Tom Brady Shares Honest Admission On Repeat Chances

“I think the assumption [that it won’t be difficult] comes from the belief that it will just be exactly like it was last year,” Brady said. “I think that’s what you’ve got to not fall into is that, ‘Oh, this is the way it worked last year, so this is the way it will be this year.’ The reality is everything is different. The teams will approach you a little bit differently. You’re kind of the team everyone is watching now, so there are different degrees of expectation. There’s more external noise, there will be more people that will be wanting to come to games [and] more opportunities to do things outside of football. I think the reality is that you’ve got to stay focused on what’s really important. How do you improve? How do you get better from week to week, day to day? Improve your routine, improve your communication with your teammates [and] with your coaches. Not allow your mind to really fall into this position that you make this assumption that just because you did something in February that you’ll do it again next February because that’s not the reality of football – it’s way too competitive.

“Even the games we won last year were very razor-thin margins. One or two plays make the difference in every game. From how I feel about it and how [Bruce Arians] has talked about it with our team — he’s done a great job of keeping us focused, keeping the intensity there, allowing us to continue to work out together and communicate and make improvements that we need to make because I feel like we’re not finished projects. It was really our first opportunity to play together last year and there’s a lot of opportunity for us to grow into something that could be very different. We’ve got to improve the things that we did well, and we’ve got to certainly build on a lot of things that we didn’t do very well. All those things can be improved. I think that’s a commitment to a daily process of trying to improve. That just comes from working at it and we’ve got a lot of guys who like to do that — a very competitive group of guys.”