New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady talks a lot in a given week.
He holds news conferences during the week and after games. He’s also interviewed Monday on WEEI and Westwood One. With a lot of airtime to fill, certain local sports talk radio hosts tend to read into all of those words he speaks a little too deeply. That happened last week when Brady gave a frank assessment of some of his younger teammates.
Brady said this:
“I think one thing we talk about here is just doing our jobs. I mean, I can do what I can do. Every player can do what they can do. I can’t do anything for anyone else; they can’t do anything for me. So, a lot of it’s just trust and trying to communicate trust and communication. So, I’ve always said the best teammates are the ones that I have to think about the least because I don’t want to spend my mental energy on things that aren’t really my job. The same goes on defense. The free safety can’t rush the passer and the pass rushers can’t cover the deep part of the field. So, I think what makes a good team is just people doing their job, doing it the best way they can and that’s what my responsibility is.”
And that was twisted into, “Brady is a bad teammate.”
Brady passed Brett Favre for third all-time in career passing yards Sunday. With 71,923, he’s now 17 yards behind Peyton Manning for second all-time. Brady is also 12 passing touchdowns behind Manning for the all-time record.
It would be out of character and against the “Patriot Way” for a game stoppage to occur — similar to when Drew Brees set the career passing mark — when Brady inevitably does pass that record.
Brady was asked Monday night by Jim Gray on Westwood One what individual accomplishments mean to him.
“I think having a lot of perspective on things like this is where I like to come from,” Brady said. “I don’t believe that football is an individual sport. So, any individual accomplishment, to me, is always a team accomplishment. There’s nothing that you can accomplish in football without everybody else doing their job. I think I’ve always taken to football because of that. I’m not a golfer. I don’t play tennis. You look at some of these individual sports, and yeah, it’s amazing, and there’s great accomplishments, but I think enjoying sports for me is the relationships I’ve built with my teammates, with my coaches, with the organization I’ve represented.
“Because I’ve been fortunate to play in the same place for 20 years with great teammates, I’ve been able to pile up a lot of individual statistics, but the reality for me is all of those I share with all of the guys that I’ve played with. You know, my wife said, ‘He cannot throw the ball and catch it.’ That’s the truth. There’s a lot of guys that have been on the other end of catching all of those passes.”
So, what is Brady’s favorite record?
“The name of the game for me has always been winning,” Brady said. “I think that’s the one that has and always will mean the most. The goal every week is to go out there and win, and I know some weeks it doesn’t always look as good as others, but the goal of the game is to win. I’m just proud of our team and all of the accomplishments we’ve had. Winning as often as we have has made my life on Mondays a helluva lot better. I can barely deal with the losses, and we haven’t hard nearly as many losses as we’ve had wins. I deal with the wins a lot better.”
Brady has 242 wins to his name. That’s 212 regular-season wins and 30 in the postseason.
