Glory comes with a catch
Brady has only had one coach
Sunday, at the Super Bowl party I go to every year, one of the fellas brought his son along for the first time. The kid is 18, and thus now old enough, in Alberta, to drink three too many beers before kickoff like the rest of us.
As we were all chatting, we realized the true significance of his presence: he was three years old for the Tuck Rule Game of 2002, the year Tom Brady stepped in for an injured Drew Bledsoe, and for the New England Patriots’ subsequent Super Bowl victory against the since-displaced St. Louis Rams.
Our young friend, old enough to drink and vote and wed and die for his country, has never known a world in which the pairing of Brady and coach Bill Belichick do not dominate NFL football.
For him t hey are an axiom, an accepted element of the human condition, as the odious pre- eminence of the New York Yankees must have been for someone born at the end of the Second World War.
Tom Brady’s capture of a fifth Super Bowl title and an unprecedented fourth championship- game MVP award are raising the question whether he is perhaps the greatest quarterback of all time. Perhaps I should say that they are all but settling the question.
Yet there is an interesting scientific problem here, which is that Brady has never played for any coach but Belichick.
How do we segregate the effect of the great mastermind from that of the great field general? Will we ever get the chance? Will they stay together for another five years and just keep winning? Which one should we kill to prevent this, given the choice?
Much is made of Brady being 39, but we have, I think, forgotten that Belichick is 64 — older than generational rivals like Brian Billick, a widely admired theorist who has been retired for almost a decade, or Tony Dungy, who is in the Hall of Fame.
When Belichick turned 60, there was some talk about this being an age at which NFL head coaches appear to start losing their energy and cognitive edge. We appear to have reached tacit collective agreement that if there is such a rule, it is not relevant to this case.
Belichick wasn’t thought to be any kind of world-conquering Alexandrine genius until he had Brady under centre.
Yet no one else considered Brady anything special as a talent until he was plucked out of the sixth round of the draft by Belichick and almost immediately began to win championships.
This might not seem to count against Brady, but it is part of Belichick’s known modus operandi to get the maximum contribution out of neglected and rejected players — one with minimal quantified abilities, or unglamorous college resumés, or alleged character problems, or skills that don’t fit any particular position.
Belichick has always won games when Brady was unavailable, and Brady’s relatively team-friendly contract is acknowledged to be one minor secret of the Patriots’ success. Is it easy to imagine Belichick winning multiple championships with some outrageously gifted QB, like Dan Marino or Warren Moon, who in real history never won any?
Hell, it is hard to imagine him losing them.
At the same time: is it easy to imagine Tom Brady having a long career of 9-7 records and early playoff exits under some other coach’s tutelage? Everyone who watches the NFL must give the same instinctive response: he’s Tom Brady!
When he started marching the Patriots downfield Sunday, staring an eightpoint deficit in the face, an entire planet knew what was coming.
Brady had, at t i mes, looked despondent and distracted in the game’s seemingly ruinous first half. It’s not as though he has never come up short in a playoff game.
But, at that moment, no one thought the Patriots were at a disadvantage; instead, we feared, correctly, that the Falcons were history.
The real answer to the conundrum of dividing credit between Brady and Belichick is the unsatisfying, even maddening one: it can’t be done, even if other questions like “Is Brady the greatest?” seem to require that you do it.
The forces these men represent might not be additive — they might be, as the saying goes, something more than the sum of their individual abilities — and, in any event, their achievements are the product of a mutual commitment, consciously made, frequently reiterated.
It would be illogical to hold it against Brady that he has stayed with the same charmless, vicious, brilliant boss, given many chances to leave, and probably for better wages.
For his part, Belichick is notorious, like the Yankees’ Casey Stengel was in his time, for saying goodbye to veterans a year too early rather than a year too late.
But when Stengel was asked about Yogi Berra, he would say: “I never play a game without my man in the lineup.” And when Casey’s indispensable man finally got too old to play baseball, he, too, with shocking, unbelievable speed, got too old to manage.
That is probably how the Patriots Era will pan out, though God knows when. It will feel to most of us like a liberation — for a while.
THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS ARE THE PRODUCT OF A MUTUAL COMMITMENT.