Adams got his first big break after college, starting as an administrative assistant with the Patriots in 1975 and landing an actual assistant coach's job with the New York Giants in 1979. Immediately, he told Giants coach Ray Perkins there was another young coach he should hire. Something in Adams' voice made Perkins listen. Adams was already a man who demanded trust; Perkins calls Adams' opinion on football "gospel." So, Perkins picked up his phone and set up a meeting. After three hours in a hotel room, he had his new special teams coach: Bill Belichick. "Ernie's recommendation opened a big door for Belichick," Perkins says.
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Adams' contributions to the Patriots begin with film. Hours and hours of film, often in his darkened office. He has been doing this for years, first at Northwestern in the early 1970s, where he convinced coaches to let him go from student-manager to scout. "He was a prodigy," says Rick Venturi, an assistant on that Wildcats team.
By now, after years of evolution, Adams sees film differently. Not just as random actions, but a genealogy of the game of football. When a defender moves, he recalls watching or having read about the first time a defender moved like that, even if it was 50 years ago, and he knows why, which tells him how to counteract the move. He has a photographic memory. Perkins tells a story of Adams' memorizing the Giants' thick playbook. In one night.
So, every week, the Patriots get the kind of analysis that only high-powered hedge funds or, say, NASA can afford. "Nine times out of 10," Bissinger says, "Ernie sees something nobody else sees."
That memory and those hours of studying film make him an unparalleled resource for assistant coaches. Want to know what a team does, and why? Want to know what a team has done on third-and-short in the red zone in the past 10 years on the road? Ask Adams. He'll know.
Adams' reach doesn't stop there. The Patriots are famous for compartmentalizing: The scouts can't watch practice, the game planners don't know who they are going to draft, and so on. But Adams is into everything. During the draft, according to Michael Holley's "Patriot Reign," he's in charge of running through the team's value chart, figuring out who will best fit their needs. This is the perfect assignment for someone who spent several years in the late 1980s as an analyst and trader on Wall Street and, as an investor, is known for spotting profitable trends shockingly early.
Pats owner Robert Kraft, a successful businessman in his own right, discusses economics with Adams. Belichick jokes that he wishes Adams would manage his portfolio. And the roots of the Patriots' insistence on value, and not letting emotion get in the way of sound investments, sound like they might have sprung from the mind of one Ernie Adams. "Warren Buffett and Ernie are actually somewhat similar," Carlisle says. "I have met Warren Buffet. Warren is one of these people who is phenomenally rigorous in his analysis. If there was someone you might associate with Ernie, it is someone who is [also] slightly asocial."
Adams' official title is director of football research, and he does a lot of that, too, trolling the world for things that might offer the slightest advantage. A year or two ago, an Andover teammate ran across an obscure out-of-print book on nonlinear mathematics. He thought Adams might find a use for it, so he mailed it to him. Adams had already read it. Or there's Rutgers statistics professor Harold Sackrowitz, who got a call from Adams a few years back. Adams wanted to talk about some research Sackrowitz had just completed, dealing with how teams try two-point conversions far too often. Adams sent the professor the Patriots' when-to-go-for-two chart, and asked Sackrowitz to tear it apart. Of the 32 NFL teams, the statistician told the New York Times, only the Patriots called.
Here's another example: The academic paper of a Berkeley researcher, referenced in the same Times story, dealt with how teams punt on fourth down far too often. That paper ended up on Belichick's desk. Now, how do you imagine it got there?
While in sixth and seventh grades, Adams read Lombardi's book "Run to Daylight" about 20 times. His obsessive personality drew him further into the web of this game, one with X's and O's he could control, men he could make appear whenever he wanted. It was simple, something missing in the 1960s. The campus and nearby Harvard were exploding in anger over the Vietnam War. Everything was turned upside down. "He was very old-fashioned," Bissinger says. "He was sort of the Lombardi era. Something about him was out of the 1940s. He was just different. He had no knowledge of rock 'n' roll or sex or drugs. The [high] school was rampant with it. Everyone was stoned. Everyone was drinking. And there was Ernie in his high-top cleats talking football with the head coach."
