You Know Things are Bad for Tom Brady When Ben Freaking Roethlisberger is Saying He Looks Miserable

Jared Wickerham. Getty Images.

Tom Brady - and please stop me if you've heard this - is not having an especially good season. Or a good year in general. At least not by the standards of Tom Brady seasons and years. Through six games, he's thrown just eight touchdowns. Which puts him on pace for a full-season career low 22.6, even with a 17-game schedule. His passer rating of 95.1 is his lowest since his last year in New England, when he was throwing to Julian Edelman, James White, and a collection of armless store mannequins. 

More to the point, his team has lost three out of their last four. The offense he leads is 20th in points. And he's losing it on his teammates. Using language that puts the "offensive" in offensive line:

And stop me if you've heard this as well, but his personal life isn't having a career year, either. It's the equivalent of that part in every VH1's Behind the Music where they'd say, "offstage for the band, things were falling apart." 

Ben Roethlisberger, on the other hand, is doing much better. Mainly due to the fact that when he retired in January, he stayed retired. And met his legal obligation as an American to do a podcast, where he is noticing how down in the dumps Brady seems about his decision to reverse his retirement. 

“Tom is the greatest. The Super Bowl rings show it,” Roethlisberger said on his show Footbahlin.. “It didn’t look like he wanted to be out there. Maybe it was the pressure and he was getting hit and whatever was going on. There’s no way he’s enjoying this. No way. I was enjoying being up there watching the game. It just didn’t look fun, to him.” 

So how bad is the condition Brady's condition is in right now? So bad that it looks bad to Roethlisberger. Who, while he may not have invented bad quarterback body language, he certainly made first team All-Pro at it. Something that was not lost on former Green Bay receiver James Jones for one:

USA Today - "I wish I was sitting there watching the game with Big Ben because I would've said, 'Big Ben, shut up!'" Jones said on "First Things First." "Because if there's anything we know about Tom Brady, Tom Brady's gonna give you everything he's got. If he didn't care, he wouldn't be yelling at his linemen, dropping all those F-bombs and all of that. And for Big Ben to say that - you are the king of looking like you don't care out there. 

"Every time you get hit - every time something goes bad - your body language is the worst out there. I've seen it with my own two eyes on the same field competing against you. For him to say this about Tom Brady knowing that … it ain't about the passion that Tom Brady plays with. So for Big Ben to say that, that's crazy."

Great point by Jones. And an even better illustration of how down Brady is right now. So morose that a guy who spent a decade moping around like … well, allow me a reference that no one but my Boomer friends will get, like Glum from Gulliver's Travels:

Sad. Very, very sad. Having Big Ben say you look like you hate your job is the ultimate indictment. It's like having Tim Tebow question your accuracy. Johnny Manziel say you're not working hard enough. Deshaun Watson calling you out for the way you treat the ladies. Antonio Brown say you're nuts. 

And so a third of a season of lows reaches yet another low for the best there has ever been in this game. I don't agree with Chris Simms speculation that Brady is going to re-retire before the season is out. But I wouldn't hate it if that happened. I saw enough of Brady not having fun in 2019. And this is exactly what it looked like. I don't want to go through that again.