When Time Stood Still: Tom Brady’s Last Great Game

Most legends do not get a send-off like the movies. Tom Brady did.

Welcome back to my Sports Passion Project everybody, where today I’m going to try to do something very rarely done in the NFL discourse.

I’m going to make Tom Brady into a protagonist.

In my efforts to turn Tom Brady into a protagonist, I’m not going to talk about his 2007 season, where he lit the league on fire, posting the second best EPA/Play in a single season of the play tracking era (1999-present). I’m not going to talk about his 2011 season, where he dragged the league’s 29th ranked EPA/Play defence all the way to the Super Bowl, had to play that game without the greatest TE of all time, 2011 Rob Gronkowski, and almost won the championship anyway.

I’m not going to talk about 2014, where Tom finally got back over his penchant that he had developed since 2005 of losing the big games, and at last won a Super Bowl again, at age 37, after most people claimed he never would. It seems silly that people thought he was never win the Super Bowl again in 2014, but that only sounds silly in retrospect because Tom went on a playoff tear from 2014 onwards, winning several more Super Bowls, but I’m not going to talk about any of them either.

I’m not going to talk about how Peyton Manning and Tom Brady met each other one final time in the 2015 AFC Championship game. I’m not going to talk about how Tom orchestrated one of the best comebacks in the history of the game in the Super Bowl. I’m not going to talk about how Tom, now 41 years old, held the young Patrick Mahomes down for just a little bit longer in the 2018 AFC Championship game, in his final show of dominion over the AFC that he had ruled for basically all of the 2010s.

I’m not even going to talk about the 2020 Super Bowl, where Tom at last won a blowout victory, which in my opinion is something Tom’s career needed, after a career long string of Super Bowl games that were needlessly close, sometimes outright losses, against a lot of teams the Patriots should’ve been able to conjure blowout victories over.

As you can see, there are a lot of lenses through which you can look at NFL history that frame Tom Brady as the protagonist. He came into playoff games as an underdog against Peyton Manning, Patrick Mahomes, Drew Brees, Philip Rivers, and plenty of others. You name any great QB or great team in the era, and Tom Brady at some point in his career was likely an underdog in a playoff game against them. That comes with the territory of playing so many playoff games, and it leaves me lots of angles I could take to frame Tom Brady as the protagonist.

I’m not going to take any of those angles.

Instead, I want to talk about my personal favourite Tom Brady performance. The one that stirs up the most feelings in me when I go back and watch it, but in order to appreciate the gravity of the moment, we have to begin at the ending.

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We all know Tom Brady’s NFL story.

It begins with Tom being drafted in the compensatory draft picks between the sixth and seventh rounds at the 2000 NFL draft. He spends one season as a thoroughly not notable third string QB for a 2000 Patriots team that finishes 5-11, before NFL history changes forever in the 2001 offseason.

In that 2001 offseason, Tom Brady unexpectedly beats out Damon Huard for the Patriots’ backup QB job, so Tom gets to go on the magical ride to the 2001 Super Bowl, and the NFL is never the same again. Over the 19 seasons spanning 2001-2019, Tom Brady is one of the top QBs in the game.

Amongst players with at least 1334 plays in this span (to exclude Patrick Mahomes, as it feels disingenuous to include him as part of this era), Tom is third in EPA/Play, behind only Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers, with both players in front of him in this rate stat having at least 3000 fewer touches than Tom does in this span, meaning he was an elite player for an extremely long time in terms of regular season performance.

In terms of playoff performance, it’s a tad worse, but only a tad, as amongst all players with double digit playoff starts between 2001 and 2019, Tom ranks fourth in playoff EPA/Play, behind only Aaron Rodgers (who yes, does lead this span in playoff EPA/Play), Drew Brees, and Russell Wilson.

Tom’s 0.3 career playoff CPOE is not inspiring, but in the postseason, it’s all about the real results, and he brought those in droves. In terms of scoring points, very few were able to do it better than Tom in this span, and in terms of winning games, nobody was able to do it better. In terms of total playoff wins, 30 in 19 years is tough to match.

Tom Brady was a Hall of Famer by the time he turned 28 years old, and then he had a second Hall of Fame career after that, all just with the Patriots, but I’m not here to talk about Tom’s years with the Patriots. I’m here to talk about Tom’s years with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, which begin with a bang in 2020.

For once in his career, Tom had some bad luck in 2020, with his 13.01 Expected Win Tampa Bay Buccaneers finishing up that season with just 11 real ones, but when playoff time came around, the NFL’s best team by Expected Wins played like it, scything through the competition to win their playoff games by an average of 11.25 points.

The only one who was even able to get close to these Buccaneers was Aaron Rodgers, the best playoff QB of the last decade by EPA/Play. Other than Aaron, nobody even got near the Bucs, as each of the other three playoff wins were blowouts, en route to the most dominant championship run of Tom Brady’s career, and one of the most dominant in the history of the league.

By 2020, the NFL was deep into its parity era. Teams are not supposed to win four playoff games by an average of 11.25 points apiece, but the Buccaneers did. They tore through the league more easily than anybody had in years, or has since. They did it with a 43 year old QB, and 2021 was even more of the same.

The 2021 Bucs had an extremely easy schedule, including two games in the final three weeks against the moribund Carolina Panthers that I want you to keep in the back of your mind, where Tampa won by a combined 50 points, and Tom beat his QB adversary (Sam Darnold) in the total EPA battle by 54.6 points over the two games. The greatness of the 2021 Bucs wasn’t solely due to the schedule though. They still won their games against Josh Allen and Dak Prescott and Tua Tagovailoa in the very few games where they had to play top quality opposition, so everything seemed fine.

Even when Tampa failed to repeat as Super Bowl champions after a blow up from Tom against the Rams in the 2021 playoffs, all seemed well. It was beginning to seem like Tom Brady’s football career would never end, but even though Tom has taken him into the twelfth round, father time eventually wins over everybody. Mere weeks after the 2021 Super Bowl, a championship that the Rams (who had beaten the Bucs in the playoffs by just three points) won, Tom Brady announces his retirement from the NFL.

This is where our story begins.

It takes mere days for Tom to change his mind. Rumours begin flying within days that this retirement is not going to last, and within 40 days of announcing that he had retired from the NFL, Tom goes back up to the podium to announce that he has made a mistake. He is not retiring. Instead, he’s coming back for an unprecedented (in the modern era) 23rd season of NFL football.

If this seems like an odd change of heart, you’re not the only one who thinks that. Why would Tom Brady retire, and then undo the retirement, all within barely a month? On the surface, this seems like a bluff retirement, in the mold of a fighter. Fighters fake retire all the time, trying to extort their promoter for more money or a different opponent, but this is not right. That would not happen in these circumstances. Who would Tom Brady need to threaten with retirement?

He does not need to threaten retirement to accomplish anything, because he’s Tom Effing Brady. Legend is not a big enough word to describe this man, and as of the 2022 offseason, he has a real argument for still being the best QB in the NFL. He finished fourth in EPA/Play just last year. Any team would be lucky to have him, strictly for the calibre of player he still is, even if he had no championships under his belt, no leadership ability, or anything else.

Considering the fact that he does bring all that other stuff, in addition to being the league’s fourth placed EPA/Play finisher, if Tom Brady said to jump, every team in the NFL in 2021 except the Green Bay Packers and KC Chiefs would have replied ‘how high?’ There is no need to fake retire to get done anything Tom wants done.

Why then, have we just seen all this nonsense, retiring and then unretiring?

In a sentence, family is complicated.

When Tom walked up to the podium to announce his retirement the first time, he repeatedly stressed that it was a family decision. It was entirely family motivated. He needed to spend more time with his son Ben (12 years old) and daughter Vivian (nine years old), before both were grown.

These were not only Tom’s words. They were the words of his wife, Gisele Bündchen, who’d had all she could handle of him being gone all the time. Football players see their teammates more than their families, especially during the season. When you take into account the offseason regimen, and the fact that Tom Brady almost always plays into at least the middle of January, this is better than half the year. Gisele was tired of her and her children being in second place, so she gave Tom an ultimatum.

Either retire from football, or she was leaving him.

Tom had already watched his first son John be born, and then grow up, and then become a teenager, all while Tom was hellbent on succeeding as an NFL QB. This did not help the bond between father and son, and there comes a point where it’s too late to fix. As a parent, you can be gone for too long. You can miss too much. While he did not put it in these terms standing on the podium, nor did he mention the ultimatum, I’m sure a real factor in Tom’s decision is that he did not want to make this same mistake again with his other two children.

Hence, Tom made the decision to retire from the NFL.

However, as we all know, life for an athlete without their sport can be extremely difficult. A couple weeks ago, I talked about Glenn Burke falling out of sports being the impetus for him turning to cocaine, and ultimately ruining his own life. At various other times on this publication I’ve spoken about Josh Freeman, who followed a similar path, jumping headlong into the Florida party scene when his football career ended, much to the detriment of the rest of his life. There are plenty of others.

When you’ve worked towards one thing for so long, and all of a sudden you’re without it, it can be hard for a person to live with themselves.

Tom has been a full time football player since taking over the starting job for his high school team, in 1993. It is now March of 2022, which means this one month, from the middle of February to the middle of March, is the first time in 29 years that Tom Brady does not have the right to call himself an athlete, or a football player, and he does not like it. Quite frankly, he’s not done. He’s not done mentally, and he’s not done physically. In his own mind, he still thinks he can be a Super Bowl QB, which is the very worst mental state for a retired athlete to be in, if their goal is to remain happy in retirement.

The best thing for a retired athlete looking to stay retired is for them to get beaten to a pulp in their final season, either literally or in the form of posting extremely bad numbers, to make it clear that at least physically they cannot do it anymore, even if mentally they still want to. Tom Brady does not have this luxury, as he finished 2021 generating 0.217 EPA/Play, and got perilously close to making the Super Bowl for the 11th time.

He still thinks he can do it, and this is an itch that will not go away. Much like a drug addiction, it takes days trying to go without for it to eat Tom alive, which is why he turns his back on his commitment to retire so quickly, taking just 40 days to reverse course publicly, and declare that he’s returning to the NFL. In violation of his wife’s ultimatum, he will remain an NFL QB moving forward.

I dig so deeply into this marital dispute because depending on which side of the fence you’re on, both sides of this divorce got a very raw deal in different kinds of media. In the sports media, Gisele got a bad look for trying to pressure Tom Brady (of all people, Tom Brady) into an early retirement. In the more general media, Tom got a bad look for continuing to put his football interests ahead of his family, in spite of Gisele’s warning that this would be the final time.

I don’t necessarily think either of the parties are incorrect. It would really suck to be the wife of a football player, and not have your husband home for your children as much as you would like. It would really suck to retire from doing the only thing you’ve ever loved, even though you still want to do it, and believe you’re good enough to compete. Both sides have a legitimate argument here.

This follows Tom all the way through the 2022 offseason, as things just feel different. The man who’s spent a whole career being unflappable in real NFL games is suddenly prone to yelling obscenities at offensive linemen in training camp practices. The man who’s spent a whole career being this robot that doesn’t know how to do anything but win now can be seen to be visibly frustrated when things don’t go well.

It’s cold to say it feels fundamentally different to watch a man show emotion, but this is Tom Brady. He never shows any emotion. He’s spent a whole career being the perfect robot QB. It’s the team’s credit when we win. It’s entirely my fault when we lose. That kind of thing is typical fare these days, in large part due to all the success Tom had portraying a perfect robot to the public, but in the 2022 offseason, he is a different person. He just cannot find the will to hold it in.

This all culminates in the infamous 11 day absence from training camp. When reporters ask why he was gone from training camp for 11 days, Tom simply replies ‘I’m 45 years old. I’ve got shit going on.’

In retrospect, we now know that this 11 days is spent in the Bahamas with Gisele, in a last ditch attempt to keep their marriage together. It does not work, so Tom comes back to America, having made his choice. Ultimately, this decision from Tom to continue playing football, in violation of the ultimatum, becomes an irreconcilable difference, and the couple initiate divorce proceedings.

It feels crude to say that Tom chose football over his family. Given all the time I’ve just spent explaining my interpretation of everybody’s motivations, that feels extremely reductive, but if I had to reduce this entire thing to one sentence, that would be the sentence.

This is the most human thing we have ever seen Tom Brady do.

Like I said, throughout his football career, we’ve seen Tom as a robot. A winning machine. A person who rarely shows any emotions, who never cracks under any amount of pressure, no matter what’s happening in the world around him, but the pressure of this family situation cracked even Tom Brady.

Being a football player is all he’s ever been. Since 16 years old, if anybody has wanted to interact with Tom Brady, the fact that he’s a football player was going to be the cause of that interaction a majority of the time, and a significant part of the interaction in all cases it was not the cause. It’s almost certain that a large part of his self identity is wrapped up in the fact that he’s a football player, and when push came to shove, he was not willing to let that part of himself go. Not even if divorce was the alternative.

This saga makes this 2022 season the only time in his entire football career that Tom Brady comes across as relatable. At all points before 2022, he was a winning machine, presenting himself in the public as inhuman as he possibly could be, and at all points after 2022, he’s been under a legally binding contract promising not to say what he truly thinks on TV.

None of that is relatable to a sports fan like yourself or myself, but there is a sweet spot, where we can get behind Tom Brady as a protagonist. I can sympathise with what Tom went through in the 2022 offseason. I can feel the pressure he was put under, squeezed between football and family, the two loves of his life. I can understand how all this going on is making him act a bit out of character, and it makes me want to root for him in the 2022 football season.

Speaking of which, we are now 3000 words into this article. Is anybody in the mood to hear about some NFL football?

The public does not yet know about this offseason drama. They’ve heard about a few training camp outbursts, but that’s really all. Nobody truly understands before the season begins just how nightmarish it all was. As such, with Tom Brady back in the fold, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers come into the 2022 season as the second favourites to win the Super Bowl, behind only the Buffalo Bills, and ahead of both the defending Super Bowl champion Los Angeles Rams, and the KC Chiefs.

It’s easy to see why the football world still likes the Bucs. We have the guts of the same roster that’s led us to better than 13 Expected Wins in back to back seasons, with the stars of the show (beyond Tom himself) being WRs Mike Evans and Chris Godwin. Two Pro Bowl receivers on the same team is a rare thing. Two Pro Bowl receivers with Tom Brady in the middle is almost a walking Super Bowl championship, but this is not all the Bucs have to offer.

We also come equipped with the defence that ranked fifth in 2020, and fourth in 2021. There’s been a bit of a cap crunch over the years, but we still have the LB duo of Lavonte David and Devin White that’s been giving teams nightmares for years. The secondary is looking a bit weaker than it has is years past, but in week one of the season, the defence shuts all the doubters up immediately.

Week one is on the road against the Dallas Cowboys, who are not a team to be messed with. This is the second ranked defence in the NFL, which does do a fairly effective job of hemming Tom in, holding him to 0.04 EPA/Play, but this doesn’t matter, as the Tampa defence knocks Dak Prescott out of the game (and a third of the 2022 season) with injury, and holds the Cowboys to -0.34 EPA/Play in an easy 19-3 win to get the season started on the right foot.

This does feel like a great start to the year, as it’s a blowout victory over a Dallas team that’s going to achieve a 12-5 record at season’s end. That’s nothing to scoff at. This is an elite team that we just fundamentally outclassed. However, much more indicative of how this season is actually going to go is week two on the road in New Orleans, where I’d like to show you the offensive production breakdown for our Buccaneers:

Purple means bad. Green means good, and look at all that purple. The only thing that goes well in this New Orleans game is the final result of our passing plays, and that is a trend that continues as this season goes along. Our rushing offence was not just horrendous in this game. That’s not a big enough word for it. It generated -0.68 EPA/Play on an astounding 28 tries, for -19.04 EPA in total. That is one of the worst contributions from a rushing offence in the entire play tracking era.

This is a game we did not lead until there were seven minutes remaining in the fourth quarter I might add. It’s not an artificially high number of rushing attempts because we were winning by 14+.

This is not just putting an anchor around Tom’s neck. This is strongman competition, forcing him to pull semi trucks around. Nevertheless, he does, generating 0.14 EPA/play through the air, which is not up to Tom’s standard, but it’s enough to defeat the 2022 New Orleans Saints, who cannot play offence either, by a 20-10 score.

In technical terms, this game is also yet another game winning drive in Tom’s absurd career tally, but let’s just say it doesn’t feel like the old ones. Tom completes one pass of 11 yards, then draws an unnecessary roughness penalty, then a defensive holding penalty, then an admittedly nice ball down the right sideline to get it all at once. Very non-Tom Brady like. However, we are 2-0, which makes it easy to ignore, but there are some games coming up against top quality competition, which will show where these Buccaneers really stand.

The first is in week three, against the Green Bay Packers, who by season’s end turn out not to be high quality opposition at all, but are believed to be one of the NFC’s top teams at the time this game is played. Nevertheless, we still cannot score. The Packers pull an immediate 14-3 first half lead, and from here we can do little. We have two drives get inside Packer territory, but both are scuttled by fumbles on completed passes. This is not Tom’s fault, but it accentuates the feeling that 2022 just feels different.

It’s hard to put a finger on what this feeling is, but for Tom’s whole career, things have just worked out for him. I give Tom all the credit for continuously having success when preparation met opportunity, but it cannot be denied that whenever there was a break to be had, it has almost always broken Tom’s way, over the course of his entire football career. From barely winning a backup job in 2001, only for the starter to get injured five quarters into the season, straight on through, but for whatever reason, things are not breaking our way today.

Our rush offence is horrendous (generating -0.38 EPA/Play this game), our receivers have butter fingers, and in the end, a team led by Tom Brady has three full quarters to do something about a 14-3 deficit, but can’t get it done. If you watched through Tom’s whole career like I did, I don’t need to tell you how radical of a sentence that is. In the end, we lose 14-12, as the Packers do not score another point after their first half burst, but do not need to, as our offence sputters again, and can’t do anything about it.

Tom in this game was fine, but fine was all, against the NFL’s 27th ranked defence. To me as a contemporary fan, this is where the thoughts about father time began to seep into my thought pattern. Tom Brady’s prime will never end, I try to tell myself, but would a prime Tom Brady ever have performed so poorly against such a poor defence? It’s difficult not to think about, and it’s even more difficult not to think about when you see the results of week four against Kansas City.

It’s a blowout loss.

I’m sorry to be so abrupt, but perhaps that abruptness is the point here. Just one year ago, Tom was still able to beat Josh Allen in a head to head fight, but now, against the Kansas City Chiefs, there’s just nothing that can be done. They go up a quick 21-3 on us, and the game never gets within one score. It rarely gets within two scores.

Some garbage time scoring on our part makes the final score look a bit nicer, at 41-31, but don’t mistake this for being anything other than a blowout loss, that we could do nothing about. We came into this game as favourites, even against the KC Chiefs, such was the belief that still persisted in us before this game, but afterwards, it’s clear to all that we cannot hang with the elite competition anymore.

Once again, Tom was fine. He was far from the reason we lost this game, generating 0.18 EPA/Play on 57 passes, because it was seen immediately (seven total touches) that the rush game was going to be of no use, but there was none of the flair you’re accustomed to seeing when Tom Brady plays football. No fourth quarter heroics. Not even a sniff of a comeback at any point. Just some garbage time scoring.

Tom’s had a knack throughout his whole career for turning up the wick, making a few garbage time points into a legitimate comeback attempt before you even know what’s happening. Look no further than the 2014 or 2016 Super Bowls as examples, but here we are, six years past the most recent of the incredible Super Bowl comebacks, and these garbage time points just feel like garbage time points.

Something is not the same. We can beat up the little guys just as badly as we ever did, evidenced by our easy win over Atlanta in week five to move us to 3-2, but when it comes to playing with the big boys, we have just had our lunch money stolen two weeks in a row, and the bullying will continue.

Week six takes us on the road to Pittsburgh, where we are ten point road favourites, because the Steelers plan to start rookie QB Kenny Pickett. However, our defence does the unwise thing of knocking Kenny out of this game, allowing Mitch Trubisky to play, at which point he resoundingly outplays Tom Brady, and we lose again, in a game that just feels deflating.

It’s not that the 2022 Pittsburgh Steelers are a bad opponent. They’re not. They’re going to end up in the playoffs at the end of this season, but only as the 14th out of 14 teams, meaning they’re approximately the median team in the NFL, and even the median NFL team is so far ahead of us that the top ten most important plays of this game look like this:

That’s a lot of Mitch Trubisky in the key moments, and virtually no Tom Brady. Every important play of this game was made by the offence that did not feature Tom Brady. I’ve been looking for ways throughout this entire piece to articulate exactly how the aura around Tom feels different in 2022 compared to all his other seasons, and I’m not sure if there’s a better way to say it than that. Tom Brady just existed, allowing Mitch Trubisky to steal the game away from him.

Would this have happened in any season of Tom’s career except this one? I have to say I doubt it. That’s the difference.

The Pittsburgh Steelers played this game around us. We were just on the field while they played, and strictly because it’s the Pittsburgh Steelers did they only manage to win this game 20-18. ‘Play a one possession game against literally everybody’ is Steeler football. That’s what they do, and it’s also why they’ve had so much trouble defeating Tom over the years, with Tom putting together a 12-4 record against them in his years in the NFL, despite there rarely being a talent disparity wide enough to indicate such a one-sided rivalry.

In essence, the Steelers tried to beat Tom Brady at his own game for 20 years in a row, and continuously failed to do so, but today, they challenged Tom to his own game, and beat him at it.

Mitch Trubisky beat him at it.

Let that one soak in.

It’s at this point, after week six against the Steelers, that it becomes impossible not to notice. Through six games, Tom Brady has generated 0.136 EPA/Play (10th) on a one flat CPOE (14th). The sack rate is an absurd 3.5%, one of the best in the league six weeks into 2022, so Tom’s pocket presence has definitively not abandoned him, but even this 3.5% would be his worst since he got to the Bucs, were Tom to finish the season this way.

10th in EPA/Play, 14th in CPOE, and anything less than the very best in the world at avoiding sacks represents a uniform decline out of Tom. He’s always been a not negative kind of QB, making his living more off avoiding negative plays than generating positive ones, and at this he’s still very skilled, with just three turnovers and nine sacks in the opening six games. There is no reason to panic though. We have some easy matchups coming up against teams that are not very good, which should represent a path to getting back on course for the almighty Buccaneers.

The first of these games is on the road against the Carolina Panthers in week seven. I don’t wish to be disrespectful to the Carolina Panthers or any of their fans, but this teams has no argument for being anything other than the worst in the NFL. They did manage to win a one possession game to have at least one win going into week seven, but their 1-5 record is the worst in the league. Their point differential of -43 is the second worst. Their net EPA/Play of -0.190 is the worst in the league.

Their QB, Baker Mayfield, is in the midst of the worst season (by xEPA/Play) out of a non-rookie in the history of the NFL, so bad that he’s been benched in favour of PJ Walker, so now we get to go into Charlotte, to face the same team that we so demolished last season, starting their backup QB. It’s difficult to imagine better circumstances. As such, we walk in as 13 point road favourites.

It’s hard to be a road favourite this big. This is the biggest road favourite of the entire 2022 NFL season in a game not involving the Houston Texans. As we walk onto the field in Charlotte, this is supposed to be our chance to turn everything around. To show everybody that we’re still the juggernaut of the NFC that we’ve been since Tom got here. To show everybody that Tom Brady’s prime is not over. He’s still the same man he always was.

This is why it’s so crushing when we walk off that field in Charlotte as 18 point losers.

The rushing offence, because of course, gets completely locked up, but for the first time, Tom gets locked up along with them, generating negative EPA for the first time all season as our defence gets torn apart by PJ Walker. This all adds up to a beyond humiliating 21-3 loss against the worst team in the NFL.

I’d like you to answer two questions for me. First, before reading this article, did you remember PJ Walker was an NFL QB? Second, did you remember that PJ Walker was an NFL QB capable of blowing out Tom Brady?

It’s 2022. Things are different now. The invincible Tom Brady aura is dead.

It’s as if we’re doing a speed run challenge on how to kill that aura. It’s only seven games into the year, and we’ve hit all the high points. We’ve had struggles to beat the top competition (Dallas without Dak Prescott notwithstanding). We’ve had Tom repeatedly coming up short in winnable one possession games against Pittsburgh and Green Bay. We’ve lost by 18 points against the worst team in the world.

Once again, I try to tell myself, Tom Brady’s prime will never end. I do this for two reasons. First, we’ve all thought this before, mostly when Tom was really bad in his final year in New England. There was a sizable contingent that thought it was over for him then, only for him to go to Tampa completely rejuvenated and continue ruining our lives for the last two years. Best to keep the hopes low to prevent this possibly from happening again.

The second reason is much more human. Who wants to witness the decline of a living legend, and icon of the game? Regression comes for all the greats eventually. It’s unavoidable, but as fans, we often spend so much time (unless the greatness is on our team) wishing for the greatness to go away, until such point that the greatness is actually gone, where the bitterness is replaced with longing. Longing to see this icon of the game play like his former self just one more time.

This is why NASCAR fans cheer Kyle Busch now. This is why Toronto Raptors fans booed Vince Carter for 12 years, only to cheer him again once it became clear his career was on the wind down. If LeBron James ever gets to the point where he is clearly faded, it will be the same. There will be no more GOAT debates. No more people trying to tear LeBron down. At least for his final season, all of this will be replaced with longing. Longing to see the icon play like he used to be able to do on a nightly basis.

I’m beginning to reach the longing stage with Tom Brady. Everything feels so different, but I don’t want it to feel different. I want it to feel like it used to, but this 2022 season is intent on not allowing me to feel that way. We can’t beat the great teams anymore. We can’t win the one possession games anymore. We’ve just been blown out by the worst team in the NFL. What’s the next worst thing we can do to twist the knife in Tom Brady’s aura even more?

How about a blowing a big lead in a primetime game?

I wish I were joking, but this 2022 season really is conspiring to take all the fun out of this. In week eight, on Thursday Night Football no less, which has always given a massive edge to the home team, we host the Baltimore Ravens. This means the outsized home field advantage goes to us, and we take advantage of it early, spending most of the first half with an estimated win probability (according to NFLFastR) above 80 percent.

We enter the second half with an estimated WP of 82 percent, but before you know it, we go three and out. The Ravens score a TD in response. On our next offensive touch, we get one first down and no more. The Ravens score a TD in response. The following drive after that, Tom manages to complete a 53 yard pass to Mike Evans, but nothing else substantial, so we settle for three, and the Ravens score a third TD.

Before you know it, this 21-3 run of scoring to begin the second half has turned a substantial first half lead into a blowout loss. We do not touch the ball within one score at any point beyond the 12:30 mark of the fourth quarter, as the Ravens overtake us and run away, while there’s nothing we can do about it.

It’s all just a blur. Some garbage time points narrow the score to 27-22, but after entering the second half with an estimated WP of 82 percent, we had nothing to give. This is the kind of trick Tom used to play on people. Now he’s having it pulled on him.

Don’t allow yourself to fall into the trap of believing this loss is acceptable because it came against the Baltimore Ravens either. These are not the Baltimore Ravens we know today. These are the 2022 Baltimore Ravens. The 7.99 Expected Win Baltimore Ravens. The Baltimore Ravens that came perilously close to letting Lamar Jackson go as a free agent, because it wasn’t working, and some important people in the organisation thought it was never going to work.

Never underestimate the Baltimore Ravens, but this is not a terribly strong opponent. They do not go in the ‘elite competition’ category, and we could not even hold a multiple possession lead against them. Once again, this was not wholly Tom’s fault. It was barely Tom’s fault at all. When a QB generates 0.15 EPA/Play on an extreme 52 touches in a game, you do not have the right to say he’s the reason the team lost, but he also didn’t do anything to reach out and grab the win, and we just keep finding ourselves in this position, of Tom having done nothing to cause us to lose, but nothing to cause us to win either.

I like to call this the Daniel Jones position. Almost never the reason for a loss, but very rarely the reason for a win. Tom Brady in 2022 finds himself stuck in the Daniel Jones position, and don’t look now, but this has just caused Tom to lose his third start in a row for the first time in 20 years.

Not since a time before time, when the 2002 Patriots lost four in a row to the Chargers, Dolphins, Packers, and Broncos, has a Tom Brady quarterbacked team ever done this much losing in a row. Ever since the end of this four game streak, 20 years ago to the week, within two days of making it to 20 full years, Tom Brady has not lost more than two games in a row, but now he has.

With losses to Pittsburgh, Carolina, and Baltimore, the Buccaneers have lost three games in a row, and now sit at 3-5 on the season, which is also the worst record Tom has ever had as a starter. In his football life (high school, college, and pro), he has never been two games below .500 before, but he’s there now, and I’m not sure if what happens next makes it worse or better.

In the aftermath of the game against Baltimore, the information about Tom’s divorce finally becomes public. Between weeks eight and nine is when everything I told you earlier about Tom’s midlife crisis in the offseason becomes available for public consumption. This does bring some compassion for the man whose stats have now slipped all the way to him generating 0.109 EPA/Play (13th) on a -0.2 CPOE (22nd) through eight weeks, but I’m not sure if it helps or hurts to finally get it out there.

I mean no disrespect to Tom or to anybody in his family, but his ongoing personal matters are a distraction. This is not publicly said, because Tom is a legend, and there is too much respect for him leaguewide to use that D word, but I’m not beholden to anybody, so I’ll say that in the middle of the 2022 season, Tom is a distraction. For the only time in his entire career, I consider him a bad influence on the locker room he’s in.

It’s not fair to say this, because Tom gave up his marriage to be here one last time, but the D word does not get used exclusively when it’s fair. When Tony Dungy said he would not have any gay players on his teams, because they would be a distraction, was that fair? It’s no different in this case. Football coaches do not want players who are going through highly public divorces. The Buccaneers have one.

Currently sitting in third place in the NFC South, we are desperately in need of a turnaround, but we are also in the position of possessing blowout wins over both teams ahead of us in the standings (Atlanta and New Orleans), so this comeback is slightly easier than most, but still. We have to win. I think Tom knows this too, because coming away from this divorce finally being made public, he plays like a different person.

If you break QB play all the way down to first principles, there are three (extremely loosely defined) playing styles. First is QBs that like to hold the ball for a long time. This is the best style if you can pull it off, because it can work regardless of throw depth, and plays where the QB holds the ball longer (‘scramble drills’) tend to be more productive on average.

Tom was never a part of this group. The group he’s always been a part of is the second group, which are guys that get rid of the ball quick, but not short. The second part of this sentence is crucial. Tom tends to be remembered as a checkdown merchant, but this reputation is far from the truth, because his throw depths throughout his career have generally wavered between 8.1 and 9.1 air yards per target. There are outliers of 7.8 and 9.2, but 8.1 to 9.1 is typical for Tom. His career aDoT is 8.2 yards.

There are multiple seasons where Tom Brady ranks in the top five for the longest average pass in the NFL, so while he was always willing to check the ball down if necessary, he did not actually check the ball down anywhere near as much as people remember him doing, for essentially all of his career. For the first half of the 2022 season, this is still where Tom lives, with his 7.4 air yards per pass being a bit below his norm, but not short enough to cause alarm. However, that’s about to change, because Tom Brady is about to move into the third of the three (loosely defined) QB playstyles.

Guys who throw the ball quick and short.

This is by far the worst of the three possible ways to play QB, because consistently playing this way puts a lid on your offence. When everything has to happen so fast, separation is harder to get for receivers. Big plays are much harder to come by, and etcetera. When it’s quick, but with a lot of deep patterns mixed in, like Tom Brady, Joe Montana, and Tua Tagovailoa for the modern fan, this can work.

When it’s quick, but with a QB either unwilling or unable to throw the deep pattern, this does not work, which is why guys who rank both in the top ten quickest times to throw and the top ten shortest average pass are almost universally awful. Joe Burrow did pull this off once, but way more often than not it’s guys like Bailey Zappe, Mac Jones, Aidan O’Connell, and this brand of player that end up in the top ten of both lists.

For the first half of the 2022 season, Tom Brady merely played like a worse version of Tom Brady, but for whatever reason, after his divorce is announced publicly, there is an easily denotable shift in the way he plays. After having fewer than seven air yards per pass in just two individual games in the first half of the season, Tom’s average pass from here is going to travel just 6.5 air yards, firmly placing himself into the short and quick camp.

I’m not sure why this divorce announcement creates a break point in Tom’s throw depth pattern, but it absolutely does. I can conjecture lots of potential causes for this, but the fact of the matter is that Tom places himself into the group of QBs who throw the ball quickly and do not throw it very far, and like the rest of them, he is almost universally awful.

It’s an uphill battle to play this way, as shown in week nine against the Rams. The 2022 Rams are the defending Super Bowl champions, but they are awful, and are going to finish this season with just 5.57 Expected Wins. Tom is very bad throughout most of this game, but it’s not helped by the fact that he has to drop back to pass an ungodly 61 times on account of the rushing offence operating at a 14 percent success rate.

As is becoming the theme of this season, we just cannot score. This is a team that we ought to beat, even in our current state, but they take a quick 7-3 lead on us, and we cannot overcome this deficit until we reach the fourth quarter, and by the time we finally do that, the Rams have scored another TD, leaving us with the ball down 13-9 with 44 seconds to go.

Tom is able to turn back the clock just a little bit, scoring the game winning TD with nine seconds remaining, and in the end this is a game very reminiscent of the old Tom Brady, as we win a game 16-13 against a team we should’ve beaten by 14+. Even in an article that’s trying to be as positive about Tom as possible, none of us can deny that winning a game by three that should’ve been won by multiple possessions is the Tom Brady special.

Generating -0.05 EPA/Play against one of the worst teams in the NFL cannot be construed as a positive performance for Tom, but he did just lead a game winning drive against the defending Super Bowl champions, and facing a much more credible opponent in the Seattle Seahawks in week ten, Tom actually does turn back the clock.

He generates 0.53 EPA/Play in defeating a very game 6-3 Seahawks team in a game that was never close, to get us to 5-5 going into our late bye, and our comeback is already made.

The weakness of the 2022 NFC South is absurd. In addition to ourselves clearly not being what we once were, the Atlanta Falcons no longer have Matt Ryan. The New Orleans Saints no longer have Drew Brees. The Carolina Panthers have one of the worst QBs in NFL history in 2022 Baker Mayfield, and the whole division is left in a lurch.

Two weeks ago, we were behind two teams. In the two weeks since, both Atlanta and New Orleans have lost both of their games, meanwhile we’ve won both of ours, to draw ourselves multiple games clear of each of them, taking into account our head to head tiebreaker over both.

This is to say that, oddly enough given our 5-5 record, we can be fairly comfortable as we rest during the bye week, as we sit multiple games clear of each of our divisional opponents, and boy, does our 45 year old QB need the rest. Despite being almost double the age of second placed Kyler Murray, our 45 year old QB is leading the NFL in total touches through ten weeks, with 465 total. That’s 46.5 total touches per game.

Surely Tom would rather not do this, but he’s a winner, and he understands that if the Buccaneers are going to win, he is the only choice, because the rush offence is not just bad. It’s tear inducing. I’ve been discussing it here and there throughout this piece, but I’ll make the definitive statement here.

As a rushing offence, the 2022 Tampa Bay Buccaneers generate -0.208 EPA/Play. That is worst in the entire league, but even still is not an accurate enough description of how bad it is. This is the rushing offence of a team that is trying to win. The 2021 Texans were worse, but they were tanking, and no team at all in 2020 was worse. I’m prepared to say this is the worst rushing offence, out of a team that wasn’t trying on purpose to be bad at rushing offence, since 2019.

It’s been that bad, which is what’s been forcing Tom and the passing offence to carry the whole load solo, which is a big component of why we’re only 5-5 right now. Thank goodness that even 5-5 can still best all of our divisional opponents.

We still have games remaining against all three of them, but all we have to do is coast from here, and we will make the playoffs again. This is truly all we have to do, as although the Tom Brady aura is badly faded, football players have proven time and again that they will psyche themselves out if you give them even the slightest reason to do so. Nobody wants to see us in a playoff game, but given the weakness of the NFC South, it looks exceedingly like somebody is going to have to.

It’s this divisional weakness that allows us to brush off when Tom again generates negative EPA against one of the worst defences in football, as he again gets beaten at his own game, this time by Jacoby Brissett, as we lose yet another late game scenario to Cleveland in week 12. A second win against New Orleans in week 13 really helps, but then we have to wake up from our dreams.

If you’ve noticed, we’ve had an extremely soft schedule up until this point. We have not faced a team that’s going to finish with as many as eight Expected Wins since Kansas City, all the way back in week four. Weeks 14 and 15 give us another chance to prove ourselves against some top competition, but unfortunately give us another harsh dose of reality.

In week 14, we go on the road to San Francisco, who beat us by 28 points. In week 15, we play the Cincinnati Bengals, where it’s the same as it was against Baltimore. We build a quick 17 point lead, only to lose it all and then some, to end up suffering a blowout loss, this time by 11 points.

Finally, at long last, the Cincinnati Bengals were able to come into Tampa as road favourites, meaning the hype for us as a Super Bowl contender has died. There is only so many times you can prove that you can’t hack it against tough competition before the world gives up on you\, and with three weeks left in this season, the NFL has finally given up on Tom Brady and his Tampa Bay Buccaneers.

It gets so bad that in week 15 against Arizona, we need a mad dash of a fourth quarter comeback to just make it to overtime against a Cardinal team that has no Kyler Murray, and were no good when they had Kyler Murray. There’s a rational argument that these Cardinals are the worst team in the NFL as of 2015, with no Kyler, and we barely got through them, in a game we desperately needed to keep ourselves in the playoff race.

Remember that feeling of longing I was talking about before? It’s coming on strong right about now, as in the last five weeks, Tom Brady has been beaten at his own game by Jacoby Brissett, had his lunch eaten by the real Super Bowl contenders in San Francisco and Cincinnati, and had to give it everything he had to beat an extremely bad (possibly the very worst) Arizona Cardinals team, all of this just to claw our way back to 7-8, in time for the week 17 matchup that we’ve all been waiting for.

This week 17 matchup is the very game referenced in the title. It’s against the Carolina Panthers, but before I get to it, I have to explain exactly what makes the 2022 Carolina Panthers such a difficult matchup.

Do you remember what I told you about these two teams’ late season matchups, all the way back at the end of last season? The ones where Tom Brady completely thrashed Sam Darnold, beating him by 54 in the total EPA battle over the course of those two games?

Sam Darnold remembers.

Those two games were the finale to a season that came within an eyelash of ending Sam’s NFL career. He was awful, and if not for the 2022 Panthers’ alternative being Baker Mayfield, he would not have gotten another chance at the NFL level, but he did, and ever since the Carolina Panthers reinserted Sam into their starting lineup, they’ve been on a tear.

Remember when I called them the worst team in the league? Not anymore.

After winning just three of their first 11 games with no Sam, the Panthers have won three of four since starting Sam. Three of these four games have been against playoff teams. Two of those four have been victories over playoff teams. One of them was a victory over the Detroit Lions.

Unlike us, these Carolina Panthers have proven that they can beat elite competition. Unlike us, the Carolina Panthers are on an extremely hot streak, and all of our messing around, losing to Cleveland and blowing the 17 point lead against Cincinnati and all the other silliness that no other Tom Brady team ever would’ve allowed ourselves to do, has allowed the once 3-8 Panthers to pull themselves all the way up to 6-9, and into a win and in playoff game against us for the NFC South crown.

This is not a fair fight, as these Panthers have a dramatically better roster than our Buccaneers. Since Sam Darnold entered their starting lineup, this team has a 0.146 net EPA/Play. That’s a 12 Expected Win pace. This Panthers run is so electrifying that it actually was a major factor in the creation of my Sports Passion Project. One of the very first articles on this publication is me writing about it as it was happening, so if you want more detail about why I think as highly about the 2022 Panthers as I do, you can click the link below.

Watch Out for Sam Darnold

Their record on the season is only 6-9. I get that. Immediately after this run is over, the Panthers decide to ruin everything they have going by trading up to draft Bryce Young. I get that, but none of that has an impact on how good the Carolina Panthers are right now. As far as I’m concerned, with Sam, the Panthers have caught lightning in a bottle. They are playing like a 12 Expected Win team, which puts them way out of our league, firmly into the elite competition category, and makes them the absolute last team that we wanted to find ourselves in a win and in playoff game against.

We had the chance to avoid this. If we could’ve beaten the damned Cleveland Browns. If we could’ve held our 80%+ chances to win against either Baltimore or Cincinnati. If Tom could’ve found a way to pull just one more rabbit out of his hat against either Green Bay or Pittsburgh. If any of these things happened, we would not find ourselves in the position of having to defeat the hottest team in the league, featuring its best QB over the last five weeks, in order to make the postseason, but here we are. This is exactly the situation Tom finds himself in, and even that is not a true encapsulation of how bad it is.

The Panthers, with RB Chuba Hubbard, have a better rush game than we have, and a QB that’s on an elite short stretch, the likes of which the league hasn’t seen since 2013 Josh McCown, which also comes with the benefit of Sam not having the wear and tear of having touched the football 732 times already, with two games still to go, like Tom Brady has in 2022, to say nothing about the 18 extra years of life experience that Tom is carrying around with him.

In short, the Panthers are better than we are. This must be understood. Both teams have turned out to be very mediocre defensively, but they’re better at offence than us. They have a better rush game than we do, and I’d be willing to say that in our current state, they even have a better QB than we do. That’s no insult whatsoever to our legendary, first ballot Hall of Fame QB. It’s just that this is a young man’s game, and the 27 year old man on his best stretch of football ever tends to trump the 45 year old man on one of his very worst.

This is especially true when that 27 year old man is at the head of the hottest team in the league, including a win over the Lions, meanwhile our team point differential in the last three games is -36, getting jackhammered by the two elite teams we played, and barely sneaking past the worst team in the NFL.

Teams go the way of their quarterbacks, and isn’t it fitting then that over the last month, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers have been playing like an old dog about to let out its last whimper, meanwhile the Carolina Panthers are shooting up the standings like a puppy who’s just been let out of its cage for the very first time?

Going into this game, which we at least get to play at home, we are four point home favourites, which is absolute hogwash. Games like this are why I always refer to the point spread as a vibe check on the public, and not an objective measure of anything, because as far as I’m concerned, this spread ought to be reversed. With the way these two teams have been playing over the last month, they ought to be four point road favourites over us.

It’s not my fault the public did not notice what the Carolina Panthers were doing. We should not allow an incorrect contemporary opinion to hold us back from realising just how tall of a mountain Tom is trying to climb here. The Panthers with Sam Darnold at the helm are going to score. That is non-negotiable, which means we’re going to have to score alongside them.

The problem with this is that we have the worst rushing attack the NFL has seen since 2019, which means it’s really not a ‘we’ proposition. It’s a ‘he’ proposition. Tom Brady is going to have to keep up with Sam Darnold, who is younger, more rested, better supported, not going through a very public divorce, and I’ll tentatively say better than the 2022 version of Tom Brady, even without all these advantages.

The problem with this is that we’ve not scored more than 23 points in a game since we played Kansas City, all the way back in week four. We have not scored as many as 23 points in a game that was not a blowout loss (with plenty of garbage time scoring) all season. The most points that we’ve scored in a game that we’ve won is a paltry 21, and 21 points is not going to beat the Carolina Panthers.

This means that in order to win this game, we’re going to require nothing less than our best offensive game of the entire year, but as on offence, we have generated positive EPA twice since Tom’s divorce went public. This game occurs on New Year’s Day. That announcement was at the end of October. To say we’ve been a bad offence would be an entirely accurate way of putting it. To believe that we’re going to have our best offensive game of the season, which is what’s needed to keep up with the scalding hot Panthers, is a long shot.

Tom Brady gave up his marriage in order to play this one last season, on the mistaken belief that he was still a good enough QB to win the Super Bowl. It’s clear to everybody by this point that the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are not going to win the Super Bowl. There’s very little that can be done to change that, but to give up your marriage to come back and miss the playoffs altogether?

I’m not in Tom’s head, but the realisation that you gave up so much to come back, only to miss the playoffs, would be a lot to take, and beyond that, take it back to when you were a kid playing sports. Would you rather keep playing or stop playing?

If we do not manage to hit our long shot and win this game, Tom suddenly has one game remaining in his NFL career, week 18 against Atlanta. Considering we know that Carolina is going to beat New Orleans next week, that Atlanta game will be for nothing, and then it will be all over for Tom Brady. What an unceremonious and anticlimactic way to go out that would be, especially for an icon of this calibre.

No going out with a ring like Tom’s career long rival Peyton Manning, but instead going out like an old bull that waited one year too long to be put out to stud.

That can’t happen. Not to Tom Brady, which means he only has one option.

Win this football game.

He hasn’t had it in him, and we haven’t had it in us, all season to step up to the plate and defeat a team the calibre of these Carolina Panthers, but for one final day, he’s going to have to find it. Elsewise, he gave up his marriage to come back and miss the playoffs. Elsewise, he’s going to finish his career like an old bull in a meaningless game in Atlanta.

The stakes are high.

Throughout his entire career, Tom Brady has done nothing but shine when the stakes are high, but 2022 has been a different animal, and as this game begins, it’s looking like a lot of the games in Tom’s final season, as Carolina bolts down the field for an easy score, and an immediate 7-0 lead.

Through all of Tom Brady’s career except this season, a 7-0 first quarter deficit would not create any fear whatsoever, but watching this game, the mind goes back to Green Bay, back to the Rams, back to all the times this year that we got off to an early deficit, and either took all game long to overcome it, or never overcame it at all. Because of all these failures I’ve watched, I am extremely nervous as the Buccaneers get the ball for our first possession, but the first thing you notice when we step onto the field is that the rush game is significantly better than normal.

It’s not good. They’re going to give -0.13 EPA/Play today, which is about a 40th percentile performance, but compared to the significant hinderance the other side of the offence has been for almost the entirety of the season, this feels like a massive boost. Tom is able to just watch as his team gets some first downs without him, which has been a precious rarity for the man who, coming into the 16th game of the year, had already touched the ball 732 times, at the age of 45, an age where being the entire offence was likely not on Tom’s bucket list.

Unfortunately, our first drive is set back by an offensive holding penalty. Tom is able to get the whole first and 20 back, but this drive ends on a fumble on a completed pass, as Chris Godwin fumbles the ball deep inside Panther territory. Our defence is able to force a three and out in response, but when we get the ball back, we waste the drive by calling rush plays on first and second down, leaving us with a third and seven hole that Tom cannot dig us out of.

We have to punt the ball back to Carolina, and they punt it right back, as our defence is having an unexpectedly good performance against the hottest offence in the NFL, but nothing matters if you don’t score. We have to score. We didn’t score against Green Bay. We couldn’t score against these Panthers the first time. There has been far too many games where we’ve just been stuck in a rut, entirely unable to score.

As we get the ball back at the close of the first quarter, we go back to playing 2022 Bucs football, which is to say we dispense with running the football altogether, and run the ball by passing it. We inch down the field, including a staggeringly beautiful display of footwork and pocket presence out of our 45 year old man to find a key completion on third and four, but the longest completed pass on this drive is 12 air yards, and most are shorter than six, as the Panthers are dropping eight on most plays, completely unfazed by the threat of the run, which has been a common feature of this whole Bucs season.

However, you cannot play this way forever, because doing so means all it takes is one mistake to stop you in your tracks, and this is what happens to us. Eventually, our drive stalls at the Carolina 35, leaving us with a long FG try that misses. This is the second time we’ve gotten past the Carolina 35, but we’ve come away from both tries with zero combined points, and before you can blink, we’re down 14-0.

Oh no.

Once again, if this were any other season than 2022, a 14 point second quarter deficit with Tom Brady on your team is still no time to panic, but this is 2022. Tom Brady’s aura of invincibility is dead, which is evidenced to me by the fact that when we dome back from commercial break, the commentators are talking about how this Tampa team is not built to come back from multiple possession deficits.

This used to be Tom’s bread and butter, but with this Tampa team in particular, everything has to happen so slowly, due to all the short passing, that it becomes difficult to get yards in bunches, difficult to score quickly, and hence difficult to make any comebacks. For all the talk about checkdowns Tom has endured through his career, he used to be fantastic at scoring quickly, and nobody has ever denied that, but right now, I am denying it. He is not fantastic at scoring quickly anymore.

He is not fantastic at scoring at all anymore, as evidenced by the fact that we come out facing this 14-0 deficit, and go three and out again, following a very untimely mistake again by Chris Godwin, getting himself called for pass interference on one of the worst executed rub routes you will ever see. This leaves Tom in a third and long scenario, where he gets sacked by a three man rush, unable to pull the trigger.

I don’t know if anybody in the audience can remember any time Tom Brady (one of the best sack avoiders of all time) has been sacked by a three man rush in his entire career. There are not any that I can think of. In a season full of out of character moments for the icon, Tom Brady getting sacked by a three man rush on one of the most important third down plays of the entire season is the most out of character moment in Tom’s entire NFL career.

This is rock bottom.

Tom has played okay so far, but three real chances to score have been taken away from him without any input of his. Two poor mistakes from Chris Godwin. One missed FG attempt, and Tom has not been able to drag us out of it. In years past, perhaps he could’ve masked his teammates’ mistakes. Perhaps he could’ve pulled us out of these holes, but now, he gets sacked on the third and long by a three man rush.

Put simply, this level of offensive play is not going to beat the Carolina Panthers. Our defence has played well to keep us within two scores, and do so again at their next opportunity, as the Panthers, in a stroke of play calling genius, elect to have the NFL’s hottest QB throw zero passes as they once again go three and out, giving us the ball back again, this time with three minutes left in the second quarter, behind by 14 points.

I’ve been talking for 11000 words now about the imperceptible shifts that have occurred through this 2022 season. About how everything that used to go right for Tom now does not. About how all these tiny chinks in the armour all combined to hurt Tom’s legendary aura quite badly, and this has all been the truth. However, I’ve also talked about the sense of longing. The feeling that fans get when a legendary player is no longer capable of playing like a legend, yearning for one last legendary performance.

As it’s becoming clear that we are not on the level of the Carolina Panthers, this sense of longing gets turned up to 100. I don’t want to watch Tom Brady miss the playoffs for the first time in 20 years. Nobody wants to see that. For the first time in my football memory, there is actually a sizeable cadre of NFL fans rooting for a Tom Brady comeback, instead of rooting fervently against one, like fans of every team he does not play for have done for years.

I don’t know if there’s anything to be said about the impact that this atmosphere of positivity may or may not have had, but it’s at this point: 3:11 of the second quarter of this game that we are being outclassed in, that I believe the football Gods notice. Throughout his entire football career, I have used this term in a non-complimentary fashion, but now that Tom is 45 years old, and much less of a threat, I can say it with a smile. For old times’ sake.

Who’s ready for one final Tom Brady luck game?

There are two fundamental elements to a Tom Brady luck game. The first is Tom being immensely lucky to have any chance to win at all, however small, and the second is Tom, like the legend that he is, turning that small chance to his advantage, taking advantage of chances that he’s given in the way that no other QB in football history has ever been able to.

For the final 33 minutes and 11 seconds of this game, time stands still. We get teleported back to the scenes of the finest Tom Brady luck games. It’s 2001 against St Louis. It’s 2003 against the Titans. It’s 2006 against San Diego. It’s all of these games rolled up into one final virtuoso performance from the old master, and all of it begins with this drive at the end of the first half, where Tom finds a wide open Mike Evans for a 63 yard touchdown to narrow the score to 14-7.

A TD is never a bad thing, but normally, this would not be the best clock management, as Tom has left better than two minutes for the hottest offence in the NFL to drive back down the field and score in response, but this is a Tom Brady luck game, remember? We don’t need to worry about such things.

Instead, on the second play of Carolina’s new possession, the snap comes before Sam Darnold is ready. It bounces off Sam’s hands, and falls right to the feet of Devin White, which gives Tom a chance to come from nowhere to tie this game, before we even get out of the half.

He cannot do it, but it is not entirely his fault.

This is still 2022 Brady after all, so nothing is easy. We end up in fourth and one on the Carolina four yard line, and for some reason Todd Bowles elects to kick a FG here. You don’t need me to tell you that kicking a FG on fourth and one from inside the five is a horrible decision, a cowardly decision, a decision that Bill Belichick would not have made. In doing this, we willfully surrender the opportunity to take a stranglehold on the momentum of this game, and instead remain content to go into the half behind.

Coming out of the half time break, it looks like this is going to bite us, as the Panthers have worked the ball all the way deep into our territory, but a dramatic INT on our own two yard line puts us back in position to be able to take the lead again. Unfortunately, we just can’t do it, as our offence sputters again, settling for another FG attempt that misses.

That is now two key turnovers that have gone our way to save our skin, but we’ve only been able to punish the Panthers with three points in total off of them, and on the first play of the fourth quarter, we hit rock bottom again, as the Panthers beat us to the punch, scoring the back breaking TD first. They take a crushing 21-10 lead on us, and things look bleak.

Remember all that I told you at this game’s beginning. If we win, we can just chalk this whole season up as a speedbump before we got to the end of season tournament, where we always knew we were going anyway, but if we lose, all of a sudden Tom Brady’s career has one game remaining in it, and the final image of him as a football player is going to be that his team choked a two game lead in one of the weakest divisions in NFL history to miss the playoffs in his final year.

You never know as an active player just how much things you do when you’re past your prime will hurt your legacy. Sometimes they’re swept under the rug, like when Peyton Manning was one of the NFL’s worst QBs in the 2015 season. As that season gets further and further into the past, nobody will remember that, and nobody will care. However, this is not always true. Sometimes, what you at the end of your career can hurt your legacy greatly.

A fantastic example was brought up earlier in this article, in the form of the NFL’s best playoff QB of the 2010s, in terms of playoff EPA/Play, Aaron Rodgers. People remember him as a poor playoff performer, primarily because his final few playoff games, in the 2020s, were horrendous.

They say the first impression is most important, but on occasion, the final impression can loom large as well, should it be memorable enough (like Aaron’s playoff blow ups in the 2020s were) that the football fandom decides to keep it in their memories. What will people think about Tom Brady’s career, if he ends it by losing five of the final six games of his final season, with the only win being an overtime thriller against the Arizona Cardinals without Kyler Murray, which would’ve been a loss against virtually any other team, to choke the NFC South playoff auto bid away to a team led by Sam Darnold?

It will not change the perception of Tom a lot, but it will change it. He has choked away a playoff position before, blowing a multiple game divisional lead over and getting blown out 30-17 in the win and in playoff game for the AFC East auto bid in 2002 by the New York Jets, but 2002 is a long time ago. People have forgotten. By now, so much time has passed since the last time Tom Brady missed the postseason that there are NFL fans that are working adults that have never known the NFL playoffs without him, but if we lose this game, they’re about to get a big dose of that feeling.

It’s tough to tell what will happen to the perception of a career as mammoth as Tom Brady’s if it ends on such a whimper. Will it mean a lot, or will it mean nothing at all? It’s almost impossible to predict, but put yourself in Tom Brady’s head for a minute.

No player wants to go out like an old man that’s stayed around too long, but if this Carolina Panthers game ends in a loss, that is exactly what Tom Brady is. He joins the group of guys that did not go out on top, who instead stayed around long enough to age out of the sport before our very eyes.

Tom never wanted this. He claimed he wanted to play football until 50, but only if he could do it at a high level. Now that he’s been playing well below that level for an entire season, I have to wonder how much regret he feels as he looks up at the scoreboard and reads the 21-10 deficit. He’s not only come back to football as the old man that he never wanted to be, but he’s given up his family in order to come back as that old man.

He’s not only making a bad final impression. He’s paid a massive price in order to make that impression. If I were in Tom Brady’s position, the regret would be eating me alive.

It’s not too late for Tom to change his destiny. We have the ball, and we have the whole fourth quarter ahead of us. We can still do this, but as this game has gone on, it’s become clearer and clearer that this offence just doesn’t have what it takes. Tom did find one 63 yard completion to Mike Evans, but beyond that, we have three points, which came off of red zone field position that was gifted to us.

We have ten points in the first three quarters, and the only way to prevent Tom Brady’s comeback from being an ultimate personal and professional failure is to double that and then some. We must score at least 11 points in these final 15 minutes.

We have to do this under the same circumstances we’ve been dealing with all season, which means that, just like it’s been the whole season, the fate of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers franchise is going to be on the shoulders of one man. One 45 year old man. The same 45 year old man who used to make situations like this look so easy, but now, 23 years into a professional football career, does the old man still have the juice to be able to do what he used to do?

As we jog onto the field for the most important offensive possession of the season, Tom Brady is about to prove the time tested saying.

He’s not as good as he once was, but he can be as good once as he ever was.

For the duration of this fourth quarter, Tom Brady rolls back the age, rolls back the wear and tear of the 732 play season, ignores the effects of his poor offensive supporting cast, and plays like it’s 2007 all over.

The same Tom Brady who’s posted a putrid -4.1 CPOE on just 183 passes of ten air yards or longer so far this season starts the fourth quarter by finding a wide open Mike Evans for the second 50+ yard touchdown on the day, out of a Tampa Bay offence that’d had only two 50+ yard touchdowns in the opening 15 games of the year. This is vintage Tom Brady, and quickly narrows the deficit to 21-16, but only 21-16, as the attempted two point conversion is a disaster, with Tom finding a defender right in his face at the finish of his bootleg drop back, which is something he could not deal with even in 2007.

The score remaining 21-16 means we need another TD to win this game, but this is still a fantastic way to open the most important fourth quarter of the season. It did not even take a minute to get the deficit nearly halfway depleted, and when Carolina can get just one first down on their drive in response, all of a sudden they find themselves in the one position no football team ever wants to find themselves in.

Up by five points, on defence, with Tom Brady jogging onto the field.

For 22 years of NFL football, this position has meant a loss for that defence far more often than not. In the 23rd, it’s been a little rocky, but not today. Today, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers dispense with the run entirely, as is our norm, and allow Tom to throw the ball seven times in a row. These seven passes are all completions, for an average of 13 yards apiece, as we blaze down the field with ease, and I want to highlight one play in particular.

Watch this one. On the surface, it looks like nothing special. An easy pitch and catch for 21 yards, most of it being YAC, but the more and more you watch it, the more and more you realise this is quintessential Tom Brady football, as Tom knows exactly which defender is going to drop, and he knows that it’s Brian Burns, who for all the things Brian is great at doing, is horrendous in pass protection. Tom throws the ball right by the ear of the inexperienced zone defender without an ounce of hesitation, creating an easy 21 yard gain out of a play that could have been confusion and havoc with a less experienced QB in there.

This is what Tom Brady does well. It’s what Tom has always done well, and even as most of his other skills have left him at the age of 45 years young, this one never has. This skill persists, just as strong if not stronger than ever, and it carries us down the field without an incompletion, or even a third down. It’s a touchdown for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and sooner than you can blink, the NFL’s hottest team has gone from winning by 11 to trailing us 24-21.

That is Tom Brady football.

He’s made a career out of doing exactly this, and in this week 17 game, for one final time, Tom has pulled the rabbit out of the hat. We lead 24-21, and you’d best believe we’re holding onto it. These Panthers are not done. They score three more, but we get six (after a missed extra point), and with (in literal terms) a fourth quarter for the ages, Tom has steered us from an 11 point deficit against the hottest team in the NFL to a 30-24 win, and the NFC South auto bid into the 2022 playoffs.

Look at the Win Probability graph of this game.

That is a lot of blue, and very little red. In other words, the Panthers controlled this game. They were dominant throughout most of its duration, but in the fourth quarter, where the money is made, the old legend showed us he had one final trick left in him.

We all know that Tom Brady lived his entire football life in a pressure cooker. The pressure was constantly on him to make the big play, to go win the game, and I must say, perhaps it helped him here. There had been no pressure throughout the entire season in the moribund NFC South, and perhaps it’s not unrelated that this also corresponds to the worst sustained stretch of football in his career, having generated positive EPA individually just twice since his divorce went public at the end of October.

By the time New Years rolled around, and all of that bad football had finally landed Tom in a position of having to fight for his playoff life for the first time in 20 years, the pressure was at a fever pitch. Nobody would’ve blamed the 45 year old for just not being able to step up to this challenge, but to blame failure on age would be the easy way out. Tom was not willing to do that.

Tom stepped up, generating 0.35 EPA/Play on a (once again) ridiculously big sample of 57 total touches, and stealing everything away from the Carolina Panthers. Tom stole this game, which means he stole their playoff spot, which means everything that has happened to the Carolina Panthers in the years since they did not achieve this playoff position can be attributed to this old man stubbornly refusing to be finished.

This makes the Carolina Panthers the final entry on the long list of teams to have their dreams crushed, their story invalidated, and the future of their franchise significantly hindered, all due to the machinations of Tom Brady.

Panthers fans need not feel bad. Tom has done this to a lot of teams. I wrote an entire article about how a fourth quarter comeback from Tom singlehandedly killed my favourite NFL team of all time. The inability to get by New England is what destroyed the Pittsburgh Steelers in the 2010s. If not for Tom’s shenanigans, who is going to stop the 2006 Chargers from winning the Super Bowl, and if they get that first Super Bowl, who knows how many more the Chargers may have gotten? Do we even need to discuss the Atlanta Falcons? These are but a few examples. I could continue for several paragraphs discussing teams whose present and future were both simultaneously ruined by a great Tom Brady performance, but I’m not going to, because it’s over now.

The 2022 Carolina Panthers are the final team that Tom Brady’s greatness will trod over the top of.

As the 2022 season finishes, it’s clear that Tom used up all the greatness he had remaining to get past the Panthers. After much talk that Tom would play the meaningless (with the NFC South already clinched) week 18 game against Atlanta, in an attempt to avoid the only losing record of his career, he does not. He plays a few series, but comes out of a game tied 10-10, and his Buccaneer teammates go on to lose it, saddling Tom with his only losing record ever, and in the playoff game against the Dallas Cowboys that Tom earned with his final elite performance, he plays like an old man.

Partly because of the Tom Brady aura, restored quite a bit by his final elite game, and partly because LOL Dallas, the Buccaneers come into this playoff game as just three point underdogs, but there was never any way that the Bucs were going to get anywhere near the Cowboys.

In the final game of his career, Tom’s estimated WP reaches zero before he’s able to score a point, falling behind the Cowboys an embarrassing 24-0. Some garbage time scoring makes it a somewhat softer 31-14 defeat in Tom’s final game, but it’s clear to all that it’s over, and these dismal performances in the wake of the final win make clear just how much of a flash in the pan it was.

Look at Tom Brady’s total EPA figures over the final six games of his NFL career:

-13.6, -2, 0 flat, 19.9, 3, -3.6.

When what once was typical becomes the outlier, that’s when you know you need to retire, and this bit of reflection makes clear that this Carolina game was the final great performance out of one of the game’s foremost talents. That’s why I go back and watch this game often. It stirs something in me that no other Tom brady performance can, because of all the circumstances surrounding it.

It’s a combination of everything. It’s the offseason divorce and everything that comes with it, making Tom feel like a much more relatable human. It’s the horrendous rushing attack forcing him to be the entire offence, a role Tom was no longer equipped for, and it’s the extremely bad stretch of football heading into the Carolina game, the likes of which we’d never seen from Tom before, and the associated sense of longing, wanting to watch the legend play like a legend just once more.

All of it coalesces into making Tom Brady the protagonist. I cheered for him. I wanted him to win, and for one final time, he came through for me, just like he’d been coming through for 23 years.

It may have taken every last bit of good football Tom Brady had in him to get this one final win, but I wouldn’t trade it for anything, because it gave me the opportunity to reflect and appreciate Tom’s greatness while he was still playing, an opportunity that’s extremely precious, and all too rare.

Fans did get the chance to reflect on the greatness of Joe Montana while he was still around, due to the unique circumstance of him sitting out of being a starting QB for almost three full years before coming back for two years with the Chiefs, but fans of Peyton Manning never got this chance. Fans of Steve Young never got it. Fran Tarkenton’s fans never got this chance. There are no elite Dan Marino performances in 1999, no awesome Troy Aikman games in 2000. Most of the time, greatness exists, and we spend so much time wishing for it to go away that we don’t take time to appreciate it until after it’s gone.

As a fan of a team (the Jacksonville Jaguars) who has never had a great QB, this has been my experience with every great QB the NFL has seen over its entire history. I’ve wished for them to go away for so long, until one day I wake up and they’re gone, at which point I regret the fact that I did not take time to appreciate them while they were playing.

As we went through the 2022 season, and everybody could see that the greatness in Tom Brady was badly faded, I took the step to begin appreciating his greatness while he was still on the field, which led me to that same sense of regret. Why could I not have taken more time to appreciate Tom Brady while he was still a great player? This led me to begin rooting hard for the Buccaneers, hoping against hope for a turn back the clock performance like this. I never dreamed in a million years that I would actually get one, but Tom Brady is not a man that ought to be doubted. On New Years Day of 2023, he proved me wrong in a big way, and thank goodness he did.

Even as Tom drifted into retirement, soon to become as unlikeable as he ever was, a TV commentator under a legally binding contract to censor his commentary, I still find myself reflecting on this 2022 season. The season where Tom Brady finally lost whatever had been keeping him going for so long, but for one final time, right at the end of the season, as he was verging on having given up his wife for nothing, he was able to find it again. I don’t think I’ll ever stop reflecting on it.

I implore you to seek out this Bucs vs Panthers game from 2022, or at least the fourth quarter of it. Looking at it with additional perspective, it’s a terribly emotional experience, knowing this would be the last time we would ever see Tom looking like the Tom Brady of old, but I highly recommend it, for that exact reason.

It may not rank high on most people’s lists of Tom Brady moments, but it’s high on mine, and perhaps it will land high on yours too.

Thanks so much for reading.