FOXBORO — A longtime advisor to Tom Brady says the quarterback is “not in complete rhythm,” but the struggles he’s had through the first five weeks of the season are “repairable.”
Bay Area quarterback guru Tom Martinez has worked on and off with Brady since Brady was on Serra High’s junior varsity team in the early 1990s, and Brady thinks enough of Martinez that he gave him the game ball he received after guiding the Patriots to a win in his first start in 2001 against the Colts. The ball is autographed by Brady with the inscription “Coach Martinez — Thanks — The first of many — 9/30/01 — Patriots 44, Colts 13 — Tom Brady #12.”
From his California home, Martinez has watched the first five Patriots games of the 2009 season, and he compares Brady’s current mechanical flaws to where Colts quarterback Peyton Manning was at the start of last season, when the Indianapolis quarterback was coming off knee surgery of his own and was struggling to re-acclimate himself to the speed of the NFL.
“I think in some respects Tom is probably a lot further along then I thought he might be,” Martinez said. “It happened to Carson Palmer as well. All the guys that have been very successful and big-time guys — it’s happened to all of them. Peyton has snapped out if it. I think Tom will, too.
“Obviously, he’s missed some throws he’d normally hit, and they’ve turned out to be fairly important throws,” Martinez added. “He’s not in complete rhythm like he was before.”
Brady has missed connections with receivers on several occasions this season, including last Sunday against Denver when Brady overthrew Randy Moss on a couple of occasions, including one first-half pass play when the quarterback air-mailed the ball over the wide-open receiver's head in the end zone. In addition, he was not able to hook up on a key third-down pass play with Wes Welker. Welker had found a seam in the defense, but the pass fell at his feet.
Brady said he had not spoken with Manning about how to handle post-surgery life as an NFL quarterback. But he was clear in what he believed was needed to tighten up his game.
“It’s just about going back to work,” Brady said. “When you don’t play as well as you’d like, there’s really no secret to it. You just have to get out there and do it, and do it better, and be more focused, and be more concentrated.
“[You have to] go on the practice field with a sense of urgency. That’s the way to overcome it. You’ve just got to say, ‘This is what it is,’ and, ‘This is what we’re not doing a very good job of,’ and, ‘This is what I’m not doing a very good job of,’ and trying to do it better.”
In that same vein, Martinez compares the quarterback to Tiger Woods in his ability to self-correct his mechanical mistakes. (“Tom has that same control,” Martinez said of the Woods-Brady comparison.) He said that Brady has done that before — he mentions the 2006 divisional playoff game in San Diego as a prime example, where Brady struggled mechanically at the start of the game before fixing his problems — including a few times this season.
“I think watching him, he’s not throwing the ball mechanically like he did two years ago,” Martinez said. “But he’s gone through spells this year where he wasn’t as mechanically as good as he could be, he knows what he’s supposed to do and snaps out of it. It’s normally very repairable, and I think obviously for him, it’s repairable.”
Martinez also assures people that as the quarterback struggles through a difficult stretch, no one is harder on himself than Brady.
“Tom, it’ll bother him more than anyone else,” Martinez said. “No one has to tell him anything to motivate himself — he’ll do that out of his competitive nature.”
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