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.
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 referred to as on a fourth-down play. Simply earlier than the sneak, there was a timeout referred to as on their sideline. They stopped me on the sneak.
“It ended up costing them as a result of once they referred to as the timeout, it reset our play. We made the fourth down, we drove the ball contained in the 10-yard line and I threw a landing move to Jabar Gaffney with little or no time left.”
With Brady’s 8-yard landing move to Gaffney coming with 55 seconds remaining, it appeared that the Patritos would transfer to 12-0 as they took a 27-24 lead. However Brady needed to sweat out yet another dramatic play from the sideline to ensure that New England to maneuver one recreation nearer to turning into the primary group in NFL historical past to go 16-0 in a daily season.
Jabar Gaffney made a toe-tapping landing seize to assist the Patriots preserve their undefeated common season alive in opposition to the Ravens in 2007. (Picture by George Bridges/MCT/Tribune Information Service through Getty Photos)
“Kyle Boller was the [Ravens’] quarterback and he drove the ball to about nearly midfield,” Brady stated. “That they had one shot to the tip zone. There was lots of wind going into the course the place their finish 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 just like the 2-yard line. They have been going for a Hail Mary, however they didn’t make the tip zone. They got here up two yards quick, which saved our undefeated season to that time.”
Whereas the Ravens gave the undefeated Patriots a run for his or her cash that day, Baltimore really completed simply 5-11 that season. However there is a purpose why Brady took satisfaction in that victory.
“We scored this nice landing in opposition to probably the greatest touchdowns we ever confronted,” Brady stated of his landing move to Gaffney.
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