For Tom Brady, it is only a "team" game if you lose

 

I have to confess that as a Packer fan I was disappointed by the result of this past Super Bowl. Although I admit that the Buccaneers probably would not have reached the Super Bowl if Tom Brady was not on the roster, it is useful to remember that the Bucs did win a Brady-less Super Bowl in a 48-21 blowout over the Raiders with Brad Johnson at quarterback; in that game, the defense forced five Rich Gannon interceptions—three of them returned for touchdowns.  In this Super Bowl, although Brady was awarded the MVP trophy, he didn’t deserve it any more than he did in his first Super Bowl appearance. It was the Buccaneer defense that throttled the Chiefs’ explosive offense, allowing a mere 9 points; the defense should have collectively been awarded the MVP trophy if they couldn’t pick just one player. I mean, this is a “team game,” isn’t it, Brady and fans?

There has been a lot of talk about the relative “responsibility” for the Patriots’ Super Bowl run, Brady or coach Bill Belichick, who had previously won two Super Bowls with the New York Giants as defensive coordinator. In the early Super Bowls, I think it was clearly coaching more than Brady; the 2008 season in which Matt Cassel was the quarterback on an 11-5 team clearly showed that Belichick could “coach,” and who knows what would have happened if that team had actually made the playoffs.

In Brady’s first run in the 2001-2002 playoff season, there was the infamous “tuck rule” game between the Patriots and the Raiders in the divisional game. With less than 2 minutes to play and the Raiders leading 13-10, Charles Woodson forced an apparent fumble by Brady, but the call was reversed and ruled an “incomplete pass” despite the fact that Brady’s arm was clearly not in a passing motion, and it appeared as he lay prone on the field he also thought he had lost the game.

In the AFC Championship game against the Steelers, Brady was knocked out of the game with an ankle injury, and replaced by Drew Bledsoe—who Brady had replaced as starting QB after an injury. Up to that point, the only points scored by the Patriots was WR Troy Brown’s punt return for a touchdown. Bledsoe would throw a touchdown pass, and Brown  recovered a blocked field goal attempt and ran it in for another touchdown in a 24-17 win in which Cordell Stewart was intercepted three times. The main point here is that the Patriots advanced to the Super Bowl in spite of Brady—not because of him; Bledsoe was the best “backup” in the NFL that year, having himself already led the Patriots to a Super Bowl under Bill Parcells, a loss to the Brett Favre-led Packers.

In the Super Bowl, the heavily favored Rams outgained the Patriots 427 to 267, but three Rams turnovers—including a Kurt Warner interception returned for a touchdown—resulted in a stunning 20-17 upset win for the Patriots. Brady threw for just 145 yards in the game, and for only 92 until the game-winning field goal drive. Brady was named MVP, but the real “MVP” was Belichick’s defensive game plan against the NFL’s most potent offense that year.

The Patriots did not win their first three Super Bowls in “dominant” fashion; each one was decided by exactly three points. Then they lost their next two to the Giants. In both of those games it was not the defense that let the team down, but Brady’s offense. The Patriots next three Super Bowl wins could easily have been losses too; there was Russell Wilson’s hair-pulling interception at the goal line in the last seconds that snatched a Seahawk defeat from the jaws of victory, and then the Falcons blew a 28-3 third quarter lead in the only Super Bowl in which it can be said that Brady’s play was the difference between a loss and a victory.

And then there was the 13-3 win over a Rams team that scored 527 points during the regular season, a game which was still tied at 3 heading into the fourth quarter. The only game where the Patriots defense failed the team was in the 41-33 loss to the Eagles. So who was more responsible for Patriots’ success depends on the game; but what is clear is that in all of those Super Bowl wins, the Patriots just barely managed to score more points than their opponents, by 29 points overall, a margin of less than 5 points per game. Talk about being “lucky.” But then again, that seems to be so often the “difference” between “winning” and “losing.”

Meanwhile, Brady seems to have gotten himself into a bit of trouble with the daughter of the man who designed the Lombardi Trophy, when he was caught on video “passing” it to a boat of other teammates; one notes that it barely did cover the distance (wouldn’t it have been “funny” if it had fallen into the water and someone had to dive for it?). The clearly inebriated Brady was later seen being “helped” off the site. Lorraine Grohs (whose father Greg was a master silversmith for Tiffany’s) said in a statement

It just upset me that this trophy was disgraced and disrespected by being thrown as if it was a real football. I have a big history of this trophy being made by my father and it’s such an honor and I know all the craftsmen that made it when my dad was there also at Tiffanu’s and it takes a lot of hard work.

Grohs came under criticism from Brady’s defenders, but one suspects that Brady has had so many of these trophies in his hands that another one is just a “plaything.” In other news, one may recall an interview with Howard Stern last year, when Brady talked about his couple decades-long friendship with Donald Trump, explaining why he had a MAGA cap in his locker by claiming that he “separated” politics from the man, although with Trump “politics” has revealed more about the “man” than we wished we were forced to know. To his credit Brady eschewed the 2017 and 2019 visits to the White House, although this was not meant to be a “statement” about Trump personally, as was the case when Belichick declined to receive the Medal of Freedom from Trump.

In the interview, Brady was “caught off guard” when Stern asked him if he ever felt “guilty” or “self-conscious” about lecturing a majority-black team, being a white man. Brady seemed disturbed by the suggestion of racism, and he defensively claimed that he “never” saw race. “I think sports transcends race, it transcends wealth, it transcends all that (really?). You get to know and appreciate what someone else may bring. When you are in a locker room with 50 guys, you don’t think about race…White, black, whatever, you figure out how to get along.”

Reading between the lines, you can tell that Brady has never really felt he needed to consider what his teammates were thinking while he berated them, as if he was assuming he knew their “motivation,” or lack thereof. A canned cliché here, briefly straying from self-absorption there, and “we’re all just one big happy family there” everywhere.  And take it all with a grain of salt or two.

But hey, you can’t argue with success. The Browns, Lions, Texans and Jaguars have never even been to a Super Bowl. The Bills, Titans, Bengals, Cardinals, Chargers, Falcons, Panthers and the Vikings have been there but never won it. Some quarterbacks were fortunate to be in the right place at the right time: Jim Plunkett, Jim McMahon, Doug Williams, Jeff Hostetler, Mark Rypien, Trent Dilfer and Johnson; for those guys, it was a “team” game. For Brady, even some of his teammates seem to have bought into the notion that if Brady is on your team, if you don’t win it is your fault.