Brady: For love of game
Even at 40, NFL’s best never lacks in preparation
History is not on the side of 40-year-old quarterbacks. Often times, neither are their aching bodies or wandering minds. But until now, there has never been one wearing recovery pajamas, eating an exotic diet more demanding than Bill Belichick, working out more often with resistance bands than barbells and, most of all, maintaining an obsessive devotion to the minutiae of football that normally begins to wane as miles of film watched take on a boring familiarity.
It is, however, the latter more than all the rest that has separated Tom Brady from all those who have preceded him under center and into NFL record books.
“Other than playing football, the other thing I love to do is prepare to play football,” Brady told Sports Illustrated this offseason. “Football has become my life.”
Many players have expressed similar feelings, but few have lived them the way Brady has. His is a monastic devotion to the game. He has said many times every choice he makes, he does to prolong his football life, and that is what has made him a football phenomenon who has missed only 15 games because of injury, all coming after blowing out his knee in the 2008 season opener against the Kansas City Chiefs.
That bit of history is particularly significant because tomorrow night he will open his 18th NFL season facing those Chiefs as quarterback of the five-time Super Bowl champion Patriots. The reason he remains in that position at 40 is more than his obsession with physical training, diet, stretching and massage. The real secret lies in his mind.
For many professional athletes, the mind goes before the body. Boredom and disinterest set in. Shortcuts are taken in preparation. A less all-consuming eye stares at video rather than watches it. Soon false assumptions about opponents confound you and diminishing physical gifts cannot counter them.
Brady has avoided that trap because, as he put it when asked about football boredom, “Playing football? Oh, no. Football is one of the great joys of my life. I love it every day.”
Because he does, the tediousness of endlessly watching defenses you’ve seen 1,000 times before eludes him. Same with working on the most basic fundamentals of his position or studying his offense’s execution. Brady essentially has been running the same offense for 17 years. There is nothing he doesn’t know about it. Yet he continues to study like the kid fresh off the Michigan campus who arrived in New England nearly two decades ago sure he was the best investment the Patriots ever made.
Just seven months ago, Brady proved that again, leading the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history. He wiped out a 25-point deficit with barely 17 minutes to play before directing the Patriots to the Super Bowl’s first overtime victory. That gave him one more Super Bowl ring (five) and Super Bowl MVP (four) than his boyhood idol, Joe Montana. It also meant he had to play 99 snaps, the most he’d ever run in a game. He was sharper at the end than at the beginning.
Brady was not a 38-year-old John Elway, letting Terrell Davis carry him to a Super Bowl victory, nor a 39-year-old Peyton Manning, his arm dead, relying on an overwhelming defense and game-management skills to add a final championship to his resume. Instead he put together one of his greatest second-half performances to become the winningest quarterback of the Super Bowl era. Yet within a month, he was poring over video of every play the Patriots ran in 2016 and critiquing each. He did it twice. Why?
Not because his obsession with winning runs deeper than his peers. He did it because he has yet to lose interest in a game he knows he’s mastered.
“I have the answers to the test now,” Brady told SI. “You can’t surprise me on defense. I’ve seen it all. I’ve processed 261 games. … There was a time when quarterbacking was really hard for me because you didn’t know what to do. Now I really know what to do, I don’t want to stop now. This is when it’s really enjoyable to go out.”
The secret is not how much he understands about how defenses will attack him. The secret is he hasn’t allowed that mastery to convince him he needs to do less to maintain it. Brady accepts without resentment that the intellectual demands of running an offense never change, never diminish, never go away. You sit and watch time and again or you are greasing the skids of defeat.
How much longer he can maintain that all-consuming focus remains to be seen, but as long as he can, the only thing that can derail him is a catastrophic injury or his arm declaring, “I’ve had enough.” There’s no insurance against that.
“Football is very humbling,” Brady explained. “You may think you go out there, practice and things go well, then you go to a particular game and they do things you haven’t worked on or haven’t thought about or haven’t talked about. I think experience helps with maybe just some recall about things we could do to solve the problems a team is presenting.
“When I was younger, you’d come in on Monday morning and make corrections. Well, we’ll be making corrections (now) after the first drive based on things that they’ve been doing and things that they haven’t shown, things that they’re trying to do to slow us down. It’s very much like checkers. They’re going to have things that we haven’t been working on, vice versa, and it’s constant adjustments throughout the game. You can’t prepare for everything.”
Unless, of course, you do, which has been Brady’s approach throughout his football life and remains so to this day, this game, this snap. There is no minimizing the game’s demands. It is what it is, a job that still fascinates. As long as it does, he’ll see you under center somewhere soon.