For some, the two-week-long wait between the conference championship game and the Super Bowl might be too laborious. But for Tom Brady, he found the time between games helpful — and there’s one instance where the wait really helped the seven-time Super Bowl winner.
In an interview with FS1’s “The Herd,” Brady shared how he and New England Patriots offensive coordinator Josh McDaniels came up with four plays just hours before Super Bowl XLIX that proved to be a difference maker in the team’s 28-24 win over the Seattle Seahawks. After going out to dinner with his family on the Friday night before the game, Brady said that he called McDaniels just before 10 p.m. in order to draw up some red zone plays.
“I called Josh and said, ‘I’m not feeling great about the red area. There’s a lot of moving parts, and I feel like if I look to the right, the defense is going to move to the right and that’s going to take away the guys I’m thinking about. If I look to the left, they’re all going to move. They’re just going to move with my eyes and cover our receivers and I don’t think we’re going to gain any leverage. Can we just go through the plan one more time?'” Brady recalled.
“He and I, at 10 o’clock on Friday night, after seven days [of practice], are watching red area film of the Seahawks’ defense. All the hay’s in the barn. Practice is over. We had no more shots at practice. Josh and I come up with about three or four plays on that Friday night between 10 and 11 o’clock at night. We walked through the plays we installed on the Saturday morning before the game and we threw touchdown passes on two of the plays that we installed on that Saturday morning.”
Brady said that one of those touchdown passes was his pass to wide receiver Brandon LaFell in the first quarter of that game. He didn’t specify what the other one was, but those last-minute changes helped Brady throw for 328 yards and four touchdowns in Super Bowl XLIX, taking home Super Bowl MVP honors.
Tom Brady on working with Patriots OC Josh McDaniels
Now, as the Patriots and Seahawks meet up again in Super Bowl LX, Brady wants that message to be a lesson to Drake Maye, Sam Darnold and everyone else that you can’t do too much work before the game.
“You talk about feeling you can be overprepared. Nah, you can be prepared, but then you can go to the next level, which is crossing every T and dotting every I,” Brady said. “That game came down to the smallest of margins. What does it take? Sometimes, that’s what it takes. And that’s the trust and confidence that he and I built in one another.”
Maye will have McDaniels by his side as he prepares for his first Super Bowl on Sunday. McDaniels returned to the Patriots to become their offensive coordinator again over the offseason, helping Maye emerge as one of the game’s top quarterbacks and become an MVP candidate.
As Maye gets his first taste of preparing for a Super Bowl with McDaniels, Brady couldn’t help but smile when Colin Cowherd asked him to reminisce about what it was like to work with the offensive coordinator in the lead-up to the Super Bowls they reached together.
“They were some of the coolest things I ever remember, working with Josh in those moments and having those two weeks to prepare, knowing the magnitude of what we were playing for,” Brady said. “You have 60 to 70 plays left in the entire season, so why have 300 calls on the call sheet? You’re not going to call them all, anyway. Why don’t you just try to thin it out to the plays that you feel give you the best chance to win and for your team to play well?”
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McDaniels isn’t the only person on the Patriots’ coaching staff with whom Brady has a connection, either. Of course, he was teammates with Patriots head coach Mike Vrabel, who won three Super Bowls alongside Brady.
Even though Brady was never a part of a team that Vrabel was a coach for, he suspects how his former teammate might approach Super Bowl LX with the Patriots being 4.5-point underdogs.
“Knowing Vrabel, he’s probably got every bit of underdog material up everywhere,” Brady said. “We were 14-point underdogs in 2001, and Vrabes was a part of that team. Believe me, Colin, if you pick the Seahawks, I’m sure he’s going to be telling the entire team, ‘Colin Cowherd picked the Seahawks. We’re underdogs.’ That’s just the mentality, and that’s OK. Someone’s gotta be that. The Patriots have had an incredible season. What they’ve done has surprised everybody.
“They certainly deserve to be representing the AFC in this Super Bowl.”
