By Michael Hurley, CBS Boston
BOSTON (CBS) — In terms of winning championships, future Hall of Fame cornerback Darrelle Revis had exactly one successful season in his NFL career.
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Apparently, he hated it.
Revis appeared on the “I Am Athlete” podcast with Brandon Marshall, Chad Johnson, Channing Crowder and Jared Odrick and spoke about his time in New England. After speaking negatively about the tension within the walls of Gillette Stadium, Revis was asked directly if he enjoyed his one season playing in New England.
“No,” Revis answered. “I did not.”
Revis took it a step further, stating plainly that … nobody enjoys or has enjoyed playing for the Patriots.
“When you deal with the things up there, it’s a little bit strenuous. And nobody likes it in the locker room,” Revis said. “That’s to be honest — nobody. Nobody likes it!”
Revis spent eight seasons with the Jets, who went 53-55 with Revis on the field from 2007-12 and from 2015-16. He played all 16 games for the 4-12 Buccaneers, before joining the Patriots, who went 14-2 before rattling off three playoff wins to win Super Bowl XLIX over Seattle.
One might think that such success would color Revis’ opinion in favor of Bill Belichick over Rex Ryan. Alas, that is not the case.
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“It’s just two different coaching philosophies. You know, Rex is a little bit more loose. You know, he likes dogs. He wants you to go out there and play hard, run into a wall,” Revis said. “You know, I’m happy for the grind and the hustle of winning Super Bowl 49, but you know, waking up every day and, you know, walking into the facility and having to deal with the tension. You know, you see why they’ve been in 10 Super Bowls, you see the hustle and the grind of it. But at the end of the day, there’s other philosophies to win. And it doesn’t have to be that way. I mean you got 32 teams with 32 coaches. Some are intense, some look at things another way, and there’s different philosophies to win the game.”
Revis also brought up DeflateGate and Spygate, stating that “people can look at that as cheating, you know, in a sense.” And he also said that the Patriots’ success came 100 percent from Tom Brady, not Belichick.
“TB12. I would say TB12. That was a steal for Bill Belichick and the Patriots, to draft him in the sixth round. Nobody never knew that Tom was gonna win this many championships,” Revis said. “But you gotta look at the hustle of Tom. Tom is one of the most competitive players on that field, and he knows how to move chess pieces on the board. To answer the question, it’s TB12. One-hundred percent. It’s the way that he knows how to run the offense in and out.”
Revis seemed to indicate that players don’t really know what’s going on in terms of the Patriots’ day-to-day operations, and that was something he did not enjoy dealing with every day in 2014.
“If you look at Tom right now, he’s having the best time of his career, because he’s in Tampa, he’s down there having a great time. And when you play with the New England Patriots, it’s a lot of pressure every time you walk in the door,” Revis said. “Because there’s a lot of tension, there’s a lot of noise going on in the background, where how the team is ran, it’s the unknown. You just don’t know — you don’t know what Mr. Kraft’s doing, you don’t know what Bill’s doing, you just don’t know.”
That being said, Revis was nice enough to give Belichick some credit for ranking third all time in regular-season wins by a head coach and winning more Super Bowls and conference championships than any other head coach in NFL history.
“At the end of the day, the way that he runs his ship is a little bit different,” Revis said of Belichick. “But I do give him credit, you know, for winning so many Super Bowls and having the longevity to do it.”
Well, that’s awfully generous.
One might assume that the lone Super Bowl ring in his collection would have brought about more positive reflections for Revis, particularly as someone who toiled through some painful losing seasons in his career. Yet the cost of winning in New England was a price that Revis did not enjoy paying.
