The GOAT Retires: Tom Brady Calls It A Career
Tom Brady plays catch with Head Coach Jim Harbaugh before Michigan’s 45-28 victory over Colorado on September 17, 2016. (James Coller/Maize and Blue Nation)
Tom Brady (probably) retired over the weekend, and made it official on Tuesday, after twenty seasons with the Patriots and two with the Buccaneers. The news hit Twitter Saturday afternoon, and immediately the conversation turned to whether he’s the greatest football player of all time.
Is he the greatest? I’m biased as a Patriots fan, but the case for Brady is very easy to make. The argument starts with his seven Super Bowl wins and five Super Bowl MVPs in ten appearances (no other quarterback has more than five). He has 35 wins in the playoffs–no team other than the Patriots has more than 36. He was instrumental in many of those wins, the most memorable of which were the 3-28 comeback against the Falcons and the last-minute drive against the Rams in his first Super Bowl. He played for 22 years and was on top of his game even in his last season at age 44. The fact that he is the all-time league leader in both passing yards and touchdowns is almost an afterthought.
Not everyone agrees, of course. Some still say to this day that he was a beneficiary of coach Bill Belichick’s system and that the defense was more important than he was in many of their Super Bowl seasons. Some attribute some of his wins to incredible luck–from the tuck rule game to many of his opponents doing really dumb things to keep the Patriots alive in playoff games. He was named to the all-pro first team only three times in his career–in most seasons there were one or more quarterbacks who were better than he was in the regular season. And there were the Spygate and deflated footballs scandals which some say taints all their wins.
I think one underrated reason that some don’t see him as the greatest is that he doesn’t look the part on the field. The scouting report of him out of college was that he is not very mobile, doesn’t have the strongest arm and doesn’t throw a tight spiral, and while he improved on all these during his career it continued to be true that he was not the most physically gifted. I was listening to sports radio talk about his greatest plays, and I honestly can’t think of a single play you can point to that shows his greatness. When you think of other top quarterbacks you think of Aaron Rodgers throwing the ball 70 yards downfield, or Patrick Mahomes scrambling then flipping the ball to a receiver left-handed, or Josh Allen trucking defenders over or Lamar Jackson outrunning everyone. Brady doesn’t do any of that.
Instead, what makes Brady great isn’t that he makes great plays, but that he consistently makes good plays, throw after throw after throw, for twenty seasons. The one thing he does better than anyone else is the quarterback sneak, but it’s not because he was bigger or faster than anyone. He excels at it because of his ability to read defenses and make correct decisions quickly. Another thing he is great is not getting his receivers injured. Accuracy isn’t just about getting the ball to the receiver but also putting it in the right spot for the receiver to continue making the play after and keep himself safe. One thing you notice from watching him play is that his incomplete passes are usually low, and his throws are rarely high so that his receivers have to stretch to catch it and making themselves vulnerable to big hits.
The other thing about Brady is that he worked as hard as anyone at the game. For years he had the best parking spot on the Patriots not because he was the quarterback but because he was always the first to show up at practice. People make fun of his weird diet regiments (can’t eat tomatoes!) but he had kept himself in top physical shape into his 40’s, while others in his generation have physically declined.
It seems strange to say that he is the greatest because he works hard, doesn’t make bad decisions and bad plays and is just consistently good, but that’s exactly what it is that makes him the greatest.
I suppose I can understand that he did some math in his head and concluded “okay, I’m probably never going to win another Superbowl” and then decided to retire.
But it feels like some weird Ricky Bobby situation where, if you ain’t first, you’re last.
Is it not good enough to have a team that is consistently 11-5 and makes it to the playoffs to be beaten by the eventual winner?
Or is that a recipe to never win the Superbowl and owners aren’t paying millions of dollars to merely make it to the playoffs?Report
That comeback in the Divisional Championships was Brady’s Ardennes Offensive. It came so close, but it still wasn’t enough, and that was proof that it just wasn’t gonna happen. Staying in after this would just burn time and energy and wouldn’t meaningfully change any of the outcome.Report
Once you have a million rings, getting a plaque that says “Divisional Champion” probably feels like being the Lions.Report
Or is that a recipe to never win the Superbowl and owners aren’t paying millions of dollars to merely make it to the playoffs?
Brady’s net worth is estimated at $250M. His wife’s, $400M. The combined pile has probably reached the point where they can’t spend the income it generates each year, so it just gets bigger. They don’t need his football salary. One of the points in the OP — at least implicitly — is that Brady almost never made a bad decision. At this point in his life, retiring is almost certainly a “not bad” decision.
Lots of NFL owners pay millions of dollars to QBs that will never lead their team to the Super Bowl. The Detroit Lions date to 1929, last won a championship in 1957, and have never appeared in a Super Bowl. The Cincinnati Bengals won their first playoff game in 31 years this year. The NY Jets are infamous for paying mediocre-to-bad QBs millions of dollars per year.Report
I suppose that if I had one percent of his net worth, I’d be considering retirement myself.
And I don’t even get hit at work.Report
Have we considered the fact that Brady and his wife are preventing 9 other people from retiring without cares? Send tweet.Report
This is the perfect summation. Brady seems to have a preternatural knack for making good decisions and this is such an obvious decision. Retire now to a life with a georgous wife, wealth and health or continue playing for more money that you don’t need and a non-zero chance of serious injury which could imperil your gold gilded future? Quitting seems like a no brainer to me.Report
“One of the points in the OP — at least implicitly — is that Brady almost never made a bad decision. At this point in his life, retiring is almost certainly a “not bad” decision.”
Eh… he IS backing Crypto. Maybe he’s just cashing a check but if he is seriously invested in the thing, it may be a bad decision.
More seriously, I’m curious what a post-football Brady looks like. It wouldn’t shock me if he has a Jordan-like second career… staying near-enough to the game to get his competition fix but not being particularly good at those other aspects of it and just kind of sputtering along, pissing people off along the way.
Stories eventually leaked that Jordan was a grade-A asshole. I don’t think we’ll hear that about Brady… but he did have a penchant for showing up his teammates that he never really got called out for. Time will tell, I guess. Being an exceptionally great athlete doesn’t necessarily translate to other endeavors. And being as singularly focused as Brady was, he may have trouble shifting.Report
You must be thinking of the Vikings. The QBs the Jets keep drafting are never on the team past their rookie contract.Report
As much as I love goats – they are ornery and irascible – I don’t like the GOAT concept. The goal posts move every generation of QB’s. Brady is statistically a hard worker and consistent performer, and for that he should be recognized and applauded.
He’s also learned the lesson some other so called GOATS have never learned – quite when you are ahead. Favre didn’t get that, though I saw in off field in his last season with the Packers and his body was clearly done.
But in a year or two, NFL fans will be debating if Joe Burrow Or Mahomes is a GOAT. and that’s as it should be.Report
He’s not my favorite quarterback, but his last Superbowl win convinced me that he’s the GOAT. I used to credit his success to Belichick, but then Brady leaves and wins another Superbowl while the Patriots stumbled, and it made me rethink my assessment.
The article says “what makes Brady great isn’t that he makes great plays, but that he consistently makes good plays, throw after throw after throw, for twenty seasons.” I agree with the second part. He also frequently makes great plays when they’re needed. Not always long throws, but great ones. Long enough to change the game, and with that Joe Montana accuracy that a fast receiver can catch without losing momentum.
My favorite is always going to be Brett Favre. He considered every play a chance for a touchdown. He’ll lose you more games by 10 thanks to a last-minute pick, but it’s because he’s doing everything he can to get the win.Report
I feel the same way. Especially after Matt Cassel flamed out and Garappolo showed he is at best a good game manager I figured Brady was just a product of the system. Turned out he is in fact the man.Report
Yep. Concur with you and Pinky on this.
There’s always raw talent and flash, and that’s what makes individual performances great to watch… but 20-years of dominating execution is so much more rare than raw talent. Tampa was the nudge.
Now, the caveat is football alone… not some weird cross sport title that I don’t think anyone could claim since Michael Jordan has the trophy at his house already.Report
Worth noting how much weight it carries if people say someone is the GOAT. Life-changing stuff there.
I’ll say this for Belichick: when he had talent on the team, it was like he had 16 different playbooks (plus ones for the inevitable playoff games). They’d minmax every week to be just the kind of football team that can beat you handily.Report
Brady was the guy leading those offenses on the field though so I think he also deserves some credit. To the extent there’s a caveat I think it would be a ‘in the modern era of football’ kind of thing. We will never see something like Sammy Baugh again with a QB also holding the yards per punt record and being a capable DB in his day. But that’s all sports that have been around long enough to have undergone big changes in how the game is played.Report
Yes, plenty of credit, and I didn’t mean to take away anything from Brady. The Patriots also had defenses who would tackle the guy with the ball, a luxury Rodgers has rarely had, but still Brady is the GOAT.Report
Oh for sure. Re: Rodgers there’s definitely a discussion to be had about how much coaching has stifled his career. McCarthy is IMO one of the more lackluster in the league and I think the jury is still out on Lafleur. At the same time I think Rodgers has revealed himself to be a bit more of a tough personality than anyone quite knew over the last year or so. I don’t get the sense he is the machine Brady appears to be in terms of personal and emotional discipline.
I also wouldn’t call Rodgers a selfish player, certainly not by NFL standards, but I also have trouble seeing him agreeing to the kind of paycut Brady did to help out the organization. He made a personal choice to keep NE out of cap hell which is both unusual but also allowed NE to skip some of the cyclical rebuilding process inherent in the system.Report
That’s a good point. New England was always able to bring in new players, and I can’t imagine how much Tom Brady would actually have been worth if he made demands.Report
I also forgot to mention that going back onto the field to get his idiot friend a $1M bonus?
The stuff of legends.
Edit to add that I am totally without bias as my team’s level of greatness at QB has a bar set at Jim McMahon level difficulty (in my lifetime, anyway).Report
With the defense that team had, any QB would have been a winner.Report
You mean the ’85 Bears, but the scope in Brady’s last SB was 31-9. I think lots of QBs could have scored 10 points against KC.Report
I’m by no means a football expert, but it seems to me that being consistently good is what will frequently get you into a scoring position, which means you are less dependent on being great.Report
As a lifelong Jets fan who has suffered watching the Patriots almost always trample my hopes and dreams for a generation, I can say with certainty that he is the GOAT.
I only accepted this after last year’s SuperBowl victory. I always crediting the evil Bill Belichick, who I forever will despise. I never *hated* Brady.
That all being said, I still believe Brady was not who he became until after the first 3 Super Bowl victories. He reached a whole different level after about his 5th season.Report
Someone (maybe The Ringer? ESPN?) had an article that Brady basically had 3 7-ish year acts in his career, each of them arguably HOF-worthy on its own. But there were definitely different stages and early career Brady was not the final form. This relates to what I say below. He was less responsible for the early rings than the later ones. Which isn’t a knock and speaks to his willingness to get better despite having had obscene success already.Report
I feel like there’s a redundancy built into the phrase “…a lifelong Jets fan who has suffered…” in part because the list of indirect objects to come after that predicate is very long indeed.Report
LOL. I’m not sure the redundancy is enough to capture the magnitude of despair, loathing and disappointment.Report
One of Brady’s (and Belichick’s) greatest attributes was their adaptability. Some QBs (and coaches) are who they are and when situations align, they can excel; when they don’t, they usually hit an obstacle they can’t overcome. Brady et al. seemed to reinvent themselves constantly, willing to do or be whatever it took to win.
This is admirable in many ways though I also think leads to some of the biggest criticisms of either: how far is too far? I think SpyGate remains a black eye on their early championships and, worse, the league for its handling of the matter. They won those titles and that is that. But they left a very legitimate “but” at the end of them that I don’t think you can really just handwave away. BB knew that was against the rules and didn’t care, figuring he’d get away with it. Even if other teams were doing it.
With Brady, he increasingly struck me as just a really weird dude. Like so singularly focused on winning Super Bowls that nothing else seemed to matter. His dedication puts him in the .0001st percentile… but is that necessarily a good thing? Extremes are just that… extreme. What was his relationship like with his kids or partner or ex-partner or friends? I get the sense they were probably weird and/or strained. Which, whatever, to each their own. He doesn’t seem to have been a bad or harmful guy off the field. But I think if he did something other than throw a football — if he was an I-banker or a lawyer or a woman doing damn near anything — and basically demanded that every moment of his life revolved around his professional success, we’d criticize that. But when it’s an athlete (not just him), we laud it. It’s weird.
I used to be more of a Brady hater. He easily has had the greatest career of any football player ever. I’m content to call him the GOAT QB, though I still lean towards Rice being the greatest player ever because of his sheer dominance over everyone else at his position. But thats picking nits.
Brady is who he is… wins, flaws, and all. He had far more of the former so he deserves all the accolades.Report
Agree with all. And while I concede Brady is the greatest QB I have ever seen, I still think Dan Marino is the greatest passer there ever was. He I do despise, for ruining so many of my childhood Sundays. If he played in this era, he would be unstoppable. He could put the ball anywhere he wanted.Report
Mahomes has the same ability, and he can do it side arm while backpedaling and loosing balance.Report
16 more years and 6 more rings and I totally think Mahomes will be in the discussion.Report
I expect the Chiefs’ roster to look pretty different next year. Will be interesting to see how Mahomes handles it.Report
Lots of people have strong arms. Jeff George could reportedly throw a ball through a tree. Kyle Boller threw the ball through the uprights from the 50-yard-line… on his knees.
Lots of guys are accurate. Lots of guys are fast. Lots of guys are strong. Lots of guys are smart. Etc.
I mean, if we think about the humans in the top .01% of any given skill, you’re still going to have 700,000 some odd people in that group. What makes elite athletes elite is that they are exceedingly good at EVERYTHING related to their profession… and not just the physical attributes. Mental processing speed, ability to commit, work ethic, etc. All of that matters.
The term “arm talent” gets thrown around alot these days and it is kind of a weird phrase but there are undoubtedly guys — now and in the past — with better arm talent than Brady. He has EXCEPTIONAL arm talent no doubt… but certainly not the best. He was just also exceptional — and likely the very best — in many other areas. So you combine all that together and it starts to separate the extreme elites from the mere ordinary guys (before accounting for the fact that “ordinary” athletes still exist in the extremes).
It’s debatable whether you can teach work ethic. You’d probably need to dig into psychiatric literature to begin to answer that question. Regardless, Brady had that and all the related things… and he also had amazing physical gifts.Report
You could say about Bill Belichick what Bum Phillips said about Don Shula: “He can take his’n and beat your’n, then he can take your’n and beat his’n.”Report
Indeed. People — including his many assistants — who tried to emulate BB always focused on the superficial. The hoodie, the scowl, the attitude, the playcalling… none of that mattered. If the winning gameplan was 40 runs with LaGarette Blount, he’d turn TB12 into a handoff machine. If next week’s winning gameplan was an air raid attack, he’s throw until Brady’s arm fell off. The point wasn’t to find a 40 carry back or the next 7th round HOF-er. It was to be smart.Report
Certainly one of the modern masters of “What have we got to work with this year?”
When Mike Shanahan was coaching the Denver Broncos, one of the things that too often flew under the radar was that he scripted the first ten plays of each game, and was astonishingly successful with them. Those scripts were always aimed at taking advantage of the other team’s tendencies. Couldn’t keep it up for an entire game the way Belichik seems to manage.Report
Shanahan learned that from Bill Walsh,Report
I’ve heard Belichick compared to Nixon.Report
The bigger question, to me at least, is what does Brady do next?
He is too driven an individual to not have a second act.
He could go the Derek Jeter route. Ownership stake and maybe president of football operations, if he wants to get that involved.
He could go the Roger Staubach route. Captain of industry type. TB12 and other ventures.
He could go the Bill Bradley route. Get elected to higher office.
I could see a combination of all three over the next 10-15 years.Report
color commentary for a year or two then reemerging as a head coach.Report
I don’t think he has the chops for either of those.Report
You’re going to really hate it when he is elected to the U.S. Senate as a Republican.Report
I have actually admired and respected Republicans politicians in the past. They have either all been run out of the party, or been revealed as cowards in the present moment. Should he choose to go that route I will wish him well, but in this day and age one has to leave ones senses to pursue that route as an athlete.Report
To my knowledge, the Bundchen-Brady family are currently domiciled in California, and I doubt the California GOP could win a statewide election if Jesus Christ Himself were the candidate. (I realize that for some, Tom Brady is the next best thing.)
Of course, he could always carpetbag to somewhere else.Report
They just bought a property outside Miami near Ivanka and Jared – so there’s THAT.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10465505/Tom-Bradys-retirement-mansion-revealed-Eco-estate-Miamis-Indian-Creek-Island.htmlReport
He’s too much a natural at what he does to ever be a good coach. Really good players almost never make the transition. Mike Ditka is one of the rare exceptions. But between the time he was a Pro Bowl tight end and a head coach, he spent nine years as an assistant. Worth noting that Ditka played at a time when he wasn’t going to earn enough to be set for life. Brady doesn’t need the money; hard to believe he’s willing to put in the years to learn to be a coach.
Deion Sanders may turn out to be an exception, but even he spent some time coaching high school before taking on a college head coaching job.Report
I don’t think it’s that TB isn’t capable of being a good coach, but more about what is required to become one (some of the reasons you mention). You have to really want it. And be willing to put in even more hours than the players do. If Brady wanted to spend that kind of time in football, he’d just keep playing.
And while I agree that the most gifted athletes are generally not good at coaching, I don’t think Brady fits that description. He was drafted in the 6th round by the Patriots and was never a full time starter at Michigan. What makes Brady’s story remarkable is that it was his determination to succeed.Report
Develop Scanning abilities.Report
The Denver Broncos are going to be sold in the next few months. The expected price will be about $4B. Neither Broncos’ HOF quarterback, Elway nor Manning, can afford to be anything except a very minor part of ownership. If the estimates for Brady’s net worth of $250M are accurate, he could take the whole pile and buy a sixteenth share of an NFL franchise. As for PFO, most of the examples suggest his boss would be some combination of idiot and assh*le.
I expect him to be like Manning, who has no idea what he’s going to do, and is filling the time making fun of himself on television. Probably minus the making fun of. Can you imagine Brady doing a Nationwide commercial with the equivalent of Peytonville in the basement, telling Brad Paisley the back stories for the figurines?Report
I wasn’t suggesting he would become a principal owner of an NFL franchise. More likely be part of a group that buys a team.
Of course, there is the long running conspiracy theory that the reason Brady played for the Patriots on such a team friendly deal was because he had a shady, post-career equity arrangement with Robert Kraft.Report
That would get them both in serious trouble. The NFL might go light on murder or domestic violence, but they will NOT stand for violating the salary cap.Report
He was probably paid in Bitcoin. … offshore accounts are so 2008.Report
L2CodeReport
I feel like you really nailed it in your fifth paragraph. It’s become pretty rare for Brady to throw a spectacularly on-target long distance pass the way a Rodgers or a Mahomes does. It’s very much his ability to read a defense and make a very fast, and usually good, decision about how to adapt to what he sees out there.
On a related note I read a rumor that Brady will sign a one-day, one-dollar deal with New England so that he can formally retire as a player as a Patriot rather than as a Buccaneer. In the grand scheme of things, that feels appropriate though I can see why Bucs fans — who now must feel like they’ve a massive letdown in 2022 in the works — might chafe at it. Goes without saying he’s a first-year-eligible HOF’er as a New England Patriot.Report
They shouldn’t be too sad. TB was always a marriage of convenience, and they got what they wanted out of it.Report
One dollar for a sixth rounder? Sounds right. I bet if he was a third-rounder he’d get $5.Report
The longest non-kicker career of Brady’s draft class ended in 2014. Just remarkable.
Perhaps even more surprising is there’s only 1 current Hall of Famer from that year, Brian Urlacher, who’s currently gracing hair replacement company billboards all up and down I-294. I imagine Brady will not suffer that fate.Report