Tom Brady – A Hater’s Retrospective

This was posted the day after Tom Brady played what turned out to be his final NFL game. Since that time, several people who have spent time with Tom Brady have assured me that he is actually a gentleman and “one of the nicest people [they’ve] ever met.” To which I say, “Well I’m sorry Timmy, you follow sports the way you wanna follow sports. I’ll follow sports the way I wanna follow sports.”

January 17, 2023

Yesterday afternoon, I was on the phone with a buddy of mine – a lifelong New York Football Giants fan – and he confided in me that, for the first time in his adult life, he would be rooting for the Dallas Cowboys in an NFL football game.  He despises the Cowboys, I know this, but it just so happened that the Cowboys were preparing to square off against the Tampa Bay Football Buccaneers in an NFL playoff game, a team led by 45-year old legendary quarterback, Tom Brady. 

I’ve always found Tom Brady to be a polarizing figure.  Half the people hate him and the other half think he’s a complete fucking douchebag.

Although I’ve been running that line for years, for some reason it hasn’t carried the same weight recently as it did during the Peak Era of Tom Brady Hate, which would have been somewhere around those last two New England championships, give or take.  I honestly have no concept about the passage of time when it comes to Tom Brady because he’s so dominated the NFL landscape for decades.  I remember watching Tom Brady’s first Super Bowl win like it was yesterday, but when I juxtapose it against my own life history, I realize I had no kids at the time and had only recently been married.  We now have four children, two in college.   So it’s hard to pinpoint exact dates.  But I do have a vague sense of the contours of his career, which, if God is just, might have finally ended last night in an embarrassing blowout loss to America’s Team.

Either way it was refreshing that my buddy still carried the appropriate flame of hate for the “G.O.A.T.,” so called.  It’s refreshing because a lot of us have forgotten that it’s completely appropriate, almost mandatory, for any right-thinking moral sports fan to despise Tom Brady and all he represents. (Legit Pats fans of course are excluded, although I’ve yet to meet one who is either right-thinking or moral. Or legit.)  As is so often the case, many of us have been lulled into a sense of complacency when it comes to moral expectations.  Many of us—myself included, truth be told—have watched Tom Brady conduct himself over the past few years and some of that prior hate has dissipated.  In fact, he sometimes comes across like a perfectly fine, unobjectionable human being, good teammate, game ambassador, competitor, family man, whatever.  But my friend’s stark admission yesterday immediately re-centered my moral core. And for that I owe him a debt of gratitude.

Americans have short memories, especially the dumb ones.  I therefore believe it’s worthwhile to remind everybody about the past twenty-five years—lest we lose the thread that binds the good people among us together.  I have attempted to summarize below in vague chronological order the Football Career of Tom Brady, completely from the recesses of my own biased memory.  Because fuck him if he thinks I’m going to click on his Wikipedia page to brush up on the facts. 

Late 90’s.  Tom Brady played college football at the University of Michigan, the greatest and most storied football program in college football history. He became the quarterback for the Wolverines right after they won the national championship the previous season.  He played two seasons and I remember he beat Ohio State at least one of those years, which was awesome, and then came from behind to win a bowl game, but for some reason he was always competing for the starting job with this guy Drew Henson, who was supposed to be great, but ended up being shitty.  Anyway, that was the last time I rooted for Tom Brady without having a gambling interest in the game.  I spent the better party of the next twenty five years actively rooting against him, in life and in sport. 

After college, Tom Brady was drafted by the New England Patriots in the 6th round of the NFL draft, pick number 199.  He was somehow lanky and flabby at the same time.  And slow as shit.  I don’t mean this in a nice, overcoming adversity sort of way.  I mean it in a “take care of your body, man, you’re trying to become a professional football player” sort of way. 

2001.  Drew Bledsoe was the starting quarterback for the Patriots, and a very good one, but he got hurt.  Patriots coach Bill Belichek put in Brady and Brady did well.   This is when nobody hated Brady yet.  The Patriots made the playoffs that year and played the Oakland Raiders in the Divisional round.  With two minutes left, Tom Brady fumbled the ball to lose the game, but the referees literally made up a new rule right there on the spot and called it an incomplete pass. It was the first of exactly one million calls that went Brady’s way over the course of his professional career, but to this day Brady still feels like he should have gotten a million more.  Patriots kicker Adam Vinatieri heroically kicked a field goal in the snow to win the game and advance to the AFC Championship Game.

The Patriots made it to the Super Bowl and went up against the high-flying offensive juggernaut St. Louis Rams, and the Patriot defense somehow held the Rams to 17 points.  Adam Vinatieri again clutched up and kicked the game-winning field goal.  Tom Brady threw for under 150 yards and for some reason was named Super Bowl MVP.   

2003-2004.  The Patriots and Brady won two more Super Bowls in very close games, one of which saw Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb vomiting in the huddle during a two minute drive of the fourth quarter.  Tom Brady was able to not throw up and ended up winning the game.  Wide receiver Deion Branch was rightfully named Super Bowl MVP.

During one season, Tom Brady got hurt in the first game, and the Patriots still won 11 games with Matt Cassell at quarterback.  I don’t know which year it was, but it was somewhere around here.

Also somewhere around here, Brady deserted his long-time girlfriend—who was pregnant with their first child—and ran off with a supermodel.   At or around the time of this disgraceful dereliction of duty and honor, Tom Brady lost several key playoff games to Peyton Manning.  I’m pretty sure he lost one to the Jets as well, but again, I’m not going to look it up.  And around this same time it was revealed that the Patriots were cheating by taping the other teams’ practices, which was against the rules.  How long were they cheating before they got caught?  Apparently for like eight years.

2007.  The Patriots signed future Hall of Fame wide receiver Randy Moss and the team just fucking killed everybody all season, finishing the regular season 16-0.  But in the Super Bowl that year, one of the two games in my lifetime that I rooted for the New York Football Giants, the Giants pulled off a historic upset to defeat the Patriots in the fourth quarter.  The Giants defense beat the shit out of Brady in that game and held him to like 14 points (again, not gonna check).  It wasn’t easy, though, as the Lord intervened and willed a player to catch a football against his helmet on a desperation 3rd down pass.  That was a good day to be God-fearing. 

And speaking of killing everybody, at some point around this time Patriots tight end Aaron Hernandez tried to literally kill everybody—killing one successfully—and ended up going to jail for life.   

2012.  The New York Football Giants beat the Patriots again in the Super Bowl, which was the second and last time I rooted for the Giants.  If you’re counting, this is like eight or nine years where Brady had not won it all.  I refer to this period as the Only Good Years of Football in the Last Twenty Five Years.

2014.  The Patriots somehow defeated the Seattle Seahawks to win the Super Bowl, a game that Brady had already himself lost, but they only won because Seahawks coach Pete Carroll called a passing play first and goal from the two yard line.  And because Malcolm Butler clutched up and made one of the most dazzling and game-altering plays in NFL history, they gave Tom Brady another MVP.   Fuck is that?

After that season, in a scandal moronically and lazily referred to as Deflate Gate, Tom Brady was accurately accused of cheating.  It wasn’t the end of the world; basically he told his equipment guy to fuck around with the amount of air in the footballs to gain a personal and team advantage.  But Tom Brady, not understanding that digital information like a text message sent across space and time has a tendency to live forever, most notably on the phone of the person you sent the text to, nonetheless smashed his phone into a million pieces.  Believing he had successfully destroyed all incriminating evidence, Tom Brady was therefore surprised when he was suspended for the cheating and the botched cover-up.  He cried bloody murder the whole time.  It was a low point in a lifetime of embarrassments.     

Throughout this period in their history, Tom Brady and the Patriots, somehow feeling morally slighted for being caught cheating, used this as motivation for being bigger assholes than usual.  I still remember when, after the Colts (accurately) called Tom Brady out for cheating, they ran the score up against them. Genghis Khan would have been proud.      

It should also be noted that during this Peak Era of Tom Brady Hate, Brady would often be found in magazines looking like this.

And this.

And the rabid Pats fans from Southie would somehow rationalize into their moral code that it was perfectly fine for a their alpha male to dress and pose for pictures like this. 

A year after the Patriots induced the Atlanta Falcons to historically implode in the Super Bowl (another MVP!), the next year saw the Patriots face the Philadelphia Eagles in the big game.  This, the only game in which I’ve ever rooted for the Eagles, saw backup quarterback Nick Foles beat Tom Brady head-to-head to win the Super Bowl.  Nick Foles has never played a worthwhile snap of football before or since, but how fucking great was that?

2019.  This should be closer to my active memory, but this is fuzzy.  I remember the AFC Championship game that year, when the refs called a horseshit roughing the passer call against the Chiefs in the fourth quarter, one of those million calls I mentioned earlier, which led to the Patriots eventually tying and winning the game.  The Patriots defense—not really Tom Brady—easily defeated Jeff Goff (?) and the Rams in the Super Bowl, holding them to something like three points.

After that season, Tom Brady left the Patriots and signed with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, where he has been for the past three years.  He outwardly seemed to be less of a dick during this time, partially because he was no longer playing for insufferable Pats fans, but largely I suspect because he had achieved a certain level of contentment, probably due to the six Super Bowls he sold his soul to win beforehand.  You’d be surprised how Zen-like you would be if you won a bunch of championships and then went home to your supermodel wife every night.  I assume.  (If you want the antithesis to this personality development, look no further than Aaron Rodgers, who becomes more and more dicky with each Super Bowl-less season.)  After winning one Super Bowl with the Bucs, Brady lost in the waning seconds to the Rams in the NFC Championship Game the following season.  In the sore-loser aftermath of this game, Brady announced his retirement.

2022.  For whatever reasons, probably all bad, petty, and selfish ones, Brady soon changed his mind.  During the off-season, Brady announced that he was in fact not retiring, and that he would indeed play for the Bucs this season after all, whether anybody liked it or not.  His supermodel wife then filed for divorce out of the blue.  Good riddance?  To whom?  Who’s to say?  Brady took some time off to reflect, but then showed up this season frail, gaunt and listless, and with a really dumb high spiked haircut. 

Brady played this past season but his heart was clearly not in it.  He shit the bed all season, literally having like 16 mediocre games out of 17, all the while visibly blaming everyone around him.  But the other teams in the division were so bad that the Bucs made the playoffs with a losing record and ended up playing host to the superior Dallas Cowboys in an undeserved home playoff game. 

Oh, and late in the season, Tom Brady learned that his massive investment in a crypto-bullshit company called FTX had cost him tens of millions of dollars.  Plus as a brand ambassador to that criminal enterprise, Brady induced countless others to invest.  Nice job, Rick!  Serves you right.

Back to Last Night.  The Cowboys defense annihilated Brady and the Bucs.  The Cowboys gave them such a whooping that it didn’t matter that the Dallas placekicker missed four extra points in a row.  Brady had another crap game, even throwing a pick in the end zone when trying to throw the ball away, a mere seconds after ESPN bragged to the world that Brady had not thrown a red zone pick in three plus years. It was a total embarrassment, and a fitting end to a shit-ass season and an ignominious overrated career. 

Looking ahead, I’ll probably have a lot more to say about Brady’s fugazi legacy, but all signs today point to Brady eventually dying lonely and sad, and eventually he and all Patriots fans, living and dead, getting ass-raped in hell for all eternity.  Gronk, too.