Brady Haters Are Convinced His Career is Over and Are Pretending to Be Sad About It

NY Mag – The New England Patriots are in trouble.  … This is as bad as the Patriots have looked in December in years. The rest of football is smelling blood.

And perhaps most telling: [Tom] Brady himself is looking old. … As recently as last season, it seemed possible that Brady really was the cyborg his fans believed him to be, likely to last much longer as a productive NFL player than anyone ever had before. Now, he looks further from the Super Bowl than he has in a decade. …

If Tom Brady, who admits he can “see the end” of his career now, finishes his career without one final Super Bowl, it will be an ignominious end for a guy who, theoretically, could have retired after that amazing comeback against Atlanta two years ago and walked off the stage in the best possible way, rather than losing to Philadelphia last year and not making it this season.

But it’s a problem for us too, I’d argue. Because pitying Tom Brady just isn’t as satisfying as hating him, and hating Tom Brady — and his coach Bill Belichick — has been so much the central organizing principle of the NFL for 15 years that it is almost impossible to imagine the cultural future of the league without Brady and his Patriots as its eternal villain. It’s been quite a run — 15 of the most successful, riveting and, yes, controversial years of any league in any sport in professional sports history. The NFL may have outwardly celebrated Brady, but functionally it commodified Brady hatred, and turned it into an industry at large as any in the country; it has bled into the worlds of popular entertainment, meme culture, and of course national politics. Brady and Belichick, almost 20 years in, remain the most hated men in sports, by a large margin. … [W]e’ll miss him when he’s gone. I sort of miss him already.

Holy moly. The Patriots lose two games, one on a surreal, once-in-a-lifetime defensive breakdown on the final play and the other thanks to eight presnap penalties and about 20 unforced errors and this is the reaction? I admit I was pretty somber after that Pittsburgh game, but this is way beyond that. This isn’t just grim or dark, it’s macabre. It’s the football media as Nursing Home Death Cat, trying to snuggle up to Tom Brady in his final moments while he’s sitting on the bed pulling on his socks to go play tennis. It’s not bad enough the family is in his room divvying up his belongings right in front of him, the people who hate him are already writing phony eulogies about how much he’ll be missed.

I know that they’ve all be on Brady Career Death Watch since about the time Bernard Pollard took him out 10 years ago. There’s been a weird, almost ghoulish obsession with what the end would look like for Brady, the likes of which I swear to God I’ve never seen before with any other athlete. A fixation about whether he’d die a hero’s death or lying on a gurney covered with wrinkles and bed sores, gasping for air as Belchick pulls the plug. But am I really supposed to believe that this is what it would look like at the end?

The latest rumor going around this week is that Brady is hurt. Mike Giardi went on Toucher & Rich and said, “His lower half has been off, dating back to Tennessee. I would not be surprised when all is said and done that we hear something about either — I’m guessing it’s an MCL. I’m saying he has a tear or a partial tear of the MCL, and that’s why he’s still playing.”

Which led to speculation that he hurt the knee on this play against the Titans:

Which explains not only why he had to use the healing powers of his magical hand on that knee against Miami:

… but also the horrible, precipitous decline in his play. I mean, ever since that Tennessee game, he’s played horrendously, amirite? Clearly he’s proving that the Brady Haters at NY Mag and elsewhere were right when they say he would’ve been better off quitting right after the Falcons Super Bowl, sparing us last year’s MVP season, 505 passing yards in the Super Bowl and the pathetic display he’s putting on right now.

Yeah, about that. Here are his numbers since that stumbling pass reception five weeks ago:

Four games. Seven touchdowns. Two picks. Three sacks. Seven dropped passes by his receivers. And three passer ratings above 100. Not his greatest month ever, not even close. But if that’s a guy who’s breathing his last professional breath then there are a lot of quarterbacks going over that cliff with him.

By way of comparison, here’s Aaron Rodgers over that same stretch, during which his team has lost three games:

Four touchdowns. One pick. Fourteen sacks. Seven drops. Three passer rating under 100. Two of them lower than Brady’s lowest and none of them coming within a hundred miles of his best. But we’re publishing Brady’s obituary while telling Rodgers how great he looks for his age. Because when Rodgers fails, it’s the failings of all the failures failing around him. It’s the team that let him down. The front office. It’s him carrying a load of losers on his back and anything he does is a miracle. But when Brady posts a line of 27-for-43, 358 yards, 3 TD, 0 INT on the road and loses to a freak occurrence, it’s time to pick out a headstone.

Fortunately, not everybody is buying the narrative. The hordes of zombies who have been waiting to come after Brady and feast on his delicious, alkaline-balanced flesh can ignore the stats I posted above. They can conveniently forget how many times they’ve been wrong in the past. They can ignore what they’re eyes tell them about his agility and his “MCL injury”:

But they’re idiots if they’re going to ignore probably the best film study analyst in the business, who’s seeing what I’m seeing. Which is Brady moving in the pocket. Brady jumping away from pressure. Brady delivering throws with laser-guided accuracy. And team-wide mistakes costing them yards:

Mistakes that can be corrected as long as you have a guy under center playing at a high level, which you do. In spite of what the haters say, reports of Tom Brady’s death have been greatly exaggerated.