From Brady vs. Belichick, by Gary Myers. Copyright © 2025 by the author, and reprinted with permission of St. Martin’s Publishing Group. Brady vs. Brady. The Dynasty Debate, is being released Tuesday.
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 in the ambulance on the way to Massachusetts General Hospital in downtown Boston, and inadvertently changing the course of NFL history by creating two legends: Tom Brady and Bill Belichick.
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 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 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 Brady, a second-year quarterback out of the University of Michigan, who completed one pass in three attempts the previous season as a rookie, and was 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 Patriots owner 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 NFL is not a contact sport. It’s 60 minutes of high-speed collisions with 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 or slide. 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. “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 Patriots linebacker Ted Johnson, standing just a few feet away. “It was a sound that I’ve never heard before and never heard since.”
Bledsoe returned for one series, was unable to function because of the concussion, and the Brady Era began. Bledsoe was 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 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 as teammates. “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.”
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.”
Bledsoe never started another game for New England and was traded to Buffalo after the season.
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Lewis distances himself from being responsible for getting Brady on the field and getting to nine Super Bowls and winning six in New England while the Jets have been stuck on one, all the way back to Super Bowl III on January 12, 1969. Lewis is bitter about his career being attached to Belichick, Brady, and Bledsoe. “You never want anybody to get hurt, obviously,” Jones said. “But it was a turning point. It could have been the worst thing to happen to the Jets because of what Brady became and for 20 years how the Patriots had a ton of success against the Jets.”
After some negotiating, Lewis agreed to talk to me about the Bledsoe hit. He had no remorse then and no remorse now. He never checked up on Bledsoe. He has never spoken to him about the play.
Does he ever think about the impact his hit on Bledsoe had on NFL history?
“No,” he said.
Never?
“No,” he said.
How is that possible?
“It’s really irrelevant to me. It was just another play to me. To you all, it’s a big game-changing, history-changing play,” he said. “I’ve never gone back to watch the play. If people want to talk about it, I don’t hide from it. But it has no importance to me.”
As a result of Bledsoe’s quick return to the game, there was no immediate reason for Lewis to be worried that he was about an hour away from nearly dying in an ambulance. “I’m not trying to be an asshole,” Lewis said. “I’m on the field. I’m not a doctor. I do not know the severity of that hit. It was just another hit. I’m a linebacker. I make tackles. I do not gauge how hard or how soft I hit a person. What you’re trying to do is make me see the future after the hit. I’m telling you, I’m not looking down the line. I’m just trying to stop him from getting a first down. Period.”
Lewis is one of the best linebackers in Jets history. He is not in their Ring of Honor.
He would not appreciate it, but he belongs in the Patriots Hall of Fame.
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Gary Myers will be appearing with Patriots three-time Super Bowl champion and former Rutgers star Devin McCourty for a Q&A and book signing at Bookends in Ridgewood, N.J. on Sept. 15 at 6 p.m.
