Bucs QB coach on Tom Brady: ‘You can’t convince him we’re not going to win the Super Bowl’

“If you talk about running a marathon and everything is right, it’s a hard race,” said Clyde Christensen, Brady’s quarterbacks coach for the past three seasons with the Bucs. “Now you start putting on a weight belt, then you add a couple weights to the belt and the next thing you know, those 26 miles are not just a tough race, they’re brutal. Playing quarterback in the NFL, and especially if you’re Tom Brady, it’s … a tough, tough, long race and now you wear a weight vest and a weight belt and some weighted shoes. At the 15-mile mark somebody says, ‘Hey, carry this.’ That’s how I would describe it.

“He’s not your average guy. When he goes out there, everyone expects him to play well, week in and week out. It was an unbelievable strain and accomplishment to win the division this year with all that took place.”

The strain, of course, was personal and professional. Brady missed a week of training camp, working through a divorce from his wife of 13 years, Gisele Bündchen. He dropped about 20 pounds. He lost starting center Ryan Jensen to a knee injury on the second day of camp.

“You literally start weighted down with some personal things that are hard and they’re full time,” Christensen said. “I think that would be different than all the other years. None of us knows what that entails but I do know it’s a hard, hard job if everything is right. It’s hard job if all is well around you.

“All of a sudden, you have that, you lose your center on the (second) practice of the season. You proceed to have people in and out of the lineup. I do think it’s a unique (season) and we just never overly played well, which always falls on the quarterback. … I don’t think anyone will understand the strain it is for the quarterback or the face of the franchise to fight through all that stuff.”