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Patriots QB
Tom Brady
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Thirteen months into his "lifetime contract" with the Patriots, Drew
Bledsoe’s life in New England ended. There’s a short life expectancy for
quarterbacks who get benched in the NFL.
Barely a year ago, Bledsoe signed a 10-year deal that was reportedly going to pay him
$103 million to lead the Patriots into battle until the end of his playing days, at which
time they would give him a snowblower to drive out of CMGI Field on his way to retirement
in Montana.
Instead, he got the gate barely a year after he was supposedly set for life, traded to
a divisional rival for a 2003 first-round draft choice like a nonentity whom no one feared
anymore. So ended the Bledsoe era in New England, and so too did it begin anew in Buffalo,
where they had to open the ticket offices unexpectedly because fans began to line up to
buy season tickets after hearing that the three-time Pro Bowl quarterback who had so often
tormented them in the past was coming to town.
Bledsoe left New England having played on two Super Bowl teams and leading one, which
is part of the reason he’s gone. In 1996, Bledsoe was the driving force behind a team
that unexpectedly reached Super Bowl XXXI, passing for 4,086 yards and throwing 27
touchdown passes. Five years later, the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVI but not because of
Bledsoe’s presence. Many New Englanders insist they won because of his absence. So it
goes in the world of the NFL.
Bledsoe stood on the sideline all day last January in New Orleans as a baby-faced kid
named Tom Brady led his Patriots to one of the most improbable Super Bowl victories in NFL
history, a 20-17 last-second win over the heavily favored Rams.
In the intervening years between those two games played, coincidentally in the very
same stadium, Bledsoe’s game slowly melted away, as did the personnel around him. He
was sacked 100 times in his last two years as a starter before being thrown down so
violently in the second game of last season by Jets LB Mo Lewis that it sheared off a
blood vessel in his heart and caused him to nearly bleed to death. By the time he returned
to good health two months later, Brady had usurped him.
Brady led his team to nine straight wins to end the season, including a Super Bowl
victory that won him the game’s MVP award and sent him to Hawaii for his first trip
to the Pro Bowl. He lived every young man’s dream, completing a club-record 63.9
percent of his 413 passes while finishing sixth in the NFL in quarterback rating with an
86.5 mark. He was, as they say, "Da Bomb," even though he seldom threw Da Bomb.
Brady was a fresh face. He was the future, and soon enough Drew Bledsoe was the past.
After he was dealt to the Bills before the second day of April’s draft after two
weeks of off-and-on negotiations with Buffalo club president Tom Donahoe, Bledsoe’s
old coach and new nemesis, Bill Belichick, said all the right things. But if he truly
meant them, would he have traded him to a team he must compete with twice a year for the
AFC East title?
"I have a lot of respect for Drew," Belichick said. "They gave up a
significant price and got a significant player. I’m sure we’ll have our hands
full when we play Buffalo. I don’t look forward to competing against him, but
you’ve got to do what’s best for the team.
"We all know what the situation was here. A football team has one starting
quarterback. In the end, it can only be one guy."
For better or worse, that guy is Tom Brady. Gone is the owner of nearly every club
passing record. Gone is the guy who threw for 29,657 yards and 166 touchdowns in nine
years. But gone, too, is a guy who was sacked at an alarming rate in recent years,
something that may have changed him as a player.
That, more than anything else, is what the Patriots are banking on. If they thought
Bledsoe was still the guy who threw 55 touchdown passes in two years or the one who twice
passed for over 4,000 yards and a third time threw for 3,985, would they have sent him
packing to a division rival?
Clearly the answer is no, because no coach, not even one so morose that Bill Parcells
used to call him "Doom," wants to commit football suicide. That is why
Belichick’s conclusion had best be right, because if Bledsoe returns to that level of
play while throwing to Eric Moulds, Peerless Price and second-round choice Josh Reed and
handing off to Travis Henry and Shawn Bryson, he will become a ghost that haunts the
Patriots for the rest of their days at CMGI Field.
Many wonder if Brady, who relies more on accuracy and quick reads than on a strong arm
or elusive feet, is a mirage. That will be the pressure he feels this fall with Bledsoe in
Buffalo, serving as his constant measuring stick while the football world watches to see
if he can duplicate last year’s miracle. Brady knows this is coming and claims to be
unfazed by it. After last season, why should he feel any other way at the moment?
"I’m no one-year wonder," Brady says, and leaves it at that.
Yet many football people wonder at the gamble Belichick took when he ended
Bledsoe’s lifetime contract in New England a year after he’d signed it. He bet
his future in coaching on No. 12, even though No. 11 has long been considered the luckier
digit. He better hope he hits that number, because if he doesn’t, no one will
remember him anymore as the guy who dumped Bernie Kosar in Cleveland.
They’ll remember him as the guy who cut his throat in New England.
Ron Borges is a columnist for the Boston Globe. |
