The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Brady’s greatness rooted in consistency
The Register’s Mike Wollschlager says it’s ultimately not the number of rings Tom Brady collects that makes him great, but rather it is his consistency.
FULL STORY ON PAGE C2
Seattle’s Marshawn Lynch is fond of grabbing his junk after scoring touchdowns. The NFL frowns on this sort of crotch-centric celebration and has repeatedly fined the Seahawks running back.
Good thing Major League Baseball doesn’t penalize players each time they make a manhood adjustment. It would become a pay-to-play league.
• One notion that gets thrown around too matterof-factly is that legacies are on the line each time players take the field. Legacies aren’t built on singular moments, and championships aren’t the only things that matter.
If cornerback Malcolm Butler was a step slower on his break, Tom Brady would be 3-3 in Super Bowls. His final stat line from last Sunday would be the same, but media and fans would point out his own goal-line interception as one of the reasons the Patriots lost. His fourtouchdown performance would be re-categorized as a two-interception failure that caused his Super Bowl losing streak to reach three games and 10 years.
Twenty-two people not named Tom Brady were on the field when the game was decided. And although the quarterback is the only player to whom a win-loss record is ultimately attributed, football is the ultimate team game.
New England was outscored by a combined 50 points in its first two Super Bowls. In the next six, New England outscored its opponents by just six points. A single play could have turned each game. The Pats could be 6-0 in the Brady-Belichick era just as easily as they could be 0-6. Adam Vinatieri and Eli Manning have as much to do with Brady’s Super Bowl record as Brady does.
His greatness — and if you want to call Brady the greatest of all time, you’ll get no argument from me — lies in consistently winning and leading his team from preseason to postseason every single year.
If the Seahawks score a TD in that final minute, Brady’s performance would still be the same. And if David Tyree didn’t catch a ball against his helmet, and Mario Manningham didn’t tiptoe down the sideline, Brady’s performance would still be the same in those games.
That’s Brady’s legacy. It’s his consistency. It’s winning every single year in a league known for parity. It’s leading 52 teammates to a Super Bowl in 2002. And it’s leading 52 different teammates to a Super Bowl in 2015.
• Love the Legion of Boom or hate the Legion of Boom, you need to respect the Legion of Boom. Richard Sherman (torn UCL), Kam Chancellor (torn MCL) and Earl Thomas (torn labrum) entered Super Bowl XLIX with what would have been seasonending injuries for many players. Each man played the entire game.
• Have you seen Mel Kiper Jr. lately? He looks like somebody dressed up as Mel Kiper Jr.
• The premise of the current Buick television ad campaign shows a bunch of confused people trying to find Buicks in various parking lots and streets. The brand-new Buick is right there, but they’re looking past it, presumably searching for a powder blue ’82 Regal.
That basically means a Buick marketing executive began their pitch with, “Look, everyone thinks our cars are crap...”
• Speaking of commercials, I never thought I could hate a character as much as Flo from Progressive. Then Lily from AT&T showed up.
• ESPN’s 30-For-30 documentary series plus the Miracle on Ice equals tune in. “Of Miracles and Men” takes a look at Lake Placid from the Soviet perspective. It airs tonight at 9.
• UConn legend and Phoenix Mercury star Diana Taurasi is being paid by her Russian Premier League team, UMMC Ekaterinburg, to sit out this summer’s WNBA season. That’s surprising enough in itself, but some of the details that came to light because of this story are even more surprising.
1. Taurasi, quite possibly the best women’s basketball player in the world, makes less than the WNBA league maximum of $107,000. 2. Roughly 40 other WNBA players earn about the same as Taurasi. 3. Most WNBA coaches make more than double what the players make and some are paid as much as $300,000. 4. Taurasi makes about $1.5 million per year playing for her Russian team.
Two questions remain. What took Taurasi so long to accept UMMC Ekaterinburg’s offer? Who’s next?
• Lance Armstrong once again proves that you can help generate $500 million to benefit people stricken with cancer and still be a terrible human being.
• I’m no legal expert. I don’t even watch Law & Order. But there’s not a single lawyer or judge who will ever convince me Odin Lloyd’s text messages to his sister minutes before he was murdered should be excluded from the Aaron Hernandez trial.
Maybe Judge E. Susan Garsh is correctly interpreting some sort of precedent and, by the letter of the law, made the right ruling. But common sense is severely lacking.
Let the prosecution and defense argue during the trial and then let the jury decide. Maybe I’m naïve, but I thought that’s how the justice system worked.
• Tiger Woods had to withdraw from the Farmers Insurance Open on Thursday after just 12 holes. He said he couldn’t activate his glutes and that led to lower back pain. Guess all those years of constantly activating his glutes off the golf course are catching up with him.
• Enjoyed the suggestion from Tony Kornheiser that Tiger, who has failed to finish 72 holes in seven of his last nine tournaments, should start wearing a red shirt — his traditional final-round Sunday garb — during the Wednesday pro-ams.
• Has Robert Allenby been taking advice from Cosmo Kramer’s caddy?
• Who in the world came up with the idea to put floral patterns on toilet paper? A fan of juxtaposition I suppose.