SATURDAY MORNING, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick alone, one last skull session before game day. This was about 10 years ago, during the ten-year drought of the New England Championship, when the Patriots were trying to reclaim lost magic, when we first began to think that maybe Brady was coming up. Belichick watched Jet’s quarterback Mark Sanchez film and focused on a particular part. Sanchez rolled to the right, chased by defenders, off balance and trying to survive, and he had a receiver open bottom field – 65 yards deep and 10 or so diagonal, on the opposite hashmark. It was a throw that only a few quarterbacks in history could try, much less complete – a fact that seemed lost to the greatest coach in modern football history.
“Throw it,” said Belichick. “You’re not going to be more open than this.”
Brady was in disbelief. I couldn’t throw it 85 meters! he thought.
“Just let it go,” Belichick added.
Let it go? Brady thought, laughing to himself. The ball would go 15 yards if I threw it.
Years after Brady told me this story, it stays with me. It’s not just because it’s rich to envision a lifelong defensive coach who doesn’t understand – or refuses to bother – the difficulty of a near-impossible throw. It’s because of what Brady told me after describing the moment, “When I see a play, I see it within my own limits.”
BRADY’S WORDS WERE hard to buy then, and they are harder to buy now. For most of his two-decade career, it seemed to fans and opponents alike that anything is possible for Tom Brady. After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers knocked out the Green Bay Packers from going to the Super Bowl, Bruce Arians put it best: “The belief he gave this organization that it was possible – it only took one man.”