|
|
January 25, 2004
Brady, Patriots rebounded from loss to lowly 'Skins
By Mark Maske | THE WASHINGTON POST
Tom Brady and his New England Patriots teammates had no way of knowing late on the afternoon of Sept. 28 how truly galling it was that they just had lost to the Washington Redskins. They couldn't have known that the Redskins would go on to win only two of 12 games the rest of the season, a performance that convinced their coach, Steve Spurrier, to walk away from the NFL.
But they did know they had lost a game that they easily could have won. They knew their injuries were mounting. They knew their record was 2-2, not what they had wanted after going from surprising Super Bowl champions in the 2001 season to home-for-the-playoffs afterthoughts in 2002.
As defensive end Richard Seymour said that day, the players also knew that they'd missed a chance. "We had them right where we wanted them. The stage was set for a late-game comeback."
"It feels like a loss," said linebacker Tedy Bruschi. "It is a loss."
Brady sat quietly on a chair in the visitor's locker room at FedEx Field that day. He stared into his locker, likely mulling the could-have-beens from a game in which he'd played with a sore elbow and made some crucial mistakes in crunch time. The Patriots were at a crossroads. They easily could have been headed toward more disappointment. They might have looked back and blamed their growing list of walking wounded and the tension created by Coach Bill Belichick's decision to release one of the team's leaders, safety Lawyer Milloy, five days before the season because of a contract dispute.
That loss to the Redskins came on the heels on a 31-0 defeat at the hand of the Bullalo Bills in the first game of the season.
That seems like such a long time ago now. The Patriots held themselves together, watched Belichick patch together lineups week after week and started reeling off victories. They have won 14 straight since that 20-17 defeat, joining the unbeaten 1972 Miami Dolphins - who went 14-0 in the regular season and then won three postseason games - as the only NFL teams to have streaks that long in a single season. They will be going for their second Super Bowl title in three seasons when they face the Carolina Panthers a week from today in Houston, and a win would qualify them for mini-dynasty status during the NFL's era of parity.
Perhaps they don't want to admit, even to themselves, how close their season was to unraveling during those four trying weeks in September, beginning with Milloy's ouster and a nasty 31-0 loss at Buffalo to open the season. But Belichick and his players are guarded now when talking about their early-season difficulties, wrapping themselves in the security of their now-is-what-matters single-mindedness.
Said Belichick: "I think in the early part of the year, every team is kind of feeling its way along a little bit. ... I think it's really true that after you have played into the middle of October to early November, then your team really has become what it's going to be. ... We're a week-to-week team. We don't really worry too much about what happened in the past, whether it be one week, two weeks, three weeks or 20 weeks ago. We are more concerned about what the upcoming challenges are and how we are going to meet them."
But it is impossible to appreciate how special and how professional these Patriots have been without remembering the early-season predicament they faced. Their season was hatched with New England in full baseball mania, peaking with the American League Championship Series showdown with the New York Yankees that delivered only more heartache for Red Sox Nation. The locals didn't quite know what to expect from the Patriots, who had been football's feel-good story of 2001 but had been fortunate to survive the "tuck rule" playoff game against the Oakland Raiders. They hadn't exactly fallen apart in 2002, but they had slipped to 9-7 and missed the playoffs.
"I don't think I watched five minutes of the playoffs last year," Brady said.
Belichick and the Patriots' front office had loaded up for the season by stepping out of their usually restrained approach to free-agent spending and signing linebacker Roosevelt Colvin and safety Rodney Harrison. But Harrison's arrival was offset when Belichick sent shockwaves through the league five days before the Sept. 7 season opener by abruptly releasing Milloy, a four-time Pro Bowl safety who had played 106 consecutive games and had served as a team captain for three years.