BRING IT ON
Pats ready for anything on path to immortality
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. — Tom Brady goes to his seventh Super Bowl now, goes to Houston to play Matt Ryan and the Falcons as the greatest quarterback in NFL history, goes to win a record fifth Super Bowl alongside Bill Belichick, goes there forever young at age 39 for the final act of his Revenge Tour.
On a night when the Patriots and all of New England asked him to be their four-time Super Bowl champion, Brady (32for-42 for a postseason careerhigh and franchise-record 384 yards and three touchdowns) delivered the way a G.O.A.T is supposed to deliver.
He didn’t beat Big Ben Roethlisberger 36-17 with deflated balls, only occasional wet balls and brass balls every step of the way.
And if you think Super Bowl LI is Matty Ice versus Tommy Vice, the crowd at the Razor that mocked Roger Goodell’s no-show with taunts of “Rog-er ... Rog-er,” and “Where is Rog-er?” sure don’t.
“I didn’t hear that chant,” Brady said and smiled. “I did hear ’em singing to Bon Jovi though, that was pretty cool.”
Brady played pitch and catch with an unlikely hero named Hogan — Jersey Guy Chris Hogan out of Monmouth College and Wyckoff — nine catches for 180 yards and two touchdowns.
“He’s a stone-cold killer,” offensive lineman Nate Solder said.
Brady didn’t get to start the season, because of his Deflategate suspension. But he gets to finish it.
“It takes a lot of people and a lot of hard work, a lot of effort over the course of many months,” Brady said.
It wasn’t difficult for his teammates to tell that Brady meant business.
“He was locked in,” Matthew Slater said. “When you’ve been a teammate with a guy for nine years, you can look in his eyes and just know when a guy’s on a mission, and I think he had that look all week long.”
Here were the two AFC super heavyweights, each led by a super heavyweight quarterback, raging toe-to-toe for 30 minutes in the center of a 100-yard ring known as Gillette Stadium, taking turns gleefully hitting the other in the mouth and getting back up every time the other guy knocked him down.
Here was the kind of high drama and compelling theater you get when one team without an ounce of fear, that was not about to bow down at the feet of Brady and Belichick 60 minutes and then less to the Super Bowl, shows up with a snarling edge and indomitable, iron will. One team that didn’t give a damn about Brady’s Revenge Tour or Brady and Belichick’s lust for history.
From a distance, somewhere near the Monongahela River, they waved their Terrible Towels and asked Big Ben to answer every one of Brady’s haymakers with one of his own, the way Terry Bradshaw would have back in the day. They asked Antonio Brown to answer anything and everything Julian Edelman or, goodness, even Hogan had in mind, the way Lynn Swann and John Stallworth would have back in the day.
They first asked Le’Veon Bell and — after Bell suffered a left groin injury late in the first quarter — then DeAngelo Williams to run the ball and catch the ball every time LeGarrette Blount and Dion Lewis did, to run it and catch it the way Franco Harris would have, immaculately or not, back in the day. They asked James Harrison and Ryan Shazier and Lawrence Timmons and Bud Dupree to wreak havoc the way Jack Lambert and Mean Joe Greene and L.C. Greenwood and Jack Ham would have back in the day.
And Brady simply laughed in the face of any clear and present danger and owned the night and carried his team on his back, all the way to Houston.
“He’s the [best] quarterback to ever play the game, so it’s not a coincidence that he’s gonna be the first one [to win five Super Bowls],” Blount said. Asked what Brady does that separates himself, Blount said, “He wins a lot more than most,” and then he laughed.
Brady was an up-tempo machine. He threw one errant ball, a pass over the middle that was behind a wide-open Hogan. Then he immediately found Hogan wide open by the left sideline for 22 yards, and then he took a pitch back from Lewis to hit Hogan on a 34-yard flea-flicker past Mike Mitchell and it was Patriots 17, Steelers 6.
“They were a little winded, I thought, got the pitch back from DLew, and I saw Hoags burning up the field, and just laid it out there,” Brady said. History awaits. “You play with a player like that, who has really made history over the course of his career, and being a fan of football my whole life, it really means a lot to be a part of something like that, certainly,” Slater said.
Where is Roger? In Houston on Super Sunday.
“He’s well within his rights to go to whatever game he wants to go and he chose to go to Atlanta,” Slater said, and smiled when he added, “Hopefully we’ll see him in Houston.”