BRADY: I’M WORTH BIG BUCS
When I can’t lead us to victory, I’ll retire... but I feel that I can do it and win my eighth Super Bowl
TOM BRADY leads his team into the playoffs tonight – just three wins away from playing in his 11th Super Bowl.
The Tampa Bay Buccaneers quarterback is five months past his 44th birthday and still hungry to add to his seven Super Bowl winners’ rings.
But the man who joined the Bucs three years ago after six Super Bowl triumphs with New England, and promptly won it again in Florida, says he will quit playing as soon as he feels he can no longer cut it with the best.
Tonight, Brady and the Bucs take on Philadelphia, and he said: “I want to play as a championshiplevel player.
“I said a long time ago that when I suck I’ll retire.
“When I’m not capable of leading a team to victory then someone else has to do the job. I feel like I can still do that.
“We have put ourselves in a decent position and we have to take care of a very tough opponent.
“This Eagles team is going to challenge us and I’m going to have to play good football.” Nobody does it better when it comes to the pressure cooker of the playoffs.
The best 14 teams in the league play straight knockout football for three weekends to leave two sides fighting it out in the Super Bowl in Los Angeles on February 13.
And Brady is ready once more to bring his expertise to the drama of win-or-go-home football.
He said: “I always try to give everything that I have. But naturally the urgency goes up because there’s more energy on the field.
“There’s more people want to come to these games, there’s more fans, a lot more excitement.
“You have to feel the urgency and go out there and get the job done.”
Brady’s dominance of the NFL over the past two decades has been partly to blame for two of the traditional champions spending years in the doldrums. The Dallas Cowboys last won the Super Bowl 26 years ago and San Francisco have not been champions since
the year before that.
But one of them will
advance to t h e l a s t eight tonight when they meet in the AT&T Stadium, Texas.
Jimmy Garoppolo was Brady’s back-up in New England for two Super Bowl wins, but since becoming the main man in San Francisco, he lost his only appearance in the final two years ago.
The 30-year-old knows that you have to take your playoff chances while you can.
Garoppolo said: “There is a lot of emotion that goes into these games.
“But when those big moments happen at the end of the game, you have to stay cool down the middle – and our team does a good job of that.”