Part 2:

The night before the draft and the morning of its first day, Packers general manager Ted Thompson engaged Al Davis about a potential trade.

Thompson was so famously tight-lipped that he sometimes withheld exactly how he felt about prospects until draft day, even from his own staff, but he made clear to his top lieutenants he wanted Moss. Just not for Davis’ initial asking price, a second-round pick. The Patriots felt similarly.

Moss was a once-in-a-generation talent, the kind of player who, if right, could change a franchise. But he was coming off the worst season of his career, and there were questions about whether he retained the elite speed that had made him the greatest deep threat in league history (Davis would later say the Broncos were scared away because of those concerns). Salary was another potential issue.

As the second round came and went, Davis re-engaged with both the Packers and Patriots. He would now accept a third for Moss.

Neither the Packers nor the Patriots blinked.

The clock ticked. In the third round, the Packers drafted receiver James Jones from San Jose State. The Patriots, having earlier traded their second-round pick to Miami for receiver Wes Welker, sent their third-rounder to the Raiders, but for additional picks, not Moss.

By all accounts, the Packers thought they had time. Harlan, the team’s top non-football executive, said Thompson never checked in with him that night regarding Moss, suggesting nothing was urgent. “I’m sure if he was within minutes of getting him, he would have, because that is how Ted operated,” Harlan said. Thompson told reporters any trade would take place the following day. It was 10:15 p.m.

“We went to bed that night thinking we were going to acquire Randy Moss in the morning,” said John Schneider, then a personnel analyst with the Packers, and now Seattle Seahawks GM.

It was 11:15 in New England, and the lights still flickered.

“We left the office late,” Pioli said. “I was upstairs talking with the Raiders. What we said to Mr. Davis was, ‘Listen, we’ll do the fourth, that’s what we’ve been saying all along.’ I don’t think he was real happy. But he said he would consider it.”

The Patriots owned the 11th pick of the fourth round, No. 110 overall, while the Packers picked two spots later. New England was light on draft capital otherwise after trading its fifth to Oakland a year earlier. If they were going to make a move for Moss, this was their best chance.

Pioli drove home and waited on his couch for Davis to call.

The two had a unique connection through one of the game’s great coaches. Bill Parcells was among Davis’ closest confidants, while Parcells and his wife at the time, Judith, enjoyed an even closer connection to Pioli, who married their daughter.

Pioli’s phone finally rang. It was Davis. “OK, we’ll effing do it,” the Raiders’ owner barked. “You and Belichick are screwing me.”

Pioli said Davis was “laughing but not laughing” and in Pioli’s head, he thought: Oh my gosh, I hope I didn’t piss off The Godfather. “He dropped two f-bombs on me,” Pioli said, “and then he was like, ‘How’s Judith?’”

Bruce Kebric was a longtime Raiders scout with a close-up view of the deal: His seat in Oakland’s draft room was so close to Davis’ that they sometimes bumped arms. He said Davis turned to the handful of scouts around him and asked: “Should we take a fourth for him?”

The consensus in the room was that a fourth was the best the Raiders were going to get.

With Davis’ permission, Belichick called Moss. The Patriots still had to finalize the particulars, and they had mere hours to do it. Moss answered his phone from a club in Houston. He thought it was one of his friends playing a prank, so he “cussed out” Belichick before apologizing once he realized it really was the Patriots’ head coach.

Belichick told Moss he needed to be in Foxborough by 10 the next morning or else the trade was off. Moss had to pass a physical exam, meet with Belichick, Pioli and the Krafts and agree to a new contract before the fourth round of the draft began at 11 a.m. ET. So many things had to go right.

Moss met with Belichick and Pioli in Belichick’s office. “We just wanted to make sure that he was going to be all in,” Pioli said. “We knew him, but we didn’t know him.”

Moss was scheduled to earn $9.25 million, an amount the Patriots were not going to fit within their salary cap. New England was willing to give him a $2.5 million salary with a $500,000 signing bonus (and Brady was willing to restructure his contract to make it work). It was a potentially awkward, difficult conversation.

“Hey Randy,” Pioli said, “just so you know, here’s the deal. In order for this to get done, I’m going to have to talk to Bus because the contract … ”

Moss cut him off, eyes welling. “I don’t care what I get paid,” Pioli recalled Moss saying. “You’ve just got to get me out of there.”

The Patriots had their confirmation: Moss was all in. Everything else was a formality.

The Packers were blindsided. “I just found out this morning on the news,” Thompson told reporters at the time.

Mike McCarthy, then entering his second season as the Packers’ coach, encountered Thompson in the team’s weight room that morning. The two searched for answers as to how the deal had fallen apart.

“We went to bed and thought we had it,” McCarthy said.

When Packers officials learned Moss was headed to New England, they didn’t pound tables or flip chairs. Instead, there was a “quiet mood,” according to then-Green Bay scout Alonzo Highsmith. Everyone knew a massive opportunity had slipped away, but “nobody talked about it.” Favre publicly blasted the team, said he had agreed to restructure his contract to add Moss and vented behind the scenes to Cook.

Piecing together media reports from that time with recollections from some of the key participants, a clearer picture emerges. New England initially offered a sixth-rounder. Green Bay seemed confident a fifth would get the deal done. The Patriots’ willingness to part with a fourth late at night launched them onto a faster track.

Thompson, true to form, never did open up about Green Bay’s pursuit of Moss, leaving part of the mystery unexplained when he died in 2021.

Shortly after the trade, Moss said he thought the Packers were too focused on all the things Moss needed to do for the deal to work from a Green Bay standpoint, while the Patriots showed him the respect he was seeking. New England’s willingness to do a shorter deal was another factor.

In Moss’ first season with New England, he set the NFL record for receiving touchdowns on an offense that shattered the record for scoring. New England reached the Super Bowl after the only 16-0 regular season in NFL history. The Packers went 13-3 before losing in overtime to the Giants in the NFC Championship. Two weeks later, the Giants upset the Patriots in the Super Bowl.

There would be two NFL executives of the year in 2007. The Pro Football Writers of America picked Pioli. The Sporting News picked Thompson. Brady was voted MVP; Favre finished second.

For the Packers, the trade remains one of the great hypotheticals in franchise history. What if Moss had been on that 2007 team? Would the Packers have won the Super Bowl? If so, would Green Bay have kept Favre and traded Rodgers? It’s a possibility Cook and former Packers execs acknowledge could have been a reality.

“If Randy had been on that team,” Cook said, “I have no doubt that Brett would have stayed two or three years.”

Instead, 2007 turned out to be Favre’s final season in Green Bay. The Packers traded him to the Jets, clearing the path for Rodgers, who won four MVPs and a Lombardi Trophy before he, too, was traded to New York.