Tom Brady Is Retiring a Year Too Late, but Now Has No Lingering Questions

I wonder whether Tom Brady kept up with Cristiano Ronaldo at all. Brady unretired last March, a day after watching the 37-year-old soccer legend score a hat trick against Tottenham. The two chatted on the field after the match, and although Ronaldo claimed that he didn’t talk Brady out of retirement, you can sort of imagine what Brady was thinking as he heard the crowd roar for the aging legend: Why walk away when you can still create moments like this? Don’t the great ones have an obligation to keep trying to be great for as long as they can? It was enough to convince Brady to immediately go back to work in the hope of winning an eighth Super Bowl title.

But Ronaldo didn’t exactly keep up the aging-legend bit. He scored just one goal in 10 Premier League appearances for Manchester United this season and began publicly complaining about his role, eventually getting suspended for leaving the bench during a game and dropped by the team “with mutual consent.” He played in the World Cup for Portugal and was benched there, as well. No European clubs pursued Ronaldo, who signed a massive contract to play in Saudi Arabia. He has yet to score for his new club.

Brady doesn’t have the Saudi option, as they haven’t created a LIV-esque alternative to the NFL yet. So he’s retiring ... again!

It’s a little bit hard to get worked up to find new things to say about Tom Brady’s second retirement that we didn’t say at exactly this time 365 days ago when Brady retired for the first time. Lots of people (including the New England Patriots) are literally just resharing their posts from last year. It feels a bit odd to be nonchalant about the retirement of the most accomplished player of all time, but, well, there’s nothing new here. Brady is retiring on Feb. 1, 2023, with the same résumé he had on Feb. 1, 2022: He owns an NFL-record seven Super Bowl rings and the all-time records in virtually every passing statistic by huge margins.

Brady’s unretirement was, quite frankly, a mess. On the field, his Buccaneers finished below .500, the first Brady squad ever to do so. Brady posted the lowest touchdown rate of his career, throwing for scores on just 3.4 percent of his passes. He finished 30th of 33 qualifying QBs in yards per attempt. The Bucs landed a playoff berth because they won their awful division, and were completely dominated in their playoff matchup with the Cowboys, losing 31-14.

Off the field, things were just as bad: In November, Brady and his supermodel wife Gisele Bündchen announced that they are getting a divorce, reportedly due to his refusal to step away from football. One of his big off-field ventures, an endorsement deal for crypto firm FTX, ended in disgrace and huge financial loss, as that company blew up in spectacular fashion. Brady signed a contract to become Fox’s lead color commentator when he retired; although that deal is still in place, Greg Olsen has been so good in his stint as the lead analyst that nobody wants Fox to replace him. (No word yet on the Rotten Tomatoes score for Brady’s new movie, 80 for Brady. Looks great, though!) Brady was even roasted online for his new, weird face. “I’m 45 years old,” Brady said after an unusual absence from training camp. “There’s a lot of shit going on.”

Brady’s one-year unretirement seems like a massive miscalculation. His decision to keep playing cost him personally and professionally, and for what? How could Brady screw this up so badly? Why throw so much away for the worst season of his career?

But I think we have to go back to consider where Brady was when he retired for the first time. In 2021, Brady led the NFL in passing touchdowns and passing yardage; his Buccaneers lost to the eventual Super Bowl champions on a last-second field goal in the divisional round of the NFC playoffs. It was remarkable stuff from a 44-year-old QB in a league in which nobody past the age of 40 had ever achieved significant success at the position. There had to be a part of Brady’s brain wondering whether he could keep doing it. Yes, he’d already set all the records, but how high could he push them? At what age would he stop playing like one of the NFL’s best QBs? 47? 50? A year ago, he didn’t have those answers.

Now I think we know. The Tom Brady we saw in 2022 was not one of the league’s best QBs, or even a league-average QB. He did not win the Super Bowl, or come close to winning a Super Bowl, or even lose to a team that lost in the Super Bowl. There’s no use in trying anymore. He’s done. He can now retire before reaching the point Ronaldo sunk to in his career, where coaches have to weigh whether they are costing themselves wins by continuing to play a rusty old superstar.

Brady’s unretirement may have backfired, but I wonder whether he got what he wanted out of it. When he stepped away last year, there was still an open question of how long Brady could fight time. He’d made it his mission to push his career—and the human body—as far as it could go, but oddly chose to retire while he was still leading the league and contending for a title. Now that Brady has experienced a year of failure, he can have closure—at least until he signs with the 49ers in six weeks.