"You get a chance to add the explosiveness of Reggie Bush to your team, and that's something that comes along maybe every five, 10 years. I don't care what the Jets offered us. We were keeping the pick. If that's a gamble, I'll gamble like that every time." -- Sean Payton, the day of the 2006 NFL draft, after the Saints eschewed offers to trade down and instead stayed with their first-round slot and picked USC tailback Reggie Bush.
Even more stuff you need to know before the NFL playoffs kick off this weekend with four first-round games...
NEW YORK -- Fourteen things you need to know on the heels of Week 14:
Drew Brees did more Monday night than embarrass the Patriots and establish the Saints as the team to beat in 2009. He gave the greatest regular-season passing performance in modern NFL history, carving up the once-proud Patriots defense.
Can't resist a few more lingering thoughts in the continuing aftermath of "Bill-gate,'' perhaps the perfect NFL storm for the cacophony of debate that the 24/7 news cycle generates and thrives on.....
Bill Belichick is famously unsentimental. That, really, is his legacy as a football coach. Herm Edwards shouted "You play to win the game!" but that was just fun talk. It is Belichick who has lived those words during his amazing career as a coach.
• If I had been on the Patriots' sideline Sunday night, I might have seen it a different way, but I hated Bill Belichick's call to go for it on fourth-and-two against the Colts. As a player, you get shortsighted when you're involved in the game. On every fourth-and-two in my career I guarantee I was saying, "Give me the ball." And I'm sure the players on that New England sideline were down with the move. That's the nice thing about being a player -- it was never your call. "Blame the coach! I'm just doing what he says." You can get away with being irrational as a player. It ain't your say and it ain't your fault. Maybe Tom Brady liked it, but players aren't in the right frame of mind to make that call.
INDIANAPOLIS -- In Patriots lore, it'll forever be known as "The Call,'' the ultimate example of some Bill Belichick bravado that backfired.
Bill Parcells occasionally sends New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin a pair of gray socks. That's it. Just a pair of gray socks in the mail. When Coughlin played football at Syracuse in the 1960s, the field was so muddy white socks couldn't be cleaned properly and cost too much to replace.
After several seconds of trying to convince a listener that Sunday's game against the Patriots is significant only because it's next on the schedule, Josh McDaniels leaned against his black BMW sedan, flashed a wide smile and, for one of the few times since becoming the Broncos' head coach in January, veered off message.
"You get a chance to add the explosiveness of Reggie Bush to your team, and that's something that comes along maybe every five, 10 years. I don't care what the Jets offered us. We were keeping the pick. If that's a gamble, I'll gamble like that every time." -- Sean Payton, the day of the 2006 NFL draft, after the Saints eschewed offers to trade down and instead stayed with their first-round slot and picked USC tailback Reggie Bush.
Even more stuff you need to know before the NFL playoffs kick off this weekend with four first-round games...
NEW YORK -- Fourteen things you need to know on the heels of Week 14:
Drew Brees did more Monday night than embarrass the Patriots and establish the Saints as the team to beat in 2009. He gave the greatest regular-season passing performance in modern NFL history, carving up the once-proud Patriots defense.
Can't resist a few more lingering thoughts in the continuing aftermath of "Bill-gate,'' perhaps the perfect NFL storm for the cacophony of debate that the 24/7 news cycle generates and thrives on.....
Bill Belichick is famously unsentimental. That, really, is his legacy as a football coach. Herm Edwards shouted "You play to win the game!" but that was just fun talk. It is Belichick who has lived those words during his amazing career as a coach.
• If I had been on the Patriots' sideline Sunday night, I might have seen it a different way, but I hated Bill Belichick's call to go for it on fourth-and-two against the Colts. As a player, you get shortsighted when you're involved in the game. On every fourth-and-two in my career I guarantee I was saying, "Give me the ball." And I'm sure the players on that New England sideline were down with the move. That's the nice thing about being a player -- it was never your call. "Blame the coach! I'm just doing what he says." You can get away with being irrational as a player. It ain't your say and it ain't your fault. Maybe Tom Brady liked it, but players aren't in the right frame of mind to make that call.
INDIANAPOLIS -- In Patriots lore, it'll forever be known as "The Call,'' the ultimate example of some Bill Belichick bravado that backfired.
Bill Parcells occasionally sends New York Giants coach Tom Coughlin a pair of gray socks. That's it. Just a pair of gray socks in the mail. When Coughlin played football at Syracuse in the 1960s, the field was so muddy white socks couldn't be cleaned properly and cost too much to replace.
After several seconds of trying to convince a listener that Sunday's game against the Patriots is significant only because it's next on the schedule, Josh McDaniels leaned against his black BMW sedan, flashed a wide smile and, for one of the few times since becoming the Broncos' head coach in January, veered off message.
The NFL season is almost upon us -- I know this because Ron Jaworski emerged from his NFL Films vault and didn't see his shadow ---and I am reminded that it is not so much a league of gentlemen as it is a league of quarterbacks. Here are the ones I'll be following most closely in 2009:
SI.com has dispatched writers to report on the 32 NFL training camps across the country. Here's what Ben Reiter had to say about the Patriots' camp in Foxborough, Mass. For an archive of all the camp postcards, click here.
On Halloween Day 1987, the then Los Angeles Rams traded franchise running back Eric Dickerson to the Indianapolis Colts in a three-team deal that included the Buffalo Bills.
The mind kind of boggles at a couple things dealing with the Matt Cassel-to-Kansas City trade Saturday. First off, I'm struck by the fact that last September 7 it was Kansas City safety Bernard Pollard who crashed into Tom Brady's left knee, ending his 2008 season and sending Cassel onto the NFL stage for what was effectively the first time in his four-year pro career.
INDIANAPOLIS -- Musings, observations and the occasional insight as we wrap up Money Day at the NFL Scouting Combine, the day the quarterbacks show their stuff (at least the ones who deem to work out) ...
The framed, felt banner hangs on a wall in the study of Amanda Belichick's apartment.
In our tough economic climate, it's worth reminding ourselves that losing a job might not be the end of the world. Sure, it never feels good, but for these well-known folks, getting the boot from their gigs provided the impetus for them to reach even greater successes.
Stop me if you've heard this one before, but the New England Patriots could be in trouble. At least that was the conventional wisdom circulating around the league last week, with some speculating that we had just witnessed the eve of destruction for this decade's only NFL dynasty.
Five years ago, Julia Chuslo, an accomplished architect and mother of three lacrosse players, was designing her family's new house in Duxbury, Mass., a coastal suburb 35 miles south of Boston.
Breaking down Sunday's New England Patriots at San Diego Chargers game (8:15 p.m., Eastern, NBC) ...
What is so wonderful about sport is that it takes your mind off of all the terrible things -- and, Lord knows, 2008 has been one whale of an annus horribilis, what with wars, oil, hurricanes, mortgages, Putin, Mugabe, Eliot Spitzer and Paris Hilton. That's why it's so wonderful to get away from it all and turn to the sports pages and see that . . . .
Tom Brady goes down with a ripped up knee, sidelined for the season, and all of Patriots Nation suddenly looks like a stopped-up Bill Belichick. The pained faces. The mumbled replies. The hurry to get somewhere else.
After an exhaustive sampling of data that stretched throughout one week of the NFL's regular season -- and that was even before the Monday night games were completed -- the pronouncements came fast and furious from the punditry class:
Bill Belichick's legacy cracked apart last year like the lobster claws at a Gillette Stadium tailgate.
There's so much good e-mail -- clearly one of the best e-mail weeks in the history of this column -- that I'm going to allow you to take it over. I'll just stay out of the way. On with the show:
HAMILTON, N.Y. -- Notes on Spygate and lessons from a scandal, on a damp, graduation weekend at Colgate University:
Musings, observations and the occasional insight as we endured Matt Walsh Day in the carnival-like fashion we expected in New York. ...
NEW YORK -- So, is it over? Is the nine-month Spygate nightmare finally over?
Jon Bon Jovi should be living it up like the rock star that he is right now. He has a rare day off from touring and he's pacing around his plush digs in Miami with the vibrant Florida sun beaming through the windows around him. With South Beach at his fingertips, however, he opts to stay in and talk football. That's what happens when you're the owner of the Philadelphia Soul, one of only two undefeated teams left in the Arena Football League.
Michael Lombardi is a 22-year veteran of NFL personnel departments, spending eight years with the Raiders and nine years with the Browns, in addition to brief stints with the Broncos, Eagles and 49ers. This is his third column for SI.com. You can read his first two here and here.
PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Wearing a fashionable Hawaiian shirt rather than his trademark gray hoodie with the cut-off sleeves, a relaxed and fairly expansive Bill Belichick met with us here for more than an hour Tuesday morning at the AFC head coaches media breakfast.
The good news is that one way or another, the end appears to be in sight.
INDIANAPOLIS -- I actually saw the scouting combine Sunday afternoon for the first time in my life, and I came away thinking, "Is that all there is?"
The e-mail bag overfloweth, much of it concerning Spygate. We'll start with that, then a plug for the new NFL Films DVD on the Giants' Super Bowl win -- being released nationwide today -- because there are a few very interesting things in the DVD that taught me a few things I didn't know about the Giants' season and the Super Bowl.
All the successful ballads about good relationships are written with some version of "I Love You Just the Way You Are" -- unless the main squeeze happens to be coach Tom Coughlin.
It feels like an ice age ago that the Patriots took the field at Super Bowl XXXVI as lovable, 14-point underdogs against the Greatest Show on Turf Rams. Their 20-17 victory on Adam Vinatieri's kick as time expired was heartwarming stuff -- unless you were a Rams fan or a partisan of an AFC rival sworn to lasting enmity for the Patriots. But for a fence-sitter, Tom Brady was the grist of beloved lore: a guy who rose from high school backup and sixth-round obscurity to steely champion. His clutch, gritty team-first crew was a refreshing antidote to a flood of me-first showboats.
MONTCLAIR, N.J. -- Five post-Super Bowl thoughts from the home office in the land David Tyree made famous:
With all due respect to my friend and colleague Paul Zimmerman, the esteemed Dr. Z., the psychic guilt of having not picked Joe Namath and the Jets to beat the Colts in the Super Bowl 39 years ago is no reason to compound one's mistake by predicting a Giants upset of the Patriots in next week's Super Bowl, as he did for both SI.com and Sports Illustrated earlier this week.
The locker room slowly emptied on Sunday evening, and the clusters of media thinnned. The New England Patriots had beaten the San Diego Chargers 21-12 to earn a place in Super Bowl XLII, and now equipment managers emerged from a laundry room and began hanging gear from the metal hooks in players' dressing cubicles: numbered (but nameless) white jerseys with blue pants for the offense, blue jerseys with gray pants for the defense. Mesh bags with socks and undergarments for everyone.
THE TUNDRA, Wisc. -- I had a clear view of Lambeau Field as night fell on Green Bay Saturday, maybe 500 yards from my fourth floor room at the Cambria Suites hotel. And the sight reminded me of a story from the Ice Bowl -- maybe urban legend, I don't know -- of a Dallas player on Sunday morning, Dec. 31, 1967, before the NFL Championship Game, placing a cup of coffee on the window sill of his hotel room, and going to drink it a few minutes later. Frozen.
NEW YORK -- Once upon a time, way back in 2000, New England owner Bob Kraft swam against the tide and hired a 47-year-old coach, Bill Belichick, who brought along a trusted friend with a knack for picking players, Scott Pioli, 34, to run the personnel side of the team.
They've been out in front virtually from this season's opening kickoff, but there is one team the Patriots will never get ahead of. That would be themselves.
This was going to be an assault, a full-on, guns blazing attack on the New England Patriots and the unsportsmanlike, classless way in which they have run up the score on a host of opponents this season. The next several paragraphs were going to set a world record for synonyms for arrogant. They were going to rip Patriots coach Bill Belichick for his lack of sportsmanship, vilify receiver Randy Moss for stealing paychecks from the Oakland Raiders the past few seasons only to come back to life for the Pats and excoriate quarterback Tom Brady for ... well, we were going to think of something.
The national points I keep reading and hearing: Spygate means no matter what the Patriots accomplish this year, it will -- and should -- be forever scarred and asterisked because Bill Belichick cheated. Belichick's evil, humorless, worthless ... football's version of Barry Bonds. The team mirrors him. They run up the score and lack grace in the process. "New Evil Empire Resides in Foxboro,'' blares a headline in today's Philadelphia Daily News. A few thoughts:
Let me get this straight. In order to re-set the NFL's starting quarterbacking landscape in Week 11, we have to remember that ...
Never fails. The Patriots' linebackers will shuffle into their meeting room at Gillette Stadium during a game week, fold their bodies into chairs for an hour or more of whiteboard and videotape education, and soon enough coach Bill Belichick is among them. He doesn't have to be there. He can be anywhere he wants, including in the executive suite polishing Lombardi Trophies. Belichick's ID card works on every lock in the building, and he has Matt Patricia to coach his linebackers. Yet more often than not he is in this room.
They are the top two coaches in the profession, Super Bowl champions, innovators, and frontmen for their organizations. They have teams built around legendary quarterbacks, smart and agile defenses and pinball-scoring offenses. They have turned former NFL outposts into hotbeds with standing-room-only stadiums.
This story was originally published in the Feb. 14, 2005 issue of Sports Illustrated
We cheer when our teams cheat. That's because all we care about is winning. And if that makes us immoral, so what?
NFL coaches, bless their controlling, obsessive, conniving, secretive little hearts, are not, as a rule, the most well-adjusted individuals you'll ever meet. The season is only one week old and already we've just about had our fill of their self-important personalities -- the way they address the media as if they're describing Operation Desert Storm instead of a third-down screen play, the way they refuse to reveal which mediocre quarterback they've chosen to start the next game as if they were protecting nuclear launch codes. Generally speaking, they're just weird guys, which is why it takes some truly abnormal behavior for an NFL coach to set himself apart from his peers.
I am always touched when, after all the savagery of a football game, the opposing players and coaches mingle pleasantly in the middle of the gridiron. Why, it's even reminiscent, on a reduced athletic scale, of the famous Christmas Eve armistice between the trenches in the First World War.
When the Jets spotted a Patriots on-field video assistant filming their coaching signals during a Sept. 9 game at the Meadowlands, it set into motion a passion play that could have starred another North Jersey operator, Tony Soprano. By exposing the dirty secret of his former boss, Pats coach Bill Belichick, Jets coach Eric Mangini broke a long-held code that NFL coaches live by: Don't go against the family. "If he wasn't before, Mangini's dead to Belichick now," says one head coach. "What Mangini did is a disgrace. He wouldn't be a coach in this league without Bill, and this is how he repays him."
ITEM: Ravens coach accuses Jets of cheating.
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. (AP) -- The NFL may soon find out if the New England Patriots video spying went beyond one game, and the team itself may provide the evidence.
• Also in this column: news from First Sergeant Mike McGuire.
Roger Goodell has acted quickly against the New England Patriots and Bill Belichick in the infamous Spy Case, fining the coach ($500,000) and team ($250,000) on Thursday, while ordering the forfeiture of conditional high draft picks next year.
Given that he lost both a first-round pick and $500,000 on Thursday night, it sounds a little strange to claim that Bill Belichick got off lightly, in terms of the penalty he received from NFL commissioner Roger Goodell for his role in the Patriots' videotaping incident Sunday at Giants Stadium.
One of the disciplinary options that the NFL is considering against Patriots head coach Bill Belichick for New England's illegal videotaping of New York Jets defensive coaches on Sunday includes both the stripping of a first-day 2008 draft pick from the Patriots -- perhaps a first rounder -- and a suspension of either two or three games for Belichick, SI.com has learned.
Jacksonville coach Jack Del Rio has officially joined the ranks of Pats premier propogandist Bill Belichick and the Disappearing ex-Dolphin coach, Nick Saban, and virtually every other NFL headmaster as someone that no observer in their right mind should believe when he's discussing the future of his team in a public forum. Here's why: After months of insisting that oft-injured QB Byron Leftwich was a cornerstone of the Jaguars franchise, Del Rio unceremoniously handed the Jags' starting job to veteran backup David Garrard.
The foldage of NFL Europa introduces the interesting question: Does the league have a future anywhere outside of North America? Thus, in keeping with one of the few halfway newsworthy themes this July, Jerome Jumpp of Slough, UK, is our E-mailer of the Week for his thesis that 1) a big reason for failure is that the lesser variety doesn't measure up to the real thing and, 2) the only way to prevent that is to place franchises internationally.
The sports world has been going through withdrawal these past seven days -- of demands, opinions, and of job acceptances. Billy Donovan's Orlando two-step is the most prominent flip-flop, but not the only one. In L.A., Kobe Bryant declared last week he wanted out of L.A., only to say three hours later that L.A. was his lady. In Washington, D.C., earlier this week Clinton Portis told the assembled media that, after further study, he reversed his earlier remarks and did have some objection to people having their dogs attack each other for entertainment.
1. "Super" proposal update: Some of you may have wondered, as I did, whatever happened to the wedding proposal that was supposed to take place in a Super Bowl commercial. Well, that plan fell through when the company that was slated to pony up the $2.6 million for the ad time backed out, and CBS then decided not to run the proposal as an in-house ad. Instead, the man once known only as "J.P." -- he turns out to be a Seattle Internet marketing executive named Rand Fishkin -- borrowed $3,000 from his mother to buy time in the Seattle market during Tuesday night's showing of Veronica Mars, his beloved's favorite show. Thankfully, when Geraldine DeRuiter saw the proposal at 9:23 p.m. PT, she said yes. Congrats to the happy couple. You can find links to both the proposal and her response (a lot of "What?!... what?!... what?!" with a "yes" mixed in) here.
He had just arrived in America's Finest City, and as Richard Seymour sat in the bus that transported the New England Patriots to their hotel in La Jolla last Friday night, the veteran defensive end felt mighty fine about his team's prospects against the top-seeded San Diego Chargers.
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. -- Defensive tackle Michael Wright sat at his corner locker Thursday while a media armada encircled linebacker Mike Vrabel at the opposite end of the room. Wright, who sparkled in four emergency starts -- mostly for the injured Vince Wilfork -- has returned to being an obscure reserve, one who went undrafted in 2005.
Patriots coach Bill Belichick was very hands-on at the finish of last Sunday's playoff win over the Jets. In his haste to lay an awkward midfield man-hug on Jets coach Eric Mangini, Belichick shoved a Boston Globe photographer out of his way. Belichick later apologized, but as this list shows, it's far from the first time that a sports figure has wanted a camera (or cameramen) or reporter out of the picture.
FOXBORO, Mass. -- If it's possible for a 21-point loser to have earned a huge measure of respect this weekend, the New York Jets have done it. New England's victory on Sunday was a 23-16 game with 10 minutes left, and Tom Brady, the best quarterback most of us will ever see, had to convert a huge third-and-eight to prevent the Jets from having one last chance to make a game of it. Then, of course, the roof caved in, and New England romped 37-16.
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