One day after suffering what appeared to be an ankle injury in the second quarter of New England's loss to Miami on Sunday, 20-10, Tom Brady told WEEI's Dennis and Callahan Show with Kirk Minihane that he was "all right."
"I’m doing all right," he said. "I’m doing all right. We’ll see how it goes this week. Sure there will be some treatment, as always. A lot of guys are banged up. Just part of football season."
Brady said that what he was dealing with wasn't anything markedly worse than plenty of other injuries he's suffered over the course of his career. The only injury that has forced Brady to miss any significant amount of time in his career was when he tore his ACL in the season-opener of the 2008 campaign. He also suffered an ankle injury in the AFC Championship Game in 2001.
"I’ve had worse," Brady said on Monday morning. "I’ve had plenty of worse injuries than this one."
ESPN's Adam Schefter reported that Brady underwent an MRI on the ankle that revealed a sprain but no breaks, no fractures and he's expected to be ready for the Patriots playoff opener in Foxboro Jan. 16.
In the WEEI interview, as Brady tried to downplay the ailment, he explained that there wasn't anything more important to him at the moment than feeling close to 100 percent.
"Suh’s a big guy," Brady said. "He just came down on the back of me. Obviously however big he is — 300 pounds — he just kind of collapses on the back of your leg, there’s going to be some residual damage to that. It’s part of football.
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"I’ll just work hard to get the right treatment. I’ve always dealt with injuries. I’m very confident I know how to deal with injuries. Believe me, I’ll be doing everything I can to be out there. There’s nothing else in my life that’s a priority at this point other than getting to feel like I’m a hundred percent."
Brady was asked if he would have been able to play had the Patriots been forced to compete this weekend. Thankfully, Brady replied, he doesn't have to worry about that.
"I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. I’ll just say I’m glad we have a week off," he said. "That obviously helps. I wanted to stay in there and play yesterday and see if I could do some stuff to help our team. We just couldn’t make enough plays. I feel like I’ve said that a lot the last six weeks, but we’re going to have to make more plays offensively if we want to keep advancing. It’s a challenge. You get every team’s best effort. They game-plan us. They’re trying to slow the things down that we do well. We’re going to have to in a way kind of reinvent how he [win], and do the things that we need to do to win the game."