Tom Brady still hates the Jets, he’s just not allowed to say it.
The Patriots quarterback said Bill Belichick asked him not to insult the Jets leading into the Monday night showdown between the AFC East rivals.
A reporter asked Brady if he still hated the Jets, something he said this offseason when asked if he watched “Hard Knocks.”
“Do I still hate them?” Brady questioned. “Well, I’ve promised coach Belichick I wouldn’t say anything derogatory, so I have no comment.”
Though Brady wouldn’t admit to hating the Jets, he begrudgingly admitted to respecting them.
“We like to think of ourselves as very smart, tough, resilient,” Brady said of the Patriots, “and that’s what they are, too. As much as it pains me to say, that’s the way it has been with the Jets this year.”
Brady and the Patriots led the Jets 14-10 at halftime of the their first meeting this season, but were blanked in the second half in a 28-14 loss.
“Hopefully we play better than we did in Week 2,” Brady said. “That’s what we are all trying to accomplish this week. I don’t think we played very good and we need to play a lot better this week to beat a team that’s really playing great football and a team that’s proven they can win in a lot of different ways.”
The winner of the “Monday Night Football” game has the inside track on the AFC East title and likely will be considered the favorites to represent the AFC in the Super Bowl.
If the Patriots lose, they would essentially would be two games behind because the Jets would own any tiebreaker, thanks to the season sweep.
“It’s a regular-season game against a division opponent that’s 9-2,” Brady said. “We treat it just like that; this is not the Super Bowl. There are games after this game that are very important as well. This game, for what we are trying to accomplish in winning the division, which is always the first goal of this team, it’s a big game.
“You can’t expect to win the division and lose to the same team twice. We really gotta go out and execute at a much higher level than we did the first time we played them because they don’t leave you much room for error.”