Tom Brady’s defining football characteristic was his ability to make the correct choice: to change the play before the snap, to throw to the right receiver, to get rid of the ball when nothing was there, to manage end-of-game situations in real time. It is appropriate, then, that he ultimately retired at precisely the right time, too. After the longest career of any non-kicker in history, Brady stuck the landing.
If Brady wanted to keep playing, to squeeze a little more football out of himself–to lick the bottom of the bowl, as my colleague Jon Wertheim has written of the Roger Federer/Rafa Nadal/Novak Djokovic triumvirate–then that was his right. There would have been a market for him. But it almost certainly would not have been pretty.
It became clear this past season that Brady was no longer playing like a star. Some of his numbers were still impressive, and he still had that incredible late-game poise. But he also missed more receivers than he did even a year ago. The Buccaneers were injured and offensively dysfunctional, but there were also too many plays when a better version of Brady would have made something work. If you forgot that he was the most accomplished player in NFL history and just compared him to other players in the league, you would have seen Tom Brady, in 2022, as just an average starting quarterback.
