Not terrific, Tom: Brady sends mixed messages
FOXBOROUGH, Mass. – For a man who has yet to throw his first official interception of the NFL’s 100th season, Tom Brady sure had a lot of explaining to do as he held court Thursday at the end of the Patriots’ minicamp.
Given the history of previous dustups, at least he wasn’t in court.
Was that tweet earlier this week — “Treat my first like my last, and my last like my first!” he stated — some cryptic hint about retirement?
Give us the whole truth and nothing but the truth, Mr. Brady. After all, you’ll be 42 by the night the Patriots will raise the latest Super Bowl banner.
“It’s a Jay-Z song,” Brady said. “I like Jay-Z a lot.”
It turns out that occasionally dropping lyrics, like from Jay-Z’s “My First Song,” is another Brady pastime. Who knew?
In this case, the lyric relates to Brady’s mind-set as he begins his 20th NFL season. Or maybe he just gets a kick out of moving the needle with self-generated buzz.
“No, I think it’s a general appreciation for every year, you’ve got to come out and you’ve got to earn it,” he maintained. “I don’t think anyone relies on what I had done last year or 19 years ago.”
For the record, Brady reiterated that, yes, he still wishes to play until he’s 45 — which was like doubling down on the lyric-as-deeper-meaning denial.
“I hope I can play that long,” he said, acknowledging that such goals hinge on surviving the hazards of his job.
Then again, put the work in, say it enough and maybe it happens.
Someone jokingly suggested that Brady has stated the “45” goal about 41,000 times.
“Is it that many?” he played along. At least the passes Brady threw during the minicamp demonstrated that his skills haven’t gone in the tank — as some might have wondered during that clunker of a loss at Pittsburgh in December. This week, a lot of zip.
Just don’t call him “Terrific.”
It turns out, according to TB12, Brady doesn’t even like the nickname “Tom Terrific,” let alone try to claim it as his own. It might not be easy to convince red-hot Mets fans that Brady wasn’t trying to steal the moniker that for 50 years has been associated with Tom Seaver, but that’s the spin he put on it after several days of blowback fueled by news that his company filed for trademark rights to the “Tom Terrific” tag.
Brady insists he wasn’t trying to disparage Seaver and maintains he was trying to protect the sanctity of the nickname. But there’s some gray area with this, given that Brady took a weird way to get to the point of declaring his intentions. He could have stated as much a few days ago, before the flood of negative reaction.
“It’s unfortunate,” he said. “I was actually trying to do something because I didn’t like the nickname and I wanted to make sure no one used it because some people wanted to use it. I was trying to keep people from using it and then it got spun around to something different than what it was. Good lesson learned … try to do things a little different in the future.”
Maybe so. As it stands now, Brady is resorting to some mixed messages.
When someone asked about the possibility of playing an 18-game regular season — a standard bone of contention between NFL owners and the players union — Brady endorsed the idea.
“Depends of how you take care of yourself, that’s how I see it,” Brady said. “I think your ability to play, your ability to practice is as good as your ability to recover.
“So if you can’t recover, I think a sixgame schedule is hard.”
Hey, Brady gets much credit for remaining a top player for so long. But he’s hardly the one to talk about the rigors of an 18-game season.
He is a quarterback, typically protected during NFL games as if handled by the Secret Service. Let’s see what the linebackers and centers think about the effects of two extra regularseason games.
Furthermore, with the 18-game schedule serving as such a hot-button union issue, it’s surprising to hear Brady come off so cavalier when the topic was broached.
After all, he was also one of the named plaintiffs in the players’ lawsuit against the NFL during the lockout in 2011 … which preceded those Deflategate matters that resulted in such a nasty legal battle.
Of course, there’s one message that never seems to change with Brady and Bill Belichick’s team.
“You’re never a finished product,” he said, alluding to the adjustments coming on the offense in the wake of Rob Gronkowski’s retirement.
“One thing you look at last year is how we evolve and how we grow over a certain point, and you just try to keep coming out with a great process and try to get better as the year goes.”
Terrific, Tom. The journey is just beginning.