Tom Brady isn’t coming back to the Patriots, so why are we still playing this game like he is?
The decision is coming, and it’s going to be a deeply altering moment for both Brady and the Patriots.
COMMENTARY
March. In like a lion, out like a lamb.
Somewhere in the middle, the GOAT will either fly or endure.
Depending on which way the wind blows today should determine the current hearsay on where Tom Brady is likely to end up for the 2020 NFL season. Brady is officially a free agent for the first time ever in a little more than two weeks, the finish line to nearly two months of speculation and guesstimates that have dominated the sports talk landscape, both locally and nationally.
The Red Sox might have been nice enough to take our minds off Everything Brady for a week or so by trading their franchise player for a ridiculed return. Otherwise, it has been All Brady, All the Time, sandwiched by whatever the Celtics and Bruins might be doing.
It is, almost, mercifully, over.
This all would have been a lot easier had Brady given a peace out on his way out the door after the Patriots fell to the Tennessee Titans in the pedestrian wild card round of the NFL playoffs. If we knew back in early January that the quarterback wasn’t returning to the only place he has called his professional home, then maybe we could have spent at least some of the time not in mourning in a productive thought process regarding the future of the Patriots as a healthy NFL franchise.
Instead, we’ve been treated to the equivalent of everyone playing meteorologist to try and predict a storm that could take any number of paths. We’re left with little more than a blizzard of “informed opinions” and curiosities regarding which uniform would frame Tom’s TB12 physique at its best.
For every assessment that figures there’s no way that the six-time Super Bowl champ would dare step away from familiar territory on Route One, there’s another that posits how badly Team A or B would be willing to open the vault for his services.
Would it surprise anybody if Brady’s good pal Jim Gray connived him to make his announcement just like Gray helped LeBron James a decade ago? I just think we should probably prepare for something just as agonizingly self-righteous.
The Chargers and Raiders need to sell tickets in order to create viability in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, respectively? Bring in Tom Brady. The Buccaneers need someone more dependable than Jameis Winston getting the ball to Mike Evans and Chris Godwin? How about the soon-to-be 43-year-old Brady, who’s plea for weapons last season went unresolved? The Tennessee Titans were on the doorstep to the Super Bowl with the average arm of Ryan Tannehill at quarterback? Imagine what they could do with Brady at the helm.
Chicago. Miami. Dallas. The New York Giants (Brady is going to go and become a tutor for Daniel Jones, a role he despised having with the Patriots? That’s cute). Every one of them might offer Brady two years at $30 million per. One of them will be desperate enough to maybe go three years.
Three years, $90 million for a Hall of Fame entity with his best years behind him? No, thanks.
As if Brady Watch 2020 weren’t already stupid enough, we haven’t even gotten to the real meat of the drama. If there is a bidding war to come, we can pretty much expect the Patriots to sit it out because, well, that’s what the Patriots do. If you’re Tom Brady, are you really going to take a hometown discount when the cash flow coming in elsewhere is rising up toward $100 million?
Brady has to be careful, too, though. He doesn’t want to have to spend the remaining handful of seasons in the NFL playing for a middling franchise like the Raiders. But it’s still not like that decision is really going to have any sort of lasting effect on his football heritage. Brady playing for another team won’t hurt his legacy as much as hanging courtside with Jimmy Fallon at Saturday’s Syracuse-North Carolina game.
There was a moment during the ESPN broadcast of that basketball game when (former?) teammate Julian Edelman spoke to the camera just before going to commercial break. “He’s coming back,” Edelman said. Brady reacted with a teeth-grinding grin normally reserved for uncomfortable moments, like when your kid asks the supermarket checkout woman about the mole on her neck.
Brady responds by shaking his head and appears to say, “He’s not” through those gritted teeth. Or was it, “He’s nuts?” Or, “Ease up?” What does it all mean?
“He’s coming back, he’s coming back.”
–Julian Edelman messing with Tom Brady 😂 pic.twitter.com/OYdPS3xzzr
— SportsCenter (@SportsCenter) February 29, 2020
It will be content gold for talk radio this week. Get ready for endless discussion about why Tom’s toothy turn was either good or bad news for the Patriots. Zapruder won’t have had as much deep-dive analysis as the Syracuse Smile.
It still seems silly to suppose that Brady is coming back to Foxborough with the cash flow sure to befall him, but there’s also that slim chance he and Bill Belichick shake on one more run for No. 7. We’ve still got little more than two weeks to hot take it all out before the real fun begins.
But Belichick should be lauded for seeing this crossroads as the perfect time to move on. Brady is going to be forty-three years old by the time the 2020 season rolls around. Do you really want the Patriots to be the team stupid enough to match the offers he’s going to get from somebody else? You’ve spent the past two decades priding yourselves about how smart your team is in the face of league-wide foolishness and now you want to join the fray?
If the Titans won last year with Tannehill, who’s to say the Patriots won’t remain in the competitive balance with Jarrett Stidham, Andy Dalton, or Teddy Bridgewater behind center? Compared to 2011 Brady? Yeah, there’s a difference. Based on the guy we watched last season? There are better ways to spend $90 million.
It’s tough, though. Patriots fans shouldn’t want Brady back so that their franchise can move into the next era, while it’s also hard to just jettison the best quarterback to ever play the game.
There’s also this: Brady was the masking tape for a lot of the Patriots’ impairments as a franchise. Whatever arrogance filtered through the stands, offices, and locker rooms at Gillette was always tempered with the presence of Tom Brady. Rip that away, and what do the Krafts and Belichick have left? Let’s just say that if you’ve been on the season ticket waiting list for years, this might finally be your opportunity. How many are going to say goodbye to their perks after saying goodbye to Brady? My guess is plenty.
But it’s going to happen at some point. Might as well let it be now, while you can be assured you didn’t have to suffer through any painful years of the quarterback hanging onto his past glory while looking like the football version of Jim Rice.
Let somebody else write that check.
The decision is coming, and it’s going to be a deeply altering moment for both Brady and the Patriots.
Sorry, Julian. He’s not coming back.
Better to prepare for one whole month of the lion roaring. The lamb is dead.
The goat is gone.
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