Tom Brady’s contract extension sets up the possibility of an ending as fulfilling as the beginning
Tom Brady celebrates an AFC Championship win in 2004.
COMMENTARY
Big news! Or as Tom Brady’s alleged friend some rich asshole might say: Yuuuuuuge news:
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That two-year extension takes Brady through his age-42 season. Given his stated and apparently serious desire to play until he’s 45, this has to be what, the second-to-last contract of his career? Third-to-last?
Facetiousness aside, I imagine this puts an end to any speculation that he might end his career with his boyhood-favorite 49ers, or any other NFL address, really. This sets him up to retire as a Patriot, and as Schefter noted, should he play out the extension, that would give him a nice, even 20 years with the franchise. Only Jason Hansen, Darrell Green, and Matthew Slater’s old man Jackie played 20 seasons with a single team. That would be a hell of an addendum to Brady’s already iconic legacy.
I suppose the obvious is worth cursory acknowledgment here: A lot can happen between now and then. The unforseen is just a missed block away. Since his season-ending knee injury during the 2008 season opener, Brady’s managed to avoid traumatic injury, playing all 112 regular season games and 16 playoff games – essentially another full season of football – since.
Some of that is due to his preparation and toughness – I still don’t know how he survived the AFC Championship Game against the Broncos without requiring a specially-made torso cast and splints for each of his limbs in the aftermath. And some of it is luck – he’s fortunate that the bone-rattling, knee-twisting hits that are inevitable along the way have been endurable rather than devastating.
Even if he remains upright and survives the next attempt at spindling by whomever Marcus Cannon was supposed to be blocking, we really don’t have much sense for what kind of quarterback he will be at 42, because there haven’t been many quarterbacks at 42. The record for touchdown passes by a QB age-41 or older is 25 by Warren Moon of the 1997 Seahawks. There have been only three other seasons in which a quarterback that age threw for double-figure touchdown passes: Vinny Testaverde for the 2004 Cowboys (17), Moon for the ’98 Seahawks (11), and Brett Favre for the ’10 Vikings (11).
Football usually tells even the greatest of the great when it’s time to go. Few are ever ready to hear it. But you have to figure that if Brady stays healthy, he can still be a very effective quarterback at that age. He’s still as good as it gets at 39; if he loses 25 percent of his effectiveness and his TD/INT ration drops to something like, oh, 2.5/1 (it was 5.1/1 this year), he’s still going to remain among the league’s best.
Extending him now isn’t about making the Patriots great again. It’s about extending this unfathomable decade-and-a-half run of brilliance right on through the end of his career. It makes one wonder whether backup Jimmy Garoppolo – whom a scout referred to as “borderline brilliant’’ in Ben Volin’s NFL column in The Boston Globe Sunday – might be moved for draft picks, given that he’ll be six seasons into his career by the time Brady’s extension is up. There are plenty of branches of the Belichick tree around the NFL now, and Houston, for one, has already tried two Patriots leftovers at quarterback. There will be a market for Garoppolo, and it would help counter and perhaps even circumvent the damage Roger Goodell’s warped quest for integrity has done to the franchise’s draft-day plays.
Details are still trickling out on the parameters of Brady deal, but with the salary cap climbing to $155.7 million this season, this would seem to allow the Patriots a wider window to lockup more than one member of their core of outstanding young defensive players, among them Jamie Collins, Dont’a Hightower, Malcolm Butler, Jabaal Sheard, and perhaps Chandler Jones.
If that’s how it plays out and this outstanding young defense stays intact, well, all you have to do is look at the team that conquered the Patriots this year to realize that Brady will be in a prime position to get a ring for his thumb and perhaps another one or two for his other hand over these next for season. The Broncos are Super Bowl 50 champions because their defense was exceptional and their washed-up quarterback finally learned his limitations.
The Patriots can improve upon that blueprint. Brady is far from washed-up – and with good health, it’s possible he’ll still be far from washed-up in 2019. In fact, it’s entirely possible now that he’s set up to win his last Super Bowl the way he won his first one: With clutch, efficient if hardly statistically dazzling play and a defense that does all of the dirty work. Here’s to the privilege of having four more years to watch the greatest quarterback there has ever been, and the good fortune of seeing how it all unfolds.
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