2023-2024 NFL Season Thread • Page 2954

Nah, Grim is right. Fuck you Josh

 

JOAH

 

I saw it, coward

 

Prove it

 

Like in my ideal football snack, I want a chips and queso, some wings and then a rum and diet.

 

Youre correct here

 

Haha nah I'm playing

 

I fucking hate you!


I hope the Jags never win a game again.

 

That's meaner than what you said about me being middle Eastern

 

Anyone got a Disney+ subscription

 

very high possibility

 

yeah

 

What a dumb fuckin movie

 

Wanna send me the text of the Wickersham Pats article?

 

I guess one of them was a 4.2 about 20 miles from me. I didn’t notice it

 

Beard why did you see a Damon lane tweet

 

I don’t know what this mean

 

Hang on Dave I’m trying

 

Reed Timmer mentioning OKC earthquakes

 

ON FEB. 7, 2021, Tom Brady stood with his children beneath a shower of victory confetti. He had just won his seventh Super Bowl. Three more than Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw, one more than his former New England Patriots bosses Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft. In NFL lore, he now stood alone. Up in a private suite, his family looked down with many emotions. Nobody who'd ever played the game had won more, been more of a winner, and it felt to him and the people who loved him that he hadn't merely beaten the Kansas City Chiefs but also had beaten his old team, after it had doubted him and opened the door for him to leave. Brady held his kids close. Watching the Tampa Bay Buccaneers' celebration unfold below, his parents opened a bottle of champagne. Nobody said a word about New England. It was simply understood. His mom and his dad and his sisters raised a glass, and if you listened carefully in that moment, the delicate sound of stemware was a bell tolling for the Patriots dynasty.

Brady and Belichick and Kraft were no longer fighting for credit. Brady had claimed that credit undeniably on the most public stage in sports. His seventh title meant Bill and Bob were now fighting not to be blamed. Both men sent Brady congratulatory texts, but they had lost control of the narrative of their own careers -- and they both knew that the team celebrating a seventh title should have been their team, and that wound began to fester.

"Bill had told me he couldn't play anymore," Kraft said privately afterward, "and then he goes out and wins the f---ing Super Bowl."
AND KRAFT ENDED their partnership four days after losing at home in the snow to the New York Jets. "We're moving on," Belichick said, and Kraft said they had "mutually agreed" to part ways. A somber mood had permeated throughout the football offices at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, since the loss to the Jets, with most assistant coaches and staffers kept in the dark on the future of the franchise even as they wrapped up a 4-13 season with exit interviews and meetings. Belichick had sent clear signals internally for weeks that he thought he was coaching his final games for the Patriots. He also made it clear that he was ready to move on, telling confidants that Robert Kraft and his son, team president Jonathan Kraft, had eroded the culture he had built over two decades.

Belichick believed the erosion had been going on for a while, at least since Brady's last season in New England. Belichick and Kraft met multiple times after this season ended, which is custom, but this year's series of meetings was different. Both men had lists of things that needed to change. And both men knew it was unlikely they'd find a way forward. Three days after losing to the Jets, Belichick had started to move items out of his office.


After nine Super Bowl appearances and six championships, Kraft wanted something new. The team hadn't won a playoff game since winning Super Bowl LIII over the Los Angeles Rams almost five years ago. In fact, without Brady starting at quarterback, Kraft and Belichick share a win-loss record of 47-57, a sample that makes both of them below average, which for two proud men accustomed to accolades might be a fate worse than ending all they had built together in New England.

STORY OF THE last days of the Patriots as we know them starts at the very beginning, when they were underdogs with a sixth-rounder at quarterback, upsetting the St. Louis Rams -- the Greatest Show on Turf, in Super Bowl XXXVI. In the hours after that first Super Bowl victory, all of their lives changing in real time, Brady knocked on the door of Room 533 at New Orleans' Fairmont Hotel, an old line place where Huey Long once held court in the lobby. It was Belichick's room, and he was celebrating with his closest friends, including old Andover classmate Ernie Adams. Belichick opened the door and handed his young quarterback a cold Corona. Brady worked up the nerve to ask his coach if he could skip the team charter to go to Disney World.

"S--- yeah," Belichick said. "How many times do you win the Super Bowl?"


That season's coaching job only calcified the authority Belichick demanded. His quarterback, the Super Bowl MVP, needed permission to travel on his own, like some kind of unaccompanied minor. That in itself is not unusual in the NFL, but the stories of Belichick's autonomy are now the stuff of Patriots reunion hospitality room legend. Get two or more New England alums together, give them each a few drinks, and then sit back and listen to one incredible tale after another. Adams often told one of those stories to friends about a meeting with the Krafts before the 2000 draft, which would yield Brady. Belichick and Adams met with Robert and Jonathan Kraft to talk strategy. Both Belichick and Adams knew that the Krafts were sensitive to the word around the league that they meddled and liked to be involved in football matters. It was their right, as team owners. But the meeting was a test of sorts. Belichick started to outline what he needed in players, from versatility to character -- he has often said privately that if there's one element of his Patriots run that has been overshadowed, it's how much planning and detail the staff put into personnel decisions -- and what followed was a master class on depth of football knowledge and insight and foresight. It was so detailed and thorough that the Krafts had no questions.

"You do what's best for the football team," Robert said, and the meeting ended.

Belichick ran operations mostly with impunity for the next decade. The team won three Super Bowls. From 2006 to 2013, the Patriots plateaued at the highest level -- losing Super Bowls in the final minute to the Giants -- and relationships started to fray. Belichick internally discussed trading Brady and talked openly to associates about wanting to win a Super Bowl without him. Kraft, trying to manage the two of them -- trying to do what Jerry Jones couldn't and keep a dynasty together -- struck a quiet deal with Brady in 2010 that if Belichick ever decided to move on from him that he would give the quarterback a say in his next destination.


During another contract impasse in 2013, Robert Kraft flew with Brady from Boston to L.A. A deal was reached, but sources said Jonathan created an urgency for his dad to be more involved. A year later, in 2014, Belichick provided Kraft a study detailing how even the greatest quarterbacks drop off in their mid-30s. Belichick drafted Jimmy Garoppolo in the second round, setting him up to succeed Brady.

Brady found another gear, like his boyhood hero Joe Montana did after the arrival of Steve Young. Brady turned to friend and trainer Alex Guerrero and an obsessive anti-aging regimen to prove Belichick's study wrong. With the conflict between his two most important employees now out in the open, Kraft took on the job of making Brady happy, offering connection and compliments and joy in an otherwise dour Belichick atmosphere. New England won two more Super Bowls, against the Seattle Seahawks and Atlanta Falcons, both with Brady-authored comebacks and situational defensive brilliance from Belichick. A tricky dynamic ensued, with Kraft acting as a referee between the two alphas. Brady wanted to ease up his offseason workouts, which didn't bother Belichick and maybe even pleased him. Brady watched his old reps going to Garoppolo and jumped back in. Brady complained to Kraft about the offseason practice schedules, which led Kraft to start asking around the building. Word got back to Belichick, who wondered why Kraft was asking these questions.

All of those issues -- Garoppolo, Brady's age and contract, Deflategate, Belichick's mostly miserable program and the TB12 method -- came to a head in 2017. Belichick curtailed Guerrero's access. At one point, Brady and Guerrero worked out of a maintenance shed at Gillette Stadium that stored John Deere tractors. Belichick spoke to confidants about leaving. Brady has said publicly that he didn't want to return to the Patriots at that time unless something changed. After releasing a statement in January 2018 denying that there was tension between his two most important employees, Kraft wanted fans to know how he solved it, by hearing Brady out, by restoring some of Guerrero's access. They won another Super Bowl in 2019. Their sixth. And last.

Seven months later, Brady again asked for a contract to ensure he would be a Patriot until his stated goal of age 45. The negotiations were tense, typical for the latter half of Brady's career. Reporters asked him if he believed he had earned a new deal. His answer was revealing, its own kind of message, because he didn't mention the coach who prided himself on total control.

"Talk to Mr. Kraft," Brady said.

 

Oh why didn’t you say espn+? I never logged into that.

 

The espn app fucking sucks hang on

 

I give up sorry

 

Okay