Tom Brady, Bill Belichick, and the Myth of the "System QB"

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There was little fanfare during the 2000 NFL Draft when the New England Patriots selected Tom Brady, with the 199th pick in the sixth round. Although he played for big-time college program at Michigan and had put up good numbers, 20-5 over two years as a starter.

Including two bowl wins, his last the 2000 Orange Bowl, he was considered an afterthought, one wondered (myself included) what would the Pats need with another QB.

They already had a franchise QB in Drew Bledsoe and a solid veteran backup in Damon Huard. Little was expected from the tall skinny kid from Michigan, in fact most people didn’t expect Brady to stick with team, possibly the practice squad but that was it.

Brady himself was slightly cocky for a rookie sixth-round pick, telling owner Robert Kraft upon meeting him, that “Drafting me was the best move you’ll ever make.” Brady did make the team in what was another unfulfilled (5-11) year for the Pats, their first under Bill Belichick.

But forces were moving, and Belichick was ridding himself of all of the older dead weight of previous Pats regimes and installing a new look and attitude in New England.

The 2001 season didn’t start off any better than the last one ended with the Patriots going 0-2 and having Bledsoe nearly die after a vicious hit from Mo Lewis while trying to run out of bounds against the Jets.

Enter Tom Brady, the morale of Pats fans was at another low, although there were rumors that Belichick, wanted to start the kid out of training camp and had complete confidence in his ability.

His first game under center came against the Indianapolis Colts and the Patriots responded by thrashing the Colts 44-13. The team started to win, and Brady and the offense got better week by week. They won eleven games, the division, and then beat the Oakland Raiders in what has become known as the “Tuck Rule” game.

And before Raiders fans get too hot under the collar, let me remind them of the name of Ben Dreith.

Sound familiar?

In 1976, the Patriots under Chuck Fairbanks went to Oakland for the playoffs and lost, in large part to a “phantom” roughing the passer penalty on Sugar Bear Ray Hamilton when he batted the ball down from Ken Stabler on fourth down.

Had the play stood, the Pats run out the clock. Dreith admitted after the fact that he was a Raiders fan. But that is a story for another time. The following week the Patriots beat the Steelers in Pittsburgh for the AFC Championship.

Then against the “Greatest Show on Turf” the Pats and Brady did the impossible, they beat the Rams in Super Bowl XXVI as Brady led the team to a game winning FG as time expired.

Brady led the Patriots to two more Super Bowl victories over the Panthers in 2003 and the Eagles in 2004, for an amazing run of three wins in four years joining the Cowboys of the 1990s as the only other team to accomplish this.

In the free agent era, such a feat is amazing and Brady and Belichick reaped in a lot of the credit. But we now live in the age of the Internet, where billions of minute data are at your fingertips, and such we can all mass communicate with each other. As a result, sports blogs became the modern day version of the barbershop debate.

Sports were argued back and forth, team’s merits and faults. Players, especially QBs were debated ad nauseum, the biggest on who was better, Peyton Manning

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