There was a reason the Patriots kept a fourth quarterback on the roster in 2000, behind Drew Bledsoe, John Friesz and Michael Bishop. And it wasn’t because Bill Belichick, in his first year, thought Tom Brady would become Tom Brady.
It was because Brady was doing all he could just to become a pro football player.
Charlie Weis, that team’s offensive coordinator, can recall Brady enlisting the camp-fodder receivers, backs and tight ends, guys destined for, at best, the practice squad to stay after practices that summer. The gangly sixth-round pick from Michigan would basically run them through the work that had just finished a second time, so he could get the reps that the coaches couldn’t yet afford to give him or the others staying late with him.
Sometimes, effort like that from a young player can be performative—the sort of look-at-me thing a guy might do to show his bosses he’s worthy of a paycheck. But Brady didn’t stop after he made the team. Into the season, and through the season, he kept staying late. He kept getting the work in. It wasn’t some phony act, and without so much as the help of a single coach, Brady was running it all himself. “Meaningful reps,” Weis called them.
So that was the first thing that Weis noticed, that made him think Brady was different.
Peter Read Miller/Sports Illustrated
The second came about a year later, after Brady had replaced the injured Bledsoe.
That summer, Brady beat out Damon Huard, whom the Patriots had signed to a three-year, $3 million deal (a lot of money at the time, and another sign the Patriots didn’t know what they had in early 2001), which positioned him to go in when Bledsoe went down. And on Oct. 14, Brady was making his third start. New England fell behind 26–16 with 8:48 left, and the 24-year-old led a rousing comeback to force overtime.
“They get the ball first, our defense stops them, we get the ball,” Weis explained. “Now, this is the play. This next play is the play. They had an exotic blitz we saw on tape that, really, we didn’t have an answer for. So we put in an audible for that one exotic blitz. If that exotic blitz came up, we would check to an audible to this play. So we go through the whole game, we don’t see the blitz, we figure out, O.K., they’re not going to run it this week.
“We get the ball back, we line up on the first play, in a three-by-one. Sure enough, what do you think they do?”
It was coming.
“They bring the same exotic blitz. The same exact one,” Weis explained. “I see it coming, but they show it after the 15-second marker for coach-to-quarterback [communication], so I can’t say anything to him. This guy sees the blitz, calmly backs off, calls the audible, throws the ball 50 yards downfield to David Patten, they have to tackle him [and pass interference was called] because he’s running free down the field, kick a field goal, win the game.”
Twenty-one years later, it still amazes Weis. This wasn’t a simple check. This was Brady changing the play completely, and with an audible they went through once, maybe twice in practice that week. He did it in his third start, with less than 15 seconds on the play clock, and 60 or 70 plays into an intense game. “There’s a lot of veterans that would not have gotten this check,” Weis said. And so the light went on for the Patriots’ coordinator.
“I remember that night specifically,” Weis recalled, “going home and saying to my wife, ‘We might have something special here.’”
Therein lied the greatness of Brady. Physically, he was far from overwhelming. He had a really good, not great, arm. He was accurate. He wasn’t very athletic. On the hoof, there’d been an assembly line of quarterbacks who looked just like him to come into the NFL.
He retired on Tuesday the greatest of all time, because of the stuff you couldn’t see.
That stuff might be referred to as his intangibles. But if a teammate or a coach spent enough around him, they’d see that what Brady was bringing was very tangible, even if it couldn’t be marked off with a tape measure or a stopwatch.
** Get SI's Tom Brady Retirement Commemorative
John W. McDonough/Sports Illustrated
Bill O’Brien can remember his first encounter with Brady after coming to the Patriots in 2007, as an offensive quality-control assistant. It was late winter, back when the NFL allowed teams to have passing camps before the spring.
“Bill had brought Wes Welker in and Randy Moss in, and we had Donté Stallworth, Jabar Gaffney, I mean, arguably the greatest receiving core of all-time. … So we went into the bubble and Tom was there.”
O’Brien paused.
“It was incredible,” he said. “I’ve never seen anything like it. He had obviously already spoken to these guys about the offense. They were running routes, they knew the signals. I mean, I’m coming from college. This is my real first experience of seeing pro football at the highest, highest level. And I was like, ‘This is amazing.’”
Brady wound up throwing an NFL-record 50 touchdown passes that fall, and the Patriots became the first team to go through a 16-game regular season undefeated.
But the point O’Brien is driving home isn’t about wins and losses, or yards and touchdowns. It’s about the standard to which Brady held himself—and everyone else. And it was most apparent in those quiet settings that weren’t for public consumption.
“He held me accountable,” said Matt Cassel, Brady’s backup from 2005 to ’08.
And what was wild about that? Cassel wouldn’t ever even be on the field with Brady—if he got on it, Brady would be off it. But Brady wasn’t going to let details slip, and that showed up, again, on a random day at practice, with Cassel getting an important lesson from his teammate after hitting a shot downfield for a long gain.
“I was happy about it,” Cassel said. “It was a big play and he goes, Cassel, you can’t do that. He’s like, Dude, you missed the motion presnap. And I didn’t even realize it at the time. I was just kind of excited about the fact that I completed the ball. We’re moving it in the right direction and all this stuff. And I was like, What are you talking about? He goes, You can’t miss that motion because guess what? At some point you’re going to have to hold those guys accountable for not being at the right depth or not having the correct spacing.
“You don’t want them to ever be able to look at you and say, Well, you forgot the motion.”
For Cassel, it was a glimpse into the standard that Brady held himself to—a standard to which everyone around him, almost by default, wound up being held. And it wasn’t that Brady was heavy-handed about it. It was that teams he was on, almost by osmosis, wound up holding themselves to that standard, too.
O’Brien can still remember taking over as play-caller for Josh McDaniels, who’d left to take the Broncos’ job, in 2009, and the first message Brady sent him. It was direct. It was clear.
“I want to be coached,” Brady told O’Brien.
The implication, for anyone who coached Brady, was daunting—you had to somehow find a way to consistently provide new information to a quarterback who was prepared to the point where he knew everything. So for coaches like Weis, McDaniels and O’Brien, it eventually would become a challenge, one that spilled over into practice.
“We would mix in some crazy blitzes, some really hard blitzes, out of nickel, out of dime,” O’Brien said. ‘And I’m telling you in the five years that I was there, we never got him on a blitz, on a blitz card in practice, in a walkthrough, never ever. … It was amazing.”
In time, that would make a player better, a coach sharper, and ultimately the whole offensive operation more dangerous.
For O’Brien, there’s one snap he can remember that encapsulates all of it. It was at the end of the 2010 season, a 10-yard touchdown throw to the late Aaron Hernandez to beat the Packers, 31–27, and one that didn’t seem all that complex—until you hear what Brady did.
“We were really good in no-huddle,” O’Brien said. “So we were going fast, and I called a formation. It was a one-word play and it was basically what we’d call a 3-by-0 formation. And it was a run. And they were blitzing to the side of the run. So he was like, Oh, easy, easy. And he began to change the play. Within however many seconds, let’s just call it three to four seconds, he changed the run to a pass. He had to check the protection; he had to point the protection correctly. He had to signal the route. He had to move Hernandez out, to get him lined up where he was supposed to be lined up, to run the route.
“He had to move the receivers and make sure they knew split-wise what they were supposed to do. I mean, he did like eight things and then he fired a touchdown pass to Hernandez on the snap of the ball with about one second left on the play clock.”
Ever wonder why Brady’s receivers would often look so open?
“I always use the example with the young quarterbacks,” O’Brien said. “I’m like, Look, man, there’s so much that goes into this position. And the problem, sometimes you’re not going to have a quarterback that can do that. So you’re just trying to explain the concept of, Hey, you guys really got to know what you’re doing. It was an incredible play. … I’ll never forget that play.”
Then, there’s the other part that you can’t see on a Sunday on network TV—how the guy wearing No. 12 would get guys to follow him, to strive for his standard, to be accountable to him, demanding as he was.
Dan Koppen, Brady’s center from 2003 to ’11, can show you why, with texts Brady sends him every year on his birthday. He can also tell you about the time Brady had a commercial shoot for Visa, and insisted his linemen be a part of it. (“It was fun for him, but also he realized these guys are gonna get some extra cash, and they deserve it.”) Or simply explain how the guy he met in ’03, still seen as a “system quarterback” who might’ve just gotten lucky during the fairy-dust run of ’01, is the same guy today, even as a global celebrity.
“The pressure’s gotta be incredible, what you go through in the outside world, to how many directions you’re pulled in, and I’m sure it got to him at times, and there were probably some changes over the years,” Koppen said. “That’s just natural. But the fact that he’s still the same guy off the field that he always was as a friend is kinda cool. And that just speaks to how he was raised, and who he is and what a great person he is.”
And that stayed the same, even as Brady got older and, eventually, some of his teammates were from a completely different generation than he was.
“He’s a good friend,” said Jerod Mayo, Brady’s teammate from 2008 to ’15, and a coach for Brady’s last year in Foxboro. “He’s one of those guys who, as different generations came through the league, he was able to evolve as a person. He was able to connect with different people, different races, different age groups. And that’s huge, especially at one of the most important positions in sports, a guy that can just stand above it all and relate to people and build rapport with different groups of people on a daily basis.
“To me, that was the most important thing. And whether you’re talking about my rookie year or my last year, I mean, it was always the same. This guy was able to relate to me, and we have a good friendship. And even though we don’t talk on a daily basis, when we see each other, it’s like we’ve never left.”
“It’s scary because as good as a football player as he is, he’s an even better friend, even better person,” added Danny Amendola, Brady’s teammate from 2013 to ’18. “He’s been like a big brother to me. … Whether it’s been getting out to Montana or going to the [Kentucky] Derby or just having us over for dinner, he’s always the same. He’s always there to help. He’s actually like a big brother to everyone.”
So if Brady’s like this now, what was he like way back when?
Weis has a story to tell that illustrates it. The former Patriots assistant had gastric bypass surgery in June 2002. It was scheduled for a Friday. He was set to be released on a Saturday. Brady had previously planned to come visit Weis on Saturday—“He didn’t want to catch my crap for not coming to see me,” Weis joked—in the morning. But by then, things had taken a very dire turn.
Weis’s stomach had burst open, and he was rushed to the ICU. The next few days were dicey at best. “I was flat-lined at times,” Weis said. And where Brady had originally planned to stop by for a few, he was now staying for much longer than anyone thought he would.
“We’re from New Jersey, and we’re up in New England; we don’t know anyone like that, to be there for my wife, with the kids,” Weis said. “We got two kids, one with special needs, they’re both young. It’s a disaster. But the whole thing was I went in on Friday, supposed to get out by noon on Saturday, so it wasn’t like you were calling the reinforcements to come up [from Jersey]. Who do you think sat with her the whole time?
“Number 12. That was the one who got her through until reinforcements got up there.”
And, Weis added, “If he’s doing it for me in ’02, imagine what he’s doing for people that he’s known for a long time. That’s why all these players that are around him for the first time feel like that.” It didn’t stop there, either. Every night before camp started that summer, Brady stopped by Weis’s house and spent about 45 minutes with him, just making sure his spirits were good.
“There are a lot of people who have their Tommy stories,” Weis said. “But he earned card-carrying Weis family status during that time right there.”
Which makes it easy to see why people follow him.
** SICovers.com: Shop SI's Tom Brady Covers
If that is Brady’s Jekyll, then Amendola got to see No. 12’s Hyde pretty early on in his time with New England. The quarterback had heard his new slot receiver was good at table tennis, and was going to find out for himself on a rickety table in a laundry room at Gillette Stadium.
“He goes, ‘Jules [Edelman] said you’re good at Ping-Pong. I’ve played a little bit myself. Let’s go back to the back and see what you’re all about,’” Amendola said, laughing. “So we went back there and played a couple of games. We were limited on time because we had to get to a meeting, but I remember just his fire, his competitiveness just in Ping-Pong. For me, it kind of set the tone for what he’s all about. And I remember one of the Ping-Pong paddles got broke. And it wasn’t mine.”
Legend from that Patriots era has always held that Amendola beat Brady, turned, and then heard a whistling go by his ear, followed by a loud smack. It was, the story goes, Brady’s paddle, missing Amendola’s head by a few inches.
“I was like, ‘Wow, man, this guy hates to lose,’” Amendola said. “And I love that. I love that I’m on his team.”
Therein was one more thing that you couldn’t know about Brady just by looking at him.
In the biggest moments, he wasn’t going to let his team lose. Whether it was driving the field in Super Bowl XXXVI against the Greatest Show on Turf Rams at 24 years old, or throwing bombs to beat the Giants and complete the 16–0 run in 2007, or battling back from down 24–14 against a generational Seattle defense to win Super Bowl XLIX, only to top it against Atlanta two years later, in surmounting a 28–3 deficit, he always seemed to be at his best when it mattered the most—and maybe mostly because that was his element.
The competitiveness came out in Brady’s intensity in so many instances, from the Ping-Pong table to the practice field, and even through tense in-game moments. Conversely, when the chips were down, it showed itself in his calm, almost as if he knew exactly what his team needed.
“He was so level, no doubt,” Mayo said. “I just remember in practice, he’d get emotional, he’d yell. But in the game, because he was so emotional during the week, it was more of that steady hand, especially based on what the roster was composed of, and if we needed that. Being able to have a steady hand at the quarterback position definitely led to a lot of wins. And wins in critical situations in my career. And for the Patriot dynasty.”
In turn, the intangibles manifested in tangibles. Lombardi Trophies. MVP awards. Passing records. And a lot of relationships that’ll last forever.
Brady had talent, of course. But his mind, his loyalty, his leadership and his competitiveness set him apart, and came together to create a football player unlike any we’ve ever seen before, a football assassin who always had a tight-knit group of gunmen alongside him.
In hindsight, you can see where all those elements were there in Brady from the start.
And the greatest career an NFL player has ever had sure did reveal them.
