Part 4
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The 2001 season was the beginning. It wasn't the peak. It wasn't the masterpiece. It was the first chapter of a story that would span two decades, six Super Bowls, and a thousand arguments about who was the greatest. But it started with a five-yard out. It started with a backup. It started with a game manager. And it ended with a legend. That's the thing about Tom Brady. He was never the biggest. He was never the strongest. He was never the fastest. But he was always the one who won. And that's what matters.
The Greatest of All Time
The clock inside the Louisiana Superdome reads 1:21. The New England Patriots have the ball on their own 17-yard line, no timeouts, the score tied 17-17, and the St. Louis Rams — 'The Greatest Show on Turf,' two-touchdown favorites — standing on the far sideline waiting to finish this. In the FOX booth, John Madden says the safe thing: take a knee, run the clock, play for overtime. Pat Summerall, calling his final Super Bowl, says nothing at all. A 24-year-old quarterback in his second NFL season takes the snap anyway. His name is Tom Brady. He was the 199th pick in the draft.
What follows is 1:21 of football that rewrites a franchise. Brady completes five of eight passes for 53 yards — short throws, smart throws, the kind of throws people used to call game-manager stuff. Then Adam Vinatieri walks out and drills a 48-yard field goal as the clock hits triple zeros. Patriots 20, Rams 17. Brady finishes 16-of-27 for 145 yards and a touchdown to David Patten, and he's named Super Bowl MVP. At 24, he's the youngest quarterback to ever win one to that point. Everything that comes next starts right here.
A Drive Nobody Thought He Should Take
Remember what the Rams were. Marshall Faulk, Kurt Warner, Isaac Bruce, Torry Holt, Orlando Pace — an offense so loaded that Hollywood had already tried to bottle that kind of firepower. Oliver Stone's Any Given Sunday (1999) is the closest cinema ever got to it, and even that was fiction. The Rams were real. They put up 503 points that season. They were supposed to win this game by two scores.
And the Patriots? A team that spent the whole season being doubted because everyone doubted the quarterback. That run included the Tuck Rule game against the Raiders in the snow, a fumble overturned into an incompletion, Vinatieri tying it from 45 yards and then winning it in overtime. It included an AFC Championship in Pittsburgh where Brady went down and Drew Bledsoe — the man he replaced — came off the bench cold and threw a touchdown to David Patten. The whole season played like a movie. It just didn't have a movie's casting.
The halftime show that night was U2. They opened with 'Beautiful Day,' and later, closing with 'Where the Streets Have No Name,' let the names of the September 11 victims scroll into the dark behind them. That's the world this game lived in. A second-year backup out of Michigan, taken in the sixth round, in a season that began with a national wound, ending it with a kick that split the uprights in New Orleans. If you wrote that, an editor would send it back.
Nobody sends it back now. Because that 1:21 wasn't the ending. It was the first sentence.
Six Rings in Foxborough
Two years later he won again. Super Bowl XXXVIII in Houston, Patriots 32, Panthers 29, another Vinatieri kick with four seconds left. The next year, Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, Patriots 24, Eagles 21. Three rings by 27 — and Brady was still, in the national imagination, a system quarterback who happened to be standing in the right huddle.
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Then came the decade that argued with him. Super Bowl XLII in Glendale, Arizona: 18-0, and then David Tyree pins a football to his helmet and the Giants win 17-14. Super Bowl XLVI: another Giants loss, 21-17. In between, Brady tore his ACL in Week 1 of 2008 and lost the season. He came back. He always came back. He threw 50 touchdowns in 2007 — a record at the time — and that year still ended with him flat on the turf in Arizona.
The second act is where the argument died. Super Bowl XLIX in Glendale, February 2015: Brady throws for 328 yards and four touchdowns against the Seahawks, and Malcolm Butler picks off Russell Wilson at the one-yard line to seal it, 28-24. Brady is MVP. Then Super Bowl LI in Houston, February 2017 — the one that broke the sport's brain. Atlanta leads 28-3 in the third quarter. New England wins 34-28 in the first overtime in Super Bowl history. Brady: 43-of-62, 466 yards, two touchdowns, MVP.
Two years later, at 41, he beat the Rams 13-3 in Super Bowl LIII, the oldest quarterback ever to win one. Sixth ring. Six titles in seventeen seasons, all of them in Foxborough, all of them with Bill Belichick on the other end of the headset.
Tampa, and the Seventh
In March 2020, Brady left. Twenty seasons, six rings, one head coach, one owner, one zip code. He signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, a franchise that hadn't won a playoff game since the 2002 season. It looked like a legend cashing a check in the Florida sun. It looked like that for about five minutes.
