You can tell a bunch about someone from their opinions on Tom Brady. This is a long standing belief of mine. When faced with unambiguous proof of rare accomplishment, feelings about that accomplishment speak volumes. I’m not saying you have to like the guy. Or that Jets fans shouldn’t harbor bitter resentment for the trauma he’s inflicted on them so far this century. But if you hate Tom Brady and believe his accomplishments unworthy of appreciation, than that’s probably a good sign you don’t see the world with much objectivity. And if you think he cheated his way to seven titles…you probably can’t really be trusted to understand the way the world works.
I’ve got my own thoughts about Brady. What’s true about others is also true about me. Those thoughts say a lot about how I see the world. I’m less in awe of him than I am curious about how it happened. Though I’ll admit, there’s still quite a bit of awe there.
Tom Brady is 120 days younger than me. I’ve watched him play football for a long, long time. He may have played his last game this past weekend. So I wanted to share some thoughts. For those of you that don’t care about American football, I’ll apologize now. This is going to be pretty football heavy. But there’s also some transferable performance stuff here. So maybe stick it out.
Here goes…
Tom Brady started winning at professional football’s highest level when he really wasn’t very good yet. At least relative to his skills today. It sounds a bit strange when you watch today’s game but 20 years ago teams still won with meh quarterbacks. During the first seven years of Brady’s career, the losing Super Bowl quarterbacks included Kerry Collins, Jake Delhomme, Rex Grossman, Matt Hasslebeck, Rich Gannon and Donovan McNabb. The winners, besides Brady, included Trent Dilfer and Rob Johnson. It’s not exactly a who’s who of hall of famers. The Super Bowl before Brady won his first, Trent Dilfer and Kerry Collins combined to complete 42% of their passes. It was probably the worst quarterbacked Super Bowl of all time. The MVP was linebacker Ray Lewis. This is the NFL Brady came into.
In the ten years before Brady entered the league, someone other than a quarterback won league MVP four times. That’s happened just once in the last 14 years. Timing matters a bunch in life and in football. And Tom Brady was born into a quarterback famine. And he was born into a league where quarterback play mattered far less to a team than it does today.
Quarterbacks have always mattered. But they weren’t always the only thing that mattered. Today, quarterbacks are everything. And they have to carry their teams from day one or they don’t get to play for very long. We talk about Brady’s longevity as a superhuman feat of strength. And it is. But it’s also just weird. It’s weird to have played through multiple generations and phases of the NFL game. But he has. And I can’t really get away from the idea that if 2002 Tom Brady showed up in 2021 as a rookie, it’s not crazy to say he does nothing but hold a clip board. And it’s near certain that he wouldn’t have won three Super Bowls in his first five years. I’m not knocking his status as the GOAT though. The fact that 44 year old Brady could win today when 24 year old couldn’t is something that’s hard to wrap your head around.
Timing is just one way to spin the Brady narrative though. Another way would be to simply say he played whatever game was in front of him the way it needed to be played. And won.
In 2006, after years of mugging Peyton Manning and his receivers into submission, Brady and the Patriots got run out of Indianapolis by a now invincible Manning on his way to his first Super Bowl. They gave up 38 points, which at the time was about a month’s worth of points for the Pats. Did Manning’s hero arc finally reach its zenith where he was finally able to cast off the evil Patriot empire? Or was it something else? Something less romantic?
It was the NFL rules committee. From 2004 to 2007 the NFL made a public and stated emphasis that they would start enforcing the rules that they’d always had on the books that made it illegal to contact receivers more than five yards from the line of scrimmage. And somewhere in the middle of the third quarter of that game in Indianapolis it became clear that you couldn’t out defense your opponent’s elite quarterback any more. And the modern NFL game was born. Pretty good 2005 Brady died that day. Long live super human 2007 and beyond Tom Brady.
The next year Tom Brady threw a league record 50 touchdown passes and the Patriots became the first team ever to win their first 18 games. He led the league in passing for the first time in his career.
When the game turned into a quarterback’s game, Brady became the game. That’s another way to tell the Brady story. But it doesn’t explain why at 44 he still wins. What explains that is the narrative that I think is the one that matters most. The narrative that Brady isn’t a thoroughbred. He’s a Swiss watch.
While Tom Brady during his first Super Bowl run may not have been very good, he was, even then, extremely consistent. Young quarterbacks in the old days used to come into the league and stink it up pretty regularly. Coaches and scouts didn’t look for consistency. They looked for proof of future greatness. They looked for that game when the kid showed some streaks of greatness. And if they looked at Tom Brady, they would have seen a weird pattern. There wasn’t really a streak one way or another. He was boring. He completed around 60% of his passes every game and threw one or two touchdowns and an interception. He had one really bad game where he threw 4 interceptions against the Broncos but never had another. It snowed and he looked the same. The wind blew and nothing changed. He never dominated. But he never had a game with a passer rating below 50.
For a frame of reference, Peyton Manning who has somehow been retired for 6 years by now, threw for many more yards and many more touchdowns in his first year but had four games with a passer rating below 50. And four games with three or more interceptions. That “flash” of greatness was there. Kid Manning threw the ball all over the field. But he was up and down. He threw 28 interceptions. Brady threw 12. The same total he threw 20 years later in his last season with the Patriots. It’s not a coincidence. He is the most consistent football player anyone has ever seen.
Of the 19 seasons Brady played (he was injured for 1) his team has never finished out of the top 12 of 32 teams. 16 times, his team finished in the top eight of 32. 13 times they finished in the top four. Ten times they finished in the top two. Over a 20 year career, Tom Brady never played three seasons in a row without going to the Super Bowl. It was twice as likely that a Brady quarterback team won a Super Bowl than it was that it didn’t win a playoff game. You read that right…it’s crazy.
Of the 721 humans that have every played quarterback in the NFL, there have been two not named Tom Brady who have won four Super Bowls; Terry Bradshaw and Joe Montana. Brady won four super bowls after the age of 38 alone. Bradshaw and Montana were retired by that age. Which means that Brady was better in his late 30s and 40s than every other quarterback that ever lived at any point in their careers. It defies logic. And that’s where the narrative telling just leaves us wandering around the Foxboro parking lot for answers.
The best explanation that I have links together people like Tom Brady and Jerry Rice. They’re really the only two undebatable GOATs at their positions in NFL history. Both were late bloomers. Rice didn’t play Division I college football. Brady’s NFL combine video and photo are comical memes. Brady just led the league in passing at 44. Jerry Rice caught 92 passes for 1300 yards when he was 40. No wide receiver over the age of 36 has ever even gone for a thousand yards. The Bradys and the Rices of the world had the super human talent of using every bit of skill they ever had. There’s no daylight between their best and worst days. And that appears to be way more powerful than speed or strength or other things more prone to the forces of entropy. It’s not sexy to say that his daring comebacks are just the game lasting long enough for the outcome to regress to the mean. But that’s kind of what they are.
To get up and just grind every day is rarer than we think. And that’s the lesson. Brady was either going to be a nobody or the GOAT. A middle ground wasn’t really possible. Not because he was so tough or worked so hard. But because he wasn’t good enough to be mediocre. He was only good enough to be great.
You can either prove people right about you or wrong about you in this world. There’s no third option. That’s the Brady lesson.