There has been a lot of great writing about the New England Patriots this week and MMQB’s Jenny Vrentas has a great story about QB Tom Brady from the perspective of his coaches and teammates.
Literally every story in the article is worth reading, so I won’t list them all (seriously, go read the article), but here’s a taste, from none other than Randy Moss.
“We were doing two-minute and I was the single receiver,” Moss said about a practice in Fall of 2007. “Tom Brady gave me the signal to run a 5-yard quick out. Make a long story short, me and Tom didn’t connect. For whatever reason, the ball was not caught. The ball was thrown, but it was not caught. Was it his fault or my fault? I don’t care; the ball was not completed. So we come in the next day, Bill Belichick puts up the film and basically says, ‘Are you kidding me? I have my such and such All-Pro wide receiver, and I have my All-Pro quarterback, and y’all cannot complete a 5-yard out?’ He said, ‘Tom, I can go down here and get the local high school quarterback to come and complete me a 5-yard out.’ And everybody was like, Oooh. So basically, when he humiliated Tom, in front of the boys, man, we went out there and put everybody up. I don’t care who it was; whoever was on that defense that day, they got it. And that was practice.
“I had never seen that, but I had heard that, and that’s what I was actually looking for in a head coach. When I went to the New England Patriots, all I wanted to do was get around a team that wanted to get out there and win. I didn’t want to get a team that wanted to win in the streets, win at the clubs, win in the bars, because I had been on teams like that. There were a lot of things I was lacking toward the end of my career that I always wanted to feel, and with my short time in New England, I had a chance to feel that.”
This is just one excerpt. Vrentas gets stories from coaches like Charlie Weis and Eric Mangini, receivers like Moss and Deion Branch, linemen like Dan Koppen and Matt Light. If you want to see how Brady became BRADY, read this article now.
What’s your favorite Brady story?