Professional football players are drawn to type-A personalities like Jack Easterby, who years ago as the officiant of Brady Quinn’s wedding wrestled the schedule away from the wedding planner and streamlined the process to make it easier for the bride and groom. Players can relate to a deep-seated desire to be great. Easterby is not the only character coach in the NFL, but he might be the most ambitious one.

On the night of Dec. 1, 2012, a man named Jack Easterby — a lanky and balding former college basketball player and golfer with a thick Southern accent and a demeanor so relentlessly positive that it approaches goofy — stood before the Kansas City Chiefs and tried to make sense of death. Not just death: a murder-suicide.

That morning, shortly after killing his girlfriend with 10 shots, Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher arrived at the team parking lot with a handgun. He was distraught, crazed, panicked. A few team officials surrounded him, pleading with him to surrender his weapon and to not do any more damage. From down the road a police siren grew louder. Belcher decided it was over. “You know that I’ve been having some major problems at home and with my girlfriend,” he said. “I have hurt my girl already, and I can’t go back now.” Belcher knelt behind his car, made the sign of a cross on his chest and shot himself in the head.

Easterby, the Chiefs’ chaplain, was in the team building preparing a Saturday service when the gun went off. Just hours later, players and coaches were waiting for consoling words from a man who, if the team hadn’t drafted punter Ryan Succop out of South Carolina with the very last pick in 2009, they never would have known. Easterby had been the chaplain at South Carolina. Early in his second season, Succop asked Easterby to lead Bible study for the Chiefs, and Easterby demonstrated such an innate ability to connect with players — listening rather than talking, investing more in their lives than their games, assigning homework rather than uttering empty maxims — that Chiefs GM Scott Pioli came to personally pay for his flights from Columbia, South Carolina, to Kansas City.

That night, while players wondered what they could have done to prevent tragedy, Easterby felt prepared for his talk as if he had been born for it. “There is hope beyond these moments,” he began. “There’s something bigger going on.” He told them that if they prepared for death and for the life that continued after it, today’s devastation would linger less. He hugged a lot of guys. He gave everyone in the room a list of notes from his speech. He told them they could call him at any time. He combated crisis with love, plain and simple. “Men left encouraged,” former Chiefs linebacker Andy Studebaker remembers. “And they left in tears.”

Eight months later, in July 2013, the Patriots opened training camp with many wondering whether they had lost their way. The arrest of Aaron Hernandez on murder charges rattled many on the team. The post-Spygate years had seen them lose two Super Bowls, which gave license for some to question the validity of the three they had won. Some players privately struggled with the ruthless reality of life in the NFL, where the machine and the pressure can become too much. Something bigger than football seemed to be at stake. The team needed someone. Strange as it sounds, special-teams star Matt Slater says, they needed someone who would “offer love with no strings attached.”

“Tonight, my goal is that you’ll never be the same.”

Easterby says that often in his devotionals, with the swagger of a hitter calling his shot. It’s an invitation, and dozens of athletes and coaches — from Tom Brady to Brady Quinn, from Bill Belichick to South Carolina women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley — have accepted it. They don’t always buy into Easterby’s gospel, but they buy into Easterby himself. His job is to be trustworthy, and it doesn’t help him earn trust if he’s out there talking about it, which is why he politely declined to speak for this story. “He’s just a great person and friend,” Brady says. “You feel a special connection with him and with his genuine caring for all the people in his life.”

The Patriots, since his hire, say they are not the same, no matter what happens in Super Bowl XLIX and no matter the result of Ted Wells’ investigation into whether the team illegally deflated footballs in the AFC championship game. Owner Robert Kraft calls Easterby a “wonderful individual,” and Brady has told friends Easterby is one of the main reasons for the Patriots’ success this past year. Safety Devin McCourty calls him “a godsend to this team” who has “helped create better men.”

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