I Feel a Little Bad for Tom Brady
What a weird year this has been for Tom Brady… Just about a year ago, news broke of his “retirement” and there was a whole slew of stories assessing his legacy — including from me:
Then in February, just a few days after he announced his retirement, news started leaking that he was regretting it, and considering a comeback. Then that spring, after just 40 days, he officially ended his retirement and went back to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, effectively pushing out head coach Bruce Arians on the way, even though they’d won a Super Bowl together. That summer, he missed training camp and gave cryptic statements as to why, which eventually led to speculation that his (now ex-) wife Gisele Bünchen was angry about his decision to go back to football.
In the fall, as the football season got underway, Brady and Bünchen officially announced their divorce. It was likely a coincidence that this came in the middle of a three-game losing streak that left the Bucs 3-5, but the effect was that it looked like Brady had destroyed his marriage for the sake of a team that wouldn’t even make the playoffs.
It was easy to make fun of all this, to mock his weird changing face and new media career. It was confusing fall for an idol. Brady seemed to have everything: Almost universal recognition as the game’s greatest quarterback, a happy family, a supermodel wife, and a $375 million TV contract waiting for him whenever he decided to hang up his helmet. And yet he seemed willing to squander it all for a team that wouldn’t even finish .500.
But personally, I found the whole thing kind of charming. Precisely because of all he has and all he’s accomplished, we know the only reason Brady is still playing is that he still LIKES playing football. This isn’t like LeBron James, for example, who still clearly feels he needs to prove himself more, by adding rings or becoming the NBA’s all-time leading scorer. There is truly nothing else Brady can accomplish for his legacy.
As I wrote way back way back in my very first newsletter, one of the cool things about sports is that you are watching people who are very good at their jobs. More than that, you are watching people who ENJOY being good at their jobs. There is something beautiful about that, especially in a world when so many people are sadly alienated or exploited at their jobs. Professional athletes are some of the few people who get to have fun at work.
Sadly, athletes get only a comparatively short time to enjoy this perk, and few of them get to end their careers on their own terms. But Brady has this opportunity… and his response is to stretch it out as long as possible. He could’ve gone out two years ago, when he won his seventh Super Bowl. He could’ve gone out last year, when his team won the division and lost to the eventual champions. When you’re working for the sake of other people, the idea of Going Out on Top, or when you’ve accomplished all you can accomplish, is certainly appealing. But Brady just likes playing football, and he’ll do it even if it’s not pretty.
Tampa Bay sort of rebounded after their early losing streak, but it was never pretty: They only finished the year 8-9, but that was enough to win the putrid NFC South, so they hosted a playoff game Monday against the Dallas Cowboys. The Cowboys were favored, but all week long people had to throw in the caveat, “Well, you can never count out Brady…” when they discussed the game. But then Dallas won easily, 31-14, despite missing an unfathomable four extra points.
Compared to other endings Brady could have had, this one was pretty anticlimactic. (Not to mention the desperation inherent in his dirty slide tackle.) When the Bucs were down 24-0, Joe Buck and Troy Aikman kept alluding to the fact that, were this anyone else, fans would assume the game was over. But with Brady, you never know… Except this time you kind of did.
Even Brady’s magic couldn’t make up for the fact that the Cowboys are pretty good, and the Buccaneers are pretty bad. Indeed, the game was emblematic of Tampa Bay’s whole season: The Buccaneers couldn’t run the ball, and their defense is only mediocre, so it all came down to whether Brady’s arm could keep them in the game. He ended up throwing 66 (!) passes, just three shy of the record for pass attempts in a game that didn’t go to overtime. This in a year in which he set the single-season records for both total competitions and total attempts.
As I wrote last year, there’s a real misunderstanding of what makes Brady great. He’s not some wizard who can sprinkle magical dust on a team to turn them into a winner. He just has an unusual ability to align his own skillset with his team’s needs, to become the type of quarterback his team needs. And in this case, he DID fill in the vacuum of the Bucs offense. He threw the ball so much this year because the Bucs needed him to — it just wasn’t enough to make up for the team’s other deficiencies.
And now there is further speculation about what Brady will do, but few seem to think he will retire. He’ll turn 46 in August; only two non-kickers have ever played an NFL game at that age, and one of them, John Nesser, played in 1921, when the NFL was still called the American Professional Football Association. But clearly Brady CAN still play, so he likely WILL still play. It’s just what he likes to do. We should all be so lucky…