Monday Night Football in Foxborough. Texans-Patriots. Houston, 11-1. New England, 9-3. The two best teams in the AFC—one with an unrelenting offence, the other with an impermeable defence—were going to run at each other for 60 minutes and see who had more piss and vinegar in them. By all accounts, it was going to be awesome. The all-powerful sports-entertainment cycle kicked into overdrive; talking heads said things like “playoff atmosphere,” “playoff implications” and “possible playoff matchup,” as they tend to do once the leaves are gone and the air is cold. The hype was enormous. More than 14 million people watched in the U.S. alone. An awful lot of people bet an awful lot of money on the outcome. And Tom Brady needed just 20 minutes to ruin it all.
Brady stepped onto the field for the first time that night at his own 44-yard line and took the Patriots to Houston’s 37 in two plays. Pushing the tempo, as they always do, the Patriots started operating without a huddle. A pass interference call gave Brady a clean slate at Houston’s 29, from where he dropped back, faked a pass to his right, calmly stepped up into the pocket and fired to diminutive wideout Wes Welker, who stretched out at Houston’s four-yard line to make the catch. Two snaps later, Brady stood in the shotgun and called his tight end Aaron Hernandez to line up beside him at halfback, which threw the Texans blitzing defence out of sorts. Players ran around confused, scrambling to adjust their coverages. The large yet surprisingly fleet Hernandez wound up covered by Bradie James, who, at six-foot-two and 240 lb., is nobody’s idea of a cover linebacker. Hernandez ran five yards upfield then cut hard to his left and took the pass, leaving James in his wake as he jogged into the end zone. All told, it took three minutes and 12 seconds for Brady to turn Houston’s defence into stewed chicken—falling apart at the bone. He wasn’t done.
His next drive took even less time—just two minutes and 41 seconds—and saw Brady calmly standing tall in the face of six-man Houston blitzes, completing pass after pass. It was capped by a play that was like magic; the kind of misdirection trick where the magician has you looking at the meaningless playing card in his right hand while he’s unfastening your watch with his left. Brady, running back Stevan Ridley and the entire offensive line ran the mother of all play-action stretch fakes, pulling Houston’s safeties in while receiver Brandon Lloyd sprinted past them untouched to the end zone, where Brady found him with a perfect fade over his left shoulder. It was 14–0, and he still wasn’t done.
What was remarkable about the Patriots’ third drive was not the precisely timed rocket Brady fired at Hernandez in heavy coverage for a first down on third and eight. It wasn’t the meticulously engineered screen pass to Welker that went for 16 yards, out of a formation that started with an empty backfield yet still convinced Houston the ball would be handed off for a run in the opposite direction. And it wasn’t even the deftly opportunistic lob he sent to Hernandez—forgotten and uncovered as the Texans struggled to keep pace with the Patriots’ no-huddle offence—for Brady’s third touchdown pass in as many drives. It was that the Texans got to Brady. Repeatedly. They blitzed over and over again, putting hands and helmets in his face as he operated. At one point, superhuman defensive end J.J. Watt—the man is six-foot-five, 295 lb.—reached Brady and looked like an octopus pulling a fishing boat underwater as he spun the quarterback to the ground, sending him forcibly into an awkward somersault. The hit would have likely broken your ribs, maybe your clavicle. Brady just got back up and kept firing until he reached the end zone.
Just like that, all the hype, all the anticipation, all the excitement, it all disappeared into the cold New England night. It was 20 minutes in and Tom Brady was already 11-of-13 for 154 yards and three touchdowns. His work here was done. The game was decided. No one stops football in its tracks. No one but Tom Brady.
Big game or not, Brady is as good as it gets when it comes to the intricate art of quarterbacking. Since 2005, he has five seasons of at least 4,000 passing yards, 25 touchdowns and a passer rating above 90. Only 28 quarterbacks have had a single season like that in the history of football, and only eight have done it more than three times. Brady is a pocket passer’s pocket passer, standing tall in the thick of pass rushers trying to tear him apart, his eyes constantly scanning downfield, looking for the open man. It has always been a firmly held belief among his teammates that if you can get open, Brady will find you. It’s why Patriots receivers commit so fully to their routes. Just watch Welker or Lloyd run a post or a screen or a hitch—they don’t waste a step, because they know the ball will be there. Brady will find them.
It’s what Houston didn’t understand that Monday night: You cannot blitz Tom Brady. Coming into the game, Brady was releasing the ball, on average, 2.63 seconds after the snap when facing additional pass rushers—the fastest of any starting quarterback. He was getting rid of the ball so quickly that he had been sacked, rushed or knocked down on a league-low 14 percent of his dropbacks when facing additional pressure. It’s been his modus operandi throughout his career. Calm nerves, cold efficiency and perfect execution. It’s almost boring in its precision.
Yet the Texans, victims of their own stubbornness, sent five or more pass rushers at Brady 20 times in the first half alone. All Brady did was step back and complete 10 of his 12 passing attempts in those situations for 121 yards and three touchdowns. Coming out of that game, Brady had thrown an NFL-best 18 touchdowns and not a single interception when blitzed in 2012. So, defensive coordinators, how do you beat a blitz-proof quarterback whose receivers work harder than any others to get open while his offensive line turns away four-man pass rushes with ease?
It’s the league’s best quarterback working in the league’s best offensive system, which is certainly a good thing when you’re in the business of winning football games, but can present a bit of a paradox for a guy like Brady. When the 35-year-old strung together maybe the three best drives of the season against Houston, the football-watching public’s reaction was decidedly indifferent. Oh, this again? Through week 15, the Patriots had scored 506 points. Only one other team was even in the 400s—Denver at 409. Brady and the Patriots have set their own bar so high that to exceed it they would have to score around 75 points a game.
The thing is, when you’re this consistently prolific, this dominant, you don’t get much credit for your prolific dominance. It becomes expected. So even if he is the greatest quarterback to ever touch a football, can Brady ever truly get the credit he deserves? Most people seem more interested in finding his weaknesses to prove he’s not so great at all.
There will always be the question of how to measure a player like Brady, who plies his trade for one of the most innovative franchises the NFL has ever known. The curmudgeonly, brilliant Bill Belichick, New England’s head coach, has dictated the league’s offensive discourse for the greater part of a decade, staying two steps ahead of defences with something as small as a running-back-by-committee system or as major as completely reinventing the tight end position. The way Belichick took Randy Moss—driven out of Minnesota and Oakland for crimes of petulance, selfishness and poor work ethic—and tranformed him from a very good receiver into a historically great one, is still the envy of coaching staffs around the league. Sure, Brady has put up some of the game’s best numbers over the past decade, but could he have done it without his avant-garde head coach and the supporting cast around him?
Well, maybe. Search a bit deeper and there are some flaws to Brady’s game. Since 2009, Brady and the Patriots have lost a game they led by eight points or less in the final five minutes seven times, tied for third-most in the NFL. Of the 17 players who have made at least 10 plays while holding a one-score lead in the final five minutes over that time, Brady’s total quarterback rating (TQBR) is fifth-lowest at 15. For comparison’s sake, Green Bay’s Aaron Rodgers has a 97.4 TQBR in the same situations, while Atlanta’s Matt Ryan sits at 89.5. But this season, Brady (77.1) had a higher TQBR in all situations than Ryan (74.5) and Rodgers (72.5). This suggests that Brady doesn’t perform well under the pressure of possessing the ball with a slim lead. He dramatically underperforms when his team needs him most.
And then there is the 2008 season, when Brady went down with a season-ending knee injury in the first quarter of the Patriots opening game. Back-up Matt Cassel, who had thrown fewer than 40 passes in his NFL career, took over and led New England to an 11-5 record, throwing for 3,693 yards and 21 touchdowns, including five games of 250 yards or more. The Patriots traded Cassel at the height of his value to Kansas City, where he has never come remotely close to replicating his ’08 success. He simply isn’t that good a quarterback. But in New England’s system, he looked like Johnny Unitas.
So if you were to take an ostensibly talented yet criminally unsupported quarterback from another team—Tony Romo comes to mind—and drop him into the Patriots’ offence, would he be a surefire Hall of Famer as well? And if you transplanted Brady to Dallas, would he be merely adequate, not extraordinary? If you took away Rob Gronkowski, Moss, Welker and the rest of the abundance of talent that has operated around him, would Tom Brady still be Tom Brady? Or is he simply a product of his environment?
Anyone who has ever had any success in life will tell you about the virtue of being in the right place at the right time. Brady only took over as the Patriots starter in 2001 because Drew Bledsoe suffered a sheared blood vessel in his chest after a violent hit in the second game of the season. Bledsoe had just signed a 10-year contract worth more than $100 million, but he never started another game in Foxborough. If that blood vessel had held up, Bledsoe would likely have played the rest of his career there. Brady might have been Matt Cassel. Or worse.
OK, Tom Brady is a better quarterback than Matt Cassel. Fine. If you really wanted to, you could even argue he belongs in the pantheon of NFL greats likes Joe Montana and John Elway. He does have three Super Bowl rings, which seems to matter a great deal in those conversations. But in the realm of great men—in general, not just in football—what is it that’s so great about Brady?
Here is what Tom Brady does: He is very good at predicting the strategy of 11 uniformed men, and making the necessary adjustments to his own strategy in order to exploit the opposition’s weakness. If his offensive line can give him a moment, he will throw a ball 20 or 30 yards in the direction of a man who, ideally, has a reasonable buffer of space and time to catch it. Often, he gives the ball to a running back standing next to or behind him and becomes irrelevant. Sometimes, a 300-lb. man will sprint at him and try to put a shoulder through his teeth. It’s probably the worst part of the gig. It hurts something fierce.
And that’s about it. It’s not like he does anything revolutionary. He’s not solving crimes or studying disease. He’s not peeling back DNA, molecule by molecule, to learn more about what we are. He thinks strategically, handles a ball skillfully and sometimes takes a hit. So why do we obsess over him the way we do? Because we all need him.
Football teams need Brady and the Patriots. You can’t be David without a Goliath. Call them a measuring stick, call them public enemy No. 1, call them what you will. But every time a team plays the Patriots, it’s a big, important game. Beating the Patriots is a statement, no matter the team that does it. When the Buffalo Bills beat New England at home in 2011, stadium staff thought the fans would try to tear down the goalposts. When Seattle beat the Patriots at home this year, overcoming a 13-point fourth-quarter deficit to win by one, you could hear them celebrating from Vancouver. A win over New England is just different. The Patriots don’t get beaten—they get stunned.
The NFL needs Brady and the Patriots. Not just for the piles of money they flood into the league’s coffers as one of its biggest television draws, but for their willingness to be the bad guys. They are unrepentant in their ruthlessness, running up the score, engaging in verbal spats and shrugging off league sanctions when they are called offside, like when commissioner Roger Goodell fined Belichick $500,000 for videotaping the New York Jets’ defensive signals during a game, a violation of league rules that Belichick dismissed as a “grey area.” Brady isn’t always the focal point of the team’s scornful arrogance, but watch a game closely and you’ll see he can taunt an opponent or scream at a referee with the best of them.
Finally, you need Brady and the Patriots. The man and the team are the embodiment of professional and personal fulfillment—they are success. They are everything you should be but likely are not. They are what you can publicly root against and privately envy on Sunday afternoons, when all that pent-up emotion, caused by the inescapable dissatisfaction and resentment of workaday life, is funnelled toward the helmet-clad men on TV. If only you were so prolific, so reliably successful at achieving your goals on a weekly basis, and with such might and dominance over everyone else, surely you would be a better person, a better friend, a better lover. No one wants to be the Kansas City Chiefs of life. And if you could be Tom Brady? If you were all firm jawline, full head of hair, wry confidence and penetrating blue eyes? If you were showing up to work every day and doing a job so damn well that people were actually bored of your success? Well, then you’d be perfect.
This article originally appeared in Sportsnet magazine on January 28, 2013.
