In a rare bad game, Brady let the Patriots down with his decision-making and lack of execution.
After six games, the New England Patriots have the same record as the Miami Dolphins – a team many felt would finish with the worst mark in the NFL.
At 3-3, the Patriots are now also tied with the Jets, a unit so dysfunctional that a caricature of Rex Ryan driving a clown car recently splashed the back page of a New York tabloid.
So does that make the Patriots comedic losers? No, probably not, but they also aren't the world-beaters everyone projected them to be. The magic is gone.
Tom Brady's unicorn ran off sometime over the summer, Rob Gronkowski isn't eating up linebackers en route to stepping on defensive backs, and Bill Belichick can't get the fog to lift from his oracle.
Right now, the Patriots are a standard-issue good team. Some days they'll win, other weeks they might get their hearts ripped out by a rookie quarterback, as was the case during Sunday's 24-23 loss to the Seattle Seahawks.
We could play the blame game for hours with this one, but the truth is the Patriots suffered a systematic failure that started at the top and extended all the way down the depth chart to cornerback Kyle Arrington.
But when big corporations go bankrupt – and make no mistake, Sunday's loss felt like a bottoming out – all eyes go to the chief officers. In this case, those guys happen to be Belichick and Brady.
It's probably not fair to hold Belichick responsible, though. He's long been a gambler, and that's part of the reason he's been universally heralded as a genius the last two decades.
Once in a while he gets it wrong, like the infamous fourth-and-2 play against the Colts, but it typically feels like he's counting cards while playing with house money. So it would be hypocritical to chase after him with a burning stick when he pushes too far and comes up short.
The second-guessers and talk-radio hosts will spend hours lamenting his decision to take another shot from the 3-yard line with 6 second left in the first half, but ask yourself this before you solely blame Belichick: If Brady threw a simple incompletion there and the Patriots could have kicked a field goal, would you have anything to say about running an extra play?
Let me be clear by saying Belichick isn't in the clear here, but the call would have been completely innocuous had Brady not been whistled for intentional grounding after throwing the ball out of the back of the end zone, an infraction that came with a 10-second runoff in this instance.
Brady got caught up and made Belichick look bad, not the other way around. In fact, you wouldn't be wrong if you argued No. 12 pulled the whole team down Sunday.
It's a curious claim for a quarterback who completed 62 percent of his passes for 395 yards and two touchdowns, but those numbers are just window dressing for a hollow performance filled with several bad decisions and streaks of ineffectiveness.
Brady's grounding penalty took 3 points off the board, and he lost another 7 when he threw an interception in the end zone at the start of the fourth quarter, turning a potential rout into a devastating loss.
Now, instead of talking about how the Patriots ripped apart the NFL's top defense, we'll spend the next week wondering if this team is finally falling victim to the league's cycle of parity it somehow managed to circumvent the last decade.
There were other factors at play beyond Brady. You could point to the defense as the culprit. But in this game of whodunit, there's only circumstantial evidence to pin it there.
Sure, the secondary couldn't defend against the deep pass and the Patriots burned an invaluable timeout by sending 12 men onto the field late in the fourth, but the defense gave New England a chance to win and only came apart after the offense frayed at the seams.
And that's where Brady failed. It's a criticism that won't happen often, and maybe he's being forced to carry too much blame because of his pedigree, but this time, he has to wear it.