MICHAEL HOLLEY is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Patriot Reign, Never Give Up (with Tedy Bruschi), and Red Sox Rule. He was a Boston Globe sportswriter for ten years, and he is the cohost of The Big Show on Boston sports radio station WEEI. Holley lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife and two sons.
War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team
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- ISBN-13: 9780062082404
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication date: 09/04/2012
- Edition description: Reprint
- Pages: 352
- Sales rank: 263,312
- Product dimensions: 5.38(w) x 7.82(h) x 0.85(d)
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In War Room, New York Times bestselling author Michael Holley gives readers an unprecedented look behind the scenes at three contending National Football League teams—from the draft room to the locker room to the sidelines—and grants access to the brilliant minds of Bill Belichick and his former protégés, Thomas Dimitroff and Scott Pioli.
In 1991, while he was with the Cleveland Browns football organization, Belichick was struck by the Big Idea: how to build the perfect team, one draft pick and one trade at a time. This strategy obsessed him, leading him on a remarkable personal and professional journey filled with miraculous finishes, heartbreaking losses, shattered relationships . . . and ultimately three Super Bowl championships. In Massachusetts, Belichick reunited with two former office employees from the Ohio days—Pioli, a low-paid scouting assistant, and Dimitroff, a groundskeeper and part-time scout—and together they refined and burnished Belichick's method for constructing a winning team. The end result was one of the greatest franchises in modern NFL history: the New England Patriots. Packed with never-before-told anecdotes and insights from team officials, players, coaches, and scouts, War Room is a fascinating, often astonishing story of grit and genius, and the art of building a championship team.
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Peter King
WAR ROOM is going to take you into the inner world of pro football. I recommend it highly.Booklist
Fans will want to read how Belichick transformed the once-lackluster Patriots into the mostsuccessful franchise of the past decade, which Holley explains in an engaging chronological narrative.Boston Globe
Crisply written, the story moves along like a two-minute drill. It also sparkles with interesting anecdotes and tidbits….WAR ROOM is a lively, fast-paced insider’s account that will please ardent and casual fans alike.
When Bill Belichick became head coach of the New England Patriots in 2000, the team was coming off a last-place finish and had never won a championship. Expectations were low, so the canvas was his for the painting. In War Room: The Legacy of Bill Belichick and the Art of Building the Perfect Team, former Boston Globe sportswriter Michael Holley studiously charts the rise of Belichick and his two closest lieutenants — Scott Pioli, then New England's vice president of player personnel, and Thomas Dimitroff, the head of college scouting. This trio, which came together when Belichick was coaching the Cleveland Browns, became the brain trust behind three Patriots Super Bowl victories and the architects of a 2007 team that's the most famous runner-up in Super Bowl history.
Football games are won and lost on the field, but those sixty- minute outings are the results of months of preparation, even before training camp begins. Holley's book follows the behind-the- scenes work of team building and tells how Belichick, Pioli, and Dimitroff aimed at victory by transforming the Patriots' scouting. What Belichick sought was a means of seeing not only a player's talent but where he might fit into the larger picture,
a grading scale that was easy to understand yet complex enough to reflect, for example, the value of an average offensive lineman who could play two positions vs. an above- average lineman who could play just one?. He wanted to assign letters, numbers, and words that would accurately describe every player in pro and college football.The ultimate goal was a system that would let them work "scientifically" to build a team with an edge in size, toughness, and drive.
The 2001 Patriots were "a starless group, the story went, that was powered by heart, luck, and Belichick's brain." They were led by a second-year quarterback, Tom Brady, who had been drafted in the sixth round out of Michigan. He ascended to the starting job only after Drew Bledsoe was injured, and he led the Patriots to a stunning playoff run, capped by a victory over the heavily favored Rams in the Super Bowl. But while this anti-glamour reputation made the Patriots "embraceable," it was also true that Belichick's icily brilliant intellect seemed at times to be paired with an equally cold heart. "Over the years, making tough decisions and replacing seemingly indispensable players would become the Patriots' way of doing business."
The natural tension between the good of the organization and the good of the players is the paradox at the heart of the so-called Patriot Way, which demanded that players buy into a team-first approach, sublimating their egos for the betterment of the group — an approach that had mixed results, notably in the case of wide receiver Randy Moss, who bought into the team philosophy until he became disgruntled during his 2010 contract year. The closest the Patriots came to creating the "perfect" season was in 2007, when they nearly became the first 19-0 team in NFL history but lost to the Giants in the Super Bowl. Thanks to the controversy known as Spygate, when the team was caught taping an opponent's defensive signals during a game and subsequently disciplined by the league, that year's squad has been lauded and derided in equal measure. How most football fans feel about the 2007 team is largely determined by how much they love, or hate, Bill Belichick himself.
Holley's book goes on to detail how Pioli and Dimitroff left New England after the team's Super Bowl successes and created variations of the Patriot Way in Kansas City and Atlanta, respectively. He follows the three franchises up through the 2011 draft, just months after all three won their divisions. The narrative is jumpy at times, and even diehard football fans will feel their eyes glaze over when years-old game recaps are delivered in toe- stubbing prose, as when Holley describes the infamous "Tuck Rule" game in 2002:
In a season of unintentional poetry, it was fitting that the next play would practically be a catch by all who had been with the Patriots since their local TV blackouts, one- and two-win seasons, and franchise coffers that had more singles than hundred- dollar bills. Jermaine Wiggins, a tight end from East Boston, was the only Patriots player who had been born and raised in the area.If the writing occasionally suffers from such disorienting circumlocutions, Holley's access to Belichick, Pioli, and Dimitroff unearths some intriguing revelations, as when Pioli admits that he was too focused on winning to properly enjoy the successes in New England and that Belichick advised Dimitroff "as your friend" not to trade up and select wide receiver Julio Jones of Alabama in the most recent draft.
Compared with the driven Belichick and Pioli, Dimitroff is revealed here as a relatively laid-back figure. With his moussed hair and vegan lifestyle, he runs counter to the usual man's-man NFL type. He learned a lot under Belichick and Pioli, but he clashed with them on certain issues. For instance, he could never understand why they didn't allow all of the team's scouts into the so-called war room on draft day, when the front office makes its picks. And he bristled when the scouts were not given all-access passes at the Super Bowl, a perceived slight that didn't allow them to celebrate on the field with the rest of the organization.
In the end, Holley suggests that this book is a study of friendship among competitors, and the unique bonds of camaraderie and even love that grow when men like these work together — bonds that persist even as they become rivals. "But," he adds, "in this business, at some point, your love is forced to be conditional." It's a sentiment some fans might, however reluctantly, understand.
Cameron Martin is a columnist with CBS Sports, Comcast SportsNet New England, and Hearst newspapers. From 1996 to 2007, he was a columnist and feature writer for the Greenwich Time and Stamford Advocate newspapers in Connecticut. Email: cdavidmartin@yahoo.com.
Reviewer: Cameron Martin
Publishers Weekly
Holley (Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance) has written the ultimate book for pro football geeks. From the front office to the draft room, the author provides an intimate look at three NFL teams-the New England Patriots, the Kansas City Chiefs and the Atlanta Falcons-and the men who built them. Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, with protégés Thomas Dimitroff and Scott Pioli, created a dynasty in New England that won three Super Bowls in four years. With fly-on-the-wall immediacy, Holley chronicles their unorthodox approach, even as Pioli and Dimitroff became general managers of, respectively, the Chiefs and the Falcons. War Room begins in 1991 with Belichick head coach of the Cleveland Browns (at 39, the league's youngest) and concludes following the 2011 NFL draft and player lockout. Holley objectively captures on- and off-field episodes, including 2007's infamous "Spygate" videotape scandal, and humanizes his subjects with reports of job interviews, dinner conversations, private meetings, and personal traumas. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Reviews
A longtime Patriots chronicler goes inside the brain trust of the NFL's most successful team. In the NFL, team building--drafting, trading and signing fee agents--is a multimillion-dollar business with many livelihoods and professional reputations at stake. The widely acknowledged virtuoso of this peculiar blend of art and science is Bill Belichick, GM and head coach of the New England Patriots. Holley (Red Sox Rule: Terry Francona and Boston's Rise to Dominance, 2008, etc.) traces the genesis of Belichick's "Big Idea" back 20 years when, as the new head coach of the Cleveland Browns, he began piecing together notions--particularly, the idea of a uniform player-evaluation system--about how best to construct a consistent winner. Working for him then were scouting assistant Scott Pioli and young groundskeeper Thomas Dimitroff, both of whom, after extended apprenticeships under Belichick in New England, would go on to helm NFL franchises elsewhere, spreading the gospel of The Patriot Way. With Belichick as the principal and Pioli and Dimitroff in supporting roles, Holley dives deep into the complexities of the draft and the subtleties of an appraisal system sufficiently exact to rely upon, flexible enough to allow for exceptions. There's plenty of inside-football, but the narrative soars when the author's in storytelling mode, drawing sharp portraits of the three very different franchise architects and other prominent NFL figures, supplying behind-the-scenes anecdotes about the Patriots' glorious run (three Super Bowl championships, one perfect regular season), the team's infrequent failures (e.g., the notorious Spygate episode), the contributions and departures of key assistants and pivotal players, the abiding brilliance of quarterback Tom Brady and the emerging efforts by Pioli in Kansas City and Dimitroff in Atlanta to reshape the football culture--to replicate, albeit with their personal stamps, Belichick's master plan. A deeply reported, thoroughly engaging look at what it takes to succeed in the NFL--and a perfect complement to the NFL Network's compelling miniseries Bill Belichick: A Football Life.