SATURDAY MORNING, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick alone, one last skull session before game day. That was about 10 years ago, during the decade-long drought of the New England championship, when the Patriots were trying to recapture the lost magic, when we first I started to think that maybe Brady was getting there. Belichick was watching a movie by Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez and focused on a specific move. Sanchez was rolling to the right, chased by defenders, unbalanced and trying to survive, and he had an open receiver in the field – 65 yards deep and 10 or more diagonally, in the opposite hashmark. It was a launch that only a few defenders in history could attempt, let alone complete – a fact that seemed lost to the greatest coach in the history of modern football.
“Just play it,” said Belichick. “You will not be more open than that.”
Brady was incredulous. I couldn’t shoot it 85 meters! he thought.
“Just let it go,” added Belichick.
Let it go? Brady thought, laughing to himself. The ball would go 15 yards if I played it.
Years after Brady told me this story, it remains with me. It’s not just because it’s interesting to imagine a lifelong defensive coach failing to understand – or refusing to worry – the degree of difficulty in an almost impossible move. It is because of what Brady told me after describing the moment: “When I see a piece, I see it within my own limitations.”
BRADY’S WORDS WERE difficult to buy at the time, and are more difficult to buy now. Throughout most of his two-decade career, it seemed to fans and detractors that, for Tom Brady, anything is possible. After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers took down the Green Bay Packers to go to the Super Bowl, Bruce Arians put it best: “The belief he gave this organization that it could be done – it only took one man.”