Featured Excerpt: Brady vs. Belichick

Pepper Johnson, the New England Patriots inside linebackers coach, was cringing on the home team sidelines at the old Foxboro Stadium as he watched franchise quarterback Drew Bledsoe drift out of the pocket, roll to his right, turn the corner, and take off in a desperate scramble for the first down sticks.

Johnson felt sick to his stomach fearing what was about to happen as New York Jets All-Pro linebacker Mo Lewis ran full speed at Bledsoe and positioned himself to deliver a ferocious hit. A massive collision was inevitable unless Bledsoe did the prudent thing for his physical well-being, career, and wife and kids: run the hell out of bounds.

He did not.

Johnson wanted to scream. No, no, I warned you!

All Bledsoe accomplished was getting splattered, nearly dying, and inadvertently changing the course of NFL history by creating two legends. Lewis has never once felt guilty about the hit—it was 100 percent clean—and he’s tired of hearing that he is responsible for the Patriots’ dynasty.

New York led 10–3 with just under five minutes remaining in a blah affair in what otherwise had been an extremely patriotic day on the first weekend of NFL games played after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The Patriots had a third and 10 at their own 19-yard line when Bledsoe was unable to find a receiver downfield or a checkdown option underneath. He was chased out of the pocket and made a run for it around the right edge with defensive end Shaun Ellis on his ass. The first-down marker was 10 yards away but might as well have been 10 miles. He was not getting there.

New England started the season with a loss in Cincinnati after it was 5–11 in 2000 and finished in last place in the AFC East in Bill Belichick’s first year as head coach. Bledsoe had enough athletic arrogance to refuse to believe he was playing for his job, but Belichick was not a Bledsoe fan. Belichick had an affinity for a second-year quarterback out of the University of Michigan named Tom Brady, who completed one pass in three attempts the previous season as a rookie, the seventh quarterback taken in a bad quarterback draft. Not to be discounted: Belichick was barely into his second season, and he was telling people in his inner circle in the Patriots’ front office that they all could be fired by Robert Kraft if things didn’t turn around by the end of the year. He even told that to Mike Westhoff, the Jets’ special teams coach, on the field before the game.

The words were not directly spoken, but Kraft was putting pressure on Belichick; in turn, Belichick was putting pressure on Bledsoe. Unless the Patriots started 1–7 or 0–8, Belichick didn’t have to be worried about getting fired midseason by Kraft. Bledsoe was not going to keep his starting job without winning games and that could have been in the back of his mind.

The NFL is not a contact sport. It’s 60 minutes of high-speed collisions with too many look-the-other-way train wrecks every Sunday. Great for TV ratings. Dangerous to a player’s long-term well-being. Lewis was a superb and powerful athlete at 6-foot-3, 258 pounds, and he was about to crush Bledsoe, a large man himself, two inches taller but 20 pounds lighter.

Bledsoe could feel Ellis grabbing his legs, but more importantly could see Lewis sprinting, unobstructed, at him, a couple of 18-wheelers driving in opposite directions on the same side of the highway with no air bags. Bledsoe decided against making a business decision as he neared the sideline. He was trying to pick up the first down, win the game, and keep Brady on the bench. He did not run out of bounds. Lewis lowered his right shoulder and drove it into Bledsoe’s left shoulder and chest, splattering him on the grass.

“Oh, does he hit … Oh my,” Dick Enberg said on the CBS broadcast.

Bledsoe fumbled out of bounds as he crumpled in a daze and was briefly unconscious on the Patriots’ sideline. He was quickly surrounded by teammates and medical staff. Literally adding insult to injury, he was two yards short of the first down and miles away in the never-never land of concussions with a life-threatening sheared blood vessel in his chest not immediately detected. Even today, with rules protecting quarterbacks to the extent that it often seems they’re wearing bright red hands-off practice jerseys, this was not a penalty.

“It was third down, and I was heading toward the sideline,” Bledsoe told me. “It was two yards short of a first down, and I tried to turn back, and when I did, I gave Mo Lewis my full chest, and he blew me up.”

The Jets were in a nickel defense. Cornerback Ray Mickens saw Bledsoe start to run and called out for Lewis to get after him. Lewis thought Bledsoe was going to slide, but Lewis hit him with full force when Bledsoe didn’t show any inclination to get down on his own.

“You got to realize, Mo Lewis is a very powerful dude,” Jets linebacker Marvin Jones said as he recalled the play. “We call it country strong. It’s just natural. He wasn’t a little guy, either.”

Jones was out of the game on third down. He could hear the hit from 53.3 yards away on the Jets’ sideline. The Earth shook. Soon there would be an ambulance.

“It sounded like somebody ain’t getting up,” Jones said. “It was a hit to remember.”

“It was the loudest hit I could ever remember hearing,” Brady told the NFL’s website years later.

“I’ve never heard a hit sound like that,” said Ted Johnson, standing just a few feet away. “It was a sound that I’ve never heard before and never heard since.”

In a matter of minutes, the Brady Era began and Bledsoe was yesterday’s news, another quarterback who would lose his job to injury. More than two decades later, Lewis still hates talking about the hit and its history-altering ramifications. Specifically, he despises being remembered and even blamed by Jets fans for jump-starting the Belichick–Brady dynasty and beginning two decades of misery for Jets Nation.

After some coaxing, Lewis agreed to talk about it. Dispassionately, he began, “I just look at it as another play. Period.”

As far as he’s concerned, the blame for the injury and the Patriots’ run to seemingly unattainable success is misplaced.

In his mind, one person deserves the blame: Drew Bledsoe.

“He just signed a $100 million deal to be what type of quarterback? A passing quarterback, correct?” Lewis said. “Had he not got outside the pocket and ran with the ball, would we be talking about this? Who caused the event? The person who was with the ball. Now he’s doing what he didn’t sign up for. He signed up to be a passing quarterback. What do I do? I stop the people with the ball. It’s just another play for me. But it’s a different play for him.”

As part of the NFL’s celebration of its 100th season in 2019, it conducted a poll to determine the top 100 game changers in league history. Lewis came in at No. 82. He should have been much higher. “He was the guy that actually started Tom Brady’s career,” said Herm Edwards, the Jets coach in that 2001 game.

As soon as Bledsoe went down, Pepper Johnson’s mind raced to two days earlier, September 21, when Belichick “had me talk to the offense about the Jets’ defense,” right before the Patriots took the field for their Friday morning practice.

Johnson was more a Belichick guy than a Bill Parcells guy when he was a linebacker for the New York Giants, winning two Super Bowls in his first five seasons. Belichick was the defensive coordinator, and they built a strong coach-player relationship. Johnson played for Cleveland in the final three of Belichick’s five seasons with the Browns from 1993 to 1995, spent one season with his hometown Detroit Lions, and then finished up with two years with the Jets in 1997 and 1998, reuniting with Parcells and Belichick.

Johnson sat in Jets linebacker meetings with Lewis and Jones for two years at Weeb Ewbank Hall on the campus of Hofstra University. He had grown close to them. “I was one step removed from playing with those guys,” he said. The three often “broke bread together,” Johnson said, and he respected their game-changing ability when he played with them and knew the damage they could inflict on the Patriots’ skill position players.

He gave New England’s offensive players an ominous yet prescient scouting report.

Johnson stood up in front of the meeting room and delivered a strong warning:

“Hopefully this doesn’t sound bad because the last thing I want to do is pump fear into anybody, but if you are headed into a one-on-one with Marvin Jones or Mo Lewis, go out of bounds, sidestep them, get out of the way,” he said.

One thing they should not do is let their pride get in the way and challenge them. Bledsoe clearly was not taking notes. “Do not try and bump heads with these guys,” Johnson continued. “They are Scud missiles. Mo is one of the guys you need to avoid.”

“Pep,” running back Kevin Faulk said, “you’re talking about two guys.”

“But those guys can change a game,” Johnson said.

Then he watched in horror as Bledsoe ignored his warning. “I’m mad at Drew because I just told him not to freaking go one-on-one with this dude,” Johnson said. “I painted the scenario for him to run out of bounds.”

After the game, Johnson was confronted by Patriots safety Lawyer Milloy and cornerback Ty Law. They said teammates were saying that Johnson was laughing, joking, and high-fiving with Lewis and Jones when Bledsoe was on the ground. Milloy was especially close to Bledsoe. Johnson didn’t deny that he spoke to Lewis and Jones when the game was stopped but said he would never celebrate any player getting hurt, especially the quarterback on his own team.

Bledsoe never started another game for New England.

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BRADY VS. BELICHICK. Copyright © 2025 by Gary Myers. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Publishing Group, 120 Broadway, New York, NY 10271.