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

The Blueprint: How the New England Patriots Beat the System to Create the Last Great NFL Superpower
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Book Summary Information

Author: Christopher Price
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Original Language); English (Unknown); English (Published)
Published: 2008-09-02
ISBN: 0312384858
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Product features:
  • ISBN13: 9780312384852
  • Condition: NEW
  • Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

Book Reviews of The Blueprint: How the New England Patriots Beat the System to Create the Last Great NFL Superpower

Book Review: Interesting NFL tales, badly told
Summary: 2 Stars

After finishing "The Blueprint," I find it hard to believe Christopher Price is gainfully employed as a writer. This is, simply, a horribly written book. He seemed to be directionless from the very start, with not only no clear purpose to the tale, but no understanding of how to unfold the events. Stories meander back and forth through a muddled timeline. There apparently was no editing whatsoever, as many missing and misspelled words, mispunctuations, truncated sentences, and derailed trains of thought attest to. It's really quite a mess in spots.

If you can wade through the disastrous presentation, there are genuinely fun tales to read, assuming you're an NFL nut who enjoys all the behind-the-lines inside scoops. The brief history of the Patriots may be common knowledge to New England fans, but it was fresh to me. Price is clearly a diligent collector of information. It's too bad he never comes close to fulfulling his subtitle's claim. There really is no revelation of the secret to the Patriot's success, and even worse, Price very often appears to be a guy who doesn't have a firm grasp on the basics of NFL operations and strategies. If you're already familiar with the Patriots history, skip this.

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

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.

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