Report: Tom Brady will retire after this season if patriots win Super Bowl
Tom Brady turns 41 on August 3, and the NFL’s oldest player seems to be looking to put the perfect exclamation mark on his career by going out with a bang.
Or so it would seem, as Matt Miller of Bleacher Report said that Brady will retire after this season if the Patriots succeed where they fell perilously short in 2017 and actually win the Super Bowl, which would be Brady’s sixth title and ninth overall appearance in the big game.
An unnamed source said, “You hear him talk, and you watch the Facebook series (Tom vs Time), and it seriously sounds like a guy who is searching for motivation.”
On the other hand, a Patriots staffer surveyed anonymously for the Bleacher Report survey asked, “How long did he say he wants to play?”
When told that Brady himself has said he’ll play until he’s 45, the staffer replied, “OK, so he’ll probably play until he’s 45.”
“I wouldn’t doubt him. This is a guy who has defied every odd to become the greatest football player of all time. If he says 45, I believe him.”
It’s worth noting that if Brady plays until he’s 45, the question remains whether Bill Belichick will still be coaching him. The coach whose legacy is tied to Brady’s as much as Brady’s legacy is tied to his will be 70 in 2022.
If the Patriots organization seriously believed that Brady was on the cusp of retirement and that he was one Super Bowl away from riding off into the fade-to-black on the inevitable NFL Films documentary, then why did they trade Jimmy Garoppolo, Brady’s heir apparent and a guy who immediately set the world on fire in San Francisco, guiding the 49ers to five straight wins to close the season?
One rival scout, perhaps overstating the point, says that New England is careening toward disaster once Brady and Belichick leave.
“Take Brady off that roster and they don’t beat the Browns. I’m not joking,” the scout said. “That’s one of the worst rosters in the entire NFL, but you never hear about it because Brady is so f—ing good.”
Are the Patriots trying to win now, knowing that it will soften the blow for fans if they have a fresh Super Bowl win to remember as the front office blows up the team, lets Belichick retire, and does the football equivalent of the 76ers’ “trust the process” franchise rebuild in the NBA?
Is the whole franchise in disarray, as the reports late last season involving a rift between Belichick, Brady, and Brady’s personal trainer and fitness guru Alex Guerrero seem to indicate?
A “plugged-in” director of player personnel told Miller, “Listen, (Belichick) was set up for another 15-year run (with Garoppolo), and (owner Robert Kraft) made him trade him away to keep Brady happy. You know that’s eating at him. He had played this beautifully, and now he gets to watch his guy become the next great young quarterback somewhere else.”
One thing you notice here, the source at Bleacher Report hasn’t identified a single one of his sources that he’s using to construct an extended piece of speculation about Brady’s future when Brady himself hasn’t said a word other than that he’s planning to play until he’s 45.
But at the same time, the Patriots’ future is mortgaged to the hilt, they’re behaving like a team firmly in win-now mode, trading the future away for the present and shipping the quarterback of tomorrow to San Francisco, and their quarterback and coach are 41 and 66 years old, respectively.
If that’s not a recipe for one last Super Bowl championship to cap off a legacy before the return of a dark age of New England football — not seen since the bad old days of the 1-15 season in 1990 — then it’s hard to imagine what is.
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