WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS, TOM?
Tom Brady weighs in on refs, receivers, elbow, trash-talking
The morning after a 23-16 Sunday loss to the Chiefs in a game in which the Patriots were on the wrong end of multiple missed officiating calls, Tom Brady declined to embrace that as an excuse during his weekly Monday morning WEEI radio appearance on The Greg Hill Show.
“I think you know when you play sports long enough sometimes you’re the recipient of things that go your way and you’re on the other side of it too, so for me, I don’t think too much about it,” Brady told Hill. “I wish they would go our way, but unfortunately they didn’t, but it doesn’t take away from when you watch the game all the different things that we had in our control that I wish we could have done a little bit better.”
The Patriots have lost two in a row, but based on his mood on The Greg Hill Show, Brady appears to have put behind him the gloomy phase he was mired in for a couple of weeks last month.
“We’re just trying to keep grinding them out,” Brady said. “We put ourselves in a position there at the end with four plays in the red area and just didn’t produce well enough to get the
job done. I don’t ever make any excuses and I certainly never blame the referees. I just look at what we’ve got to do and how we have to get back to work this week and find a way to go to Cincinnati and get a win.”
After the game, Brady was wearing an ice pack on his throwing elbow, an issue that appeared on the injury report during the week.
“It’s all right,” Brady said. “I just took a helmet right on the inside of it. Just a typical football game. So nothing that I haven’t dealt with before. I’m just going to try to get some extra treatment and hopefully be a hundred percent next week.”
Developing better chemistry with receivers remains high on Brady’s list of priorities.
“Yeah, that’s totally important and it’s a process throughout the year. I don’t feel like you ever feel like you’re done with that,” Brady said of nurturing quarterback-receiver relationships. “I would say for as long as you play you’re always trying to be on the same page, and like I said there are a lot of different (defensive) looks you get. It’s impossible to practice everything that comes up in the game. You have no idea what their plan is going to be. You can kind of hypothesize with what you think they’re going to do, but ultimately when you get out on the field you have to adjust to what you see and everyone has to adjust it the same way.”
Among wide receivers, only Julian Edelman (eight receptions, 95 yards, one touchdown) had more than one reception. A texter to the show wondered why Mohamed Sanu Sr. was not more involved. Sanu caught a pass in his only target.
“Well, we were trying to get him the ball at different times and sometimes the coverage dictated it go somewhere else, but he’s doing a great job,” Brady said. “He’s a really tough, hard-nosed guy who wants the ball and he’s competitive. I have to do a better job finding him and getting him the ball because he can do good things with it. I just love the way he has come in with his attitude and he’s a very hardworking guy. I am going to keep finding ways to get him the ball because you have to get the ball to guys who can make plays, and he’s one of them.”
Brady laughed about his trash-talking with Chris Jones.
“Oh man, yeah, we were going at it for a little bit,” Brady said. “It was pretty talkative out there, so there’s definitely a healthy rivalry, but yeah, there’s definitely nothing I could really repeat. I typically don’t try to make the D-linemen any more angry than they probably already are with me because they’re the ones who get paid to hit me, so I don’t give them any more incentive typically, but I couldn’t really resist at certain points.”