Thanks to Drake Maye and the New England Patriots, a lot of people are enjoying déjà vu right now. For the first time since 2016, the Patriots have finally managed to claim a 14-win regular season record and a top-two seed in the AFC playoff race.
Advertisement
The performance has led to all sorts of comparisons between the sophomore QB and Tom Brady. And in light of their 16-3 victory over the Los Angeles Chargers in the Wild Card round, parallels are being drawn between Maye’s head coach, Mike Vrabel, and his predecessor, Bill Belichick.
However, one of their former teammates, Devin McCourty, won’t have anything of that. The former NFL safety, who played 13 seasons with the Patriots from 2010, feels that it is highly unlikely that anyone will ever come close to replicating what Brady and Belichick were able to do together.
“[Brady] was the one that dad loved the most, so dad got him on the most because he knew how special he was,” McCourty jokingly recalled during his latest interview with Kay Adams.
“Tom would always go to our captain’s meetings and go, ‘Hey. You guys have gotta ask Bill, because if I ask him, he’s not going to do it… He’s the oldest. He’s the favorite. It just got showed in different ways. They had a special bond that nobody else understood,” added McCourty.
While he appeared to suggest that the favoritism went too far at times, McCourty can likely live with how things panned out, having won three Super Bowl titles himself. Unfortunately for everyone in New England, including McCourty, that same favoritism eventually culminated in the first and only free agency period of Brady’s career.
The seven-time Super Bowl winner has since explained that “a natural tension” developed between him and Belichick throughout the years, and that by the time COVID-19 hit, they were pretty much done with each other. In an open letter that he penned last year, Brady explained that “It was the kind of tension that could only be resolved by some kind of split or one of us reassessing our priorities.”
The way things ended notwithstanding, the fact is that it’s going to be a while, if ever, before Maye and Vrabel can add legitimacy to their comparisons to the Patriots of old. There’s just simply too much nostalgia, victories, and history attached to the ones who came before them to really justify the debate right now.
