Some Dogs Have Their Day
Belief, Motivation Were Major Factors In Previous Upsets

By Les Carpenter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 3, 2008

GLENDALE, Ariz., Feb. 2 -- In the dark of night, the Patriots left. They filed into the gilded elevators of the luxurious old Fairmont Hotel in downtown New Orleans on the day before Super Bowl XXXVI, slipping through the carpeted lobby, out the glass doors and into waiting buses ready to whisk them toward the airport, to a building that was far less spectacular.

Their coach, Bill Belichick, never did warm to the team's proximity to the French Quarter. It was too tempting, too close to the mayhem. And what was all the ruckus downstairs? The throngs of people pouring in and out of the doors never stopped. For a coach who loathes distractions, this bordered on the insane.

So when it could, after all league obligations had been met, the team headed to a drab airport motel that, needless to say, lacked the splendid flourishes of the Fairmont.

Looking back, it was a critical move that led to the unimaginable events that unfolded the following night, when the Patriots, who had scrapped through the playoffs with the luck of an ambiguous fumble rule, stunned the mighty St. Louis Rams in one of the Super Bowl's greatest upsets. In ensuing years it would be hailed as one of the top reasons why New England was able to neutralize an offense so explosive it was called "The Greatest Show on Turf." The Rams hit Bourbon Street in the days before the game. The Patriots headed as far away as they could, to the least likely place you would find a Super Bowl team.

"It was basic, very basic," said New England special teams coach Brad Seely, one of the few coaches left from that year. "I mean how nice a hotel can you be getting on the night before the Super Bowl with rooms for 80 people?"

Was it like the Red Roof Inn, he was asked.

"I don't think it was as nice as the Red Roof Inn," Seely said.

But indulgence hardly mattered on the eve of the franchise's most significant game. The most important thing was to eliminate distractions.

"That hotel lobby was like Bourbon Street," Seely said of the Fairmont.

And the less-sensational airport hotel?

"Very quiet," Seely said with a laugh.

Now everything has changed. The Patriots loom as an impediment bigger than even those Rams, while the New York Giants come into today's Super Bowl seemingly without a chance -- a wild card against a football machine that has gone to four Super Bowls in seven years. If New England faced the impossible in New Orleans, what must the Giants be up against? If the unbelievable is to happen again, New York likely will have to follow a path set before it in some of the great sports upsets of all time.

You must believe you can win. " I think when you get to the Super Bowl, NCAA Final Four or World Series you know you have done something right along the way," said former Villanova basketball coach Rollie Massimino, whose Wildcats stunned the heavily favored Georgetown Hoyas in the 1985 national championship game. "You've got to make the players understand they are not in this thing to lose."

In the hours before Villanova stepped onto the Rupp Arena court in Lexington, Ky., Massimino told players they had accomplished a great deal in just making it to the Final Four and the championship game. Already they would be hailed as heroes, they would even get a parade through the streets of Philadelphia. But there was still something more they could grasp: respect.

That, he said, was more important than everything else.

Massimino, now the coach at Northwood University in Florida, was helped by the fact that the Wildcats knew Georgetown well, having played the Hoyas twice that season. And while the Hoyas had won both games, Villanova was comfortable with its opponent. Center Ed Pinckney enjoyed playing against Georgetown's Patrick Ewing, who seemed to tower over Pinckney and was considered the most dominant player in college basketball.

But Pinckney believed he could handle Ewing, Massimino said. That night Pinckney had 16 points and six rebounds and Villanova won, 66-64.

In 2000, when former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda faced the U.S. Olympic team he was handed -- a group not expected to fare well against the likes of Cuba -- he told the pitchers: "You don't know how good you are. If you give me this pitching staff in the big leagues, we'd win the World Series in two years."

Speaking by phone from his Dodger Stadium office, Lasorda chuckled.

"Shoot, they believed it," he said.

The Americans went on to win the gold medal.

Use any motivation possible. It was in the middle of the 1988 World Series and Lasorda had been handed a gift. This came in the form of a quote from broadcaster Bob Costas, who had referred to the Dodgers as perhaps the weakest-hitting team to ever make a World Series. Regardless of the fact that Costas likely was right, Lasorda played it for everything it was worth.

"Did you hear what Bob Costas said about you?" Lasorda said he shouted in the clubhouse before that game. "If I hear a guy talk about us like that, I want to chop his head off."

Needless to say, the Dodgers, who had already stunned the far-superior Oakland Athletics with Kirk Gibson's Game 1 game-winning home run, grabbed the final two games and the World Series title.

Just two weeks before, Lasorda employed a similar tactic as Los Angeles faced an equally formidable New York Mets team in the National League Championship Series. Already up 1-0 in the series, Mets pitcher David Cone -- in a New York Daily News journal -- said Dodgers reliever Jay Howell pitched like a Little Leaguer throwing curveball after curveball. Lasorda posted the article and railed about it to the team.

That night, with Cone pitching, he said the entire team was irate, shouting at Cone. Just 46 pitches later, Cone had been knocked from the game and the Dodgers went on to win the series.

Keep routines. Belichick, who is brilliant at using any hint of motivation, also works tirelessly to maintain a steady hand through any chaos. When the Patriots moved their hotel that Super Bowl weekend, the trip went from being a show to something resembling normal. Belichick always prefers to stay near airports on road trips, figuring the isolation will keep the players focused. So when the team moved to its motel in New Orleans, everything seemed normal to the players and coaches, Seely said. Even if the conditions of the hotel itself were somewhat beneath what the Patriots were accustomed to.

Seely remembers the locker room that day being very much the same. Very little, in fact, seemed to change. While a party raged around them in New Orleans, the Patriots managed to turn that week into something dull and ordinary, which came to matter when the game finally began.

Dick Tarrant agrees. The former basketball coach at the University of Richmond, who led the Spiders to upsets over Indiana, Georgia Tech and Syracuse in the NCAA tournament in the 1980s and 1990s, did not like to change tactics for the tournament. His players ran the same plays and employed the same defenses they had during the season. The difference, he said, was that they played crisper, without mistakes.

"You just know you had to play it close to the vest," Tarrant said.

In a league game, where his players might have felt they were on the same level as their opponents, Tarrant said they might be tempted to make behind-the-back passes or otherwise try to show off. But in the NCAAs, against mightier teams, they played cautious, careful and in all their upsets the same pattern emerged: Richmond made around 50 percent of its shots and had very few turnovers.

Never let them know how good the other team is. In his years at Richmond, Tarrant never showed his players tape of an NCAA tournament opponent. This became especially true in 1991 when the Spiders were preparing to play Syracuse at Cole Field House. Syracuse was a No. 2 seed, Richmond a 15th. The last thing Tarrant wanted to do was let his players get a glimpse of how formidable the Orangemen really were.

"I believe they found the films more entertaining than informative," Tarrant said. "When someone had a reverse dunk they would go 'wow!' and jump out of their seats."

In 1988 when Richmond, a 13th seed, went to play Indiana in the first round of the NCAA tournament in Hartford, Conn., Tarrant figures his players knew little about the Indiana history other than the fact the Hoosiers had won the national championship the year before. This was by design. The less they knew, the looser they would play, he figured.

Tarrant has been watching the NFL playoffs. And in many ways he figures there is a huge difference between coaching a college basketball team and one in professional football. The players are older, smarter, more aware. Though, he said, "you're still dealing with people."

But the David who routinely beat the Goliath is not optimistic about the same thing today. When asked about it, he laughed.

"I don't think you're seeing an upset happening," he said.

Then again who said the same about the Richmond Spiders against the Syracuse Orangemen?