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- A new book by ESPN Senior Writer Seth Wickersham delves into the secrets, vanity, and ultimate downfall of the Patriots dynasty.
- Among the revelations is Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s alleged disdain for Bill Belichick, undermining him to friends and confidantes over the years.
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To Patriots fans, uttering the name Seth Wickersham will cause them to armor up and take to the trenches.
The ESPN senior writer is seemingly on a relentless crusade to uncover the insidious hacks used by the greatest dynasty the sports world has ever known.
In January 2018, he published a piece about the dysfunction in Foxborough and the untenable power struggle between Brady, Belichick, and Kraft. On October 12, he’ll release a 527-page book titled, It’s Better To Be Feared, delving into the vanity, secrets, and ultimate unraveling of the two-decade marriage.
In a recent ESPN piece promoting the book, a source outed Robert Kraft for trashing his 3x NFL Coach Of The Year, classifying him as an “idiot savant” before leaving Cleveland for to become an assistant in New England in 1995.
“As for Kraft, in late September, he was in Aspen (Colorado) for a conference and bumped into a few friends in the hotel lobby early one morning. He told them he was leaving later for Detroit, where the Patriots were playing their next game. ‘I hate leaving here,’ Kraft said. ‘You leave here and you leave some of the most brilliant people you’ve ever met. You pick up so much knowledge from all these brilliant minds. And I have to go to Detroit to be with the biggest f—–ng a–hole in my life — my head coach.’ “
“Bill was an idiot savant,” Kraft told a confidant, according to the book, alluding to Belichick’s reputation before he hired the former Cleveland Browns coach in 2000. “I gave him this opportunity.”
Belichick’s ruthlessness may best be highlighted by this incident from 2008, one year after Eric Mangini, who was mentored by Belichick before leaving the Pats to become head coach at a division rival, snitched to the NFL about the Patriots practice of video taping their opponents’ defensive signals from the sideline.
At the 2008 league meetings, Belichick and then-New York Jets head coach Eric Mangini nearly had a fistfight. After a dinner for head coaches, Julie Mangini, wife of Eric, bumped into Belichick and said hi, trying to ease tension after the post-Spygate fallout. Belichick blew her off, and when she told Eric what had happened, he charged across the room and needed to be held back by other coaches from swinging at Belichick. “Hey Bill, f— you!” Mangini yelled.
In 2017, a full decade after SpyGate, Mangini claimed Belichick hadn’t spoken to him since.