National Post (National Edition)
Patriots pluck gems from dross
Team has way of transforming unknowns
Bill Belichick is not one to say much to a question he does not particularly want to answer. He doesn’t try to filibuster his way through a long response that bores the audience to death, he just recites a clipped sentence or two in the same droning monotone that he uses in every news conference.
Occasionally, though, he goes long. The tone doesn’t change — a friend here likened it to listening to an air conditioner hum — but Belichick just keeps talking and suddenly you realize he still hasn’t stopped. Someone asked him about his father this week, and he started in with memories of Navy football — his dad was the coach — and for almost five minutes straight the Patriots’ field boss went on a soliloquy. “Yeah,” he said when he finally stopped. “Long answer to a short question.”
You don’t say. Then someone asked about what a Super Bowl win would mean to his legacy, and Belichick said “that’s for you guys to write,” and the news conference was over. A coach in two acts.
But one of the subjects that is most likely to get Belichick going is a question about one of the Patriots’ lesser stars. Or non-stars. While New England’s long run of success is unquestionably tied to the presence of the coach and his remarkable quarterback, the Pats are also — infuriatingly to those with whom they compete around the league — uncommonly good at finding unknown players who become major stars. The cornerback who saved the last Super Bowl for the Patriots, Malcolm Butler, was an undrafted free agent from the University of West Alabama, which plays in something called the Gulf South Conference in the NCAA’s Division II. Belichick shrugged about the process of finding him. They asked him and some other undrafted players to a rookie mini-camp in 2014. They liked what they saw. Eight months later or so, Butler was picking off Russell Wilson in the end zone in the closing minute of Super Bowl XLIX.
One of this season’s breakout stars has been wide receiver Chris Hogan, who went undrafted, was signed and released by three teams, and then was a middling player over three seasons in Buffalo. Then he came to New England and led the league in yards per reception. He had 180 yards in the AFC Championship Game, or almost half of what he had in his best seasons with the Bills.
“We saw him in Buffalo,” Tom Brady said this week. “We knew how talented he was.” Quite how they knew this is another question. Perhaps the Pats saw that Hogan was open all the time, even if the Buffalo quarterbacks didn’t.
It’s as though, for all these years of division titles and championship runs, the Patriots have been Belichick, Brady and a great big pile of fungible assets. Rob Gronkowski, the most dangerous tight end to ever play the game, goes down to injury this season, and the Pats simply spread his targets out to backup tight end Martellus Bennett and wideout Julian Edelman, with Hogan filling the role previously occupied by Edelman (and before him, by Wes Welker). The Patriot machine rolls on. If they can’t find new guys to fit the scheme, they change the scheme to fit the guys they have.
If there is a thread that ties some of New England’s out-of-nowhere stories together, it’s that Belichick likes to find players who have to fight just to make it to the NFL.
The team’s long snapper is Joe Cardona, who was also with the Patriots last season but only part-time because he was serving in the Navy. Another special teams stalwart is Nate Ebner, who spent the off-season playing for the U.S. rugby sevens team at the Rio Olympics. Belichick has not been shy about praise for either of them.
“It’s really a privilege to have Joe on our team,” the coach said. “Joe is a tremendous person and he’s done a great job as a snapper in terms of protection and recognition of the different rushes that we see in this league and so forth.”
What Belichick said last season, when Cardona was still on active duty, was a bit different.
“His day job was the Navy and his second job was to play football,” Belichick said. “Obviously, that’s a lot different from any other player in the room. Once everyone fully understood that, you just gained even more respect for Joe. What he was doing was in addition to a job that was for everyone else.”
Ebner’s second job wasn’t on the same level of selfsacrifice, but Belichick said that once they had agreed that he could go play rugby, they were pleased with what they got back.
“He’s done a great job for us and has worked really hard,” Belichick said. “This is by far his best year. It’s somewhat unexpected. He had a very gruelling off-season.”
Ebner says he took a couple of weeks off after last season’s loss in the AFC title game, then began daily workouts with the rugby team. From Rio, he came almost immediately to Patriots camp.
“One thing is that when he came back, he was in great shape,” said Belichick, possibly giving an intentionally deadpan response, although it’s hard to tell when that’s his default setting. “He had also done a lot of tackling. That was good.” The coach smiled there. Or maybe grimaced.
Ebner is recovering from a concussion, so it’s unclear if he will take the field Sunday. But if he does and he makes a game-saving play, it would be hard, at this point with these Patriots, to be surprised.