When trying to describe Adams and what he does, team employees shrug. Some profiles indicate he should be 57, but he has no official biography with the team and therefore no way to check. He is in the coaches’ box during games, but no coaches or players will say whether he is the one talking to Belichick on his headset. What they do say is he dissects tape better than anyone they’ve seen; that he can see things on the field that nobody else would ever find; that he is brilliant; and that he attacks football problems for Belichick, whom he leaves his office to see two or three times a day. “I think he has a photographic memory,” O’Brien says. Others who have worked with him say the same thing. “Essentially, he is one of the people who meet with Belichick at Belichick’s level,” explains Jay Robertson, who was an assistant coach at Northwestern in the early 1970s and has remained friends with Adams since. Adams has always been a genius in that way you might read about in a book or see in a move but never believe such a person could be real. He was raised in the elite prep schools of Massachusetts: Dexter School in Brookline and Phillips Academy in Andover, and there was no limit to what fed his curiosity. But his passion was football.