Everyone Was Wrong About Tom Brady Except One Coach

Imagine buying the one stock every analyst rated a sell and not living long enough to watch it climb. It said, poor build, very skinny and narrow, get pushed down more easily than you'd like. That was the scouting report on Tom Brady, and the whole league read it, nodding along. One coach in New England read the same pages and carried a very different verdict into Bill Belichick's office. Belichick remembered his exact words. Brady, this is the guy. So what did Dick Rabine see in Tom Brady that every other team missed? Everybody else in this story is holding a stopwatch. Dick was holding a notebook. He died six months before Brady reached his first Super Bowl, and his family sat in the stadium for it. To that family, Dick was never a famous quarterbacks coach. He was a soft-spoken man who grew up in Green Bay, where football is less a hobby than a climate. He became a long snapper, a job where the best review you can get is that nobody mentions you. His first coaching job was on special teams under Bart Starr with the Packers. More than 20 NFL seasons followed, much of them coaching offensive linemen. Linemen are paid to stand in front of quarterbacks, not to study them. Then came the Giants, and then an offer from Belichick in Foxborough. Dick took it for a reason that had nothing to do with football, the family says. Foxborough was a small town, and he wanted to raise his girls in one. Dick and Pam had two girls, Betsy and Sarah Beth. Betsy had a pager, and her father used it the way other fathers use a note in a lunchbox. The one-letter word is I, the four-letter word is love, and the three-letter word is you. He would always use 143 with me. He would just kind of, you know, hey, 143, love you. Belichick hired that man in 2000 to coach quarterbacks, a job Dick had never done. Hiring a lineman's coach to judge passers looks smart now, mostly because it worked. There was one item in his file that nobody treated as a problem. Years earlier, a chest x-ray had shown an enlarged heart. Dick answered it with careful eating and long runs. He believed he had it handled and nobody around him argued. The first job Belichick gave him was homework. Four late round quarterbacks, a stack of tape, and a deadline. Came back at the end of the project and it was clearly the guy he thought that had the best chance was clearly Tommy. The Michigan tape told a stranger story than the scouting reports did. Brady started as the seventh quarterback on the depth chart. Seventh string means the coaches had six other answers before they got to him, and Brady outlasted all six. Then they split his snaps with Drew Henson anyway. He still won 20 of his 25 starts, including five comebacks in his final season. That season ended with an overtime win over Alabama in the Orange Bowl. Dick and Bobby Greer agreed on the verdict. Michigan had made the mistake, not Brady. They also liked that his teammates had made him a captain. He really liked the command that Tommy had with all the players. Greer was the only NFL man who phoned Lloyd Carr about him. Carr told him straight, you will never regret drafting Tom Brady. Carr believed enough to give a guarantee, though not enough to stop splitting Brady's snaps. Then came the combine, where football swaps film for a stopwatch and a measuring bar. Brady ran a 5.2840 and jumped 24.5 inches. The scouts treated the shirtless photo from that weekend as a closed case. A 40-time is a strange thing to prize in a quarterback who does his best work standing still. So basically they're saying that I don't look like an NFL quarterback. Dick came home from that weekend with only one subject on his mind. The quiet man had found something he wanted to be loud about. His wife, Pam, put it simply. He was huge on Tom Brady. Just huge. He flew to Ann Arbor with Rob Ryan to work Brady out himself. When he got home, Pam told a reporter years later, he said something that sounded absurd for a late-round project. 20 years from now, people will know the name Tom Brady. Nobody else was writing that on a scouting form. And Dick did not make the picks. He still had to sell a head coach. Belichick had narrowed his search to two names, Tim Rattay and Brady, and he sent Dick to look at both. Dick told an intern named Kyle O'Brien which one he wanted and why. This is the kid, he said. I really believe in him as a person. The credit for the find gets passed around. Greer made the call to Carr. Charlie Weiss says Scott Pioli and Belichick had to find Brady first. Dick, by most accounts, cast the deciding vote. Can I take the obvious answer? I've had it. Talk about the softball tee up here. Drafting the quarterback, Tom Brady. Ask TV who found Brady and you get Belichick's name. The coach who cast the deciding vote never makes the graphic. Across the country in San Mateo, California, the Brady family sat by the television. They had been led to believe Tom would go in the second or third round. The names kept coming, and none of them were his. Six quarterbacks heard their names first, which is a lot of teams agreeing with a stopwatch. Brady can still list them. Twenty years later, he posted the list on Instagram, with three words underneath. Nope, I haven't forgot. By the sixth round, Tom was finished sitting. He grabbed a baseball bat and walked up the street. When he came back, two more quarterbacks were gone. So he went around the block again, this time with his mom and dad. In Foxborough, Dick kept waiting too. Then pick 199 came up, and the Patriots took Brady. The pick was practically a refund. It was a compensatory pick, the league's consolation prize for free agents New England had lost, and Pablo Torre's digging traced it to a punter, Tom Tupa. So the NFL paid the Patriots back for a punter, and the payment won seven Super Bowls. Then Dick picked up the phone and called Pam. We got him. He had just won a fight for a quarterback the team did not need. Drew Bledsoe held the job, and nobody in Foxborough was shopping for another. A quarterback nobody needs is hard to keep. The Patriots carried four that camp, and Weiss put it bluntly, nobody keeps four. Brady's rookie deal ran three years and $866,500. The signing bonus was $38,500, which is a rounding error next to what the team was about to give Bledsoe. Robert Kraft tells the story of their first meeting, and the rookie did not do small talk. Kraft says the rookie looked him in the eye and told him, I'm the best decision this organization has ever made. Brady has since said Kraft's wording is off and that he meant it as a promise. Dick took him just as seriously. Jermaine Wiggins, a tight end on that team, saw it every day. You could just tell that Dick and Tom had a close relationship. Dick really had high expectations for Tom. High expectations come with a ledger. Years later, Brady told Steve Croft on 60 Minutes that he had once caught a glimpse of Dick's notebook. The page said what everybody else was saying. Everything he does is slow. He needs to do everything quicker. The Believer was not blind. He had written down the same flaws as the Scouts, and he kept betting anyway. That March, the Patriots gave Bledsoe the largest contract the league had ever signed. It was 10 years and $103 million, which is what a team pays when it wants the stopwatch to be right. It left no room for what Dick saw. Bledsoe's deal ran 10 years. Dick had given Brady 20. By the following summer, Brady had climbed to second on the depth chart It was the last summer Dick would coach. Training camp gave the coaches a few days off, and Dick spent one at a gym with Sarah Beth. She was 12. He collapsed on a treadmill while she watched. Doctors diagnosed cardiomyopathy and told the family he would be fine. Sarah Beth recalls sitting with him in his hospital room, watching Mr. Ed. That night, he phoned Weiss, who recalls the call coming around 9.45. Dick would take one more stress test, he said, and be back at work by noon. He goes, okay, well, the thallium stress test is in the morning. I mean, after that's over, I'm going to get a clean bill of health. Before the test, the family says, he left Betsy with three words. Love you, boo-boo. On August 6th, during that test, he collapsed again. Pam was drying her hair when the phone rang. Dick passed out during the stress test. We're trying to revive him right now, but it's not looking good. Weiss heard from an intern who walked in to tell him. What, is he not going to be here? And he goes, no, he died. I said, what? Dick Rabine died at Massachusetts General Hospital. He was 45. At the funeral, the family was given two helmets, one from the Patriots and one from the Giants. Brady's signature is on the Patriots helmet. Bledsoe set up a college fund for the girls. Brady still had not started an NFL game. The quarterback room had lost its only coach. Belichick never hired a replacement. He and Weiss took the quarterbacks themselves, and the job stayed empty for the rest of the season. Damon Heward has described film sessions with Belichick that ran about three hours. A head coach with a whole team to run was spending that time on one sixth-round passer. Pam has long suspected that Dick's death helped build the bond between Belichick and Brady. She says she cannot know. The league delayed its opening weekend after the attacks that fall. In the second game, Mo Lewis of the Jets caught Bledsoe at the sideline. The Patriots needed a new quarterback in the middle of a game. Boy, that was some collision. It was my impression in watching this that Drew kind of hesitates. Brady's first start came against the Colts, and the Patriots won. Betsy was in the stands for it, watching the player her father had picked. So, Tom Brady gets his first career start in the National Football League at quarterback. Once Bledsoe healed, the Patriots had a $103 million quarterback watching from the sideline while a sixth-round pick ran his offense. You have to remember, at the time, he went all in on Brady. The sort of prevailing theory was you couldn't lose your job to injury. Belichick broke that rule for the kid Dick had picked. Betsy was at the snow game against the Raiders. She saw the clock stop on a number only her family would notice. I remember looking up at the clock and going, the clock is stuck in a minute and 43 seconds. The Patriots kept the ball and won in overtime. Kraft flew Pam and the girls to New Orleans, where New England went in as a 14-point underdog. On February 3, 2002, the Super Bowl came down to one drive. New England had 121, no timeouts, and the ball at its own 17. I think that the Patriots, with this field position, you have to just run the clock out. You have to play for overtime now." The last stopwatch in this story sat in John Madden's voice, and he was asking America to settle for overtime. The booth was not being cruel. It was doing arithmetic, which is exactly what the stopwatch camp always did with Brady. Brady took the offense down the field anyway. By the time he spiked the ball with seven seconds left, Madden had stopped talking about overtime. Give me goosebumps. Adam Vinatieri kicked it through as the clock hit zero. Up in the stands, Pam and the girls had been handed their tickets in a sealed envelope. And we were in section 143. Sarah Beth, the family says, looked at the field and thought one thing. He's still here. We know that he saw it. He used 143 to show us that he was there. But we wish he could have been on that field that day. So what did Dick Sabine see that the stopwatches could not? He did not see a different player than the scouts did. He saw the same slow feet, the same thin frame, and the same ordinary arm. And he wrote every flaw down himself. Then he bet on what a stopwatch can't time. 20 wins in 25 starts and a seventh string kid who climbed all the way to captain. I think they understand, they underestimated how much I really enjoyed playing football. Everyone was wrong about Tom Brady, except the one coach who agreed with them. That fall, Belichick called Dick the guy that's most responsible for Brady. Before that Super Bowl, a reporter asked Brady about his old coach at media day. Coach Rabone was a tremendous influence on my life, on all the quarterback's life. Pam had said 20 years. In 2020, Brady left New England with six rings. Then he won a seventh in Tampa. In the Rabine house, the family teaches its children about Papa Angel by telling the story of Brady's draft. If you were holding the stopwatch that spring, would you have trusted it or the notebook? Tell me in the comments. You know, someday I want her to tell her kids, hey, I write 143 just like my mom wrote. And my mom wrote it because her dad wrote it. I want to make sure that it continues and it always goes right back to dad.