BRADY’S PAPERS IN WITH NFL
Tom Brady’s retirement plans are now in ink.
The Bucs quarterback has filed a letter with the NFL and the players union, making his Feb. 1 retirement official, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
It’s a step that Brady did not take after announcing his retirement at this time a year ago, and his retirement ended 40 days later when he returned to the Bucs.
By filing the letter, Brady becomes eligible for the Pro Football Hall of Fame’s Class of 2028.
Nine days ago, Brady distributed a video on social media that lasted less than a minute, emotionally announcing the end of his 23season playing career by saying this time it was “for good.”
“I’ll get to the point right away,” Brady, 45, said in a video posted to Twitter on Feb. 1. “I’m retiring for good. I know the process was a pretty big deal last time, so when I woke up this morning, I figured I’d just press record and let you guys know first.”
Why submit paperwork now? Among other things, It begins the process of severing marketing agreements with the NFL and the NFL Players Association for Brady, who sold a lot of merchandise for the league for more than two decades.
Less clear is the impact it could have on the Bucs’ salary cap. Tampa Bay is $55 million over the $224.8 million cap for 2023, with $35 million in dead money counting against their space for Brady.
Brady’s official retirement could make it more difficult for the Bucs to spread that dead money over the next two years.
Perhaps more importantly to Brady, it could quell speculation that he still has an interest in playing next season. His job as the lead NFL analyst on Fox doesn’t begin until the fall of 2024.
Closest-ever matchup?
This year’s Super Bowl matchup between the Eagles and the Chiefs is so evenly split that not even Wall Street can figure out who might have the upper hand.
A team of quants at the $465 billion Allspring Global Investments, which publishes an annual view on possible winners for football’s biggest game, says it’s “painfully split down the middle” for Sunday’s contest. In their calculation, they look at “alpha,” or how well a team performs throughout any given season versus what the market had expected of them.
The Eagles, with 15 percent NFL alpha, and the Chiefs, with a reading of 16 percent, “seem to have been cut from the same cloth this season: identical records, identical seeding, near-identical expectations, and near-identical NFL Alphas,” says Matt Robinson, a portfolio manager at the firm.
“The Chiefs and the Eagles are right there next to each other in terms of alpha for this year — they were almost inseparable in terms of their performance relative to expectations,” he said in an interview. “It’s a tough one this year.” Allspring went with the Eagles by 11⁄2 points, noting that “lower-Alpha teams are undervalued in the postseason.”
Professional bookmakers seem to be just as befuddled as the quants. When betting for the game opened, the Chiefs were slight favorites but the odds have now shifted toward the Eagles. Betting apps such as FanDuel currently list Philadelphia’s team as favorites, but only by 11⁄2 points. That’s the fourthtightest Super Bowl point spread in history, according to handicapper Jimmy Boyd’s website.
The team at Allspring say they’ve called 13 of the last 19 Super Bowls correctly. Last year, they chose the Rams — the winner — though they’re not counting it as an accurate projections because the victors would have needed to win by two more points for the forecast to have been correct.
The spread in this season’s alpha is the narrowest it’s ever been, said Robinson. “So as much as I’d like to say we’ve got the Eagles by a mile or the Eagles are severely mispriced, this is actually probably as efficient as the prices have been since we’ve been doing this.”
Robinson and his team say not much separates the two teams and “it could very well come down to a single play as time expires. All we can do is hope that the Eagles have at least one more ‘Philly Special’ hidden away for that moment,” they wrote.