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Patriots QB
Tom Brady
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If you would have told me before this season began that the Patriots, coming off a
dismal 5-11 campaign, would advance to this year’s AFC title game, I would have said,
"Yeah, right. That’ll happen when hell freezes over."
Well, I don’t know what the temperature was in hell, but Foxboro Stadium sure
looked pretty frozen in the Snow Bowl that the Patriots and Raiders just played.
Patriots fans went to a playoff game, and the Winter Olympics broke out.
Do you believe in miracles? Yes!
This may not qualify as a miracle on ice, but the Patriots’ victory on snow is
just one more chapter in the improbable book this New England squad is writing.
Before the season began, the Patriots’ talent base looked so poor to me that they
couldn’t have done any worse if they had brought in Mike Eruzione and Jim Craig and
fitted them with shoulder pads.
On paper, the Patriots were hurting everywhere you looked. As I saw it at the time, the
RB situation seemed useless. The OL situation seemed hopeless. The receiving corps seemed
helpless.
The secondary had quality players in Ty Law and Lawyer Milloy, but the rest of the
defensive backs appeared vulnerable. The front seven was nothing to get excited about.
The only unit that warranted a grade of better than a C-plus was quarterback because of
Drew Bledsoe. And then he got hurt two games into the season.
On paper, this looked like one of the worst teams in the NFL.
Do you believe in miracles? This certainly seems to qualify as one, except for the fact
that in the new-age NFL, the most unlikely of teams now make strong pushes for the Super
Bowl on a yearly basis. Every season we get a team that no one saw coming, like a thief
that picks your pocket in a crowd. This season it’s the Patriots making the preseason
power teams want to file a police report. Hey, commissioner Tagliabue, the Colts and
Titans undoubtedly feel the Patriots stole their season.
While every member of the Patriots’ organization deserves credit for their
astonishing turnaround, two people stand out — head coach Bill Belichick and QB Tom
Brady.
Belichick is someone I think a lot of people previously liked to write off as a guy
who, as a head coach, made a pretty good defensive coordinator. That wasn’t fair
before the season began, and it’s certainly not true now. He was previously fired as
the Browns’ head coach, but if you think back, the club had progressed nicely before
he was sabotaged by the organization’s controversial decision to move out of
Cleveland.
This season, meanwhile, Belichick has turned in one of the great coaching jobs of all
time. Talk about making chicken salad out of chicken feathers. Belichick has squeezed
every ounce of potential out of this team. And then some. Actually, and then a lot.
It’s a case of squeezing blood from a stone.
Plus, Belichick deserves a ton of credit for his season-making decision to hitch his
wagon to Brady. A lot of people thought Belichick was nuts when he decided that Brady
would be his guy even when Bledsoe came back from injury. Make no mistake about it, I do
not believe the Patriots would have enjoyed the success they have if Bledsoe had stayed
healthy and been THE guy all season. Bledsoe is a quarterback who I think can still do
wonderful things if he is surrounded by high-quality talent. I do not think he is someone
who can excel with mediocre to poor talent around him. I do not think he is someone who
could have made Brady’s magic with the ragtag bunch that comprises the rest of the
New England offense.
Belichick’s crystal ball clearly was in sharper focus than anyone else’s
regarding the team’s QB situation. The vision of Belichick and director of player
personnel Scott Pioli was clearer than anyone else’s when they were making so many
moves below the radar that have worked out so spectacularly. That said, it is the outcome
of the one-time QB controversy that has made the Patriots’ season.
When Bledsoe got hurt, the Patriots had all the upside of a dot.com start-up company in
today’s wobbly marketplace. It turns out that Brady is the Kurt Warner of this
season. Not since Warner came from nowhere to take over for the injured Trent Green for
the Rams has an injury been so spectacularly beneficial for a team.
While he still must prove he can build on this season, Brady looks like he can develop
into something special.
As if his regular-season success weren’t enough, Brady turned in the type of
performance vs. the Raiders in the playoffs that was pure storybook in its sense of drama.
New England was trailing 13-3, and it looked like Cinderella was going to get the boot.
Instead, Brady found the glass slipper just in time. It was a perfect fit.
Despite posting nondescript numbers in the first three quarters, Brady got it going
when it mattered most. On a 10-play, fourth-quarter TD drive that cut the Raiders’
lead to 13-10, Brady completed nine straight passes for 61 yards and then finished it off
with a six-yard TD run. The young man — in only his second pro season and only a
sixth-round draft choice — was simply brilliant. Out of nowhere? He was playing out
of his mind.
With 2:06 left in the fourth quarter and still trailing by a field goal, Brady and Co.
worked some more magic to tie the game and send it to overtime. Sure, it took — holy
Rob Lytle, Raiders fans — a controversial call when a Brady fumble was overturned by
replay to keep New England alive. But don’t forget that the Patriots were not in
field-goal range at the time. Brady took advantage of the second chance provided and
completed the pass that set up Adam Viniatieri’s game tying 45-yard field goal.
In overtime, Brady completed 8-of-8 passes to set up Vinatieri’s game-winning kick
on the first possession of the extra period.
I still haven’t determined the temperature in hell, but without question, Foxboro
Stadium had frozen over. The chill bothered young Mr. Brady not a bit. It takes a pretty
cool customer to come through the way he did, and in crunch time, the kid had ice water in
his veins. It was the type of clutch, defining performance that many other quarterbacks
would sell their soul to the devil for. |
