Tom Brady: A Titanic Loss and a Fall From The Wall

Tom Brady must now know how Humpty Dumpty felt.

He can wrap his psyche around the captain of the Titanic.

He can visualize the Hindenburg.

He knows that somewhere in Gillette Stadium, an ancestor of Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicked over the lantern and sent New England's dream season up in smoke.

Brady was helpless when it came time to put out the flames. In the end, when the smoke cleared and New York Jets players were gliding with their arms outstretched, there in the traffic pattern in Foxboro, they buzzed the tower, then buzzed past Brady and Belichick and any Patriot fans who stayed until the bitter end, rubbing their eyes in disbelief.

Brady and his seemingly unstoppable P-Men lay there, dismantled and disbelieving.

"It's like you're on a tread mill running 10 miles per hour and then someone just hits the stop button," Brady lamented after watching his young counterpart, Mark Sanchez, take better care of the football.

Brady forgot to add that it was an equally bad feeling to get planted on his duff by those ambitious, unmerciful Jet linemen.

The sad fact for New England and the joyful song for New York is that there were too many Mark Sanchez moments and not enough vintage Brady.

Hand it to the Jets defense, they slammed Brady and handcuffed him like another purse snatcher on the streets of New York.

"They certainly have a lot of calls," Brady said of those mean green defenders. "I think it was a good plan by them and you've got to give them a lot of credit."

Credit a repeat of the anti-Manning game plan. Cover well and get some pressure from just the front guys.

It was a formula that blew up the New England Death Star, a formula that zapped Brady as Darth Vader and Belichick as the Evil Emperor. 

This was Star Wars with the biggest star of all of them—Brady—taking it squarely on the chin.

In the end it was Sanchez with the 127.3 quarterback rating, a number normally reserved for Brady. But Brady's improbable 89 smelled of a conspiracy by the Jets defense to make his life miserable on that cold Foxboro evening.

The poster play for this 60 minutes of Brady mistreatment was the screen pass by Brady that was intercepted by Calvin Pace.

"Not probably the safest play in the playbook," is how Brady put it.

Then he put "it" in the hands of Pace.

It was that kind of day for the gifted one.

This was just another 14-win season for Brady, Belichick and the no-doubt frustrated owner of this New England clan, Bob Kraft.

So there lies Brady and the rest of the Patriots, looking around at the pieces of a dream season and unlike Humpty Dumpty, they've got time to figure out how to put it all back together again.