Tom Brady Uses His Feet to Get Out Ahead of the 49ers, and His MVP Pursuers

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — As the rain came down, turning the field into green soot and the football into a brick, we saw two different, highly atypical versions of Tom Brady.

At different points in the game, Brady was simply off. Footballs sailed high (insert your Deflategate joke here) in ways we don’t normally see. The weather was likely the main culprit, for sure. It was still just odd to see.

As the game wore on, and the 49ers continued to apply pressure, that other Brady emerged. When 49ers defenders would get close, Brady bounced and skipped in the pocket. He was…mobile.

Read that last line again. Brady was slippery and evasive, a conjurer, a scamperer.

“He’s Brady Vick,” joked Julian Edelman after the game, when asked about Brady’s mobility.

The end result of these two Bradys was that Brady likely has—and has earned—a lead in the MVP race. But that race is tightening. It is tightening quickly.

The main takeaway from New England’s 30-17 victory over San Francisco at Levi’s Stadium was that even when Brady isn’t Brady, he finds a way to be Brady. He still gets the job done, even if he sometimes has to do it in a non-Brady-like way. Like scampering.

It was easy to predict a Patriots victory. The 49ers are putrid. The only thing this team has going for it is Colin Kaepernick, and if Kaepernick was smart, he’d find the nearest escape pod and abandon this ship, this warp-core-breached franchise.

In some ways, Kaepernick looks better than he ever has. He was far from perfect, and some of his passes fluttered and quivered so much they quacked and were hit by shotgun pellets, but he has almost no weapons, …

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