Chiefs cornerback Ty Law, tackling the Jaguars’ Fred Taylor in October, has not been back to the Super Bowl since he left New England.

AP / Ed Zurga

It was thought that the salary-cap rule would mean the end of dynasties in the NFL. But the Pats have built one anyway. This three-part series examines how they've done it.

"If your singular focus is winning, you must release aging, overpaid players, no matter how unpopular doing so is.”

—From Management Secrets of the New England Patriots, by James Lavin

It’s no secret why the Patriots are the best team in football, undefeated at 18-0, and playing in the Super Bowl for the fourth time is seven years.

No organization in the NFL is better at determining not only what a player can do for it on the field, but also what a player is worth to it in this era of the salary cap.

There’s only so much money to go around, and if a team fails to make shrewd personnel and financial decisions, it finds itself out of money and out of the playoffs.

What has made the Patriots perennial winners is not just the players they sign, but, equally important, the players they don’t.

Remember the uproar when the Pats couldn’t agree to terms with popular strong safety Lawyer Milloy and wound up waiving him just before the start of the 2003 season?

Milloy was a four-time Pro Bowler and a team leader. He also was turning 30, and in 2002 had failed to intercept a pass, make a sack, or, despite his reputation as a hard hitter, force even one fumble.

He wound up signing with division rival Buffalo, which routed a shaken Patriots team in the season opener, 31-0. But the Patriots quickly recovered, losing just one more game the rest of the season. They won their last 15 in a row, including a 32-29 victory over Carolina in Super Bowl XXXVIII.

In the five years since Milloy left New England, he has not been to either the Pro Bowl or the Super Bowl.

“It is human nature,” Lavin wrote, “to allow sentiment to sway decisions. Many coaches would have paid Joe Andruzzi, David Patten and Ty Law — integral members of three Super Bowl-winning teams — to stay on for a fourth Super Bowl run (following the 2004 season.)

“But Bill Belichick is not your ordinary coach. Belichick suppresses his humanity and makes personnel decisions a robot might. As he says: ‘I just want to improve our team and make it as good as it can possibly be. That’s what I do every year.’ ”

A.J. Smith, the Cranston native who’s general manager of the San Diego Chargers, has been studying the Patriots organization for years.

“Why wouldn’t you study winners?” he said. “The bottom line is that it comes down to players. It always has been, and always will be, about the players. You have to get as many good ones as you can. If you’ve done a good job evaluating players, then you extend their contracts early, so your team doesn’t turn into a ‘college program,’ where guys are with you for four years, then gone. Of course, if you sign players long-term, and they’re not any good, that gets you in salary-cap hell.”

The Patriots determine the terms they’ll offer, and it’s up to the player to decide whether to accept them.

“The organization decides who’ll stay, and how much they’ll get,” Smith said. “If the player and his agent agree, there’s a deal, and everybody’s smiling. If not, the organization moves on. New England is unbelievable at that.”

The Patriots almost-unbelievable success in that regard is attributable to the brilliance of Belichick and Scott Pioli, the team’s vice president of player personnel, and the willingness of team owner Robert Kraft to let them do their jobs.

“I’m thankful,” Pioli has said, “we have an owner that asks questions, but doesn’t question us.”

There was no question that the Patriots, after losing the AFC Championship Game at Indianapolis in 2006, needed a game-breaker and a playmaker at wide receiver.

First, they made a deal with the Dolphins, giving Miami second and seventh-round picks in the ’07 draft for Wes Welker, who set a franchise record for receptions in his first season in New England, with 112 catches.

Next, they signed Donte Stallworth as a free agent. He averaged 15.2 yards per catch on 46 receptions.

Finally, in a gamble that has turned out to be a stroke of genius, they obtained Randy Moss from the Raiders for only a fourth-round pick. Moss proceeded to set an NFL record this season by catching 23 touchdown passes.

If the Patriots hope to re-sign Moss for the ’08 season, they’ll all but certainly have to release Stallworth, whose contract calls for him to receive big numbers next year.

“The NFL is a tough business,” Kraft says. “It’s cruel and ruthless, in many ways. Harvard Business School doesn’t prepare you for it.

“In our sport, as opposed to some other professional leagues, every team has a chance to win. Our success hasn’t been something that just happened. It’s the result of years of planning and organizing.

“I didn’t grow up in this business,” said Kraft, who was a Patriots fan before he became the team’s owner, holding season tickets in Section 217, row 25, near the 10-yard line in the old stadium in Foxboro. “I had to learn it.”

“All the businesses I’m in, I try to figure out what I don’t know. Once I know what I don’t know, I go get the best people who know the things I don’t. I wanted an organization that could get to the playoffs every year. Once you do that, anything can happen.”

The Patriots have been to the playoffs five years in a row now, and six of the last seven, since Belichick was brought in to replace Pete Carroll for the 2000 season.

“When I hire people,” Kraft said, “I look first at integrity, character, and loyalty. That’s most important. Number two is work ethic. Number three, I look at brains. If they don’t have one and two, brains don’t matter. Bill had all those qualities, and we’ve been able to forge a strong, trusting relationship.”

Which is not what Kraft had with his first coach, Bill Parcells. “I wanted to know what was going on,” Kraft said. “He wasn’t always respectful about telling me what was going on. I’m not taking anything away from his being a great coach. He brought a lot to this franchise. If you need a quick infusion of credibility, he’s great. But he’s not someone to manage resources for the long-term.”

Long-term, no organization in the NFL has proved to be better at managing resources than the once-again Super Bowl-bound New England Patriots.

jdonalds@projo.com