How Patriots’ Matthew Slater decided to return for a 16th NFL season

As the Patriots climbed aboard an airport-bound caravan of busses on the second Sunday in January, their wing-and-a-prayer 2022 season having ended with a 35-23 loss to the Buffalo Bills at Highmark Stadium, Matthew Slater’s cell phone was very much alive and kickin’.

Slater, a special-teams performer for the Patriots for 15 seasons, three of those seasons ending with Super Bowl victories, had talked with the media after the game. It had been an emotional session, sure, and yet he was noncommittal about returning for a 16th season. “I’m not sure,” is how he put it. But now, as calls and text messages kept arriving from many of the important people in his life, Slater wasn’t so sure about being not so sure.

Maybe, the 37-year-old thought to himself, this really is it.

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“You’re hearing from teammates, guys you played with five or 10 years ago, and you’re getting calls from family and friends, and they’re also congratulating you on a great career,” Slater said on Friday, recalling that bus ride to Buffalo Niagara International Airport. “And I’m thinking about how that game went, the way we performed, especially in the kicking game, and I’m thinking, OK, this is probably the end of the road.”

“The emotions were very high,” he continued. “I was obviously very frustrated, the way the day had gone. Maybe it was God’s way of telling me it was time to stop playing football.”

A little more than a month later, Patriots fans were delivered the happy news that Slater, who turns 39 in September, is not ready to retire. The news went on a bit of a test drive first, with various sources parceling out the information to the beat writer, and then, on Feb. 17, the Pats sent out an email with an all-caps headline: “PATRIOTS ANNOUNCE THAT SPECIAL TEAMS CAPTAIN MATTHEW SLATER WILL RETURN THIS SEASON.”

Season 16 with Slater.
Patriots announce that special teams captain Matthew Slater will return this season:
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) February 17, 2023

So . . . what happened between the bus ride and the headline? The easy assumption is Slater made his decision following a kitchen-table summit with his wife, Shahrzad Slater. Or maybe what he needed was a pep talk from his dad, Jackie Slater, the Hall of Fame offensive tackle who played 20 seasons in the NFL, all with the Rams. Perhaps it was no more complicated than Slater taking a couple of weeks off to rest his body, after which he determined he had another season in him.

Then again, perhaps it was no more complicated than this: It would have been wildly presumptuous to plan on a 16th season until Patriots coach Bill Belichick weighed in on the matter. In other words, he was waiting for Bill to tell him, “We’re on to 2023.” Or not.

Turns out, it was all of these things. The body. The wife. The dad. The coach. Slater never called it a four-step process, and yet that’s the way it came across. We were sitting in an otherwise empty suite at Gillette Stadium, where, down below, Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s soccer team, the Revolution, was engaged in a practice on this cold, icy day.

When Slater got around to talking about his meeting with Belichick, it was me who called it a four-step process. Slater seemed amenable to that at first, but then stopped and said, “Actually, it was a five-step process.”

Body. Wife. Father. Coach. And?

“And my faith,” Slater said.

Here, then, is the inside story of the five-step process that led to Matthew Slater’s decision to return to the New England Patriots for a 16th season.

The faith

“My faith is the lens through which I see the world,” he said. “As a faithful man, as a prayerful man, that was the first step of the whole decision.”

He posed a question to himself: Do I feel like I am walking in my purpose if I come back and play football again?

“It’s hard to articulate what your personal relationship with God looks like,” he said. “Certainly I felt like He was telling me not only could I come back and play football, but that the relationships and platforms I have allow me to make an impact in so many ways.”

The body

Slater took two weeks off after the season ended. “I didn’t do anything in terms of training,” he said.

It took another week for him to begin making regular visits to Gillette Stadium to work out. At this point, he still hadn’t made a decision whether to retire or play another season.

But this happened: “I didn’t feel as bad as thought I would,” he said. “And by that, I mean physically. I felt pretty good. So I worked out for a couple of weeks, and I’m watching the playoffs, and I’m thinking, this is going even better than I thought it would.”

He sat down to watch the Kansas City Chiefs play the Cincinnati Bengals in the AFC Championship Game.

“That got me to thinking about the many AFC Championship Games that I’ve been able to participate in,” said Slater, who has participated in eight of them. “I realized I might not be ready, mentally and emotionally, to walk away from this.”

A message from the captain 🫡
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) February 22, 2023

The wife

Matthew and Shahrzad Slater have three sons (Jeremiah, Noah, Micah) and a daughter (Hannah). Now that’s a lot of family. And Slater admits it’s a lot of extra work for his wife during football season — keeping in mind that on some level, football is a year-round business.

“She’s essentially raising our kids during the season,” Slater said. “I’m not there to drop them off at school, or pick them up from school. And for her to say, ‘I’m going to support you as you chase your dreams,’ that’s what I needed to hear. She was telling me that she can take care of the things at home that need to be taken care of.”

Slater said his wife told him, “I don’t want you to look back in five years and say you wish you had played another year.”

“That gave me peace of mind,” Slater said. “That was her saying, ‘I got you covered.’ That did a lot for me.’

The dad

I explained to Slater that I was only 15 when my own father died. Therefore, I told him, I have no concept of what it’s like to be a middle-aged man who can call his father for advice. That’s an advantage that Slater has in his life that many others, myself included, do not have. And in Slater’s case, the advantage becomes even more pronounced: Not only is his father still around, but Jackie Slater, age 68, is a former NFL player. He’s a Hall of Famer.

And central to this discussion, Jackie Slater had to make similar decisions about continuing his playing career as age took him into his late 30s. And beyond: He was 41 when, in 1995, he played his last game. The Rams had relocated to St. Louis by then. He played with Ron Jaworski on the 1976 Los Angeles Rams and with Jerome Bettis on the 1995 St. Louis Rams. (I had to look those up.)

“My dad is semi-retired now,” Matthew Slater said. “He does a little media in Southern California. He and (former Rams quarterback) Vince Ferragamo have a podcast they do.

“So I’m in a very unique position. My dad has more experience doing what I do than I have. The conversation between us was what Year 16 looked like to him, in his career. And how he felt physically.

“Some of the conversations my wife and I had, my mom and him had years earlier,” he said. “Just as my wife and I talked about what would be best in terms of the family dynamic, my parents had that talk in terms of what would be best for the four of us, which included my brother and me.”

Slater said his father walked away from the game on his terms.

“He was hurt that last season,” he said. “He tore his triceps. He says he could have played another season, but he understood going in that it was going to be his last season.”

Matthew Slater has no triceps issues. His father gave him his blessings to play a 16th season.

The coach

It would probably make for a better story to ladle it out there that Slater stepped nervously inside Bill Belichick’s office for the Big Meeting. And it would be even better if an image emerged of Slater sitting here, alone, in a mahogany-walled room filled with trophies, proclamations, championship banners and framed, autographed photos of famous people as he waited for Belichick to arrive.

(Disclosure: The only time I’ve ever been in Belichick’s office was when the team was still playing in old Foxboro Stadium. The way it looked, Belichick could just as easily have been a carpet salesman.)

Anyway, the Big Meeting was really no meeting at all. And there wasn’t even an office involved, grand or otherwise.

It happened in a hallway.

“I bumped into him outside the weight room,” Slater said. “I was going out, he was coming. I told him I felt like I wanted to come back and play. And it was very well received. He was excited that I felt that way.”

Robert Kraft and Bill Belichick on the return of Matthew Slater.
— New England Patriots (@Patriots) February 17, 2023

“If Bill had said, ‘OK, it’s time,’ that would have removed all doubt about playing,” Slater added. “But he wanted me back. The conversation was all of two minutes, maybe three minutes.”

(Photo: Mark J. Rebilas / USA Today)