Brady, Patriots will be unstoppable if Antonio Brown doesn’t stop them

Thanks to Brady’s continued Benjamin Button act, Antonio Brown’s new team beat Antonio Brown’s old team without Antonio Brown on the field after NBC’s Al Michaels reported the quarterback told his owner, Robert Kraft, he was a hundred percent behind the AB deal before upgrading it to a thousand percent and then a million percent.

“It was a personal conversation with RKK,” Brady whined about the owner, drawing a laugh from his postgame audience. “I’ve got to reevaluate.”

Michaels also disclosed, via Brown’s agent Drew Rosenhaus, that Brady had invited his new receiver to move into his on-the-market, $39.5-million mansion in Brookline until he found his own place. Though Brady wasn’t offering up any specifics on Brown, the quarterback did say, “We’re all excited to have him. All I can say is we’re just going to work as hard as we possibly can to get up to speed as quickly as possible.”

If Brown conducts himself in accordance with all Patriot Way ordinances — and that’s a pretty damn big “if” — the Patriots will have enough firepower to mirror the juggernaut that was the 2007 team that featured Brady, Randy Moss and Wes Welker at the peak of their record-breaking, scoreboard-tilting powers.

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Tom Brady says he’s looking forward to Antonio Brown joining the Patriots and aims to build chemistry as quickly as possible.

Enough firepower to finish the job those 18-0 Patriots couldn’t finish when …, well, you know.

Who needs Rob Gronkowski when you have Brown on one side, Josh Gordon on the other, and the reigning Super Bowl MVP, Julian Edelman, in the slot? Not to mention a first-round pick, N’Keal Harry, potentially on the way in November, and three opportunistic winners (James White, Sony Michel, and Rex Burkhead) already established in the backfield?

“Do you think other teams will bother to show up this year?” Brady’s father, Tom Sr., joked over the phone Saturday, about an hour after the Patriots pounced on the Oakland Raiders’ fumble and recovered a seven-time Pro Bowler. “Or should one just meet us in Miami?”

Miami Gardens, to be exact. Site of Super Bowl LIV.

The elder Brady was laughing, of course. But as soon as the words were out of his mouth, Tom Sr. acted as if Bill Belichick had just stepped into the room.

“I probably shouldn’t say that,” he sighed.

Forgive Brady Sr. for feeling giddy out loud, for rejoicing after his son built his incomparable career largely without the benefit of explosive playmakers on the outside. Aside from Moss’ brief stay, Brady has made do with undersized overachievers in the slot and a Hall of Fame tight end who has called it a career … for now.

Though Brady Sr. maintained that his son has had plenty of receiving talent around him over the years, including the likes of Edelman and Welker and Danny Amendola, he knows Brown is not a Patriots skill position player out of central casting. He has caught 74 regular-season touchdown passes. He has averaged 1,524 receiving yards over his past six seasons.

“It’s going to take him four to six weeks to get the lay of the land,” Brady Sr. said the day before the opener, “but if he plays to his abilities and develops in the Patriot Way, it should be a spectacular season for the Patriots. If I were a defensive coordinator, I would probably be losing a lot of sleep. … We won the freakin’ Super Bowl last year, and it’s pretty nice to add more talent. I’m feeling rather jubilant this afternoon.”

It was an exclusively regional feeling. Outside six New England states, the quarterback’s father said, “there are about 300 million other Americans who love football who are just shaking their heads.”

The most frustrated among them live in the AFC East. Brady just made his 18th consecutive opening-day start, and outside of his lost 2008 season and his four-game suspension in 2016, he hasn’t missed any time. Worse yet, for long-suffering Jets, Dolphins, and Bills fans, Brady has publicly entertained the idea of playing beyond his 45th birthday. His old man, for one, thinks he is capable of taking this until age 47 or so.

“I don’t have any doubt he can,” Tom Sr. said. “He’s in the best physical shape of his life, and his arm is better, his mechanics are better, his thinking process is better. There’s no question he can go five, six more years if he wants to. … I don’t think there are any boundaries to what he can accomplish. If Tommy doesn’t think he’s performing at the level he expects to perform at, I know he’ll bail out. But there’s nothing I’ve seen or heard that indicates there’s been the slightest regression in any area.”

“You don’t want the house sitting on the market for two, three, four years if you get cut,” Brady Sr. said.

Cut?

“It’s a two-way street,” Brady Sr. said. “The Patriots may feel they have the arsenal to continue on for many years after Tommy’s gone, and that makes Tommy disposable. As a result, while the attention has been given to Tommy’s side of the contract, there’s also the Patriots’ side of [the] contract. You know as well as I do that Bill is not the least bit sentimental with his ballplayers. If Tommy regresses in Bill’s eyes then he becomes expendable and Tommy would have no choice but to go somewhere else.”

Tommy didn’t look like he was regressing Sunday night. And for the record, after the storied quarterback-coach partnership temporarily unraveled in 2017, Brady Sr. said his son maintains “a terrific professional relationship” with Belichick and described the two as “pretty much in lockstep.”

The Steelers could certainly confirm that. Not that this blowout means New England is a mortal lock to break its tie with Pittsburgh to become the first franchise with seven Super Bowl titles. For starters, coming off yet another suspension for substance abuse, Gordon is the ultimate day-to-day proposition.

“For me, initially,” Gordon said of his Foxborough arrival last year, “it was a culture shock.” The former Cleveland receiver figures Brown is in for some of the same. “He’s going to have to figure out his own way,” Gordon said.

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Bill Belichick commends his defense for silencing the Steelers’ offense in Week 1, but refuses to speak about Antonio Brown.

Belichick predictably declined to comment on his latest addition. But there’s no question Brown made a fool of himself to escape Oakland, and his bizarre online presence will not fly with his new head coach, who said in a 2017 CNBC interview that he does “all I can to fight” social media’s influence and that his goal is to “try to stamp it out” in his locker room. Belichick also told his friend Urban Meyer that he no longer wants to manage troublemakers at this stage of his career. “I want to coach guys I want to be around and that’s it,” he said. “I’m not going to coach anybody else.”

How will Belichick respond if Brown starts fiddling with his helmet, and starts sticking his feet in his mouth and/or a cryotherapy machine? How will Brady react if Brown starts leaving his dirty socks around the house, and starts getting into public spats with him like he did with Big Ben?

As much as Antonio Brown makes football look easy, he makes not-fitting-in look even easier. If he conforms, the Patriots will probably win lucky number seven. If he doesn’t, Tom Brady will regret the quick math he did on Brown to get to a hundred, a thousand, and then a million percent.