Brady's injury a costly blow for the NFL

AMERICA AT LARGENew England Patriots not alone in ruing the season-ending injury to the league's major star, writes George Kimball

LAST SUNDAY'S season opener between the New England Patriots and the Kansas City Chiefs was deemed to be of such scant interest that it wasn't televised in most parts of the United States, but only moments after it began there occurred an episode of such consequence that networks broke into their coverage of every other game in the country to show it.

What viewers saw was Chiefs' safety Bernard Pollard crawl from beneath a Sammy Morris block to throw himself at the left leg of Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady. The moment of impact occurred just as Brady was planting his foot to throw a pass, and he grotesquely twisted as he toppled forward from the impact.

What viewers did not hear was the scream that escaped Brady's lips as he fell, a primal shriek so chilling it was plainly audible to spectators at the sold-out Gillette Stadium.

Nor did television viewers hear a concomitant scream, this one from the bean-counters at NFL headquarters in New York, but trust us, there was one. The economic impact of the season-ending injury to the league's marquee player - Brady will undergo surgery for a torn medial collateral ligament (MCL) and has been lost for the year - has been estimated at $150 million.

The NFL's reigning Most Valuable Player had piloted the Patriots to 18 consecutive victories last year, and had come within two minutes of winning a fourth Super Bowl in six years. That game, the most-watched football game in television history, and Brady had been the centrepiece of the league's 2008 marketing campaign.

Brady, whose base salary is a bit over $5 million, earned another $9 million from commercial endorsements last year, from companies ranging from Visa and Nike to Coca-Cola and Movado watchmakers. He dates Gisele Bundchen, reputedly the world's most glamorous model, and just a day earlier had been featured in newspapers as part of a nationwide advertising campaign promoting the new season.

The calamitous injury will also have a far-reaching impact in that it threatens to realign the balance of power throughout the league. Although American football is a team sport, quarterback is its most vital position, and Brady's absence instantly turns the defending AFC champions from a team favoured to return to the Super Bowl to one that may struggle to win from week to week for the rest of the year.

If the quarterback is the single most important figure on a 53-man NFL roster, the second-most important is the back-up quarterback, and while Brady's untested understudy Matt Cassel performed creditably if unspectacularly as the Pats hung on for a 17-14 victory last Sunday, the reins have now been placed in the hands of a 26 year-old who has not only never started an NFL game, but didn't start one in college, either.

Cassel was selected by the Patriots in the seventh round of the 2005 draft despite his having played behind Heisman Trophy winners Matt Leinart (now of the Arizona Cardinals) and Carson Palmer (Cincinnati Bengals) during his tenure at the University of Southern California.

The product of a baseball-playing family (older brother Jack is a relief pitcher for the Houston Astros, while younger brother Justin plays in the Chicago White Sox' minor league system), Cassel (who at age 12 played in the Little League World Series) might himself have pursued that sport but for another freak injury.

In 2004, when it was clear that he was destined to play behind Leinart in his final collegiate season, Cassel skipped the Trojans' spring drills to pitch on the USC baseball team, but he came off the mound to field a bunt and broke his foot in an early-season game, and decided to stick thereafter with a safer sport, like football.

Having spent three seasons holding the clipboard for Brady, Cassel operated with a drastically simplified game plan in last Sunday's relief role, the guiding credo of which might have been "just don't screw up." He completed 13 of 18 passes for 152 yards, and even threw a touchdown pass to Randy Moss in seeing his first meaningful NFL action.

Still, the fact remains that when he takes the field against the New York Jets on Sunday afternoon, Cassel will assume the role of starting quarterback for the first time since November 24th, 1999, when he was a senior at Chatsworth High School in California.

Although Brady's season-ending injury clearly appears to have been the result of an accident, the finger-pointing started almost immediately, with everyone from Pollard, the perpetrator, to Lil Wayne, the rapper, getting the blame.

Moss (who caught a record 23 touchdown passes from Brady last year) termed Pollard's "a dirty play," and although an NFL review of the play absolved the Chiefs' safety of wilful misconduct, Bill Belichick, the normally tight-lipped New England coach, seemed to fuel the argument when he said on Tuesday, "we have always taught our players that it is their responsibility to hit the quarterback above the knees and below the shoulders".

Lil Wayne was the featured performer at a Louisiana concert last February at which New England running back Kevin Faulk was arrested for possession of marijuana. Although the case was adjudicated without criminal charges, Faulk was suspended for the first two games of the season by the NFL. "If not for (Faulk's) bust at the Lil Wayne concert," noted Boston Globe columnist Dan Shaughnessy yesterday, "Faulk would have been blocking Pollard instead of Sammy Morris."

Ironically, Tom Brady was a sixth-round choice out of Michigan when the Patriots took him in the 2000 draft, and spent more than two seasons on the bench until he was forced into action by a 2002 injury to the incumbent New England quarterback, Drew Bledsoe.

Brady led the Patriots to their first Super Bowl win, and had started every one of 128 games the team played since, a consecutive-game streak that ranks third in the league behind only Indianapolis's Peyton Manning and long-time Green Bay field general Brett Favre, who was traded to the Jets before this season.

On Tuesday Cassel's old college coach Pete Carroll (who in less successful NFL stints coached both the Jets and the Patriots) contemplated Sunday's debut for his former charge. "He's going against the Jets, which is awesome," said Carroll. "Cassel (in his first start) versus Favre (who will be making his 255th). What a great match-up!"