ALLEN PARK, Mich. – Maybe it’s fitting that on the day Tom Brady and the New England Patriots reportedly agreed to a contract extension that could run him through the 2021 season (and past his 44th birthday), he and team arrived here for a week of joint practices and a preseason game with the Detroit Lions.
This is a business trip that sits just 35 miles east of another, long-ago business trip; one that proved to be among the most important, if unlikely, in Patriots history.
In the spring of 2000, New England quarterbacks coach Dick Rehbein arrived at the University of Michigan to scout a player no NFL team seemed to want, who played a position that the Patriots didn’t need any help, and was a draft mystery in part because he’d been saddled in college with a system of shared-starting that perhaps no one ever heard of before.