Looking for a Friend at the End of Tom Brady

It’s no surprise that the punditry and non-Patriot fans gleefully awaiting the inevitable decline of Tom Brady were out in force this week. While most professional sports legends are attributed a kind of reverence as their careers wrap up, Brady has just been too good for too long and transcended from the days of old media (newspapers!) to today’s overabundance of constant breaking news and hot takes.

Not only does it seem like the great majority want to see Brady finally stink, they’re actively rooting it on, eager to take the heroic stand that at some point he will break down and they were the first-ish to call it. Do you ever remember people on ESPN or wherever else getting excited about Wayne Gretzky, Michael Jordan, or even old pal Peyton Manning finally hanging them up?  Imagine how Manning was treated after Super Bowl 50, despite being a passenger on their championship ride. Would Brady ever get that kind of glowing adoration if he willed this 2018 Patriots team a Super Bowl title?

I’m still reading hot takes that coming back from 28-3 wasn’t all that impressive.

For whatever the reasons, and there are plenty of them, the Brady hate at the end is very real, leaving us all wondering why they can’t just leave him alone to get old and stinky in peace and not cue the victory parade after any sub-300 yard game.

Brady has provided his fans with some of the greatest moments of our lives across 20 years. When it all began I was a freewheeling kid in my 20’s and now, like Brady, I’m a father rapidly navigating my way into middle age. My life is completely opposite of what it was then, yet there is Brady, still going to Super Bowls as recently as…check calendar… 10 months ago.

What is life without Tom Brady? It’s a question that I’ve avoided trying to answer because Brady and the Pats winning has been such a consistent source of joy. But there’s one thing I’m sure of now, and this week has been just the latest emboldening of the Brady Doomsday Cult. The end of Brady’s career will be celebrated like no other professional sports legend’s and that’s going to make the next couple years really tough for us.

There will be a few different phases. The first is the Jump to Conclusions portion which has already lasted about the last three years. Brady has a bad game, the hot takes that ‘the end is here’ flow until Brady bounces back and then the trolls crawl back under their bridges and wait for the next time he is off. Each time it gets a little worse.

Next there will be a time when something really unprecedented happens and unfortunately for us, the bar is set incredibly low for that to be the case. The Patriots are still probably going to win the division and make the playoffs this year, but what if they don’t make the AFC Championship, something they’ve done a record seven-straight times? Any other team can call bowing out in the divisional round a pretty good season, but for the Patriots it will mean an entire offseason questioning if Tom Brady should just retire or be traded and assuring anyone who will listen that THE PATRIOTS ARE DONE.

Hopefully, we don’t get a painful Peyton Manning final stage, where it’s just depressing watching him try to play quarterback. I don’t think Belichick would have that and I’d guess Brady will hang them up before he ever gets to that point. Instead, you want the news to come out of nowhere sometime around March. That Brady is hanging them up after what most of us deem a pretty damn impressive season even if it didn’t end in another Super Bowl title. The Pats will have ample chance to address it during the offseason and the page will be turned, with a minimized effect on the organization and at a time when fans will have sufficient time to grieve.

There’s also the career-ending injury scenario which might be the second-easiest for Patriots fans because it will rob the idiots of their chance to root on every poor performance.

The final stage will be post-Brady, where hopefully Belichick finds us a quarterback to keep us competitive, but if he doesn’t it’s going to be a whole lot of average teams stomping the field at Gillette.  That last phase should only last as long as Robert and Jonathan Kraft allow it to and it’s a good bet they’ve gotten too much of a taste of glory to not throw their extensive resources into the Post-Bill & Tom Era. But to assume the next guy will just step in and keep winning is foolish.

The end has already been filled with false starts and unless Brady decides to win one more and ride off into the sun, every scenario sucks on some level.

The Patriots get compared to the Patriots, but as Belichick always reminds us, each season is unique and almost completely self-contained. There isn’t the kind of carryover that could in anyway connect the 2004 Pats to the 2016 ones, even if it was still Bill coaching and Tom throwing. But those great teams of the past are where the comparisons start and it will be impossible to maintain the kind of dominance they’ve exhibited for far longer than any other football team ever has. So the “signs of slippage” are low-hanging fruit, and we know how the sports media loves the low-hanging fruit.

What’s a Patriots fan to do in these coming dark days? Remember how spoiled we have been. Remember that no matter any of the stupid ranking debates — More Belichick or more Brady? Brady-Manning? Brady-Rodgers? Brady-PSI? — no football fan has had it better than us. None have ridden a more thrilling roller coaster that paid off far more times that it has for anyone else.

But maybe it will be nice to go back to being an also-ran. To not be the lead story every time anything happens. To not constantly be the focus of rumors and leaks. To not be the hot take driving machine that the New England Patriots have unfortunately become a pillar of in modern sports media.

The good news is the end isn’t quite here. We’re still in phase one and even if we’re closing fast on phase two we still get to watch Tom Brady play quarterback. We still get the chance to see him bounce back from last week. And we still might get a chance to see him win another Super Bowl.

 

Here’s a few other ‘End of Brady’ pieces I wrote last offseason.

Brady will Retire a Patriots on His Own Terms

Brady: 2022

Stop Worrying and Enjoy the End of Brady/Belichick