THE DYNASTY

From the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of Tiger Woods comes the definitive inside story of the New England Patriots football team - the greatest American sports dynasty of the twenty-first century.

It's easy to forget that the New England Patriots were once the laughingstock of the NFL, a nearly bankrupt team that had never won a championship and was on the brink of moving to St. Louis. Everything changed in 1994, when Robert Kraft acquired the franchise. Since then, the Patriots became a juggernaut, making ten trips to the Super Bowl and emerging as one of the most valuable sports teams in the world with an estimated value of $4 billion. In February 2019, Kraft, head coach Bill Belichick, and quarterback Tom Brady won an unprecedented sixth Lombardi Trophy together. Their twenty-year reign atop the NFL was the longest in league history, surpassing previous dynasties by the Packers, the Steelers, and the 49ers. The sports world has wondered: How was the Patriots dynasty built? And how did it last for two decades?

In The Dynasty, acclaimed sportswriter Jeff Benedict provides richly reported answers to those questions. Beginning with training camp in 2018, he secured unprecedented exclusive access to the Patriots team and organization. Over the next two years he conducted interviews with more than two hundred insiders, including team executives, coaches, players, players' wives, team doctors and lawyers, league officials, network television executives, sports agents, politicians, and entertainers. He also had access to hundreds of hours of video and audio recordings, as well as thousands of pages of legal documents, business records, emails, text messages, and minutes from phone calls and meetings.

From his interviews and exhaustive research, Benedict uncovers surprising new details about the inner workings of a team notorious for its secrecy. He provides an inside account of Robert Kraft outmaneuvering a legion of lawyers and investors in his quest to buy the team, and takes readers into the room at the eleventh hour when Kraft convinces the chairman of Boston's biggest bank to lend him the extra millions needed to close the deal. We observe the heated disagreements between Kraft and legendary coach Bill Parcells that led to their breakup. We listen in on the phone call when the greatest trade ever made - Bill Belichick for a first round draft choice - is negotiated. We are in the emergency room when doctors scramble to save franchise quarterback Drew Bledsoe as his chest is filling up with blood from a lacerated artery. We ride along with twenty-four-year-old Tom Brady as he follows a police escort to the stadium in a snowstorm before leading his team in the momentous "Tuck Rule" playoff victory over the Raiders that launched the dynasty. And we look over the shoulder of forty-year-old Brady as a surgeon performs a procedure on his throwing hand on the eve of the AFC Championship game in 2018.

What emerges is an intimate portrait that captures the human drama of the dynasty's three key characters - Kraft, Belichick, and Brady. Starting with the team's Cinderella season in 2001 when the Patriots roused a nation grieving the 9/11 attacks and pulled off the biggest upset in Super Bowl history to become "America's team," to the epic run of dominance that followed, they created the most disciplined, entertaining, and polarizing franchise in NFL history. The result is perhaps the most compelling and illuminating book that will ever be written about the greatest professional sports team of our time.

JEFF BENEDICT is a #1 New York Times bestselling author, a special features writer for Sports Illustrated, and a television and film producer. He has also written for the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, and his stories have been the basis for segments on 60 Minutes, 20/20, 48 Hours, Good Morning America, CBS Sunday Morning, the NFL Network, HBO Real Sports, CNN, and the Discovery Channel. He has authored and coauthored sixteen books, including the #1 New York Times bestselling Tiger Woods with Armen Keteyian. He lives with his wife and four children in Connecticut.