It was the Patriot Way, until it wasn't

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."

BELICHICK 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.

THE 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.

IN OCTOBER 2021, BRADY returned to New England as a member of the defending champion Buccaneers. Kraft and Belichick both had decided to let Brady go. No matter how much Kraft tried to distance himself from that decision, he approved it.

"He backed Bill," Brady told a friend at the time.

When Brady entered Gillette Stadium, he got a window into life in New England without him there. Kraft and Belichick coordinated to meet him shortly after he arrived. The field seemed like the best place, because one of Brady's rituals was to walk it before games. But when Brady saw a thicket of cameras around, more than for any Patriots game in memory, including cameras for an all-access documentary coming out in February -- which in the words of a Kraft confidant "is an infomercial" and "pitch for Robert to get into the Hall of Fame" -- he stopped. He didn't want to be used in that way. Instead they met in the hallways inside the stadium. A camera crew found them, and Brady asked for some space. He didn't want those conversations to be weaponized in any way.

After the Buccaneers' narrow win, Belichick and Brady met alone near the visitors locker room. When Brady left for Tampa, he seemed to have a visceral reaction whenever someone raised Belichick's name "He doesn't know what he's losing," Brady privately said after he left. But in Foxborough the two men chatted for 20 minutes, and Brady later told friends that Belichick was conciliatory. Belichick didn't blame Brady for leaving: He admitted in the meeting that the Buccaneers were better equipped to win than New England in 2020, a season that required a reset of sorts after Belichick publicly said that the team had "sold out."

It was as close to a concession for how things ended as Belichick was capable of giving. Brady's grudge against Belichick eased, a confidence rooted in assurance that, coming off his recent Super Bowl triumph, he could afford to be magnanimous.

NEW ENGLAND'S RECORD IN the first three years after Brady left -- 7-9 in 2020, 10-7 in 2021, 8-9 in 2022 -- and most of all, the way the team was trending downward, caused the Krafts to assert themselves more in football operations. Three moves during the 2023 offseason show its effects.

One was promoting linebackers coach Jerod Mayo to a vague but favored status last January. The Carolina Panthers wanted to interview Mayo for their head-coach opening in early 2023. Kraft swooped in, as he did with Josh McDaniels in 2018 when he was about to leave for the Indianapolis Colts. The team issued a news release, signed by Belichick, saying that the Patriots were working on an extension for Mayo that would keep him with the team "long term." That type of public declaration of a staff transaction was unprecedented in the Belichick era -- he has been title agnostic with coaches since his days in Cleveland, and often waited until the eve of the season to release basic details about his staff -- and it struck those close to the head coach that the Krafts were sending a message to fans that they were becoming more involved. And that they had a successor picked out. Kraft later told reporters that Mayo was the "heir apparent."

The second was hiring Bill O'Brien as offensive coordinator. Belichick signed off on bringing him on for a second run -- O'Brien was on the Patriots' staff from 2007 to 2011 -- but it was a move heavily influenced by and advocated for by the Krafts. O'Brien had success as a head coach in Houston, more than any other coach from Belichick's New England run. O'Brien reminded other coaches that after 2022's Belichick-designed offensive failings under Matt Patricia and Joe Judge, he was brought in to "fix the offense."

Then, during offseason planning meetings, Belichick later told people in the building, he raised the idea to the Krafts of trading quarterback Mac Jones. The Krafts had embraced Jones after he was drafted in the first round in 2021, hoping to build something close to a Brady-like relationship with him. Jones played well as a rookie under then-coordinator McDaniels, then regressed in 2022 under Belichick's patchwork offensive staff. Ownership argued against trading him, wanting to see what Jones could do with O'Brien calling plays, which this past week they denied saying through a team spokesperson. Belichick technically could have traded Jones, but he ceded to his bosses. Longtime observers of the Patriots noticed a disconnect in training camp, when Belichick in news conferences almost went out of his way to not compliment Jones. It had already been a strange offseason. At one point, Belichick and Kraft publicly needled each other over the team's cash spending. Which Belichick hinted was a reason for the lack of recent success. Kraft made it public that he expected a return to the playoffs. Once again, it was coming down to how each man viewed the game's most vital position.

"I'm going to do what I need to get my quarterback the right people," Kraft told a confidant.

KRAFT DECIDED TO MAKE the opening of the 2023 season a celebration of the team's storied past. He invited Brady to return for a halftime ceremony. The night before the game, Brady and his family had dinner at Kraft's Chestnut Hill home. It was clear that Kraft was trying to do more than prepare for a ceremony for Brady the next day. He was trying to make amends for the quarterback's awkward departure. The night at Kraft's house was warm and friendly. Brady's family joked that they were happy that he had retired but were so bored without his football games, their first fall of freedom since he was 14. Kraft had been forgiven by the Bradys in a way Belichick had not. Tom Sr. often jokes that he has "Irish Alzheimer's" with those he believes did his son wrong, such as Roger Goodell and the rest of the league, seared into his brain. The Bradys believe in loyalty in a sport that celebrated it, and from a Patriots franchise that has made emotionless roster decisions part of its ethos. When the San Francisco 49ers traded Brady family hero Joe Montana to the Chiefs in 1993, Tom's mother, Galynn, wrote the team off forever. To this day, she cheers against the Niners.

The afternoon after dinner with Kraft, the Bradys watched the Patriots play the Eagles from the owner's suite. The family never spoke to Belichick during the trip. The crowd seemed most engaged when Brady sprinted down the field at halftime, capped with his signature fist pump. Brady sat next to Kraft as they watched early editions of the hallmarks of the 2023 Patriots: good defense, turnovers on offense, inability to jump to an early lead, which exposed even worse deficiencies. Everyone in the suite knew that Brady could have stepped in at halftime and been the best quarterback on the field. Over the years, those in Kraft's orbit have heard the owner "put down Belichick at every opportunity," a source close to Kraft said. This game was no different. Kraft's open mocking of Belichick -- a common line was "the great, intelligent man" -- was the worst-kept secret in New England. Although he denied saying it through a team spokesperson, Kraft used that line too many times to too many people for it to remain a secret.

EVERY LOSS DURING THE Patriots' 1-5 start added to the running tally of Belichick and Kraft's record without Brady. As the math got worse, the relationship between Kraft and Belichick remained unchanged on the surface -- they were businesslike and distant, two men in an unhappy marriage who couldn't afford a divorce -- and was decaying in private. The relationship between Jonathan Kraft and Belichick, never strong, worsened. Jonathan is protective over his father's legacy and watched for years as Belichick refused to acknowledge him in the hallways and dismissed him as obsessed with optics. In late 2022, according to a first-hand account, which Jonathan denied this week through a team spokesperson, Jonathan was talking to friends when one of them brought up New England's losing season.

"That guy's got to go," he said about Belichick. "He's done."

The losses, combined with the structure Kraft helped set up -- empowering Mayo and O'Brien -- subtly eroded Belichick's authority inside the building. The personnel and coaching staffs, intertwined for most of Belichick's run to avoid the type of back-stabbing common on other teams, started complaining about each other. In years past, Belichick would set a vision and leave it to the staff to execute it, leading to long discussions and creative solutions. That high-level collaborative roundtable was a thing of the past. People in the personnel department privately said that it was "amateur hour" with the coaches on game days; coaches complained that those on the personnel side were incapable of implementing Belichick's ideas. O'Brien, humbled by the inept offensive performance, was invested in finding a solution with Belichick. Mayo sometimes brought a baseball bat to meetings, swinging it around while the rest of the coaches had their heads down, projecting an attitude that he was separate from the rest, a favored son. Jonathan Kraft and the senior vice president of business affairs for the Kraft Group, Robyn Glaser, would chat with staff off to the side, asking why the head coach had made certain decisions. The subtext of the conversations was that life in Gillette Stadium might be different soon.

Belichick, who since the last Super Bowl win had slowly lost the core of his brain trust -- Ernie Adams, McDaniels, Patricia, Jack Easterby, Dante Scarnecchia, Nick Caserio -- had a mostly loyal staff who felt pinched between their boss and ownership. Word leaked around the office that if Belichick were gone in 2024, football operations would be split between Glaser and Jonathan Kraft. Patriots coaches and executives thought that "the Krafts' meddling has got everyone spun around," a source on the personnel side said.

Belichick's missteps on roster construction -- and in games -- had given the Krafts an opening. The offense had no explosive players. Jones looked lost; the alternatives looked worse. Belichick cut backup Bailey Zappe in the preseason, then re-signed him after he cleared waivers. Players thought third-stringer Malik Cunningham could have added a big-play dimension to the offense, but he saw action only in a loss to the Raiders on Oct. 15. He was cut a week later -- and 10 days after Belichick signed him to a three-year contract -- and signed by Baltimore, the type of front-running move the Patriots used to execute. Local reporters asked Belichick and O'Brien whether Jones would be benched; instead, Belichick left him in games, even when it was clear the quarterback was losing confidence.

"A f--- you to Kraft," a confidant of Belichick's said.

Kraft remained mostly silent publicly, not speaking to reporters at October's league meetings about the state of the team. But his ideas for how to replace Belichick started to leak. Trading for then-Titans coach Mike Vrabel was on the table, even if a long shot, bringing home a former Patriot who'd had success and seemed to be a perfect mix between Belichick's tactical genius and an ability to relate with players. Word of interest in Vrabel found its way to The Boston Globe. After that, there was an NFL Media report -- seemingly from Belichick's side -- that he had signed a "lucrative, multiyear" contract. Both men appeared to be leaking against each other. As the season neared its halfway point -- and New England lost to Dallas and New Orleans in consecutive weeks by a combined score of 72-3 -- Jonathan Kraft was as involved as ever, hammering Belichick behind the scenes about personnel decisions, as if slowly building a case to remove the coach.

"He's been brutal," Belichick told a friend.

THE PATRIOTS' GAME IN Frankfurt, Germany, on Nov. 12 stood out as a window into the dysfunction of 2023. The Krafts told confidants that Belichick was safe until that game, but after that, there were no guarantees. The question was what the Patriots would do if they were to fire Belichick. Would Mayo be the interim coach? Was he ready to be a head coach in 2024? One of the benefits and issues of Belichick's run was that there wasn't a lot of infrastructure in New England. It was mostly Belichick, everything flowing out of his experience and ingenuity. What would the hierarchy of the team look like for Mayo if he were to be the head coach? Nobody could answer it.

The relationship between Mayo and Belichick seemed strained to those inside the building. The Boston Sports Journal later reported that Mayo was rubbing other coaches the wrong way.

The Patriots lost in Germany, this time to the Colts. Jones was so broken that Belichick benched him for Zappe before the final drive of the game, New England's last chance at a comeback. In the coming days, there was no news out of Foxborough. It was business as usual, an unspoken message that Belichick would finish the season. Kraft "didn't want that to be how the relationship ended," a source close to him said. Instead, another source said, Kraft wanted "a soft-landing approach for Bill," where there would be a negotiated settlement. "Money isn't the object here," the source said. "The optics are." Nobody knew more than Belichick how sensitive Kraft could be to public perception.

The two men had spent 25 years together, including the 1996 season, when Belichick was a Patriots assistant under Bill Parcells. Both had a deep understanding of each other's vanities and insecurities, and in the end, they knew how to hit one another where it hurt. Belichick wasn't going to make it easy on Kraft. In quiet moments Belichick over the years has mused about running football operations at another team. The Giants, a team he reveres. Washington, near where he was raised. Even Dallas, because he has a good relationship with the Jones family and it would be a fun way to stick it to Kraft, who has asked voters why Jones is in the Hall of Fame, as a way of asking why he is not. But in the end, Belichick didn't want to be in the executive suite. He wanted to keep coaching. When situations get tense, Belichick has long liked to let them play out. His calm during stressful moments might be his true superpower.

He believes he loses leverage when he moves too fast. As the season went on, there were some whispers around the league and within the Patriots building about what it might be like for him to coach the Panthers, Bills, Bears, Bengals, Cowboys, Commanders or even the Eagles, if their late-season tailspin ends in an early playoff exit. But for most of this year, Belichick seemed most interested in staying put. If Kraft came to him after the season, he would make it clear to confidants that his plan was to say that he had done his best with what ownership wanted, with Mayo, O'Brien and hiring outside on the scouting side. He wanted to force Kraft to decide.

"He's going to have to move first," Belichick said.

BY DECEMBER, SOMETHING UNEXPECTED happened: People around the league who had spent two decades disliking but respecting Belichick started to feel sorry for him, watching how the Krafts left him to twist under a barrage of reports about his future. As much as other coaches and executives liked to mock the sanctimoniousness of Belichick, nobody believed in the Patriot Way quite like they did. New England offered proof that another road existed if only you had the discipline to follow it, to be ruthless enough to cross lines along the way and fearless enough to rewrite rules. Before New England's 2002 Super Bowl against the Rams, Belichick refused to play along with the ritual player introductions and insisted on taking the field together, as a team, no stars, no egos, just a group of proud, talented men with a shared goal and a willingness to chase that goal with relentlessness. That became the norm. The central enemy of the Patriot Way was all those pesky human emotions: kindness, loyalty, friendship, nostalgia, ego. Rejecting those urges is what led to the success, and the inability to reject them is what proved the other 31 teams unable to replicate the blueprint.

As New England's season started to wind down, and it became clear that the Patriots would again fail to make the playoffs, Kraft groused to his fellow owners, telling them he wished he had a winning team. Ownership told confidants that they felt the game had passed Belichick by. Coaches and players started to rally around their coach in a way last seen during Spygate, angry that their coach's job status -- someone in professional and cultural thin air -- was a constant debate topic. The Patriots beat the Steelers and Broncos, two teams with more at stake than New England, on the road in December. It was clear the team hadn't quit. "I saw no quit in Bill Belichick," special teams star Matthew Slater said at the end of the season. "If you had sat in our team meetings this week, you would've thought we were getting ready for the AFC championship."

"The Krafts should be ashamed of themselves," a Patriots assistant coach told a confidant.

Still, no matter how frustrated Kraft was during the season, he tried to keep options open. He had a vision of getting a draft pick for Belichick. If Kraft fired Belichick and whiffed on a replacement, he would have watched Brady win a Super Bowl as a Buccaneer and Belichick become the NFL's winningest coach ever for another team. Belichick rode the coaches hard down the stretch. His program doesn't allow anyone to quit. Every meeting has a meeting to prepare for it. Every conversation has a conversation before. Every drill has a drill as a prelude. But the building felt different. Belichick spent more time alone in his office. Over the decades he'd give assistant coaches projects toward the end of the season, preparing for the draft or free agency. He didn't do that this year.

In one staff meeting, O'Brien got angry with Belichick during a discussion about running plays. He stormed out. The rest of the coaches were quiet, unsure of what to do. Belichick just let it go, knowing it all would be over soon.