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Tom Brady Spends Bye Week Scouting, Uses Sushi Chef As Inspiration to Perfect Quarterback Mechanics

While Andrew Luck, Matt Ryanand Doug Martin captivated the football world on Sunday, Tom Brady was sitting at home with his feet up.  But just because the Patriots didn’t have a game, didn’t mean the quarterback wasn’t still working.

Brady, making his weekly appearance on WEEI’s Dennis and Callahan Morning Show on Monday, explained how difficult it can be to shift your attention away from football, even during a bye week.

“It’s hard to stop your mind from thinking about the game,” Brady said. “It’s impossible to do that when all these other teams are playing.”

Brady admitted that he did some advanced scouting during his day off on Sunday, watching some games throughout the day. He caught some of the battle between Luck and Ryan Tannehill in Indianapolis as well as doing some extra preparation for the Bills, the Patriots upcoming opponent, during their loss in Houston.

While some further exploration of upcoming opponents was a focus for Brady, his commitment to improving himself was also of great importance during the bye. And some of motivation came from a foreign documentary, of all things.

“I saw a great documentary this weekend on the airplane, it was called … I don’t even know how to pronounce his name … it was this Japanese sushi chef that I would encourage you guys to see, it’s really cool,” he said. “But he’s 85 years old and the only thing he ever wanted to do was make sushi. … It was just his life-long commitment to being really great at what he loves to do. And he’s 85 and still doing it, it’s just amazing the commitment that it takes to do that.”

Brady wasn’t just impressed by the documentary, but he’s also using it as inspiration in helping to perfect his mechanics as a quarterback.

“You think man, it’s just simple, throwing a football or making a piece of sushi. How hard can that be?” Brady said. “When it’s something that you just love to do, you think about it, you wake up in the night and think about my mechanics. I wake up in the middle of the night thinking about what I can do better: my foot stride and where my arm is and what I’m doing with the front side of the body. For some people it may be crazy to think that, but for me, that’s just what I’ve always loved to do.

“That’s where my improvement — I always seek my improvement from, is improving my mechanics so that every throw I make is absolutely perfect,” he continued. “It’s exactly where I wanted to throw the ball and exactly the amount of velocity I wanted to put on the ball. Those are the types of things that I think about in my off time. That’s what I was meant to do.”

Brady’s calling is undoubtedly under center for the Patriots, and he’s one of the best all-time at the position, but even he knows there’s no such thing as perfection. So wherever he needs to look to continue progressing, even to something as small as a piece of sushi, the more power to him.

Have a question for Luke Hughes? Send it to him via Twitter at @LukeFHughes or send it here.