Much like the majority of modern day defensive players, when asked to name the quarterback that gave him the most trouble throughout his career, Tyrann Matheiu couldn’t help but to smile and shake his head before uttering the name “Tom Brady.” The “Honey badger” was the hammer, more often than not throughout his 12-year career, but at Super Bowl LV, Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers showed Mathieu what it was like to be the nail, and suffice to say, that still haunts the retired DB to this day.
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“He was just always hard to deal with,” Mathieu exclaimed during his latest interview for NFL on ESPN. In addition to noting that Brady’s rate of play was notably above everyone else’s, Mathieu also suggested that he tends to break you from a “mental perspective” as well.
“Rarely did he give you a beep, rarely did he get to the line and kind of give away what he was doing.” Of course, you can’t truly appreciate greatness until you’ve experienced it, and for the former Kansas City Chief, his brush with Brady just happened to come on one of the grandest stages of them all.
Thinking back to everything that transpired throughout the Buccaneers’ 31-9 win that day, Mathieu was forced to admit that Brady “got him” good. “It was the Antonio Brown route,” he grimaced. “I thought I covered this route decently, at least… But he just knew exactly where to put the football… It didn’t matter a lot of times whether you had great coverage or not, because his ball placement was so spot on.”
According to Mathieu, Brady’s accuracy is perhaps the most underrated part of his game. In suggesting that he was just as accurate as Drew Brees, he insisted that the former New England Patriot “rarely made mistakes.”
Thankfully, the 69th overall pick from the 2013 NFL Draft was still able to retire from the gridiron having won at least one championship with the Chiefs before Brady put a temporary stop to their dynasty. Although, it’s incredibly unlikely that Mathieu will forever regret his decision to poke the bear by getting in the quarterback’s face early into that evening.
Brady himself later confirmed that Mathieu’s extracurricular activities provided the very spark that helped him to claim the seventh Lombardi trophy of his career while simultaneously depriving the legendary DB of a second one. The picture of the two of them standing toe to toe will live in infamy, right along with the final result of the game, but seeing as Mathieu was able to net himself more than $97.5 million in contracts throughout his 12 years in the league, it’s not as if anyone feels too bad for him in the end, not even himself.
