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 .
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.
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, 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, .
“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 . 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.
