Editor's note: This column originally published on Feb. 1, 2022, when Tom Brady first announced he was retiring from the NFL. Brady announced Thursday he was retiring from the NFL after 23 seasons, for good this time.
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Go ahead and pick a decade. Any of them in this millennium, really, and you’ll come away with the same feeling about Tom Brady and his legacy.
He was peerless, in part, because he was ageless. And in pro football, where the violence often renders that impossible, Brady, who officially announced his retirement Tuesday, saying he felt like "the luckiest person in the world" after a remarkable 22-year NFL career, actually made himself the exception in his sport by the way he ruled it.
You could chop Brady’s career in half, or even into thirds, and each of those portions would be filling enough for a first-ballot Hall of Fame candidacy. But instead, Brady somehow managed to put them all together to form one immutable truth: He’s the greatest of all time.
A three-time NFL most valuable player and five-time Super Bowl MVP, Brady played in 10 Super Bowls in all, winning seven of them. Both are records that won’t be equaled anytime soon, if ever. Brady retires with more career wins (243) to his credit than three NFL franchises that began playing before he did. And his statistical numbers as a quarterback are equally astounding, having completed more passes (7,263) for more yards (84,520) and more touchdowns (624) than any other player in history.
And having played his best when it was needed most. It was in the playoffs, and in the clutch, where Brady truly made his mark, starting with that game-winning drive to claim his first title 20 years ago this week against the heavily favored St. Louis Rams. There also was the epic comeback from 28-3 to steal a ring from Atlanta, the fourth-quarter heroics to beat Seattle in Super Bowl XLIX, and the wild finish to beat Carolina a decade before that.
The list goes on and on for Brady, and it includes "Spygate" and "Deflategate" and the "Tuck Rule" as well. But in the end, the GOAT will retire with more playoff wins (35) than all but four NFL franchises can claim at the moment: Green Bay, Pittsburgh, Dallas and, of course, New England, where Brady had a hand in 30 of the Patriots’ 35 all-time postseason victories.
Yet that, too, was another myth Brady dispelled at the end of his career, after he and Bill Belichick parted company in New England two years ago and Brady decided to spread his wings in Tampa as a free agent.
All Brady did there was lead a franchise that hadn’t been to the playoffs in 13 years to a Super Bowl win over the defending champs — Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs — in his first season with the Bucs. So much for the notion that the “Patriot Way” was entirely Belichick’s creation.
Still, even Brady would later admit the whole experience — the escape, if you will — was something of a revelation for him.
"When you're in one place for 20 years, you think that's the only way," he told ABC last spring. “And I think when you go to a different place, you realize, 'Wow, there's another way that people do things.'"
Of course, the way Brady viewed it, there was always something more to prove, whether that was starting his college career as Michigan’s seventh-string quarterback or starting his pro career as the seventh quarterback selected in the 2000 NFL Draft. (The six-pack that went before him: Chad Pennington, Giovanni Carmazzi, Chris Redman, Tee Martin, Marc Bulger and Spergon Wynn.) His agent warned him to rent rather than buy as a rookie in Foxborough, but Brady had already promised Patriots owner Robert Kraft: “You’ll never regret picking me." And, boy, was he ever right.
"I was always kind of motivated by people that say, 'You can't do it,'" Brady said. "You know, 'You're not good enough, you're not fast enough, not big enough, not a good enough arm.'”
But whatever Brady lacked in physical talent, pick No. 199 more than made up for with his mental toughness, his discipline and his meticulous preparation. Brady’s devotion to a strict diet and his “TB12” training regimen with guru Alex Guerrero has been well-documented over the years. So has his relentless competitive streak, one that often drew comparisons to another sports icon, Michael Jordan.
“I have always believed the sport of football is an ‘all-in’ proposition," Brady wrote in the retirement announcement he made on social media Tuesday morning "if a 100 percent competitive commitment isn't there, you won't succeed, and success is what I love so much about our game."
That belief, and that commitment, helps explain how he threw more touchdown passes in his 40s (168) than he did in his 20s (147), or how Brady led the league again this past season, throwing for a career-high 5,316 yards and 43 touchdowns at the age of 44. (The No. 2 passer this season, Justin Herbert, was a 2-year-old when Brady made his NFL debut.)
When he was in his late-30s, Brady talked rather matter-of-factly about wanting to play until he was 45, something no quarterback — other than George Blanda, in a much different role and era — had ever done before. In recent years, he even talked about playing until he was 50, though it usually came with a smile and a laugh.
And while this retirement means he won’t quite get there — Brady turns 45 in August — it is a move he’d subtly hinted at for months, even as he was adamant about not wanting any sort of “farewell tour.”
He’d talked more freely this fall about his post-football plans — a new clothing line, his aptly-named 199 Productions company, his TB12 wellness centers — and also about the pull of family that was getting harder to resist. That’s something he made abundantly clear in his comments after the Bucs’ season-ending playoff loss to the Los Angeles Rams a week ago.
"It's not always what I want,” said Brady, whose wife, Giselle, made it clear years ago she was ready for him to hang up his cleats. “It's what we want as a family. And I'm going to spend a lot of time with them and figure out in the future what's next. … I'll know when I know."
And now we all know: The man who’d spent a career defying the limits of his profession had finally reached his own. Not that you could ever tell by watching him play, and win, again and again.
