Brady Can Make Claim As NFL’s Best

This past offseason, Jim Schwartz, the Titans’ defensive coordinator, spoke at a sports banquet. The host asked him a question: What NFL quarterback would you select, other than Steve McNair, to start one game?

When he picked Tom Brady, guests in the audience stirred. “The guy looked at me and says, ‘Tom Brady?’ and I laughed,” says Schwartz. “I mean, he’s won two Super Bowls, he’s a clutch performer, and people still don’t see him as a marquee player. What hasn’t he done?”

What he hasn’t done is move out of the shadow of It. When those who passed on him in the draft four years ago and those who can’t beat him now try to explain how this kid -- the one they remember out of Michigan with the weak frame and average arm, terrible feet and limited mobility -- can possibly possess two championship rings, the fallback position always is, blame It, that mysterious, seemingly indefinable something that some quarterbacks have and many don’t, and when you have It, you win and when you don’t, you are Ryan Leaf. They simply didn’t realize Brady had It.

Now, they are wiser. His cup of It runneth over. Charlie Weis, the Patriots’ offensive coordinator, gives It a name: moxie. “And Tom is the epitome of having that special moxie,” he says. Scouts speak about It in reverent tones as if It has form and breathes and invisibly stalks the playing field. “It is leadership, poise, judgment, competitiveness, an edge,” says John Dorsey, the Packers’ director of college scouting. “You know It is there, but can you find It? When you do, you eventually will get the trophy. But the search drives us crazy.”

Brady still is driving them bonkers. They so much want to look at him differently in this, his fourth year as a starter. They see the Unitas-like accomplishments, how the Patriots have won 18 straight games, how he has never lost any of seven overtime contests, how they have fallen just once with him in 17 games decided by six points or fewer, how he has pieced together 15 winning drives in the fourth quarter or overtime. Yet, even with this resume, which carves out space among the all-time greats, their vision still is clouded by the shadow cast by his close pal It. With Manning and Favre and McNabb and McNair and Vick, you can see all the natural talent and a decent amount of It mixed in, too; they’ve always seemed more suited than Brady to be elite NFL quarterbacks. Maybe with him, the success is too much, too soon.

When you are a draft afterthought, when your coaches at Michigan worked so diligently to replace you as a senior with young Drew Henson and his All-American gifts, and now to be considered an equal of Manning, who has been part of our quarterback mind-set forever, well, the NFL always has been slow to change perceptions.

Listen to the inner debate of Bills General Manager Tom Donahoe: “If you rated Brady’s skills, he is not the top-rated quarterback in the league,” he says. “To put him skill-wise with Favre or Manning, you just can’t do it.” OK, but ... “All he does is win two Super Bowls. You can argue all day long who is the best athlete, but you still have to win. And no one has won more than him recently.”

So where does that leave Donahoe? “How old is Tom, 28? He’s 27? Wow, that is even worse for the rest of us. If the Patriots keep going and the rest of us don’t find a way to stop them, he will put together a record as good as anyone who has ever played.” Like so many in the league, Donahoe walks right to the edge with Brady, but hesitates to take the next step.

For sure, Brady can be buried by numbers. Manning and Favre are all over the record book. Manning might even challenge Dan Marino’s career statistics one day, a notion once considered unfathomable.