The Mastermind

Osi Umenyiora says he discovered Tom Brady's pre snap cadence and knew when he was going to snap the ball ahead of Super Bowl XLII, and says it allowed the Giants defensive line to dominate the game with 5 sacks and 20 hurries “But as I was watching the tape, because you have two weeks leading up to the game, I noticed that Tom Brady would come up to the line of scrimmage. And this is real information I’m giving you here, worth millions of dollars. I’m giving it to you right now. And there’s people recording this to pass it on to their players.” “But what I noticed was he would come up to the line of scrimmage and he would say ‘hut,’ which is telling the center to snap him the ball. So what he was doing was he would come up to the line of scrimmage, and before he said that, he was pointing at somebody, maybe somebody on the opposing side. And if he didn’t point at that person, that means they weren’t going to snap the ball. But if he did point at that person, the ball was coming as soon as he said ‘hut.’” “So after I watched this, I studied this for literally a week. I went back, I watched all the games, and he was doing the exact same thing, but nobody had figured it out. So I saw that, and I went and gathered the whole defense, and I was like, ‘Listen, this is what this man is doing.’ If you know when the ball is being snapped as a defensive line, you are at a tremendous advantage over the offensive lineman because they’re relying on you not knowing.” “Because if you don’t know, that means you’re going to be late. But if you do know, you’re going to beat them almost every time. And so as soon as I figured this out, I gathered the whole defensive line. I was like, ‘Listen, this is what Tom Brady’s doing.’” “Now we all started to watch this together, and we saw this was 100%. It wasn’t even like 80. This was 100%. So now we knew going into that game that, as a defensive line, we were going to be able to overwhelm them offensively simply because of that one thing that I had pointed out.” “And we went into the game and we sacked him like five times, hit him like 20 times. They couldn’t understand how we were getting off the ball and getting to him that fast. And it was simply because, for two weeks prior, I just sat there and I had watched what this one person was doing, and that gave us the mental advantage going into the game. We knew we were going to win that game even though nobody else did, because we knew something that they didn’t know, and nobody else knew that we knew.”