“Me, neither,” said Gronkowski. The all-world tight end was among those who discussed the importance of Brady’s return.
“It’s super great,” Gronkowski told reporters. “He’s our leader. He’s our guy. He came out here on fire, and we did what we had to do all week as an offense.”
Tom joked about his first-down run during his postgame press conference and was sure to thank the fans who traveled to Cleveland for the game.
“We’ve got amazing fans,” he said. “I think we’ve got the best fans in the world. They showed up today and it was great to hear them.”
But what he wouldn’t discuss was his suspension, nor would he be lured into answering questions about how it felt to be back after missing four games.
“This isn’t a time for me to reflect,” he said. “I’m happy we won today. I’m happy we win every time we play. I have a job to do and there’s no point in looking back, whether we won Super Bowls, or lost championship games, or the last four weeks. None of it matters. [I] Just go out and do the best I can do every week.…It’s fun to come out and play, and fun to win. That’s the most important thing.”
Pressed by reporters for comment on the four weeks he spent away from the team, he added, “I’ve just moved on, man.”
And move on he did.
Chapter Nineteen
Rolling
Like a classically trained pianist who can sit down at any piano in any concert hall anywhere in the world and just play, Tom Brady’s preparation and wealth of football knowledge allowed him to pick up right where he’d left off the season before.
“Twenty sixteen, in general it was a really good season in that I felt like I, at this point in my career I know what I’m about to experience,” Tom told the authors. “I know what I’m seeing. I just gotta trust my eyes and try to make good decisions and play fast.”
After Brady torched the Browns, pundits predicted—and opponents feared—a repeat of the 2007 season, when the Patriots were under fire for Spygate and went on a record-shattering rampage. With Hall of Fame receiver Randy Moss on board, an emerging Wes Welker, a running game anchored by thousand-yard rusher Laurence Maroney, and a stacked defense, the Pats blew out team after team that season, embarrassing many.
Number 12 threw fifty touchdowns against only eight interceptions. The fifty-score season was an NFL record that stood for five years until rival Peyton Manning broke it in his first and most productive season with the Broncos. Moss caught ninety-eight passes for nearly fifteen hundred yards and an NFL record twenty-three touchdowns. Welker hauled in 112 balls for almost twelve hundred yards and eight scores. The team scored an astounding 589 points while going undefeated in the regular season, a feat that had not been accomplished since the Miami Dolphins went 14–0 in 1972.
The Patriots scored over fifty points twice, over forty points twice, and over thirty points eight times, meaning they didn’t score under thirty several times that season. Brady’s season was among the best on record as he completed 398 of 578 passes for 4,806 yards. His 117.2 passer rating that year was second best in league history.
Coach Belichick was criticized throughout the year for keeping his quarterback and all other starters in games long after the score was well out of hand. Brady and his teammates took offense to the criticism publicly. This was not Pop Warner, high school, or even college. It was professional sports, where men are paid big money to perform at the highest level. In other words, this is what they were paid to do.
They may not have invoked the Spygate scandal publicly as a driving force in their evisceration of the league that year, but it was there.
“We’re not trying to win 42–28, we’re trying to kill people, we’re trying to blow them out if we can,” Brady said on his weekly interview on WEEI radio in Boston late in the 2007 season.112
But then, he caught himself and provided some balance and measured perspective.
“You want to build momentum for each week, you don’t want to be up, 42–7 or 35–7, and all of a sudden you look up and it’s 35–21,” he said. “We don’t want to be part of that, you don’t want to go into next week realizing that for the last 18 minutes of the game your team didn’t play well, or didn’t play up to its capabilities. You gave other teams momentum for the next time they play you, or you gave another team a reason not to be intimidated.”113
The 2016 New England Patriots team heard comparisons to the 2007 team, both praiseworthy and critical in the wake of the Browns blowout.
“Our expectation was to come out here, perform as a team and win,” Coach Belichick told reporters after the Cleveland game. “I’m talking about the whole team. That includes everybody. What else would we come out here for? I think Tom works hard. He’s always worked hard. I don’t think there’s any question about that. I think there are a lot of things he needs to work on. There are a lot of things we all need to work on as a football team. There are things we need to improve on. That’s all of us—players, coaches, everybody.”114
It was strictly business, not personal, according to the coach and his quarterback. But those who covered the team on a daily basis believed differently.
“Don’t buy it. This is personal for Brady,” Boston Globe Patriots beat writer Chris Gasper opined. “What he loves to do was taken away from him. Those he loves were saddened and stressed out by seeing his reputation tarnished and his name soiled. Despite his unflappable demeanor, Brady also suffered signs of stress from the air pressure imbroglio. As the legal walls closed in on him after the vacation of his suspension was overturned by a federal appeals court, Brady was forced to accept and serve a ridiculous punishment. Welcome back, Tom.”115
Brady and Belichick may have wanted the hype to just disappear, but it only got more intense the following week as number 12 made his return to Gillette Stadium to face the 2–3 Bengals. Tickets for the mid-October game were the most expensive NFL ticket of the season and were going for more than seven hundred dollars apiece on resale websites. In addition to Brady, another key member of the team, linebacker Rob Ninkovich, was also making a return to Foxborough after being suspended four games for a banned-substance violation.
As Brady waited to make his grand entrance, a video montage of his greatest moments played on the Jumbotrons to the tune of Skylar Grey’s “I’m Coming Home.” Patriots great Troy Brown also stood sentry in front of the locker room doors. Wearing sunglasses and a dark suit and flashing one of his three Super Bowl rings, Brown appeared on the stadium big screens, whipping the crowd into a frenzy. Was this a football game or was it WrestleMania? The team knew what their fans wanted so they gave it to them.
Brown opened the doors and there stood Brady, without his helmet on. He led his team out of the locker room and down the stadium hall to the tunnel flanked by fullback James Devlin and Julian Edelman. He was the only player without his helmet on. Just before he led his team onto the field, he turned to Edelman, shouted, “Let’s go,” and slapped him five.
Brady took off running as Ozzy Osbourne’s “Crazy Train” blared from the stadium speakers. A unit of colonial reenactors fired their muskets in the end zone. Fireworks shot out of a huge replica of the Patriots’ “Flying Elvis” logo that encased the tunnel. Tom ran to the 50, stopped, walked over to the coaches, and grabbed a drink from a Gatorade cup and pulled on his helmet. As he threw warm-up tosses, the cameras never left him and projected his every move to the crowd. The applause he received when the lineups were announced and his name was called was thunderous.
Brady put on another near-perfect display, lighting up the Bengals defense for 376 yards and three touchdowns while completing twenty-nine of thirty-five passes.
In two games, he had thrown six touchdowns and zero interceptions.
The next week was supposed to be a potential AFC championship game preview as New England traveled to Pittsburgh, but the game lost some of its luster because quarterback Ben Roethlisberger was scratched from the lineup with a knee injury, replaced by backup Landr
y Jones.
Jones and the Steelers were overmatched. New England won 27–16.
Tom Brady continued his torrid march with the Buffalo Bills next on his hit list. Once again, he led the Patriots to a lopsided victory, 41–25, in which he threw for 315 yards and four touchdowns. The offense was executing near to perfection and the defense was also jelling, but the unit was about to get shaken up.
Jamie Collins, a 2013 second-round pick out of the University of Southern Mississippi, had become a leader on the defense. He had freakish athletic ability, as evidenced by his jaw-dropping leap over the offensive line to block a crucial extra point against the Colts in 2015. He had a breakout year in 2014, leading the team with 199 tackles and recording four sacks and two interceptions, and was integral to the win over the Seahawks in Super Bowl XLIX. He was named to the Pro Bowl a year later, recording five and a half sacks and eighty-nine tackles on the season despite missing four games due to an undisclosed illness.
In 2016, Collins appeared to be playing well, registering forty-three tackles over the first six games with a sack and two interceptions. But he was replaced on run packages and played only about half of the snaps in the Bills game. The next day—on Halloween—he was traded to the lowly Browns for a compensatory third-round pick.
The move stunned Collins’s teammates and had some fans questioning why Belichick would shuttle away one of his most athletic players from a championship-caliber team, which had already taken a hit with the off-season trade of another defensive star—Chandler Jones—who’d been hospitalized for a hallucinogenic reaction to synthetic marijuana.
Others shook their heads and repeated the mantra they’d been repeating for the past seventeen years: In Bill [Belichick] we trust.
The trade, however, was not without good reason. Collins’s rookie contract was up and he’d be a free agent at the end of the season, and there were reports that he was seeking a huge deal similar to the six-year, $114 million package the Broncos had showered on linebacker and Super Bowl MVP Von Miller. News also surfaced that Collins was upset over being told he’d be a part-time player because of his deficiencies against the run. Other reports accused him of freelancing and not following designed play calls and of butting heads with coaches.
In his weekly radio appearance on Westwood One, Brady called it a “tough day” because of the trade and heaped praise upon Collins.116
“It’s always tough to hear news like that with a teammate that I’ve played with and been in so many battles with,” he said. “Jamie is a great player for our team and I’m sure he’ll be a great player for the Cleveland Browns.…I’m always sad when we lose a player that I like and someone that I respect like Jamie. It’s a tough day, but it’s part of the NFL, this business. Coach Belichick makes these decisions and we as players still have to go out and do our job.”
It was the bye week, so sports reporters and talk show hosts had fourteen days to tear apart the trade. Belichick said little about it and refused to get into specifics about the factors that led to his decision.
“In the end, we did what we thought was best for the football team,” he said flatly on his weekly appearance on WEEI radio. “There are a lot of things to take into consideration. I’m sure we could bring up a lot of points to talk about, but in the end, that’s really the bottom line.”
The criticism only intensified the following week when the Patriots lost their nationally televised Super Bowl rematch with the Seahawks at home 31–24, the only regular-season game attended by Brady’s father. Seattle quarterback Russell Wilson outplayed Brady this time, racking up 348 yards passing and three touchdowns. For the first time since his return, number 12 threw no touchdowns and tossed an interception. The Patriots defense, meanwhile, gave up season highs in points, yards, and first downs. It was a bad performance that once again called into question the coach’s decision to trade Collins.
“It’s time to start worrying about the Patriots defense,” shouted a Washington Post headline.117
Worse than the regular-season loss to the Seahawks and even the trade of Jamie Collins was the loss of Brady’s biggest and most reliable big play target, Rob Gronkowski. The tight end suffered a brutal hit by Seattle defender Earl Thomas and then was knocked out of a game with the Jets two weeks later with a back injury. Team doctors determined that he needed back surgery to repair a ruptured disk. He was out for the season just as he was reaching peak form. Gronkowski’s motor had begun to run upon Brady’s return but now he was done. The tight end finished with twenty-five catches for 540 yards and three touchdowns in a season cut short by injury. Once again, the loss had many questioning whether the Patriots could make a serious run at another world championship.
But Brady’s “revenge tour” kept rolling. New England beat the Jets twice and also rang up victories against the Rams, Ravens, Dolphins, and the Broncos in Denver. The Broncos were fighting for a playoff spot at 8–6, and the game was vitally important for the Patriots as they were battling with the Steelers for the best record in the AFC and home field advantage throughout the playoffs. Mile High Stadium had always posed trouble for Tom, and he played his worst game of the season, but still managed to come away with the victory.
Brady threw for less than two hundred yards with no touchdowns, was sacked twice, and fumbled twice. With a performance like that, a team generally loses. But the Patriots defense was now fully recovered from the Collins trade. In fact, the squad was playing better than ever before. Defenders sacked quarterback Trevor Siemian four times and held Denver to just a field goal in the 16–3 win.
The final assault on the league came in week fifteen, when the Patriots crushed the Jets once more, 41–3, led by Brady’s three touchdown passes and a pair of scores by Blount. Jets quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick was sacked twice and harassed all day by defensive stalwarts Trey Flowers, Chris Long, Alan Branch, and Jabaal Sheard. Fitzpatrick also threw two costly interceptions to cornerback Malcolm Butler. The Patriots defense was now giving up the fewest average points in the NFL.
Despite missing four games, Brady finished the regular season with 3,554 passing yards, twenty-eight touchdowns, and only two interceptions. It was the best touchdown-to-interception ratio in league history. And he was thirty-nine years old.
Chapter Twenty
Freight Train
The competition for 2016 league MVP was coming down to Brady and Atlanta Falcons star quarterback Matt Ryan. Both players were worthy of the honor.
Ryan had thrown for nearly five thousand yards with thirty-eight touchdown passes against only seven interceptions. The Falcons QB was playing the best football of his career, and he and All-Pro receiver Julio Jones were the most feared tandem in the league, the season’s version of Brady and Randy Moss.
Debate was white-hot over which player should be named the NFL’s most valuable player.
Brady critics argued that he shouldn’t be eligible because of the suspension, while supporters predicted that the brilliance of his twelve-game run would never be duplicated. The argument raged on into the playoffs as the Falcons and the Patriots each had first-round byes. While the Patriots waited to see who they would play in the divisional round, a mini-distraction arose as offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels and defensive guru Matt Patricia both surfaced as candidates for several head-coaching vacancies.
McDaniels had already tried his hand at head coaching—unsuccessfully—when he left the Patriots in 2009 to helm the Broncos. The son of Ohio coaching legend Thom McDaniels, Josh grew up in Canton, Ohio—the home of the football Hall of Fame—and attended John Carroll University, where he played wide receiver. His quarterback on that team was Nick Caserio, while other teammates included future Bills linebacker London Fletcher and Chargers general manager Brian Polian.
Both McDaniels and Caserio joined the Patriots coaching staff in 2001. McDaniels started as a personnel assistant and was promoted to defensive assistant and then to quarterbacks coach, where he developed a close rapport and friendship with Bra
dy. McDaniels was on the staff for all five championships and was the architect of the record-breaking 2007 offense. He was lured away from the Patriots after helping guide the Patriots and backup quarterback Matt Cassel to an 11–5 record after Tom went down with a torn ACL in the first game.
McDaniels signed a four-year, $8 million deal with the Broncos and came in with much fanfare as the replacement to Denver legend Mike Shanahan. Jay Cutler was the quarterback for the Broncos, but as soon as McDaniels arrived trade rumors swirled, including one that involved a swap with the Patriots for Cassel. The team pulled the trigger on a different deal, though, one that sent Cutler to the Bears and made Kyle Orton Denver’s starting quarterback.
The season started well as McDaniels’s team won six straight, including an overtime victory over Belichick and the Patriots. The Broncos cooled, however, and ended the season 8–8, missing the playoffs. In 2010, McDaniels’s first head-coaching experiment ended when he went 3–9 to start the season and was fired in December. The poor record was only part of the reason for his firing.
Another factor was a mini-Spygate incident in which Broncos assistant Steve Scarnecchia, the son of Patriots offensive line guru Dante Scarnecchia, was caught illegally taping a 49ers pregame walk-through in London. Scarnecchia was fired and investigated by the league for the taping. McDaniels was hit with a $50,000 fine for failing to report the incident to the league, and the Broncos were also fined $50,000 for the violations.
He sat out the remainder of the season and was hired as the offensive coordinator for the St. Louis Rams but was let go in 2012 and returned to the Patriots.
His handling of Brady, not to mention the rotating cast of receivers and running backs in 2016, made him the envy of the league. Still, there were no indications that he seriously considered leaving. The rumors persisted, however, providing a minor distraction as the Patriots prepared for the Dolphins, Raiders, or Texans in the divisional round.
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