Patriots Rule Out Brady for Year

Star Will Have Knee Surgery, Testing Team's Preeminence

The NFL's competitive landscape changed yesterday when the New England Patriots announced they were placing Tom Brady, their three-time Super Bowl-winning quarterback and the reigning league most valuable player, on the season-ending injured reserve list because of the serious knee injury he suffered Sunday.

Brady will undergo surgery on his left knee, according to the team. He was hurt early in the Patriots' season-opening triumph over the Kansas City Chiefs on a hit by Bernard Pollard, a Chiefs safety. That quickly, the Patriots' league-record 20-game regular season winning streak, their string of five consecutive AFC East titles and their status as the sport's most dominant team under Brady and Coach Bill Belichick were put in severe jeopardy.

"Of course we feel badly for Tom about the injury," Belichick said at an afternoon news conference in Foxborough, Mass. "You hate to see anyone go down. Nobody has worked harder and done more for this team than Tom has, so it's a tough setback for him."

Brady underwent an MRI exam yesterday. Belichick declined to provide details about Brady's injury, his pending surgery or the length of his recovery period. But sources familiar with the situation had said earlier that Brady suffered a torn anterior cruciate ligament and perhaps other damage to the knee.

Understudy Matt Cassel finished Sunday's 17-10 victory over the Chiefs and now inherits the starting job for Sunday's game against the New York Jets at Giants Stadium.

"He was the MVP of the NFL last year," Cassel said while replacing Brady on the quarterback's weekly radio appearance on Boston station WEEI. "He's probably going to go down as one of the top five greatest quarterbacks to ever play this game. I'm not trying to be Tom Brady. I'm just trying to be Matt Cassel and I don't know where that's going to take us right now. But I know that I'm going to be able to go out there and give 110 percent effort and try to emulate Tom on the field and off the field and go from there."

Brady had started 128 straight games for the Patriots and was coming off one of the best seasons by an NFL quarterback. He threw 50 touchdown passes and only eight interceptions during the regular season last year while the Patriots went 16-0. They won two more games in the playoffs before being upset in the Super Bowl by the New York Giants.

Brady was plagued by a high-ankle sprain in his right leg, suffered during the AFC championship game, in the Super Bowl. He missed all four preseason games this summer because of a sore right foot, then was knocked out of Sunday's game by what Patriots wide receiver Randy Moss called a dirty low hit by Pollard. That was denied by Pollard, and the league ruled yesterday that the hit was legal because Pollard was coming off a block.

"We always taught our players that it's their responsibility to hit the quarterback above the knees and below the shoulders," Belichick said.

The Patriots will have to rely more heavily on their running game and defense. Cassel looked overmatched at times during the team's winless preseason, and the Patriots are more vulnerable than ever before during their championship run.

"This is not the same New England Patriots team without Tom Brady," former NFL cornerback Deion Sanders told the league-owned NFL Network, for which he works as an analyst. "You can cancel the Super Bowl hopes."

Division foes weren't ready to pronounce that, but did seem to sense a rare opportunity at hand with the Patriots minus their former sixth-round draft choice turned larger-than-life, supermodel-dating football icon.