The Pipe Dream of Tom Brady’s Unretirement Finally Feels Over

Confession time: As I watched Trevor Lawrence hobble off the field Monday, after going through the various stages of grief for the player and the position, after performing remote, restorative witchcraft rituals of healing so as to avoid a playoff matchup between C.J. Beathard (no offense) and Mitch Trubisky, there was a section of my brain that turned to the great quarterback savior.

If Lawrence’s injury was more than just a sprained ankle, would that flip on the proverbial bat signal and finally lure Tom Brady out of retirement? I remember something about him needing to work—if he did choose to work—in the state of Florida, hence all the backroom horseplay involving the Dolphins. There is a narratively pleasing aspect about Brady’s teaming up with Doug Pederson, the offensive mind who outdueled him in the quarterback’s second-to-last Super Bowl. There is something vaillant about the idea of Brady coming back amid a season where so many of the great quarterbacks are gone, when efficiency and scoring and generally aesthetically pleasing football has bottomed out, to rescue us, and to remind us of the limits of what is possible.

Sadly, though, if this season has taught us anything, it’s that there is a finality to Brady’s retirement. If he did not come back to rescue the Bengals when they lost Joe Burrow, or the Vikings when they lost Kirk Cousins, or the Jets (imagine that) when they lost Aaron Rodgers, or the Browns when they lost Deshaun Watson, or the Colts when they lost Anthony Richardson, or the Titans when Ryan Tannehill started missing games, if he did not bail out old pal Josh McDaniels when the walls were closing in, and if he didn’t return to New England to spare us from another down of backward Mac Jones passes, he was never coming back.

As we awaited confirmation that Lawrence’s injury was something shorter-term, it was hard not to feel like Linus in the pumpkin patch on Halloween. Maybe the great one isn’t manifesting from the fog, after all.

There is an absolute sweetness to this, of course. When Brady retired, I wrote that he would not officially be retired until something like this happened—until the game begged him to come back and put the pads on one more time and he refused. Had Brady professed a desire to play, he would have been more in demand than a high school math teacher. Instead, we are left strip-mining the very depths of the professional quarterback barrel. There is value in this, of course. We are going to encounter periods of time when there are less-experienced quarterbacks thrust into roles they are not yet prepared for. Only through that attrition can we form the next great generation. Inevitably, there are going to be periods of time when it is Jake Browning vs. Beathard (Browning was pretty close to excellent Monday, by the way).

To be clear, I am not a Brady fanboy or apologist. I fall closer in line with the thoughts of Alex Smith, who lent some sobriety to the Patriots’ mythos of the last two decades during a recent ESPN appearance. I also think Brady’s continued remarks about the decline of the NFL’s on-field product lack context and are somewhat misdirected (profit-sucking owners are far more responsible). But I do like watching him play and I do think that all of us, in some strange way, enjoy having a part of our lives continue on in perpetuity against the laws of time. I can’t take much of the early 2000s with me—is it O.K. to still play with your Titan Tron every now and then?—but Brady definitely defines a time and a place.

Foisting Brady into the playoff picture in January 2024 would have been beautiful. It would have been chaotic. It would have given this season of in-betweens—in between eras of great quarterbacks, coaches and the next big offensive evolution—a sort of historical weight. It would have given us Brady vs. Lamar Jackson on Sunday Night Football on Dec. 17, and Brady against the Buccaneers on Christmas Eve. It may have given us Brady vs. Patrick Mahomes one more time.

Of course, it is better for everyone that Lawrence’s injury does not necessitate such thoughts (as of this moment, Lawrence is dealing with a high ankle sprain, according to Pederson, though sprains come with a wide variety of grades and recovery times). It is better for Brady that he goes full throttle into the next phase of his career, yanking himself out of the emotional purgatory that he once feared and many of his closest friends experience.

But admit it, you thought about it for a second, too. And the further we get from this moment, the closer Brady comes to being an announcer, an entrepreneur, a guy who walks around in very expensive looking coats, than the person who defined two decades of football experience for all of us.