SATURDAY MORNING, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick alone, one last skull session before game day. It was about ten years ago, during the drought in the English Championship in England, when the Patriots tried to capture lost magic, when we first began to consider that Brady might be standing up there. Belichick watched the movie of Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez and drew on a particular play. Sanchez rolled right, chased through defenders, off balance and trying to survive, and he had a receiver open in the field – 65 yards deep and 10 or so oblique, on the opposite hashmark. It was a throw that only a few quarterbacks in history could try, even less completely – a fact that seemed lost to the greatest coach in modern football history.
“Just throw it away,” Belichick said. “You’re not going to be more open than that.”
Brady sits in disbelief. I could not throw it 85 meters! he thought.
“Just let it go,” Belichick added.
Let it go? Brady thought and laughed to himself. The ball will run 15 yards if I throw it.
Years after Brady told me this story, it remains me. It’s not just because it’s rich to suggest a lifelong defensive coach who does not understand the difficulty level in an almost impossible throw – or refuses to care. It’s because of what Brady said to me after describing the moment: ‘When I see a play, I see it within my own limitations.’
BRADY’S WORDS WERE hard to buy then, and it’s harder to buy now. For most of his two-decade career, his fans and opponents seemed to think everything was possible for Tom Brady. After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers knocked down the Green Bay Packers to go to the Super Bowl, Bruce Arians put it best: ‘The faith he gave this organization that it could be done – it only cost one man. ‘