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SATURDAY MORNING, Tom Brady and Bill Belichick alone, one last skull session before game day. That was about 10 years ago, during the ten-year New England Championship drought, when the Patriots were trying to take back the lost magic, back when we first started to think maybe Brady was going up there. Belichick was watching the movie of Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez and focused on one play in particular. Sanchez was rolling right, chased by defenders, off balance and trying to survive, and he had an open receiver downstream – 65 yards deep and 10 or more diagonally, on the opposite hashmark. It was a throw that only a few quarterbacks in history could attempt, much less complete – a fact that seemed lost to the greatest coach in modern football history.
“Just throw it away,” Belichick said. “You’re not going to be more open than that.”
Brady sat in disbelief. I couldn’t throw it 85 yards! he was thinking.
“Forget it,” Belichick added.
Let it go? Brady thought laughing to himself. The ball would go 15 yards if I threw it.
Years after Brady told me this story, she stays with me. It’s not just because it’s rich to imagine a lifelong defensive coach not understanding – or refusing to care – about the degree of difficulty on a nearly impossible pitch. It’s because of what Brady told me after describing the moment: “When I see a room, I see it within my own limits.”
BRADY’S WORDS WERE difficult to buy then, and they are more difficult to buy now. Throughout most of his two-decade career, it seemed to his fans and detractors that for Tom Brady anything was possible. After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers knocked out the Green Bay Packers to go to the Super Bowl, Bruce Arians put it better: “The belief he gave to this organization that it could be done – it didn’t take only one man. “
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