Tom Brady, the New England Patriots’ 38-year-old quarterback with four Super Bowl trophies and nearly 55,000 yards passing, is now saying he would like to play professional football for 10 more years, and this is not his idea of some kind of joke.
“I want to play for a long time, maybe 10 more (years],” Brady said on Wednesday. “I love playing this sport. I love making the commitment to my teammates and my coaches, and hopefully I can go for a long time.”
Brady has thrown exactly one interception in 197 pass attempts this season, which came in the Patriots’ last game, a 34-27 victory over Indianapolis, and Brady playfully made it clear that it was really the result of his wide receiver, Julian Edelman, bobbling the ball.
“I haven’t spoken to him all week,” Brady said, tongue in cheek, on a conference call this week with New York reporters.
Brady has completed 70% of his passes this season, his 16th in the NFL, and the Patriots will take a 5-0 record into Sunday’s game in Foxborough, against the New York Jets, who are 4-1 in their first season under Todd Bowles. He replaced the bombastic Rex Ryan, so it has been a quieter week than Pats-Jets games have been.
But this is expected to be a tough game, a marquee matchup, largely because the Jets have the No1 defense in the National Football League, and the Patriots have the No 2 offense. Bowles loves to call blitzes, even more so than Ryan, while Brady prefers to stand in the pocket and pick apart secondaries.
“It just seems like, every year, they lose guys and plug in guys, and it works,” Calvin Pace, the Jets’ linebacker in his 13th NFL season.
It works partly because Brady has been around since 2000. That is a football eternity: none of his current teammates were in New England before 2006, and none of the other starters on offense were Patriots before 2009. Brady says he enjoys the cast changes.
Brady, of course, was the central figure this summer in Deflategate, in which the Patriots were alleged to have tampered with footballs used to win the AFC Championship game in January. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell suspended Brady for four games because he was said to have known about the caper, but a federal judge, citing a lack of fairness and due process in the investigation, erased the suspension September 3.
Asked if he was looking at this season as sort of a Tour of Vengeance, Brady pedaled away, saying he simply wants to do his best because he holds himself responsible for the way he plays, and he still wants to continue to be regarded as dependable and consistent.
“I never want to be part of the reason why we lose a game,” he said.
And the Patriots don’t lose very often. His record as a starter is 165-47. Forty-seven times in his career, he has led the Patriots team to victory from a fourth-quarter deficit or tie. Since the Jets beat New England in a playoff game in January 2011, Brady and the Patriots have won seven of eight games against New York. He is 21-6 against the Jets in his career.
Ryan Fitzpatrick, the Jets’ quarterback, played in Buffalo for four years, which meant he saw Brady a lot. But Fitzpatrick spent last year in Houston, where the Texans’ new coach, Bill O’Brien, a former Patriots’ assistant, installed a similar offense to New England’s.
“He’s just so efficient out there, and he’s fun to watch just because of how in command he is of that offense and of the game,” Fitzpatrick said this week.
A potential subplot is how Brady fares against a secondary that includes Darrelle Revis, who played cornerback for the Super Bowl champion Patriots last year before returning to New York. Revis smiled slyly when he said: “I’ve got my notes.”
Earlier, Revis said of Brady: “He’s always looking for the best matchup, and he trusts his guys.”
Edelman is the Patriots’ leading receiver, with 40 catches and four touchdowns, and tight end Rob Gronkowski is as formidable as ever, with 23 catches and five touchdowns. But 10 other Patriots have caught at least one Brady pass this year.
Brady seems ageless: in the second game this season, against none other than the Buffalo Bills and new coach Rex Ryan, Brady completed 38 of 59 passes for 466 yards and three touchdowns in a 40-32 victory. It was his second-highest single-game mark of his career.
“Coaches move, and players move,” Brady said. “You deal with it and develop chemistry with the guys you have.”
He has never completed 70% of his passes in a full season, but, so far this year, Brady is. He regards this as an accomplishment for the whole offense, not just himself. He has the highest passer rating in the NFL, better than even Andy Dalton and Aaron Rodgers.
Probably more important to him is that the Patriots are 5-0 for only the third time in his career. Only the 2004 and 2007 Patriots won their first six games.
Bill Belichick, the Patriots’ famously grumpy coach, said at his Wednesday news conference: “I don’t even care about any of those other teams. I’m just trying to work on this year. I don’t care about anything in the past. I don’t really care about anything in the future. Right now, I’m just worried about the Jets.”
The Patriots don’t really change too much. Brady suffered a knee injury in the 2008 season opener but never has been thought of as a mobile quarterback; he has rushed for all of 827 yards in his NFL career and has been sacked 377 times – 40 times in 2013 and 13 times already this year.
Pace said forcing Brady to move does affect the way he throws, but Bowles said that is generally true for most quarterbacks. Pace said of Brady, “From the day I got here until now, he still puts the ball on the money – finds the open guy.”
Brady did say something unintentionally silly about facing the Jets: “It’s a big challenge, and hopefully, we can nail things down by the time the game starts Sunday.”
It will be the 215th regular-season NFL game for Brady. He usually gets things nailed down. And he would like to keep nailing things down well into the 2020s, if he has his way.
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