Yoshi MaeshiroBelichick and Brady: Two Men, The Patriots, And How They Revolutionized Football - Michael Holley
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“What Belichick talked with his coaches about, in amazement, involved the kid, Brady.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“His offseason had been phenomenal. His strength was up and his body fat was down. He challenged himself in the weight room with squats and leg lifts, knowing that his best throws began from the bottom up, with proper footwork and balance, and then on to arm position and follow-through. He was fluent in the offense. And if he had any bitterness about the generous paydays that had happened for other quarterbacks in Foxboro and around the league, he didn’t show it. He had natural leadership qualities, and he was rapidly developing a game that was in sync with his intangibles.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“Bill Parcells, still a respected voice in New England and now doing a national radio show, went on the air and was prescient prior to the next game, at Denver.
“Someday he is going to be in a game where he and his team take a beating, like 31–10 or something, and he throws four interceptions,” Parcells said of Brady. “The other players will be mad at him, the assistant coaches will look sideways at him, and he’ll finish the game with a broken nose.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“Now, what he does the next Wednesday, when he practices with the team for the first time, and what he does the week after that, is where he is going to find out what he is made of. It’s easy when you have a great start, and you haven’t gotten beat up yet. The great ones are the guys that go through the bad times and keep on getting better.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“Phifer’s father, James, was a minister, and he frequently taught from the book of Proverbs. Specifically, the passage that reads, “God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.” Phifer had been talking to his father about football for twenty-five years, and this was the first time that he could see his own career within a sermon. Indeed, he had been the proud one for a decade.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“He had become a dutiful note-taker, and his notebook pages were filled with painstaking instructions from Belichick. He thought to himself, This could be an MBA program. It’s like I’m going to grad school for football, and Bill is the professor. He knew that Belichick and the other coaches got to the old stadium long before the players did, and departed who knew when. They had watched more film than the players had, and considered more game possibilities than the players had. Given that, it always amazed Phifer that the professor could stand in front of the group and condense that mass of information into three things. It was always, Do these three things and we should be in position to win.
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Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“It was genius, and several layers of it: of football, of efficiency, of leadership.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“James Phifer sure had been onto something when he preached about humility.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“When we won, it really was that feeling of emerging from the dark tunnel and seeing the light,” Damien Woody says. “Playing for Coach Belichick, you were on edge every single week. You got comfortable being uncomfortable. It’s never easy. He demands a lot, all the time. If you can’t get it right, he just gives this cold stare like, ‘Are you shitting me right now? How do you not know this?’ So to win it, and hold that trophy, it was finally relief.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
Lawyer Milloy “Look, we shocked the world. This is not for anybody else but us and our fans, the greatest fans in America. This is what it’s all about. Can’t nobody take this from us, for life!” He was asked, truly, if he thought the Patriots were capable of shutting down one of the best offenses in NFL history the way that they had. “We believed,” he replied before the question was fully complete. “People die for their beliefs, and we believe in our team.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“Fauria had remembered the intense Belichick from years earlier, when the coach was still in Cleveland and the player was a draft prospect from Colorado. They were at the Shrine Bowl in San Francisco, and Fauria had watched film in Belichick’s hotel suite.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“He had a bunch of tapes in his room, all of my tapes from college,” Fauria recalls. “It was like Roy Hobbs in The Natural: dark room, one light. He said, ‘Pick out your best game and your worst game.’ I thought it was some type of trick. My worst game, I thought, was Nebraska. We put it on and I was kicking somebody’s ass. He said, ‘That’s your worst game?’ He was going over every game, and he knew about everybody on the field. I was thinking, ‘Please don’t draft me.’ He had a reputation as a taskmaster, and I just didn’t want to deal with it.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“Belichick was amazed by what Brady routinely saw, and impressed with the intelligent way that he maximized each play. One of the defensive coaches, Rob Ryan, had begun calling Brady “Belichick with a Better Arm,” and the description was as precise as a Brady throw.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“Ironically, the winning pass in front of a national audience was an illustration of how underrated Brady was. He was so smooth at the line of scrimmage that he didn’t give hints at how quickly he was processing and adjusting before the snap of the ball. He made it look too easy. Even after the snap, on the winning play, Givens had run the wrong route. Brady noticed it when he looked Givens’s way and instantly made the adjustment. ”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“While Tom Jackson had said that the players hated Belichick, many of the players were starting to notice the opposite. He was informative in team meetings, with the right dose of self-deprecation, and the mixture always made them feel prepared for anything. ”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“He gave me every aspect of the game. I had never thought of it in such detail from a defensive lineman’s standpoint,” Seymour says. “Bill’s approach was, ‘These are their weaknesses; we’re going to take away their strengths.’ He’d talk about the plays that were run when the tight end or fullback was on your side. He’d have you think about the tendency of an offense out of a one-back set versus two backs. He covered it all. Your awareness level went way up.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“As the play-offs began to unfold, it was obvious what the biggest sacrifice of being a 2003 Patriot was. Sometimes, when you played for this team, your talent could be hidden, right before thousands of people in the stands and millions watching on TV. A quarterback like Brady, gifted as well as studious, might be overlooked when compared to Peyton Manning. ”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“On this team, sometimes the game plan would call for forty-five passes, and sometimes it was half of that. Maybe it’s why the perception of the quarterbacks was so different. Manning and Tennessee’s Steve McNair shared the league’s MVP award, while Brady received no consideration for it.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“On this team, a wide receiver wasn’t guaranteed to get the same amount of targets every week. Here, defensive tackles would sometimes exit a game with a tackle or two, applauded by the coaches and met with indifference by the media. ”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“You have to be secure in your talent on teams like these because you’ll be known as a football player’s football player, and sometimes even they would miss what you were doing.
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Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“This is what we started to do: We slowly accumulated winning stat guys as opposed to the high-sack, high-interception guys,” former Patriots linebacker Matt Chatham says. “Willie McGinest, Mike Vrabel. Those guys are way more valuable if they get eight sacks rather than sixteen. ”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“Dominating the edge, getting on the tight end, blowing up wide receivers and never letting them get into the pattern. That’s way more valuable than sixteen sacks.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“I think that the world thinks that the sixteen-sack guy is more valuable, but the Patriots don’t think that, and you can get into the economics of this: The sixteen-sack guy costs twice as much as the other guy. And once you get to a certain point, it’s saturation.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“It’s just sixteen plays and when you play five hundred snaps, it’s not that important. It just isn’t. Who are the best rerouters among outside linebackers? Who are the best edge-setters? Does anyone in the media know that?”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
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“This was what it meant to be a Patriot; winning had to be satisfactory enough, because the hype and awards weren’t always going to be there. Brady should have known that better than most. He had grown up watching Montana, his generation’s symbol for winning. Montana had won his first Super Bowl at age twenty-five, but he didn’t win his first MVP until he was thirty-three. Sometimes it took a while for people to catch up.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
“As Chatham mentioned, there were lots of jams and reroutes by linebackers. Lots of instances where receivers were obliterated at the line of scrimmage before they had a chance to give Manning a clean target. The Patriots called it suffocating; Polian called it holding.”
Excerpt From: Michael Holley. “Belichick and Brady: Two Men, the Patriots, and How They Revolutionized Football.” Apple Books.
