ARLINGTON, Texas – You look at Tom Brady, and you have to wonder how different the narrative could have been. If, say, he started this season like Andrew Luck, dragging a 65.1 quarterback rating into October like an anchor. Or if Brady's mistakes and inefficiency had mirrored Luck's noxious cocktail: seven interceptions and a 56 percent completion rate. Slap those numbers under Brady's name, and they'd be used as pitchforks and torches.

Maybe his detractors would say the proof was on the field, that the New England Patriots' star had been exposed as a guy profiteering from deceit. Maybe they would go further, suggesting that meticulously regulated footballs had finally ended Brady's reign. Maybe they would try to burn his entire Hall of Fame career to the ground.

But they can't.

The Cowboys brought the heat Sunday but Tom Brady didn't melt down. (AP) More

Four games into Brady's season and playing some of the best football of his career, he has definitively minimized the mythology of football inflation. It's a footnote, a single teaspoon of sand inside an NFL dust storm. And it doesn't mean a thing to Tom Brady's game.

The NFL gave him a regulation football in the icy second half of the AFC championship game, and he whipped the Indianapolis Colts. The league gave him the same ball for the first five weeks of this season, and he's been the MVP frontrunner. If the NFL could swallow its pride, it would accept that this rule has caused nothing but absurdity and embarrassment, and drop its federal court appeal. Anything short of that, Brady should roll up the league's case and light a cigar with it. Because his numbers are proving more than any court case ever could.

Through New England's 4-0 start, Brady is averaging almost 347 yards passing per game, and has 11 passing touchdowns (and one rushing) with no interceptions. His completion percentage (72.5) and passer rating (121.5) are the best in the league. And if you watched him in Sunday's 30-6 victory against the Dallas Cowboys, you saw him carve out some of those digits despite getting repeatedly thumped, sacked and hurried by a feisty pass rush. In total, he was sacked five times and hit at least a half dozen others, but seemed to get only stronger as the game progressed.

"One of the toughest players in the league," Patriots coach Bill Belichick said of Brady.

It's a special kind of tough, too. The kind that had Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones holding his head in frustration Sunday. One wave after another, Jones watched his defense batter Brady in the pocket. He watched pieces of the New England line fail over and over when trying to solve defensive end Greg Hardy. But then he kept watching Brady get up, one time after another, methodically moving the Patriots down the field. Hardy got to Brady twice for sacks, and knocked him down on a few others. But he was just a millisecond too late early in the fourth quarter, smashing Brady after he completed what turned into a 59-yard catch-and-run touchdown by Julian Edelman.

"There are two things about being tough," Jones said. "One is being able to take anything. The other definition of tough is the one that gives it out. That's an aggressive tough. We were able to handle some of their best stuff early. But we couldn't punch anybody. We couldn't sock anybody in the nose. We can't win games like that."

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