Photo by Kevin Sabitus/Getty Images
It was a horrible, terrible, no good, very bad year.
There will be no shortage of touching eulogies to Tom Brady’s career. Flowery prose juxtaposing grace with grit, style and substance — worthy of the greatest career we’ve seen from an NFL quarterback. This isn’t one of those.
Tom Brady is done. Finally done. Really, actually, permanently done. His final season in Tampa Bay was that of a wounded zombie, making one last desperate lurch forward before being double-tapped and left behind. It wasn’t how Brady was supposed to go out, but the way he chose to — hanging on just a touch too long, repeating the same mistakes dozens of brilliant athlete have made before him.
Brady’s 2022 season was founded on attempted fraud or ego. Which of the two is up for debate. Brady was implicated in a scheme to force his way to Miami with Sean Payton as his coach in a move which ultimately cost the Dolphins their first round pick in 2023 for tampering. Whether or not Brady would have gone through with it, or if his retirement was designed around this is up for debate.
Similarly, did Brady’s retirement getting scooped by Adam Schefter set up him returning for the whole season so he could go out on his own terms?
Either way, the whole year was built off contrivance. It didn’t feel like Brady was coming back for the love of the game, or pursuit of a championship — but more because he either wanted to maximize his brand, or avoid any harm to it. Brady had already been setting up his post-career life in broadcasting, making 2022 perfunctory.
Then he got Bruce Arians shelved.
The Buccaneers head coach took the high road in all this as he moved from the sidelines up to the suites, but we all know that Brady was the catalyst behind this. Brady and Arians routinely butted heads, and Tampa Bay was entirely reliant on No. 12 coming back to play again. It was an unceremonious end to a Bucs era that brought the team its second Super Bowl, and really didn’t have to go that way.
It’s not like the team would have been drastically better with Arians at the helm instead of Todd Bowles, but they definitely would have had a higher chance of winning in the playoffs because of Arians’ game prep and specificity on offense.
Next was the announcement that Brady and Gisele would be divorcing. It came in October, with the Buccaneers’ having middling results and looking like a shadow of their former glory. It’s incredibly myopic and childish to assume that the dissolution of their marriage was based purely on Brady returning to the NFL, but it was reported that Gisele wanted him to walk away from the NFL after Tampa Bay’s Super Bowl win in 2020, but he wasn’t ready to leave the NFL.
The whole thing put Brady into the headlines for everything but his football. He was playing decently enough, but that was wildly overshadowed by every tabloid be plastered with Tom and Gisele’s faces. Even witches on TikTok claimed he would be cursed now as a result of the divorce. The whole thing got very weird.
From there the football side of things floundered and was mired in mediocrity. Tampa Bay did enough to stay atop the woeful NFC South, but everything reeked of the Buccaneers being a one-and-done playoff team that had no functional chance of making noise in the NFC.
It wasn’t even Brady’s fault. It’s more that nobody around him seemed to want it as much. It’s as if the entire team were ready to turn the page and start a new era, while Touchdown Tom wanted to keep going back and re-reading the last chapter, like a bedtime story a kid never wants to end.
The biggest moral victory game in Week 17 when the Bucs beat the Panthers to functionally knock Carolina out of the playoffs while punching their ticket to the postseason. This joy wouldn’t last long, as two weeks later the team was thoroughly embarrassed on national TV against the Cowboys in the Wild Card round.
In front of home fans desperate to see Brady pull out some magic, he faltered in the saddest way. Down big and with no running game, Brady threw 66 passes which got sadder with every attempt as he tied to will something into existence that never stood a chance. Dejected and crushed he watched as the Buccaneers fell 31-14, ending his 2022 season in a puff of confused disappointment.
This season never should have existed. It’s not how Brady should be remembered, and let’s be real, nor will it be. No. 12 will be remembered as the greatest of all time, but it doesn’t change that the last time we saw him in uniform was in a season that was functionally fine on paper, personally horrible off of it, and nothing anyone of a player Brady’s stature should be proud of.
In the end the whole thing was just sad, and it didn’t need to be.
