No Tom Brady, No Problem

12 Sep, 2016

The house was rocking. The Cardinals were coming. And the cold, cruel hand of fate appeared to be on the verge of a corrective smackdown that would put young Jimmy Garoppolo in his place.

The New England Patriots, without Tom Brady to save them, were surely going down to defeat in the desert — or so it seemed to most of America.

Watching from the sidelines with his team trailing by a point and facing a third-and-15 from its own 20-yard line with nine minutes remaining, Pats safety Devin McCourty knew the untested dude with the ball in his hand faced a daunting situation. Yet something told McCourty — even as 64,864 fans at University of Phoenix Stadium roared for the Arizona Cardinals to take control of a tense, regular-season-opening Sunday Night Football showdown — that Garoppolo was going to stand and deliver.

And remarkably, the third-year quarterback from Eastern Illinois making his first NFL start shrugged off the stress and seized the moment.

No Brady? No Gronk? No problem.

“It was so cool for Jimmy to come out and have that poise,” McCourty said after the Patriots pulled out a 23-21 victory over the loaded Cardinals despite the absence of their two biggest stars. “When you’ve got a player who comes out and shows you nothing but good things in practice and training camp, you kind of expect these things… but to actually see him do it was great. We knew we were short-handed and without a couple of guys we usually count on, and we needed everybody to step up.”

What Garoppolo accomplished on Sunday night should have every Patriots fan — hell, every Patriots player — high-stepping to work for the rest of the week. With Brady, their future first-ballot Hall of Famer, serving the first game of a four-game NFL suspension for the deflated-football scandal stemming from the 2014 AFC Championship Game, Garoppolo resoundingly proved the Pats are fully capable of thriving under his stewardship.

The fill-in quarterback’s 24-of-33, 264-yard performance was surprisingly smooth and savvy — and a whole lot of other shining adjectives.

“He’s just gutsy, man,” said veteran defensive end Chris Long, who had a sack of Carson Palmer in his first game with the Patriots following eight seasons with the Rams. “He stepped up and made some gutsy, gutsy plays.”

None was gutsier than the one the young quarterback made on that third-and-15 with nine minutes remaining, shortly after the Cardinals had taken a 21-20 lead on Palmer’s second touchdown pass to sublime receiver Larry Fitzgerald.

Garoppolo, who two plays earlier had been sacked by ex-Patriots linebacker Chandler Jones, once again faced pressure in the pocket and slipped to his left to buy time. And then, in the nick of time, Garoppolo zipped a glorious throw downfield to slot receiver Danny Amendola, who hauled it in for a 32-yard gain.

“Third-and-15, you’ve got to let your guys get down the field, and Danny found the opening in the zone,” Garoppolo explained afterward. “It was a great job by him. He made it a pretty easy throw for me and he made a nice catch, too, so it was a good play all the way around.”

Ten plays later, Stephen Gostkowski’s 32-yard field goal gave the Pats their 23-21 lead with 3:44 remaining. Three minutes after that, following Chandler Catanzaro’s 47-yard attempt that sailed wide left, Garoppolo took a knee to close out the victory and got a lot of love from his exuberant teammates.

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