Jaylin Noel dared to do something Tom Brady would’ve never done in the Houston Texans‘ blowout victory over the Baltimore Ravens. After scoring his first career touchdown, the Texans’ rookie wide receiver did Ray Lewis’ squirrel dance, upsetting members of the Ravens’ defense.
In the latest edition of “Storytime with Tom Brady,” the seven-time Super Bowl winner shared how he strayed away from doing things like that against the Ravens during his career, specifically Lewis.
“I was definitely never going to get anywhere close to Ray,” Brady said of the Ravens’ iconic linebacker. “He was a tough man. I never was going to pick any fights with anybody out there, but I was going to instigate something and get the hell out of the way before I got my ass kicked.”
Brady and Lewis had a pretty fierce rivalry over their Hall of Fame careers. Lewis’ Ravens were actually one of three teams (New York Giants, Denver Broncos) to beat Brady in the postseason on multiple occasions in his career. Brady did get the better of Lewis in the majority of their matchups, going 5-3. But Lewis went 1-2 against Brady in the postseason, with the Ravens’ upset victory over the Patriots in the 2012 AFC Championship Game being the penultimate game of Lewis’ career.
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Tom Brady vs. Ray Lewis 😤 The ULTIMATE ‘Chess Match’ & Trash Talk between two NFL Legends
As Brady said that the Ravens were “one of the toughest organizations” that he had to play against during his 20-year career with the Patriots, he specifically pointed to Lewis as a reason why.
“Ray was the ultimate competitor. He was the quarterback of the defense at linebacker and everything ran through him,” Brady said. “So, you just knew that there was a chess match between what he was trying to get his defense to do and what we were trying to get our offense to do. He was such a cerebral player; he read route combinations better than anybody. Once in a while, I’d get out in the open field and he’d come tracking me down.
“Of course, if he hit me, he’d probably break me in two. So, I would try to slide pretty early, but then me, knowing I was protected by my own offensive linemen, I was ready to talk a little of my own s—. But it didn’t last too long. There was a lot of mutual respect between the two of us. We had a great rivalry over the years.”
One of those instances where Brady and Lewis jawed at each other came in the 2011 AFC Championship Game. Lewis hit Brady after the Patriots quarterback took off for a run. As the two were mic’d up by NFL Films, the two repeatedly said “What?” to each other with a bit of an aggressive tone. However, after that game, the two told each other during their postgame meeting that they’re “the best” and expressed their admiration for the other.
Tom Brady and Ray Lewis would respectuflly talk trash to each other when they went head-to-head in their playing careers. (Photo by Matthew West/MediaNews Group/Boston Herald via Getty Images)
Brady’s Patriots wound up winning that game, but he didn’t have his best performance that day. He threw for 239 yards and two interceptions while rushing for a touchdown, while Lewis had a game-high 12 total tackles in that game.
So, as Brady heads back to M&T Bank Stadium to call Sunday’s game between the Los Angeles Rams and Baltimore Ravens on FOX, there’s another game against Baltimore that he picked as his favorite from the Patriots-Ravens rivalry.
“My most memorable game there was in 2007,” Brady said. “We went in there undefeated and we were going against a team that had a lot of pride. It was a back-and-forth battle. There was a sequence there at the end of the game with Rex Ryan as [defensive] coordinator and there was a quarterback sneak we called on a fourth-down play. Just before the sneak, there was a timeout called on their sideline. They stopped me on the sneak.
“It ended up costing them because when they called the timeout, it reset our play. We made the fourth down, we drove the ball inside the 10-yard line and I threw a touchdown pass to Jabar Gaffney with very little time left.”
With Brady’s 8-yard touchdown pass to Gaffney coming with 55 seconds remaining, it appeared that the Patritos would move to 12-0 as they took a 27-24 lead. But Brady had to sweat out one more dramatic play from the sideline in order for New England to move one game closer to becoming the first team in NFL history to go 16-0 in a regular season.
Jabar Gaffney made a toe-tapping touchdown grab to help the Patriots keep their undefeated regular season alive against the Ravens in 2007. (Photo by George Bridges/MCT/Tribune News Service via Getty Images)
“Kyle Boller was the [Ravens’] quarterback and he drove the ball to about almost midfield,” Brady said. “They had one shot to the end zone. There was a lot of wind going into the direction where their end zone was. Kyle unleashed a rocket up into the air and I’m watching it from the sideline, and the ball comes down and the Ravens receiver (Mark Clayton) catches it at like the 2-yard line. They were going for a Hail Mary, but they didn’t make the end zone. They came up two yards short, which saved our undefeated season to that point.”
While the Ravens gave the undefeated Patriots a run for their money that day, Baltimore actually finished just 5-11 that season. But there’s a reason why Brady took pride in that victory.
“We scored this great touchdown against one of the best touchdowns we ever faced,” Brady said of his touchdown pass to Gaffney.
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