What separates the Patriots dynasty, Malcolm Butler benching, Belichick-Kraft duo | NFL | THE HERD

is a New York Times bestselling author of 16 books, including Tiger, which is an inspiration for the HBO documentary, this one is called Dynasty and I just finished 10 parts of the documentary. Now it's interesting, so the book is here and I think you need to, you need to read the book there, it's much deeper than the document and the documentary is going to do the story of Aaron Hernandez, uh, the story of Malcolm Butler. I understand that the documentary is expensive to make, you're going to choose the hot spots, uh, but I want to. talk about this because my conclusion about all this is, and I said it before, that all dynasties, almost all, are the same: hard work and vision strengthens them, resilience and toughness maintains them and then power corrupts them, and my conclusion about this book, regardless of which side.

What was needed is that Bill could never come to terms with year 2. Tom Brady was not Tom in year 18. The league had pivoted to offense and was treating him like a child because he wanted to keep the governorship. I wanted the power and my conclusion is Bill. the world changed it that's not the league no, that's my conclusion it's fair to say that your book illustrates more of that than the documentary well, it's good to be with you Colin again uh, obviously in a book you have a lot more space that you can cover a lot more ground, you can go deeper into things in a documentary, you have to make harder decisions and people sometimes criticize those decisions, but I thought the entire filmmaking team here did an incredible job of selecting which stories to tell. and

what

to leave out, but I definitely laid the foundation in the book.

I think that's

what

's distinctive about this

dynasty

. I agree with most of what you said about the course of dynasties. I think that's what has always separated the Patriots

dynasty

from all the others. The football dynasties before them was how long they lasted, the Packers, the 49ers, the Steelers, all great dynasties, none of which really lasted more than a decade, and this dynasty is so unusual and the reason I think they never We will see it repeated again is because it lasted two decades with the same core, the core being Brady as quarterback, Bill, head coach and Robert Craft as owner, those three together for so long that if this dynasty had continued the course of His predecessors would have won three Super Bowls, three of them. of the first four would have had the perfect season that ended with a heartbreaking loss to the Giants, then it was over and then Brady got hurt, yeah, and he came back and maybe another year or two and then it was over and if that was done, he would be right next to the 49ers and the Steelers, but they stayed for 10 more years and I would say the back half of the Dynasty is more impressive because what happened in the end, how much they won that bill and Tom did it. together in the back half of the dynasty, I think it's more impressive than at the beginning and what's harder to see, Colin, is that the role of the owner in the back half is just as critical, less than in the first half, yeah, the first half is really all about Bill and Tom, yes the back half Robert's role is much more pronounced but still not visible for needs it had to be yes yes because if they had been left alone , they wouldn't have stayed together so long, huh, I said.

And again, I'm not taking sides. I think Bill is the best defensive coach of all time. I think this happens culturally in technology, in media, in entertainment and sports. You know, like Greg Papovich, you have to shoot threes. He didn't want to accept it like you did. I got the world has changed, you can't put Matt Patricia as offensive coordinator, he's just tone deaf, um, but I did think Bill won a Super Bowl that Tom didn't play well in, Rams and Bill won it, a Brilliant moment as coach and Bill. I lost a Super Bowl when Tom was absolutely brilliant in Philadelphia.

What bothered me deeply is that Bill demanded accountability and even in the hot seat, when he was pressed, he didn't say why he didn't play Malcolm Butler. You don't owe me that, but you do owe Tom. You owe it to your staff, you know, thank you, you owe that to the team, because you've demanded accountability and people are looking for accountability. Why talk about that story in book V, the document, which is not that deep and doesn't give you a good answer, so when I was working on the book, I mean, one of the things I was thinking about and Talking to people within the team, I didn't realize that and I learned this even more working on the dock. was that there really was no one who knew what was going on that day Jos McDaniels never received an explanation no and and I think that's the worrying part and Devon McCordi does a very good job of explaining this is that it's not just that Malcolm Butler took the 97% of the plays that year, it's when you take a guy off the field that is so interconnected with the defensive game plan and he just disappears, it's not just that he's failing, it's disconcerting everyone because they're used to having him in certain places and he wasn't there and there wasn't a single person replacing him, it was like a platoon of guys coming in and no one could really do the job and I think it was really disheartening for the guys to realize that.

In the end, they hadn't told anyone, they hadn't explained it and I think it's difficult because, think about it, they won the Super Bowl before they won the Super Bowl, then they definitely should have won that Super Bowl, I mean that team. was considerably better than the team that beat the Rams and yet they lost to the Eagles and Tom had his best Super Bowl performance on paper, his best quarterback performance up to that point. I think so, the only reason I don't say it. That's because I think what he did in the Super Bowl in Atlanta, oh yeah, even though the numbers weren't the same, it was incredible.

That's the best quarterback performance ever in a Super Bowl. I thought you knew. I've always liked Robert Craft. and here at Fox I know the power and the importance of him, he and Jerry are very important in the owners room, the Hunt family, Stan Kony, there are a bunch of guys and Robert Craft really does a lot of the television negotiations, so What to give up to give that up so the owners say Robert you do the TV yeah he's a brilliant guy and the job yeah I mean Robert is really that's why I always say Jerry Jones can be quirky , but the other owners lean towards Jerry.

Very much, there was a moment here where, if they hadn't won that Ram Super Bowl, it almost sounded and I want you to dig into this. Surely Robert was ready to go. Bill Bill was wearing down all the players to one player. saying it's not funny here, yeah, and then Bill has perhaps his best moment in a Super Bowl. McVey is perplexed because they can't move the chains. A dominant offense all year long. Do you think Craft regrets it? I mean, obviously he regrets how he ended up, but when? Do you think Robert started to get this feeling that Bill is terribly difficult even though we're winning?

It was in '65 or almost the Garoo movement that bothered Bill. When did you start to feel that bubbling, that seepage of animosity in 2010? One of my favorite scenes in the book. We couldn't do it on the bench because there's no footage of it, so there would be no way to tell this story on film, but it could be done on paper in 2010, when Tom Brady. asks to come talk to Robert privately and he goes out to Cape Cod for the summer and um he goes to his summer house and it's not just Robert, it's Robert and Jonathan Robert asked his son to also attend the meeting and he asked Tom yes it was Okay and of course Tom said yes and that's when they went out to meet and the purpose of that meeting is that Tom is worried about his future.

Think about this, it's 2010. Yes, he's worried about his future and whether Bill will move away from him and become a part of him. that's because he's been there for a decade he saw what happened to Drew he knows how he got his job he saw what happened to lawyer Malloy Adam viter there's a long list of big players how they did business that's how they did business and Bill had a great track record of walking away from players a little early rather than a little late and that, although it seems ruthless and harsh, it worked time and time again and the skill that the owner allowed gave Bill the freedom to make some decisions. really difficult ones that I don't know if Robert would have done it because they are difficult decisions to make, but it was Bill's job to make them and he did them and he was almost always right, so Tom goes and has this meeting with the craftsmen and this is the first one. time he asks them to intervene in his contract negotiations and they do, they get involved and it's the first time it's happened because it's the first indication that things are possibly changing and then four years later they draft Jimmy Garoppolo and when They select Jimmy thinks about how long it's been, it's been a decade since they won a Super Bowl and at that time this to me was the closest thing to when Bill Walsh goes out and finds Steve Young and brings him to San Francisco and Joe Montana gets goes.

It's crazy, yeah, and all of a sudden you see Joe Montana do things near the end of his career that he hadn't done at the beginning of his career and that's because he had Steve Young right there and I think Jimmy Garoppolo I'm not suggesting that this It was intentional. on Bill's part, but I think what he did was, this is like adding gasoline to hell, yeah, Tom is hell when it comes to competitiveness, he's on fire all the time and this was like just pouring some gasoline on him. to that and I think this is what jonath Jonathan Craft most of the Miss This people talked about in the documentary, which I thought was one of the best things that was said at the end of the documentary, he talked about how at this point there is a gap between Bill and Tom and they are not communicating much. the entire organization knew it was barely communicating, but what Jonathan pointed out is that both guys used the situation as motivation to compete harder and compete better, it actually pushed them both in their own way, which I thought was a really astute observation from someone on the inside who was there through the whole thing that's how it worked with Bill and Tom, even when they didn't have the kind of quarterback coaching relationship they had in the early days, the relationship was very functional on Sunday afternoons at 1:00. it really was for our radio audience Jeff Benedict 16 uh New York Times Best Selling Books Television Film Producer uh Executive Producer The HBO Documentary Tiger Goes Much Deeper Into the Book I implore you to go buy the book that's still out there. selling uh the tiger book is still selling LeBron books selling everywhere Istanbul Canada here everywhere in the world these books are fascinating and if you love The Deep dive, whose documentaries can't get them all right, you know we all watched 30 for 30 and they were fantastic, but you can't cover all of MJ's doc, you know, Pippen feels like they slipped him, well, MJ had the floor, that's right, that's how it works, by the way, Tom didn't have the floor me too.

I want to point out that you know Tom Brady deserves a lot of credit for this, not because he only works at Fox, yes, but I said this a couple of weeks ago if Patrick Mahomes got a defensive coach, not Andy Reid who asked him to take over Finance. sacrifices and that never had a great receiver outside of Randy Moss, there were many good ones who surpassed Edelman uh yes, I don't know if Mahomes would be Mahomes I came out of this thinking, you know who was nicer to Bill Tom Slater hit on him there was me , Tom BR, you know, typical Tom, the sensitive guy got emotional, but I think Tom could have pulled out the hammer on this, yeah, and he didn't, that was my opinion, take yours, so my opinion on Tom, two things, uh, and me.

I don't know if you're watching this interview, but the first time I interviewed him for the book was in his suite at the stadium and it was right at the beginning of his penultimate season, so this is the season they're going to do. I beat the Rams in the Super Bowl and in that interview, the first time I did it with him, at the end of the interview, I went in with 20 questions that I had been working on for a long time and I went over the kind of ground rules with him and I told him at the beginning that if there's something I'm going to ask you, I'll turn off the recorders, if there's something I'm asking you that you don't want to record, I'll turn it off, and if there's something you don't want to talk about just tell me, we'll move on to the next thing, yeah , and the last question, by the way, he answered all the questions and never asked me to turn off the recorder, the last question I asked. he, which I thought was the easiest of the 20 so I thought it would be the least interesting answer, was the best answer and it was about a car accident he had been in shortly after starting, he got into a relationship with Jazelle and, um, he could have been seriously injured in that accident in Boston.

It was a miracle that he walked away and that led to a really emotional answer that went much further than he expected and he cried when he was answering the question and so did I. because it was so obvious that he was so raw but so honest and you rarely see people. What was the question? I asked a simple question about what happened that day because I knew he had been in an accident.automobile, but as he began to talk about it and reflect on how fragile life is and began to talk about the relationships that mattered to him.

He could see underneath the athlete celebrity at the heart of who this human is and he was just very powerful and Sim-like. Something happened when he came to the interview for the documentary we only interviewed him once for the movie and he was very emotional about that too and when he cried during the filming of the documentary I did it again too and what would I say about Tom if you take a step back It's just that I have never seen anyone who has occupied the high road for as long as Tom Brady and I'm not talking about the high road of performance as an athlete, that is a different road and he is also alone on that road, that is a road that people like Tiger, Michael and LeBron stand in their Sports Tom's alone on that path in the NFL, but I'm not talking about that, I'm talking about him in terms of characters I've never seen and I don't think anyone who sees or hears his show can point to a case where Tom didn't take the right path when he had. so many opportunities to criticize another person who has never done it and some people accuse him of being false when he says that he always says good things about Bill or this person or that person who is not false who is not and is not dishonest is someone who has They've made a decision that this is how they're going to live their life and I do think that if more people really went through life that way, life would be a lot better, but it's really hard to do that when you've been through some of the things that Tom.

He's been through something like when he walked through the deflated door. The people he thought were his friends in the NFL saw the opportunity to shoot and did so, and these were people who knew better and used it as an opportunity to undermine all of those accomplishments. a lot of jealousy and envy in professional sports, oh yes, a lot, someone like Tom is prepared to be beaten by people and that is what I admire more than all things football, of which I am an admirer. but much more impressive to me is that he has been on the road for so long and when he is there you don't see many people like you are on the road and it's like there are no people passing by.

You look at it, you think about how. Randy Moss finished um, I don't think there's a teammate that ever shot Tom that I remember well. I can think of an Antonio Brown, but that's just embarrassing, but I mean, he's not really a teammate, not really, but you. It's about his teammates for more than 20 years, tremendous respect for how Tom is and, by the way, the interesting thing is that it's not easy to play with Tom, you know, it's not easy to be, he's a great teammate. equipment. I'm not saying that, but he's a perfectionist. and that's why when guys are honest like gronowski talking about his first rookie season, how hard it was to like tom at first, but then they come back and i think that's one of the things he and bill had in common , yeah, it was that they were really hard to play because the standard was so high, yeah, I think another conclusion I had again from 30,000 feet, another conclusion when I read your book first, which you always know, sometimes with the movie business , reading the book first helps, but then another, sometimes you feel the The movie is concise compared to the book and here, this is your book, it's very substantial, but I thought the documentary landed well.

Me too. I thought they did a very good job. One of the criticisms was the Aaron Hernandez situation when I thought about it. Ernie Adams, who was a lovable figure in this documentary, everyone knew Aaron was the first player, you could see highlights from his high school and college, he was Patrick Chung, he once told me, I said who's the coolest guy hard to cover in the league, he's Aaron Hernandez and I cover gronet practice, you can't guard him, he's faster than me and he's a tight end and me and I thought about this and I want to go back to the book that everyone knew came with luggage, so, by the way, someone would have done it. cast him, he was just too talented and there were moments where Wes Welker said, listen, if you were around Aaron and you heard him talk, there's trash talk, then there's weird awkward stuff, yeah, um, do you point fingers?

Go to the book about Aaron because As a sportscaster, I just accepted that a lot of these kids come from different difficult situations, you're not going to have a locker room with 55 perfect people, right? I don't know what guys do when they go home. It's not my job, they have families Did you think the Patriots knew more than they were letting on or did it really erode very, very quickly? I think the guy who probably knew the most was Urban Meyer and Urban Meer coached Mid Florida, he knew there was More than smoking weed, yeah, who cares?

I mean, come on, there was more than that in Florida, there were some violent incidents there now, not gun stuff, but I mean, there were waiter fights, yeah, stuff like that, I think the Patriots. In the book I didn't single out anyone in the Patriots organization, I think they were all deceived and I think when you think about how sophisticated we are talking about Bill bich Ernie Adams Jonathan Craft Robert Craft sophisticated, intelligent, experienced people, they were all deceived. I mean, when Robert Craft talks about playing snooker and how he recognizes that he recognizes it, I understand, I actually give him credit, a lot of people wouldn't recognize that they were schnuer, that they were snooker and I think it was so surprising to them when when the Los Murder charges at first went well, not the charges, but when there was a murder and it was still unclear who had done it, the idea that he could have done it was difficult for Fathom and then when he was taken out of his house in handcuffs, It's still hard to understand because it's unprecedented, that's the thing, so I didn't feel it was appropriate to criticize Bill for not knowing how he would know that Jeff thinks about couples who are married for 20 years, live together, sleep together, and They have affairs for decades and no one knows the idea that the coaches know the NBA, it's a small roster, you have 70 guys in the room, they are new transition coaches.

I always say with the team you can tell it's a problem by the way they might name a player for the Years ago, the Cowboys were drafted at wide receiver and knew they had security details around him. He's a little immature, he's not a bad guy, but everyone knew that Aaron came with things that you don't think are going to go from things to murdering any of the guys. In the locker room, the guys in the locker room there were some Dion Branch, Wes Welker, some of the guys that knew a little bit more, they didn't know much because yeah, Wes wasn't a fan, yeah, Wes wasn't a fan, but Dion was.

I knew him very well and I thought about that admission in the movie where he says how I didn't see that that's the point. Dion, none of these guys actually hung out with Aaron outside of football, they weren't part of what he had. his own guys and none of the players were actually part of that group and they didn't really know that that's not a cover-up, it's not an excuse, it's just a really unusual situation and the reason I spent as much time on it as Lo What he did in the book was because things happened to the Patriots in a period of 20e that had never happened to any other team, as if there wasn't another team with a 16-0 record that demolished the league by the way, the same year in who were accused of spying on the Jets.

The year they go 16-0 and lose the same way they lost to a guy who hits a ball in the helmet, there's no other team that's happened to that, so I think as a writer you have to lean on those things. , not because you're trying. to tarnish the Patriots, in fact I think those bad moments are what really illustrate the magnitude of what they accomplished because they had to overcome things that would have crushed the soul of most organizations, yeah, well, hello everyone, I'm I. Uncle Colin, subscribe here to receive the latest. from the pack, including exclusive behind-the-scenes videos and more, wherever you are, however you may be watching, thanks again for making us part of your day.