No more hiding for Goodell as Brady, Patriots try to finish the job at Super Bowl LI
COMMENTARY
As the game clock expired Sunday night, Patriots quarterback Tom Brady waltzed onto the field at confetti-filled Gillette Stadium to perform the obligatory handshakes with select members of Just Another Team in the Way.
This Super Bowl trip, Brady’s seventh with head coach Bill Belichick, was never supposed to happen. The NFL had already decided that by deciding the Patriots and Brady had committed enough wrong against the letter of the league’s law in order to warrant stiff punishment. One million dollars. First- and fourth-round draft picks. Their superstar quarterback suspended for the first quarter of the 2016 season.
Instead, Brady has a chance to win his second Super Bowl title since accusations of deflating footballs arose two years ago. Brady has a chance to win in the face of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, the man who persecuted him for Deflategate with a fervor rarely seen in professional sports, and the league leader who has yet to show his face at the headquarters of his most successful franchise since. He has a chance to win his fifth Lombardi Trophy, which would throttle him past Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw, and cement the legacy he already owns as the greatest quarterback of all time.
“It’s unbelievable,” Brady said after throwing for 384 yards and three touchdowns to help lead the Patriots to a 36-17 win over the Pittsburgh Steelers in Sunday’s AFC Championship game at Gillette Stadium. “It was a good day. I mean, we’re going to the Super Bowl, man. S***. Gotta be happy about that.”
Brady has every right to be happier about it than everybody else.
One week after delivering one of the weaker playoff performances of his career against the Houston Texans in the divisional round, Brady was spectacular against Pittsburgh. You could argue that the closest man in coverage to receiver Chris Hogan might have been a Steelers defender using only Sean Spicer’s brand of evidence, but Brady found him for his first score of the night, a 16-yard touchdown. He found Hogan eight more times for a total of 180 yards, including on the back end of a flea flicker touchdown. He depended on Julian Edelman for 118 more and a touchdown in the second half that pretty much started warming the Steelers’ buses back to Logan.
If last week wasn’t in the least convincing about what these Patriots are made of, what their mission happens to be, then perhaps Sunday’s beatdown of the Steelers will sway you.
The Patriots are going back to the Super Bowl.
Winning a fifth would be sweet.
Vengeance would be sweeter.
“That’s because of the hard work of a lot of people,” Brady said after helping lead the New England franchise to its record ninth Super Bowl appearance. “It takes a lot people, a lot of hard work, a lot of effort over the course of many months. This didn’t start at 6:40 tonight. This thing started in April.”
April?
Oh, perhaps in terms of free agency, the draft, rookie camps, and whatnot, the culmination of every tool the Patriots have been built with began in April. But this goal has been burning holes in the minds of Brady, Bill Belichick, and the Krafts ever since the hammer came down on them from Goodell’s own high chair on Park Ave. They came within a missed extra point of getting back to the Super Bowl a year ago, a repeated matter that lingers as nothing but a footnote one year later in the AFC title game. But Goodell remained, insistent on setting league precedent with the Patriots and Brady as the examples. He won. And he has cowered from the sight of his league’s modern-day dynasty ever since.
Well, sorry, Roger. You’re going to have to face the potential of life with the Patriots now. Brady is headed to Houston from Foxborough, the place the commissioner once again ran away from, instead choosing to travel to Atlanta to watch the Falcons unload on the Green Bay Packers in the NFC Championship game. There’s the very real possibility that Goodell will have to stand in a crowded conference room the Monday after the Super Bowl and hand Brady, the man whose name he dragged through the dirt in the name of affirming his all-deciding power, the Most Valuable Player Award, just as he had to do two years ago in Phoenix.
That’s when the Deflategate was only beginning to be written. We were a long way from Judge Berman, destroying cell phones, and “more probable than not” facades at that point.
That win was long before the NFL tried to put a halt to the New England Patriots.
Looks like that worked well.
Goodell could have cut this all off at the pass by visiting Foxborough even once over the past two years. He could have made this Super Bowl less about the Middle Finger Tour, the storyline that will dominate the next two weeks, had he showed up for Sunday’s game instead of his repeat showing in Atlanta. Instead, he’s made himself into more of a target for the Patriots and their fans, a target to be mocked and ridiculed with the ultimate comeuppance sitting within their reach.
“Where is Roger?” the sellout crowd at Gillette chanted in the fourth quarter, singing a derision to the commissioner that Brady claimed afterward he didn’t hear.
Right.
Belichick wasn’t biting on discussing the sweet taste of reaching the Super Bowl despite the cards the team was dealt either.
“Like every year, it had its own challenges,” he said. “Whatever they are, they are. Every team faces them, every team has to deal with them. We’ve dealt with them. Other teams have dealt with them. Whatever it happens to be.”
It’s Super Bowl No. 7 for Brady and Belichick, who has been to a total of eight with the franchise. It’s the 10th Super Bowl for Belichick as a head or assistant coach, which comes out to about 20 percent of all those played.
“The numbers are nice and all that, but it’s really about this team, and this year, and this group of guys,” Belichick said. “It’s a special year because it’s a special team. Its a special group in the way that they’ve worked together. But there are aways challenges that we have to overcome. Whatever those are, they are.”
They are now the Atlanta Falcons.
Or Just Another Team in the Way.
Where is Roger?
No running away anymore. The Patriots are coming and they have an old friend to find in Houston.
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