Since the start of the Super Bowl era, the National Football League has had a handful of dynasties: the Green Bay Packers in the 1960s, the Pittsburgh Steelers in the ’70s, the San Francisco 49ers in the ’80s, and the Dallas Cowboys in the ’90s.
But the first two decades of the 21st century were dominated by the New England Patriots – and that was after the league introduced a salary cap and implemented free agency.
The Pats played in the Super Bowl nine times in those 20 years and were champions six times: in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2015, 2017 and 2019; they were runners-up in 2008, 2012 and 2018.
All of those appearances occurred with Tom Brady as the starting quarterback and Bill Belichick as the head coach. During that span, the New York Jets, the Buffalo Bills and the Miami Dolphins, in the Patriots’ division, went through a combined total of 24 head coaches.
The unique relationship between Belichick and Brady, and how they transformed a lackluster professional football team into a consistent winner, is told in The Dynasty by Jeff Benedict (578 pages, Avid Reader Press, ©2020).
When Pats owner Robert Kraft hired Belichick in 2000, and Belichick drafted Brady, the Patriots franchise had existed for 40 years (initially as the Boston Patriots) without ever winning a championship. Belichick came from the Cleveland Browns, where in five years as head coach he had just one season when wins exceeded losses.
Drew Bledsoe had been the Pats’ starting QB for eight years and had just signed a 10-year, $103 million contract that made him the highest-paid player in the NFL, when he was seriously injured in a game on September 23, 2001. He was hit by a Jets linebacker in a collision so violent that Bledsoe’s face mask was bent, several of his ribs were broken, the jagged edges of the ribs punctured one of his lungs and tore an artery in his chest.
Brady took over as QB. At the time he had never started an NFL game. Bledsoe recovered from his injuries but never regained his starting job. Brady remained with New England until last year, when his one-year extension with the Pats expired on March 17, 2020.
BRADY/ BELICHICK IMPACT SUBSTANTIAL
To give you some idea of the value of Brady and Belichick, consider:
• During Belichick’s 21 years with the Patriots, the team has had just two losing seasons: 2000, when Bledsoe was the starting QB during Belichick’s debut season in Foxborough, and 2020, when the Pats went 7-9 after Brady left.
• In 1960-1999, New England won 20 games, lost 17, and broke even three times.
• Between 2001 and 2019, the Patriots made the playoffs every season except 2008. Without Brady, New England finished out of the playoffs again in 2020.
• Between 2000 and 2020 the Tampa Bay Buccaneers had 12 losing seasons. With Brady at QB, 2020 was the first time the Bucs made the playoffs since 2008.
• With Brady at the helm, Tampa Bay appeared Sunday in Super Bowl LV, the first time the Bucs had made it to the championship game since 2002, which they won. The Bucs routed the favored Kansas City Chiefs, 31-9, Sunday night for their second title.
• In 2004 the Pats became the first team in the 85-year history of the NFL to win 21 consecutive games.
• In 2007 the Patriots became the first team in NFL history to begin a season by scoring 38 points in three consecutive games.
• New England in 2007 went 18-0 in the regular season and the playoffs – the first and only time any team in NFL history has done so – before losing to the New York Giants in the Super Bowl.
Both Brady and Belichick are perfectionists. Belichick is the only coach in NFL history to win six Super Bowls and Brady is the only player to have won seven.
Brady now has more Super Bowl wins than any NFL team. And he played in his 10th Super Bowl on Sunday, at age 43, which made him the oldest player in modern history to lead a championship team.
In an interesting side note, the Super Bowl show attracted higher ratings in the Boston area than in Tampa Bay, according to Sports Business Journal.
BRADY WAS THE MAN THAT NOBODY WANTED
Although reared in California, Brady chose to enroll at the University of Michigan because he considered it “the gold standard in college football.” Interestingly, “he was considered much better at baseball than football,” Benedict relates. Brady was “a standout catcher at the same high school Barry Bonds had attended, and the Montreal Expos had already drafted him.” However, his heart “was set on football...”
Brady was used sparingly by Wolverines Head Coach Lloyd Carr. The “lack of appreciation Brady felt from Carr drove home the feeling that he was the man nobody wanted,” and he developed “a chip on his shoulder.”
And apparently Brady is still smarting from the 2000 draft, when he was the 199th player selected, by Belichick and the Patriots.
The Brady family had season tickets for San Francisco 49ers games for 25 years. The 49ers had four picks in the first two rounds of the 2000 draft. At the start of the third round, with the 65th overall pick, the 49ers passed on Brady and chose Giovanni Carmazzi, a Californian who played quarter-back at Hofstra. Carmazzi lasted just two years in the NFL and never played in a regular season game.
KRAFT OWNED TENNIS TEAM PATS
Kraft’s first venture into sports-team ownership was when he bought the Boston Lobsters in the mid-1970s; it competed in the newly formed World Team Tennis League. He paid for the rights to 18-year-old Czech defector Martina Navratilova, who went on to become a super star.
In 1993 a group that included actor Paul Newman, novelist Tom Clancy, Hall of Fame running back Walter Payton, and a handful of financial backers joined forces to buy the Patriots and move the team to Hartford, Conn.
But Kraft, who made his fortune in paper manufacturing, acquired the Patriots for $173 million in 1994; at the time the Pats were financially unstable and had been for several years.
His first team finished the regular season 10-6 and qualified for the playoffs but lost in the first round to a Cleveland Browns team coached by . . . Bill Belichick.
PUBLIC SERVICE GOOD BEHAVIOR EXPECTED OF PATS
Kraft and his wife, Myra, set the standard for public service among professional football players. It’s quite common now for athletes to be featured in commercials promoting the United Way, for example. But 20 years ago that wasn’t standard practice.
The Krafts expected Patriot players to perform community service. “It’s important to give back,” Kraft said. Every player’s contract included a provision requiring 10 appearances at charities or hospitals each year. In 2001 the Patriots logged 1,000 hours of volunteer services to communities in Massachusetts and elsewhere in New England.
Kraft believes that his players ought to set a good example. In 1996 theN Patriots Head Coach Bill Parcells drafted Nebraska defensive lineman Christian Peter, who had “some off-the-field problems.” Within hours, the Pats received a fax of a story from a local newspaper in Nebraska which reported Peter’s “litany of arrests” in college; two incidents involved assaults on women. Myra Kraft was livid, and two days after the draft Robert Kraft informed Parcells that Peter was being cut from the team.
Belichick’s father was an assistant football coach at the U.S. Naval Academy for 33 years, a factor which might explain why Bill Belichick declined the offer of a Presidential Medal of Freedom. Although a longtime supporter of President Donald Trump, Belichick refused the honor less than a week after the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6. “Above all, I’m an American citizen with great reverence for our nation’s values, freedom and democracy,” he said.
END OF THE LINE
Belichick is not known for sentimentality. Few if any of his current or former players claim to love the guy, but almost without exception they say they respect and admire the man for his unparalleled accomplishments on the gridiron. Belichick can be vicious in his criticism, but players say he’s tough on everybody because of his desire for perfection from everyone, including himself.
The 20th year together for Kraft, Belichick and Brady “was filled with frustration,” Benedict writes. Consequently, six weeks after the 2019-20 season ended Brady left for Tampa Bay, perhaps ending the greatest sports dynasty of the 21st century.
Brady viewed Kraft “as a mentor, a confidant, and a father figure,” the author writes. But although Belichick and Brady were “the greatest coach-quarterback duo in history, they had become distant.” The professional relationship between the two biggest stars in the football orbit “had gone as far as it could go.” After two decades together “they had reached the end of the road.”