Late in Episode 7 of his “Man in the Arena” docuseries, Tom Brady reveals a motto that, had it been widely known at the time, would have appeared on thousands of T-shirts across New England.
The episode, which premieres Tuesday night at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN+, focuses on the 2016 Patriots season, which began with Brady serving his four-game Deflategate suspension.
“From the suspension standpoint, once that was over, that was over,” the quarterback says. “That was in the past. I wasn’t going to dwell on that. It was an FEA year.”
FEA year?
“FEA meant ‘(Expletive) ’em all,’ man,” Brady continued. “They ain’t cheering for you anyway, so you may as well go out there and win. Because we’re going to go please everybody and get everybody to like us by losing? (Expletive) that. We’re not doing that. We’re going to go (expletive) ’em all.”
Brady achieved that goal.
After returning in Week 5, he began one of the most ruthlessly efficient campaigns of his NFL career. He completed 67.4% of his passes (second-best behind 2007), averaged 8.2 yards per attempt (third-best), posted a 112.2 passer rating (second-best) and threw 28 touchdowns with just two interceptions as the Patriots went 11-1 in regular-season games he started.
Brady capped the ’16 season, of course, by erasing a 28-3 deficit to stun the Atlanta Falcons in overtime in Super Bowl LI — a game he calls the “best Super Bowl ever played.”
The episode also features an explanation from Brady about why he ultimately decided to drop his Deflategate appeal, which dragged on for 18 months before the QB finally accepted his suspension.
“Maybe that’s a little bit of the disappointment that you feel when you do accomplish something like we did — that it becomes a distraction and takes away from what you believe this team had accomplished, and that people want to try to minimize those accomplishments by certainly talking about a deflated football,” Brady says. “And there’s a great line that I always kind of adhere to: If you’re explaining, you’re losing. So I never like going, ‘But, but, but, but.’ … I don’t need to defend myself. I’ve defended myself for a long time.
“I’ve said what I had to say multiple times in front of a lot of different people, in court, in public. I felt I had given them what they needed to make the right decision, but I feel like they had their mind made up. … You’ve got to know when to fight, and you’ve got to ultimately know when it’s taking too much out of you to fight. And I realized I wasn’t going to win. It’s hard to beat 31 billionaires in court. I thought we gave it a great fight, but in the end, just dealing with the results of what (the) New York circuit judge decided, I decided to put that behind me and then move on to the next year.”
Episode 7 of “Man in the Arena,” a co-production by ESPN, Religion of Sports, 199 Productions and NFL Films, premieres Tuesday at 9 p.m. ET on ESPN+.
