The most prescient prediction anyone in football has made in recent times came from the mouth of Tom Brady Sr. in a New York Times Magazine feature in January 2015. The father of the most accomplished player in football history was talking with a reporter about the distant but eventual end of his son’s playing career, and the reporter asked if the younger Brady’s time with the New England Patriots would end badly. “It will end badly,” Brady Sr. said. “It’s a cold business. And for as much as you want it to be familial, it isn’t.”
The question was about Tom Brady’s time with the Patriots in particular, but the answer might as well have applied to his entire football career. NFL defenses do not go easier on a quarterback as he gets older and piles up more Lombardi Trophies. NFL front offices do not keep a seat warm for anyone forever, not even Brady. And indeed, the Patriots-Brady relationship was sour by the end, and his last pass in a New England uniform was an interception that went for a defensive touchdown in the opening round of the playoffs to cap the 2019 season. There had been numerous chances, between Brady Sr.’s prediction in the Times and Brady’s actual exit from New England, for the QB to defy his father and indeed end his Patriots career happily. The Patriots won a Super Bowl days after that story went to press. Then they won two more with Brady. And then, upon leaving, Brady won another in 2020 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Were he ready to quit at any of those points, Brady would have gone out on top.
After the 2021 season, exactly a year ago, Brady did retire. It was not the world’s happiest exit, because Brady had not won a Super Bowl and also seemed irked that word of his retirement leaked in the press rather than in a choreographed release from his camp. But Brady had just led the league in passing yards and finished second in QBR while leading his Bucs to 10 wins, and even he knew he couldn’t win them all. He was leaving the NFL as one of its best players. As retirements go, it looked peachy.
It took another season, and another retirement announcement on Wednesday morning, for Brady the younger to ultimately prove Brady the older correct. These things do end ugly, and seven Super Bowl wins were not enough to make Tom Brady an exception. In a nonproduced video that was both quick and self-aware, Brady said he wouldn’t make another big blowout announcement, because you only get one of those, and would retire “for good” effective as of this tweet at 8:12 a.m. Eastern Time:
2022 was the bad ending his father had foretold, though maybe it was worse. Brady looked gaunt and angry on the sidelines throughout an 8–9 regular season, often frustrated with his offensive linemen, himself, or someone else. He was a serviceable, middle-of-the-pack passer, which reads like an insult in the context of his career. The Bucs made the playoffs by winning the woeful NFC South, then met a quick dismissal in a blowout loss to the Dallas Cowboys in the Wild Card Round. Brady and Gisele Bündchen divorced, and his continued attachment to football seemed like one reason. That is all his business, not ours, but it clearly falls under the umbrella of “ending badly.” He even got the bonus pleasure of being sued over his boosterism of FTX, the crypto platform that exploded in the middle of the NFL season. A bizarre movie that is sort of about Brady comes out this week, and if it’s bad, things could yet get worse.
That Brady would get a pretty sad ending, not an uplifting one, was inescapable for the same reason his success was. Brady’s single-mindedness and determination were exceptional, something even his haters, of which there were many, would acknowledge. His physical exploits were exceptional enough to match it, too, as he remained in shape and relevant well into his 40s. But NFL-worthy bodies expire long before Hall of Fame–worthy drive and game IQ. A QB who had a more realistic view of himself would not have been a QB who achieved everything Brady did. His doggedness bought him the greatest career in NFL history, but it guaranteed he wouldn’t quit while he could still operate at his customary level.
For Brady to exit happily, still at the height of his powers, would’ve required him to leave behind the possibility that he had more in his football tank. Quarterbacks never do that if they can help it. Andrew Luck did, a few years ago, but the Indianapolis Colts star went out because a hamster wheel of injury and rehabilitation had taken the joy out of his playing. Brady’s other contemporaries, if you can call them that, went out grimly. Eli Manning and Ben Roethlisberger played until they were terrible. Drew Brees, like Brady, kept putting up respectable stats until the end but was still a shell of his old self. Aaron Rodgers and Russell Wilson, fresh off miserable 2022 seasons, could be on the same path.
Peyton Manning, Brady’s closest competitor by quality of play, got a good ending. But that was because Manning had the pleasure of playing a 2015 season with edge rusher Von Miller and an excruciatingly good Denver Broncos defense that dragged him across the line for a Super Bowl win. Manning got to leave the sport with his arms up and a chance to plug his sponsor, Budweiser, on live TV. A certain level of defense for the 2022 Buccaneers would’ve given Brady a similar chance, but that’s hard to pull off on command. If the Bucs had given Brady that, would he have returned for an even rougher 2023?
There is some justice in Brady not getting a good sendoff. He made a career of turning other people’s dreams into nightmares and denying them the chance to be remembered more prominently and positively. That was what struck me on writing about Brady’s first retirement, and it sticks out again now. Brady is why Atlanta Falcons fans remain some of the saddest in all of sports. He is why Roethlisberger and Peyton Manning did not win several more Super Bowls, and why Donovan McNabb did not win one. He was what ended so many Cinderella quarterbacking stories (Blake Bortles, Matt Schaub, and Brock Osweiler, for example) before they could get to that point. He is why the St. Louis Rams and San Diego Chargers, who are no longer in St. Louis nor San Diego, fell short in some of their biggest playoff moments.
In delivering those haymakers to the rest of the NFL over so many years, Brady defied the usual laws of football gravity. Doing that had to become intoxicating, and heaven only knows how many times people around Brady have gushed about his “addiction to winning,” or whatnot, on the day of his latest (and, I would even guess, last) retirement. Brady’s need to play football was always going to last longer than even his freakish body’s ability to handle the load.
By the end, Brady was running out of wins. He found one last one on Wednesday, when he managed a leak-free announcement that appeared to catch the NFL’s most plugged-in reporters by the same surprise as everyone else. Brady always seemed focused on acting on his terms, and he spent 23 NFL seasons dictating them more stringently than any other athlete ever could. That meant setting the NFL’s on-field agenda year after year, and sometimes it got much sillier, as when the Miami Dolphins appeared ready to make Brady both an owner and player. Brady redrew figurative NFL rules, sometimes just broke them, and other times created them. The only thing that applied to Brady the same way it applied to everyone else, eventually, was time.
