Product Details
The Blueprint: How the New England Patriots Beat the System to Create the Last Great NFL Superpower

The Blueprint: How the New England Patriots Beat the System to Create the Last Great NFL Superpower
By Christopher Price

List Price: $24.95
Price: $16.47 & eligible for FREE Super Saver Shipping on orders over $25. Details

Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Ships from and sold by Amazon.com

56 new or used available from $4.29

Average customer review:

Product Description

For years, the New England Patriots were a certifiable joke of a franchise. They were run on the cheap and were once the very example of how not to manage a team. They hired inept coaches---one of whom (Clive Rush) was nearly electrocuted when he grabbed a microphone at his introductory press conference. In 1968 their scouting director, Ed McKeever, suggested they draft a wide receiver . . . before someone in the organization realized the player had been dead for six months. They plucked ex-players out of the stands minutes before kickoff---Bob Gladieux was enjoying a beer at the game when he heard his name called over the P.A. (The Patriots had cut a player earlier that morning and found themselves short. Gladieux, who would go on to spend four years in the league as a running back, made the tackle on the opening kickoff.) And they played in a run-down stadium that was one of the worst venues in professional sports. There were brief moments of success, but on each occasion, front-office infighting would invariably cause the franchise to slide back down to the basement again.
 
But in the first four months of 2000, everything changed. The hiring of head coach Bill Belichick and Vice President of Player Personnel Scott Pioli and the drafting of quarterback Tom Brady turned the fortunes of the franchise around. And their nontraditional approach to acquiring personnel---remembering that it’s not about collecting talent, it’s about assembling a team---quickly led to three Super Bowl titles in four seasons. It’s a feat that, in the salary cap era, with free agency, planned parity and balanced scheduling, is in many ways even more impressive than anything achieved by the past dynasties of Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Dallas, and San Francisco.

Along the way, Christopher Price has had a front-row seat for football history, chronicling the rise to power of the NFL’s unlikeliest superpower. Price takes the reader inside the franchise to give him a dynamic portrait of a mighty organization at the height of its power. Readers are immersed in the locker room during the strange and tumultuous days of 2001 and 2003, when major personnel moves involving a pair of the most popular players in franchise history---Drew Bledsoe and Lawyer Milloy---threatened to rock their championship foundation to the core. Readers get an up-close look at the team that dominated the league on the way to a record-setting winning streak in 2004. And Price analyzes what went wrong when they fell short in 2005 and 2006, and how they plan to return to Super Bowl form in 2007.

 The Blueprint  will explore how the Patriots went from the dregs to a dynasty, becoming the gold standard for professional sports franchises everywhere. It will prompt sports fans (and those who study organizations) to acknowledge what many football insiders have believed for a long time: when it comes to building a successful system, the Patriots have the Blueprint.
 
Praise for Christopher Price’s Baseball by the Beach: A History of America’s National Pastime on Cape Cod
 
“[Price] provides anecdotes bound to amuse some, astound others, and inform all.”
---Cape Cod Times
 
“[Price] captures the true essence of the game and its people.”
---Front Row, New England Sports Network
 
“An excellent job . . . a solid, definitive story of the Cape Cod Baseball League.”
---The Cape Codder

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #56280 in Books
  • Published on: 2007-10-16
  • Released on: 2007-10-16
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 304 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Given the almost perverse ratio of fans and media attention on the one hand (massive) to the minuscule number of NFL games (a mere 16 per team in regular season, compared to 162 in baseball), the level of attention paid to each play, press conference or trade is astounding. So when Bill Belichick took over as coach of the famously inconsistent New England Patriots in 2000 and quickly turned them into what Boston Globe sportswriter Price terms the unlikeliest dynasty in the history of the NFL, the coach's low-key recipe for success was bound to be anatomized within an inch of its life. Fortunately, Price's account of the team's elegantly simple transformation from league laughingstock (his stories of their 1970s foibles are legion and hilarious, to nonfans at least) to Tom Brady powerhouse is a breeze to read; neither pumped full of steroidal sports hyperbole or weighed down by bloated play-by-play. From the soap opera that was the Bill Parcells era to the high drama of Drew Bledsoe's injury, when he unwittingly handed the quarterback crown to an untested Brady, this is a highly diverting read perfectly timed for the start of a new season for a team that, in Price's mind, has become the gold standard for the rest of the National Football League. (Oct.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Penned by a New Englander who's covered Boston sports for the past 10 years, this volume may run parochial for many readers. Still, it's hard to argue with the recent success of the Patriots, who have won three Super Bowls since 2002 and, but for a play-off loss to Indianapolis in January, would have been in it again this year. Price traces the Patriots' history, from its AFL days in the 1960s through the team's many losing seasons, as well as its changes of ownership and personnel, arriving in the '90s with the hiring of Bill Parcells as coach and the team purchase by Robert Kraft. The pieces truly fell into place with the hiring of coach Bill Belichick and the emergence of quarterback Tom Brady. It was Belichick's reliance on his linebacker corps, on some smart and versatile JAGs ("just average guys") to step in where needed, and on his young quarterback—not to mention very sophisticated defensive schemes—that made it all work. Football fans who can't seem to get enough of the game will enjoy this profile. Moores, Alan

About the Author
Christopher Price has covered the Boston sports scene for the last ten years, working for ESPN.com, SI.com, and Baseball America, as well as The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and The Miami Herald. In that time, he’s established himself as an award-winning sportswriter who has been honored by Northeastern University, the New England Press Association, and the North Carolina Press Association. He’s currently the football writer for Boston Metro, a job he’s held since 2001. He lives in Boston with his wife, Kate.

Customer Reviews

Price continues to write great stuff5
I've read alot of his daily stuff, and LOVE his writing style. He's as good as they come. The book has some nice insite, and is well written. If you're a sports fan in general, you'll love this book.

A Good, not great, look into the current success of the Patriots.3
The Blueprint offers a complete breakdown of the New England Patriots' history and the foundation for the team's current dominance. The book is well written and is a good foundation for new fans, but doesn't offer much additional insights into the franchise beyond the well known facts. The writer's style is a bit dry. For a more entertaining and deeper look into the New England Organization, Michael Holley's "Patriot Reign" was far more insightful and a much more entertaining read. For a newer fan this book is great; for a die hard, lifetime fan, there isn't much here you didn't already know. On a personal note, a big pet peeve of mine is insufficient editing, and I found numorous spelling errors, and repeatitive thoughts through out the book, which is a bit distracting.

The thesis is correct.............5
First, yes, the Patriots didn't win Super Bowl 42, some team named the New York Giants won. I am a Patriots fan and I gladly congratulate the NY Giants for a tremendous win in SB 42. To the true Giants fans (and not the fairweather ones that popped out on Feb 4th), you deserve all the bragging rights afforded to you.

Second, the point of this book is not that the Patriots should win it all every single year and if not, then the Patriots failed. It's that the Patriots, unlike a lot of NFL teams, put themselves in position to be an elite team (i.e. with a serious chance to win it all) year after year after year. Yes the Patriots have Tom Brady but its also true that the Patriots also have a lot of turnover and a lot of contract disputes on both sides of the ball and yet this team still finds ways to get to playoffs, get to SBs and even win 3 of em and all of this in the era of parity and free agency.

Third, there will always be a lot of jealous fans of other teams who put up one-star reviews and whine and cry about this and that but these are the same people who think that the sole reason for the Patriots success was Spygate which is just silly. I truly hope these people don't vote in 2008 because I would hate to see these gullible fans nullify my vote.

I bought this book on sale and it is extremely insightful. It covers the decisions made from the time spent on the draft and free agency to the unique ways that Belichick coaches each player to have more than one responsibility.