity again. I can’t imagine a world where Blake Bortles is ever playing in the playoffs again. Double-down week!” BORTLES!
2. I see Saints-Vikes becoming the signature game of the week: a back-and-forth nail-biter playing out like the 2015 season’s Cards-Packers classic (maybe without the Hail Mary). I like that New Orleans played a legitimate playoff game against an on-fire Cam Newton last week. Great test for a team that loves playing in domes, obviously. They’ll be ready. One of these two teams will make the Super Bowl.
3. Did you see Bortles last weekend? I mean, did you watch him? Have you ever seen a sideline reporter fight off the urge to ask the winning QB, “What went wrong out there?”
4. Was it just me or were Bills receivers open for that entire Round 1 game? And what about the Niners dropping 44 on Jacksonville in Week 16? Are we sure the Jaguars defense is good? What about Big Ben’s revenge game? What about JuJu Smith-Schuster’s inevitable big play? What about Josh Lambo’s inevitable shank in Heinz Field? What about Leonard Fournette’s refusal to look like the Fournette from those first five weeks? What about the three picks that Bortles has coming? What about the thought of the Jags playing from behind?
5. Last week Bortles rushed for 88 yards and threw for 87 yards against a 9–7 team that made the playoffs because of Andy Dalton.
6. If Roethlisberger loses to Bortles, he should retire on the spot.
7. BORTLES. Let’s do this.
(For in-depth discussion of Round 2, check out The B.S. Podcast with me and Mike Francesa RIGHT HERE.)
Last week: 0–4
Playoffs: 0–4
