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

Jeff Benedict, author of ‘The Dynasty,’ joins Colin Cowherd to discuss his book and how it compares to Apple TV’s documentary ‘Dynasty.’ He dives into how the New England Patriots dynasty compares to other football ones, along with when the Bill Belichick-Robert Kraft relationship began to diminish. Benedict also discusses the Malcolm Butler benching, the Aaron Hernandez fiasco and more.

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

The Herd with Colin Cowherd
https://www.youtube.com/c/colincowherd

He’s a New York Times bestselling author of 16 books including tiger which is a uh inspiration for the HBO documentary this one’s called Dynasty and uh I just finished 10 parts of the documentary now it is interesting so the book is right here and I think um

You need you need to read the book there it goes so much deeper than document and documentary is going to do the Aaron Hernandez story uh the Malcolm Butler story I understand documentary it’s expensive to make you’re going to pick the hot spots uh but I want to talk

About this because my Takeaway on all this is and I said this earlier that all dynasties almost all are the same hardwork and vision builds them resilience and toughness maintains them and then power corrupts them and my Takeaway on this book for regardless of whose side it took is that bill could

Never come to terms with year 2 Tom Brady was not year 18 Tom the league had pivoted to offense and he was treating him like a kid because he wanted to maintain governorship he wanted the the power and my takeaway is Bill the world changed it that’s not the league no

That’s my takeaway is it fair to say your book illustrates more of that than the documentary well it’s good to be with you Colin again uh the obviously in a book you have a lot more real estate you can cover a lot more ground uh you can

Go into things more in depth in a documentary you have to make harder choices and people sometimes are critical of those choices but I I thought here the whole film making team did an amazing job on selecting which storylines to tell and what to leave out

But definitely in the book I I laid the groundwork I think for um what is distinct about this dynasty I agree with most of what you said about the course of dynasties I think what always has separated the Patriots dynasty from all the other football dynasties before them

Was its length the Packers the 49ers the Steelers all great dynasties none of which really lasted more than a decade right and this dynasty is so unusual and and the reason I think it we won’t ever see it repeated again is because it lasted two decades with the same nucleus

The nucleus being Brady at quarterback bill at at head coach and Robert Craft at owner those three together for so long that if this dynasty had run the course of its predecessors they would have won three Super Bowls three out of the first four they would have had the

Perfect season that ended with a heartwrenching loss to the Giants then it’s over and then and then Brady gets hurt yeah and he comes back and they maybe one or two more years and then it’s over and if they done that it would be right next to the 49ers and the

Steelers right but they stuck around for 10 more years and I would say the back half of the Dynasty is more impressive because what happened at the end the amount of winning that bill and Tom did together in the back half of the dynasty I think is more impressive than in the

Beginning and what’s harder to see Colin is the role of the owner in the back half is so critical less so than in the first half yeah the first half is really about all about Bill and Tom yeah the back half Robert’s role is much more pronounced but yet not visible to the

Needs to be it had to be yes yeah because they if left to their own devices they wouldn’t have stayed together that long uh I said and again I’m not taking sides I think Bill’s the best defensive coach ever I think this happens culturally in Tech in media in

Entertainment and sports you know like Greg papovich you have to shoot threes he didn’t want to embrace it right like you have to the world’s changed you can’t put Matt Patricia offensive coordinator it just it’s toned deaf um but I but I did think Bill won a Super

Bowl in which Tom didn’t play well Rams and Bill won it a brilliant coaching moment and Bill lost a Super Bowl when Tom was absolutely brilliant Philadelphia what bothered me deeply is that bill demanded accountability and even in the dock when pressed he would not say why he didn’t play Malcolm

Butler you don’t owe me that but you owe Tom you owe your roster you know grank you owe the team that because you’ve demanded accountability and people are looking for accountability why talk about that story in the book V the the doc which doesn’t go quite as deep and

Doesn’t give you an answer right so when I was working on the book I mean one of the things that I was thinking about and and talking to people about within the team is that I I didn’t realize um that and this I learned this even more

Working on the dock was that there really wasn’t anybody who knew what was going on that day Jos McDaniels like never got an explanation no and and and I think that that’s the the troubling part is and Devon mccordi does a really good job of explaining this is that it’s

Not just that Malcolm Butler took 97% of the snaps that year it’s when you take a guy off the field who’s that interconnected with the defensive game plan and he’s just disappears it it’s not just that he’s missing but it throws everybody off because they’re used to

Having him in certain places and he’s not there and there’s not one person filling in for him it was like a platoon of guys coming in nobody really being able to do the job and I I think it was really disheartening for guys to figure

Out in the end that not no one had been told it hadn’t been explained and I I think it’s hard because that’s think about it they won the Super Bowl before they won the Super Bowl after they definitely should have won that Super Bowl I mean arguably that team was

Considerably better than the team that beat the Rams and yet they lost to the Eagles and Tom did have his his best Super Bowl performance on paper the greatest quarterback performance to that point ever I believe yeah the only the only reason I don’t say that is because

I think what he did in the Atlanta Super Bowl oh yeah even though the numbers weren’t the same was amazing that’s the greatest quarterback performance ever in a Super Bowl um I thought you know again um I’ve always liked Robert Craft and here at Fox I do know the power um and

The importance of him he and Jerry uh have great importance in the ownership room the hunt family Stan Kony there’s a handful of guys and Robert Craft really does a lot of the TV negotiation stuff so to give to to relinquish that for owners to say Robert you take care of

The TV yeah he’s a he’s a bright guy and the labor yeah I mean Robert is really that’s why I always say Jerry Jones can be quirky but the other owners lean into Jerry a lot um there was there was a moment here that um

Had they not won that Ram Super Bowl it almost sounded like and I want you to go deeper on this sure Robert was ready to move off bill bill was wearing out everybody players to a player were saying it’s no fun here yeah and then bill has maybe his greatest moment in a

Super Bowl McVey is perplexed they can’t move the chains a dominant offense all year um do you think craft regrets I mean obviously he regrets how it ended but when do you think Robert started having this sense of Bill that he’s just terribly difficult even though we’re

Winning was it year 65 or was it almostly the garoo move Bill resented it when did you start feeling that bubbling that percolating of animosity in 2010 um and there’s one of my favorite scenes in the book which we we couldn’t do this in the dock because there’s no

Footage for it so there would be no way to tell this story in film but you could do it on paper in 2010 when um Tom Brady asks to come and talk to Robert in private and he goes out to Cape Cod over the summer and um goes to his summer

Home and it’s not just Robert it’s Robert and Jonathan Robert asked his son to also come to the meeting asked Tom if it was okay and of course Tom said yes and that’s when they go out to meet and the purpose of that meeting is Tom’s concerned about his future think about

This is in 2010 yeah he’s concerned about his future and whether bill will move away from him and part of that is because he’s been there now 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 great players how they did business it’s how they did business and Bill had a great track record of moving away from players a little early instead of a little late and that although that seems ruthless and hard it worked time and time and time again and craft as the

Owner allowed gave Bill the latitude to make some really hard calls that I don’t know that Robert would have made because these are hard calls to make but it was Bill’s job to make them and he made them and he was almost always right so Tom goes and has this meeting with the

Crafts and this is the first time that he asks them to intervene in his contract negotiations and they do they get involved and it’s it’s the first time it happens because it’s the first indication that things are changing possibly and then four years later they draft Jimmy Garoppolo and by the time

They draft Jimmy think of how long it’s been it’s been a decade since they’ve won a Super Bowl and by that time this to me was the closest thing to when Bill Walsh goes out and gets Steve Young and brings him to San Francisco and Joe Montana

Goes nuts yeah and suddenly you see Joe Montana do things near the back of his career that he hadn’t done in the front of his career and that’s because he had Steve Young right there and I think Jimmy Garoppolo I’m not suggesting this was intentional on Bill’s part but I

Think what it did was it this is like adding gas to an inferno yeah Tom’s an inferno when it comes to competitiveness he’s on fire all the time and this was like let’s just dump some gas on that and I think this is what jonath Jonathan Craft talked about most people Miss This

In the documentary which I thought was one of the best things said in the very end of the documentary he talked about how by now there’s a rift between Bill and Tom they’re not communicating that much the whole organization knew it barely communicating barely communicating but what Jonathan pointed out was both

Guys used the situation as motivation to compete harder to compete better it actually drove both of them in their own way which I thought was a really astute observation from someone on the inside who was there for the whole thing that is how it worked with Bill and Tom even

When they didn’t have the kind of Coach quarterback relationship that 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 TV film producer uh executive producer HBO

Documentary tiger it’s much deeper in the book I implore you to go buy the book which is still selling uh the tiger book is still selling LeBron book sells everywhere istan buul Canada here everywhere in the world these books are they’re fascinating and if you love The Deep dive which documentaries can’t hit

On all of it you you know we all kind of watched 30 for 30s and they were terrific but you just can’t cover everything the MJ doc uh you know Pippen feels like he got slided well MJ had the say that’s right he did so that’s the

Way it goes um by the way Tom didn’t have the say and I want to point on that you know Tom Brady um deserves a lot of credit for this not because he just works at Fox yeah but and I said this a couple weeks ago if Patrick Mahomes got

A defensive coach not Andy Reid that asked him to take Financial sacrifices and that never really had outside of Randy Moss one great receiver it was a lot of well wers overachieving Edelman uh yes I don’t know if Mahomes would be Mahomes I came out of this

Thinking you know who was kindest toward Bill Tom Slater banged on him there were I Tom BR got you know typical of Tom sensitive guy got emotional but I think Tom could have brought out the hammer on this yeah and he didn’t that was my take

Yours so my take on Tom two things uh and I don’t know if he’s watching this interview but um the first time I interviewed him for the book was in his suite at the stadium and it was right at the start of his second to last season so this is the

Season they’re going to beat the Rams in the Super Bowl and in that interview my first time doing it with him um at the end of the interview I I I went in with 20 questions which I’d worked on for a long long time and I

Went over the kind of the ground rules with him and I told him in the beginning if there’s anything I’m going to ask you I’ll turn the tape recorders off if there’s something I ask you you don’t want to on tape 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 one yeah and uh the last question he answered every question by the way and never asked me to turn the recorder off the last question I asked him 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’d been in shortly after he started um entered into a relationship with Jazelle and um he could have been seriously

Injured in that accident happened in Boston it was a miracle that he walked away from it and that led to a really emotional answer that went way farther than I anticipated and he cried when he was answering the question and so did I be because it was just so apparent

That he was it was so raw but so honest and you rarely see people um what was the question I asked a simple question about what happened that day cuz I knew he’d been in a car accident but as he started talking about it and reflecting about sort of the um

How fragile life is and he started talking about relationships that mattered to him you could see underneath the athlete celebrity to the heart of who this human is and it was just very powerful and the Sim similar thing happened when when he came in for the interview for the documentary we only

Interviewed him once for the film and he he was very emotional in that as well and when he cried during the documentary filming I was I did too again and what I would say about Tom if you step back is I I’ve never seen anyone who’s

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’s a different Road and he’s alone on that road too that’s a road that people like tiger and Michael and LeBron occupy in their Sports Tom’s alone on

That road in the NFL but I’m not talking about that I’m talking about him character-wise I’ve never seen and I don’t think anyone watching or listening to your show can point to an instance where Tom didn’t take the high road when he had so many opportunities to criticize someone else he’s never done

It and some people accuse him of being disingenuous when he says always says nice things about Bill or this person or that person that’s not disingenuous that’s not and it’s not dishonest that’s someone who’s made a decision that that’s how they’re going to live their

Life and that if I I just think if if more people actually went through life that way life would be a lot nicer but it’s really hard to do that when you’ve been through some of the things Tom’s been through like when he went through deflate gate people that he thought were

His friends in the NFL saw the opportunity to take a shot and they took it and these were people who knew better and used it as an opportunity to undermine all that achievement there’s a lot of jealousy and envy in professional sports oh yeah and and a lot someone like Tom is just

Sort of set up to to be hit by people and I I that’s what I admire more more than all the football stuff which I’m an admirer of that but way more impressive to me is that he’s been on the high road for so long and when he’s up there you

Don’t see many people like you’re on the road and it’s like there’s no people passing you look at it think about how Randy Moss ended um I I don’t think there’s a teammate that’s ever taken a shot at Tom that I remember well I can think of one Antonio Brown but that’s

Just that’s just embarrassing but I mean he he’s not really a teammate that not really but you’re about his teammates over 20 years tremendous respect because of how Tom is and by the way what’s interesting also is Tom’s not easy to play with you know he’s not easy to be

He’s a great teammate 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 in the beginning but then come around and I think that’s one of the things that he

And Bill had in common yeah was that they were really hard to play for cuz the standard was so high yeah I think another takeway I had again from 30,000 ft another takeaway when reading your book first which I always you know sometimes with the movie business

Reading the book first helps but then another sometimes you feel the the the movie’s pithy compared to the book and here this is your book is so substantial but I did think the documentary um landed well I do too I I thought they did a really good job um one of the

Criticis was the Aaron Hernandez situation when I thought Ernie Adams who was a lovable figure in this doc everybody knew Aaron was a firstr player you could look at his high school and college highlights he was Patrick Chung once told me I said who’s the hardest

Guy to cover in the league he goes Aaron Hernandez and I cover gronet practice you can’t guard him he’s faster than me and he’s a tight end and I and I thought in this and I want to go back to the book that everybody knew he came with

Baggage that’s why by the way somebody would have drafted him he was just too gifted and um there were moments where Wes Welker says listen if you were around Aaron and you heard him talk there’s trash talk then there’s weird uncomfortable stuff yes um do you point

Fingers on that go into the book on Aaron because I’ve as a sportscaster I just come to terms with a lot of these kids come from diff difficult situation you’re not getting a locker room of 55 perfect people right I don’t know what guys are doing when they’re going home

It’s not my job they have families did you think the the Patriots knew more than they let on or it really did erode very very quickly I think the guy that probably knew the most was Urban Meyer and urban Meer coached Mid Florida he knew that there was more going on

Than pot smoking yeah which who cares right I mean come on it there was more than that in Florida there were some violent incidents down there now not things with guns but I mean there were bartender fight yeah stuff like that I think the Patriots I I did not point

Fingers in the book at anyone in the Patriots organization I think they were all fooled and I think when you think about how sophisticated we’re talking about Bill bich Ernie Adams Jonathan Craft Robert Craft sophisticated smart seasoned people they were all fooled I mean when Robert Craft talks about being snookered

And how acknowledges he acknowledges it I get I actually give him credit a lot of people wouldn’t acknowledge that they were schnuer they were snooker and I think that it was so astounding to them when when the murder charges first came out well not the charges but when there

Was a murder and wasn’t clear who did it yet the idea that he could have done it was hard to Fathom and then when he was brought out of his house in handcuffs it was still hard to Fathom because it is unprecedented unprecedented that’s the

Thing and so I I didn’t feel it was appropriate to criticize bill for not not knowing how would he know Jeff think about couples that are married for 20 years they live together they sleep together and they have affairs for decades and nobody knows the idea that

Coaches know NBA it’s a small roster you got 70 guys in the room it’s transitional new coaches I I I always say with Team you can know he’s a problem by the way I could name a player for the Cowboys years ago that was drafted a wide receiver and they knew

Get security detail around him he’s a little immature not bad guy but everybody knew Aaron came with stuff you don’t think it’s going to go from stuff to murder no and none of the guys in the locker room the guys in the locker room there were a few Dion Branch Wes Welker

Some of the guys that that knew a little more they didn’t know that much because yeah Wes was not a fan yeah Wes wasn’t a fan but Dion knew him really well and I thought that admission in the film where he says how did I not see that that’s

The whole point Dion none of these guys actually hung around with Aaron outside of football they weren’t part of that he had he had his own guys and none of the players actually were part of that group and so they really didn’t know that’s not a cover up that’s not an excuse it’s

Just it’s a really unusual situation and the reason I spent as much time on it as I did in the book was because the Patriots over a 20e span had things happen that no other team had happened like there is no other team that went 16-0 demolished the league by the way

The same year they were accused of spying on the Jets that year they go 16-0 and lose the way they lost on a guy pinning a ball against his helmet there’s no other team that’s had that happen to them so I think as a writer you have to lean into those things not

Because you’re trying to suly the Patriots I actually think those those down moments are what really illustrate the magnitude of what they achieved because they had to overcome things that would have crushed the soul of most organizations yeah well hi everybody it’s me Uncle Colin subscribe here to

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