John Riordan: Who's next to emulate retired Brady? Who knows?
GOAT: Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback Tom Brady holds up the Vince Lombardi trophy after defeating the Kansas City Chiefs in the NFL Super Bowl 55 football game, Feb. 7, 2021. Pic: AP Photo/Ashley Landis, File
And then he retired for the second time.
Tom Brady kept it simple on Wednesday morning, a short video message to his millions of Instagram followers confirming that now is the right time to finally walk away from a quarterback career which should always top-tier him as the best the NFL has ever produced.
Justifiably consumed by the constant effort to control his own narrative and how he is perceived, the former New England Patriot exiting as a Tampa Bay Buccaneer had to get this second mega announcement right. We’ll never know if declaring his retirement on February 1 two years in a row was intentional, pre-ordained, planned out or just completely accidental but that’s how it mapped out.
With a wry smile, he acknowledged that he had expended his one opportunity to write a deep and meaningful essay a year ago. This version was sparser with a brief threat of tears. It was good and worthy of a career that had done all the talking already.
And it was timed perfectly to avoid next week’s all-consuming Super Bowl media circus. The NFL has done him wrong once or twice but there’s no point in upsetting the overloaded applecart in Arizona where the carefully staged media opportunities would be undone by a monumental talking point such as this.
He recorded his farewell on a beach just as the east coast was rising, giving the morning sports talkshows on television and radio ample time to digest the news and pay their respects while most of their peak audience was tuning in.
Tributes gushed all day long and there wasn’t a single counterargument to his stature atop the NFL pyramid. It suddenly mattered little that his unretirement season was a wash. Discard it.
Go back and look at his breakout season that saw him rush impatiently from replacement to starter to a Super Bowl in a matter of months. U2 played the half-time show as the US picked up the pieces from the 9/11 attack and what better nicknamed football team than the Patriots to fit the mood of a nation reeling.
The corny movie script extended way beyond what an average NFL career can ever muster up. Aided and abetted by the willing and able coaching prowess of Bill Belichick, the Patriots added a Super Bowl two-in-a-row in 2003 and 2004 before a drought and an ACL injury took away his entire 2008 season.
By that time, they were the team the US loved to hate and he was settling into his role as preppy arch-villain. When he guided his team to a perfect regular season and yet another Super Bowl, the New York Giants tore the whole venture down just as history was on the verge of being made. America was delighted. Six months later, his knee buckled and the knife twisted.
Who comes all the way back from that? Especially in an era when competition stiffened slightly and prominent competitors like Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers enviously eyed up the throne.
That talented duo had little to do with the day lightning struck for the second time when the once again less good Giants took another Super Bowl back to the Tristate. The sound of millions of New Englanders tearing their hair out was deafening.
Slowly but surely three more Patriots Super Bowls in the 2010s helped him equal and surpass the achievements of Hall of Fame quarterbacks Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw. The fifth was the perfect riposte to a suspension which embittered him and his region, a murky tale of slightly deflated footballs allegedly giving him an edge in home games.
That was the 2017 Super Bowl that also improbably witnessed the historic collapse of the Atlanta Falcons from being 28-3 up to conceding 25 unanswered Brady manufactured points and the inevitable overtime completion of the Patriots mission.
You couldn’t make it up. And yet there was more to come: another Super Bowl victory as his career was allegedly winding down followed by a pre-pandemic playoff exit that was sealed by a limp interception. But he had no time for career advice from the people who knew him least. His seventh Super Bowl arrived in Tampa Bay the very next season and there simply wasn’t anywhere left for the scriptwriters to go.
“No end in sight for the Brady retirement saga”, I pontificated here two weeks ago. I wondered how long this faded Brady epilogue would last and why he would be mad enough to run it back one more time at another team desperate enough to wring the last moments out of his talented arm.
The speculation from much more informed observers was that he wouldn’t be able to resist the urge of one more shot at glory, be it his hometown team, the San Francisco 49ers or his former rivals, the New York Jets or even an ambitious dark horse like the Carolina Panthers.
Within ten days, the frenzied speculation ceased. He can now enjoy a peaceful spring and summer without repetitive workouts, notoriously strict diets and complicated playbooks for the first time in his adulthood.
By the time next season begins, he’ll be settling into his lucrative retirement at Fox where he will be the primary game analyst and surefire ratings builder.
More importantly, he can peacefully reflect on a career that delivered a Super Bowl seven times, during his 20s, his 30s and his 40s. He can be pretty certain that this will never be repeated, not just because it seems as though physically he created a peak of performance that seems insurmountable twice in a lifetime.
Of all the obvious obstacles preventing emulation by the next generation, it is the depth of talent of that young crop of players who can be good enough to cancel each other out over the course of the next decade and maybe longer if they can take care of their bodies the way Brady did his. Within reason, of course.
Josh Allen’s star faded this season at the Buffalo Bills but he is talented enough to pick it all back up. And crucially he is surrounded by a team that is strong enough to support him.
The same can’t be said for LA Charger Justin Herbert and Arizona Cardinal Kyler Murray but they have time and ability enough to see it out until fortunes come good for them again.
It’s sad to include him but Deshaun Watson has also been granted time and more than enough money to turn the Cleveland Browns into a powerhouse or at least a problem in spite of his career having been stalled by seemingly endless sexual assault charges.
Lamar Jackson, meanwhile, needs to find a new home that isn’t the Baltimore Ravens and he surely will. When he does, he can start again on the process of living up to the prediction made by Brady himself when they embraced at the end of a game between the Ravens and the Bucs: “you’re next,” the veteran told the pretender.
He can’t be perfect all the time but I imagine Brady would adjust his prediction slightly after Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow fought for supremacy once again this past Sunday in the AFC Championship. Avenging the reverse result last year, Mahomes guided the Kansas City Chiefs to next week’s Super Bowl in spite of a visibly injured ankle.
Burrow was thwarted by a crocked offensive line and the feeling at full-time was that these two would be thorns in the sides of the other for several seasons to come.
Which brings us to the other half of the Super Bowl, Jalen Hurts at the Philadelphia Eagles. He has yet to win a Super Bowl, unlike Mahomes, but he has already assured the undying commitment of the City of Brotherly Love. Philly is a town which is notoriously difficult to please and he is playing with house money next week.
The future is bright for the league and Brady will watch from the gantry as the young guns fight to fill the void. No one truly knows who’s next but it’s safe to say that the next great won’t surpass the last great.
