The Ringer NFL Show - Why Tom Brady Retired Now and How He Forever Changed the NFL

Episode Date: February 1, 2022

Kevin Clark and Benjamin Solak react to Tom Brady's retirement from the NFL. They discuss Brady's career and legacy, where the NFL will go from here, the Buccaneers' future, and more. Hosts: Kevin Clark and Benjamin Solak Production Assistant: Isaiah Blakely Additional Production Supervision: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I'm Derek Thompson, the host of the podcast, Plain English. We tackle technology, politics, culture, history, everything that's happening in the world and why it matters. New episodes of Plain English drop every Tuesday and Friday on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It is the Ringar NFL show, part of the Ringar Podcast Network. I'm Kevin Clark. After 22 years at the pinnacle of a sport, Tom Brady has retired. Lots of stops and starts to this story, but on Tuesday morning, Brady released a statement on social media. calling his NFL career a thrilling ride. thanked everybody who ran the Tampa Buccaneers organization,

did not thank anybody associated with New England Patriots, probably a lot more to come on that second part there. I had a conversation with Ben Solac about what this means for Brady, for the NFL, for the quarterbacks who remain in the league, for the Tampa Buccaneers going forward. A really interesting conversation, kind of capturing all of the news, and here it is. Okay, so there is so much ground to cover,

when you're talking about a 44-year-old who was playing at an incredibly high level, who was still making his team relevant, who won a Super Bowl last year and had his team in the mix this year, probably the first guy ever to be the oldest person in his sport and retire in his prime at the same time.

That's pretty hard to do. With his legacy bet, as a football player, you start where? Oh, my goodness. That's the thing is that the contextualizing of Brady is impossible. Right? There's, there's too much volume. There are too many things that happened, right? He had two, he had like multiple Hall of Fame careers.

Right. Exactly. The way people always say it is like, yeah, you could break down his careers and like in, in pieces of seven. And you would be able to argue that all three of those careers get a 22 year career. So like a seven year span, eight year span and a seven year span. All three of those spans are Hall of Fame spans. So he lived three Hall of Fame lifetimes in the NFL, which is just ridiculous. And like when he retires, like people immediately react to the news. And what like I'll think of when I think of Brady's legacy is the variety of reactions

because of how long he was in the sport and what that scale allowed him to mean, right? Like you saw the Falcons come back in the Super Bowl, the greatest comeback in Super Bowl of all time. I had somebody say that he should have made sure he won a fourth MVP because now he can't stand up to Jordan as the greatest athlete in American history. And it's like, that's where we are. What? Like that's, that's, that's, that's the scale we're dealing with right now.

I'm not going to say it. Get them. Patch them in. It was, somebody who worked in football was like, I really thought he'd say for four MVP. It's like, all right, whatever. That, that number of things. Was it Bruce Ariens?

Is that why Bruce Aaron does it be retired? We got to, we got to galvanize him, motivate him to get back. But I think like maybe it's, it's the freshness of the moment coming right off of that Rams game. But I will. The first thing I'll think about with Brady will be the fact that at 44, he was as good, if not better as he was at 34. And he was as good, if not better if he was at 24. That, I think, will be the thing that always defines him for me is the longevity and the endurance, is the fact that he was just out here leading the league in all major passing categories in his final season, which also happened to be when he was middle-aged. That is something that I think will never be replicated.

No matter how good sports science gets, that relative success, I think, will never be a match. Okay. So you brought up a point, which is that you can't distill him to any one thing because he was everything. It reminds me of something when you were talking that popped in. Chuck Holsterman said this by the Beatles one time, where it just evolved so much that it can mean anything to you at any given time. Right. There's a different, if you read the 2001, 2002 stories and a lot of this was just the media being completely wrong. But there were so many columns about how he'll paper cut your death. I think that was Bob Ryan's column in 2002. And Bob Bob was on point at the Super Bowl, but it was like, he's a game manager. He'll paper cut you to death. And then as he expanded, we were like, oh, wow, like this is a completely different. He's driving this offense.

I just think people didn't know what they were watching in 0-1, 0,0,0, or 3, which is a little bit different. The defense was better. Obviously, people gave a lot of credit to Bullichick, Charlie Weiss, all that stuff. But the way everything evolved and the way that you could tell the story of football in the last 20 years through Tom Brady. Tom Brady not only evolved with every change,

he helped make the changes in most cases. Like you look at the 07 team, Josh McDaniels goes to Florida, meets with Dan Mullen and 06, about the spread offense. And they, you know, Josh Daniels was basically like,

Dan, what literally, what is your definition of the spread? That's something Dan told me. And then a year later, they're running some wide open stuff. They're running some college stuff. And, you know,

what, four or five years later, that's everywhere in the NFL. And I used to the quarterback's doing. Tom Brady was at the forefront of every little change. over the past 20 years, whether that's using the middle of the field more,

using that as a cheat code, using tight ends, using D.I. It doesn't matter. If there was a trend in the NFL, Tom Brady was at the forefront of it. From a scheme, kind of nerd tape evolution,

Ben, when you think about Tom Brady, you think what? Right. It's funny. I'm thinking now about Charles McDonnell before the win had the tweet when Brady retired,

which is like, it's very apt. It's very funny that a white slot receiver ended Brady's career, right? Because it was Cooper Cup with a long touchdown catch. But that's that kind of hallmark era, right, of the late 2000s, early 2010s when there was that discovery that, oh, we can just complete passes as easily as we can complete handoffs.

And then we can just walk down the field that way. That, I think, will always be formative. That will always be watershed. When he arrived in Tampa Bay and the way that that Bruce Ariens offense changed to incorporate him, like, I think we forget how uncertain we were three years ago, two years ago, that Brady could. go to Tampa and make that offense work. Like, we weren't sure. There were questions about that. It sure felt like he was.

He was Tom Brady. But that was like a outstanding question. It was like, what will Brady look like elsewhere? And the fact that he was, can you throw the, the two big questions among some pundits were can he throw those aggressive balls at Arients once and he's going to get hit too much? Meanwhile, he won the Super Bowl. Yeah.

And in 20, right, wait, years it, 2021. Yeah. In 2020, he had the greatest depth of target of his career while also cutting down as time to throw. Like, that's the sort of thing that just does, that's not real. That's not how it works. And so I'll definitely remember him as kind of heralding in that era of the slot receiver

and changing the prototype for that position. Like, guys who were built like Wes Welker didn't play wide receiver. Yes. In the NFL, they played it in college, and then they stopped playing football. And the way Brady used that position changed the way the wide receiver body type of work. It changed the way the position visibly appears. So that, I think, will always be it for me.

but like I said, it's kind of impossible. I'm always more stunned by the breadth of options than I am by any individual one. There's a reason, by the way, the Belichick story is linked with what you're talking about because you think about a guy like Wes Welker, well, there's a reason that the dolphins let him hit restricted for agency, and there's a reason the Patriots gave up a second round tender, basically,

to get him, is that Belichick knew exactly what Brady needed, knew exactly which waves to ride when it came to Brady, as he was becoming the best quarterback of all time. And then Brady's work ethic and talent created it all. I mean, there are stories a couple of years ago. I talked to Tony Godalas, and he worked out with Tom Brady in the offseason. And he said that there would be times where Brady would be an inch off a throw in June at UCLA. And he would yell at himself and start screaming.

And Tony literally actually read the story this more when I saw the news. Tony would come up to him and be like, dude, if you've seen the quarterbacks I play with, like relax. And he thought he was getting mad. Tony thought I was getting mad for not getting the passes. Like, no, in November when I'm throwing those passes, if I'm one inch off, you're not going to get the yards after catch that you need. By the way, he didn't even play with Tony Gonzalez.

Like, this was just his simulations. And you think about it. And I think that there's a, I think that there's certain things that Brady did where if I explain a player, I'll give you a good example. Brandon Lafell told me one time that Tom Brady knows everybody's name in the locker room, right? And if you're listening to this right now, you're thinking, well, of course

a quarterback knows everybody's name. I'll tell you something. No, no. Sometimes the quarterbacks don't even know who they're backup left tackle is. Famous quarterbacks don't know. Don't introduce themselves to anybody, whatever. The story's about him going up, say, hey, I'm Tom Brady to practice guys. Practice squad guys. Like, that stuff matters.

And when I say that... You got to think about, like, Brady, knowing mentally he's going to retire, screaming at Tyler Johnson, when they're up four-touching. against the Eagles in a wild card round that doesn't mean anything. Like that's just, that's the level it's at. So the point I'm trying to make here is that no one did the little things,

whether that's June practice, where that's knowing the practice squad guys' names, whether that's knowing, I mean, it has been told ad nauseum, those Tuesday, I think, meetings with Bill Belichick, where they go over every single thing.

I think the offensive coordinator wasn't allowed in the room. I think Charlie Weiss said that in Seth's book. It was just Belichick and Brady figuring out football, figuring out the defense there, playing that week, probably the two smartest people in football, figuring out exactly what the rules are of the defense and how to break those rules. No one did the small things better at the quarterback position than Tom Brady and no one did the small stuff better of coaching than Belichick. And when they were together, it was freaking beautiful. It's wild that we're here

now. Like, I'm thinking about the last week and the last month and trying to like contextualize it. Because I never thought until like maybe when they lost to the Rams like, oh, he might retire this year, right? Like, that wasn't crossing my mind yet. It's crazy that he lost in the divisional round, and we're all surprised that he didn't want to retire on top. He was one of the last eight teams available, right? He was, like, when Rivers went out on a wildcard loss, when Rathsburger went out on a wildcard loss, we were like, wow, that's tremendous, it's beautiful. It's how nice for those guys at the end of their career to get to show up in the playoffs one more time. And here's Brady, playing in the division round at 44, and we're all

like, man, I really would have thought he would have wanted to go out on top because that to him is underwhelming relative to career expectations. Right. And that's where like when you say little things, I see career consistency at a level that's like unmatched. And that's that that's what puts that kind of divisional round loss into into light is that like for us to perceive that as Brady out not on top kind of indicates just what Brady's peak was.

It wasn't a peak. It went up and then it went down. It was a plateau. It was just level. Number one, constant for so. so so very long. I just, it's astounding. It's astounding.

And it was not, when you read anything about his college career, I mean, the fact that Lloyd Carr promised Drew Henson playing time, the fact that at one point Tom Brady was thinking about transferring, that has been told, I mean, Seth's book is very, very good about that he thought about just leaving the Michigan program. This was not supposed to happen. Belichick essentially was talked into it by the late quarterback coach who said this guy wins. something, you had the arm strength, all that stuff. This was,

this would have been one of the greatest stories in NFL history if it ended after 10 years. The fact that it lasted until it was age 44 is amazing to me. Where does the NFL go from here? It was interesting because five, six years ago, I was reading stories about how

there had been a pipeline problem with quarterbacks. You remember this. It's James Winston, Marcus Marriota, the first two picks in the draft. NFL types are getting scared because the spread offense wasn't translating to the NFL. And what's amazing is there was a post Jordan drought of talent until LeBron James. And what Tom Brady was able to do is he was able to play so long that the NFL didn't have that. He bridged his own talent drought.

And now the league is in the hands of Patrick Mahomes and Joe Burrow and Josh Allen and that generation. And that's what's amazing about how he created this NFL and then he left the NFL in good hands by playing this long. You got to, I do wonder a little bit then, like, in that framework, if Brady saw that, like, he was like on the fence and then he saw Mahomes out and he was like, no, that's probably at this point. We don't need to keep going. In terms of where you go from here, I think, and I talked about this a little bit

with the Mahomes and the Chiefs across the course of this season where they just have like, Mahomes didn't look as good in the regular. the season and kind of felt like a step back and whatever. What you have to do is as a from a team building perspective, there was that time in the early 2010s when general managers were like, we have to get pocket passers,

we have to get really sharp guys. Brady was the paragon. He was the exemplar. He was the ideal to which we all strive. And so we go and we're drafting like Matt liner in the first round. And we're like, he's going to, you know, dice him up, whatever. And that prototype has fallen away.

Like we've clearly gotten away from that prototype. The next thing that we have, have to relinquish. The next idea that we have to accept belongs to Brady and Brady alone is that players will have more variance season over season than that guy did. Right. Like, Mahomes will have stretches like he did in the regular season this year where he's not as good as he usually is. We like never had that with Tom. And experiencing Mahomes as this new guard, as the new defining quarterback of the next generation made us think to ourselves, all right, he's just always going to be good forever. That's what, that's what Brady did. That's what the top quarterback of a generation does.

And I think that we'll see over the next couple years, especially in the fact that these quarterbacks just have inherently a more volatile play style, we will realize that even among the best, even among the best of the best, even among the truly generational, not using that word as a throwaway, but using it for what it means,

the generational quarterbacks, you don't get a guy you can set your clock to the way Brady does. So firstly, we've stopped trying to draft quarterbacks like him. And now even when we hit and we get elite quarterbacks, we have to recognize that they're not going to be able to play year over year the way that he did. no one's ever going to be able to get that sort of consistency out of somebody else. That 100% correct. And I would also say I think Mojombs is the most likely to have that

sort of similar path just because he has Andy Reed and just because that he has an infrastructure. And unless Travis Kelsey gets hurt in the next couple of years, unless Terry Hill gets hurt or loses his speed in some way or something else, some other roster problem that we, we aren't even anticipating at this point. He'll have that level of stability. But what we saw from Brady is just incredible. And I think it comes down to, A, the infrastructure. But B, he's the best competitor in football history, maybe. I mean, there were stories where, you know, he thinks he's fast.

Okay. And he would race his backup quarterbacks, Brian Hoyer, Zach Robinson told me the story, Jimmy Grappel told him the story. He would race these guys because he thought he was faster than them because he had just tricked himself into thinking that he was, good at everything. And by the way, he was good at 99% of things. He just wasn't good at running against other people. But it's a testament to the work ethic and just the fact that in the NFL, it gets really hard to be a leader. And the people we think are leaders are not leaders.

The guys who are talking to the media a lot about leading oftentimes have no influence in the locker room. That's for the reason they're talking to the media about leading. Tom Brady, the leading by example thing with Tom Brady cannot be overstated. And the fact that he wasn't basically an extension of the coaching staff and was able to, you know, everyone talked about Peyton Manning as someone who ran his own practices, ran his own offense, all that stuff. And there's something to that. But Brady was just as self-sufficient.

And that was something I didn't understand until later in Brady's career because Peyton Peyton Manning talked about it more and other people talked about it more. And by the way, Peyton didn't have the same infrastructure. You didn't have Bill Belichick on his side. But Tom Brady was still a, a, I know this is a cliche, but a literal coach on the field. One of the smartest people was ever played.

Yeah, and that's why I'm so grateful for Brady's Tampa Bay era. I feel like, and I can especially say this because of like how young I am and when I grew up, I grew up hating Tom Brady. I loved football. I loved everything about football and Tom Brady was the greatest villain in the world because all I

ever did every single year was watch this guy play in the Super Bowl and then talk to my cousins lived in Connecticut and they told me about how great Brady was. It's just when you're a kid. That's what you do. The best player, if he's not on your team, you hate him. If he is on your team, you love him. And so for so long, I just hated Brady because that was just me growing up. It's what I did.

And then as, like, I got older and like, you know, you just don't care as much about hating other teams and whatever. But also as I, like, got into, you know, doing the NFL media or whatever, Brady's there in New England. I still just like, you know, can't stand how good he is. And the entire New England infrastructure is one of like, we're business. We're robots, Belichick, Brady. You know what I mean? There's this terminator feel to them. And then Brady went down to Tampa and just became cool.

like just became fun just became cool you know a little bit of midlife crisis dad energy you know just absolutely sloshed at the the the super bowl parade right and having get like carried over and then tossing the Lombardi trophy on a boat and there was that that kind of blossoming right he's out here just like in subway commercials now joking about how he doesn't eat bread and and I think it gave us a nice reminder that there was a lot of of incredible stuff to appreciate about Brady at least like people my age there's a lot of stuff that appreciate about Brady in that 2010s era were like, yes, they were absolutely clinical,

they were surgical, they were dominant. But like Brady was an incredible dude. Brady was a guy people loved playing with. Brady was a guy who got free agents into the building. Brady was a guy who, you know, obviously the Antonio Brown recent stuff aside, but like helped players who were like struggling to find the teams where they liked and teams that they were happy. He brought them into New England, helped them

win and then they felt like they could stick in a locker room and they could be successful. Like, he did a ton for players in a very, very dynamic and personable way. and I don't think we had as much access to that when he was in New England as we did when he was in Tampa Bay. And I'm very appreciative that we got those years because it changed the light through which I saw Brady.

It's changed the legacy. And I know that it sounds so talk radio-eatist due the Bill Brady thing, but it really did. And we got to see those guys kind of separate and see, okay, this is what Belichick is what Brady is. And obviously they weren't at their peaks necessarily. But listen, there was a PFF article last year

that basically spelled out that this, last year was Brady's second best season ever. when you look at the efficiency numbers. And I understand there was an extra game this year. But the touchdown and yardage marks that Brady hit this year, only four the people in history have hit those marks.

And we're talking about Dan Rayna. He said a single season record for completions. Yes. 44. It's unbelievable. There is a team building element that I want to get too quickly. The bucks go where now?

To a sad, dark place. They drafted last year in the second round, Kyle Trask, a young man out of Florida who had a nice final season there with the Gators, but doesn't really feel like a future NFL starter. They have Josh Rosen, who once felt like a future NFL starter, but certainly doesn't now, also on the depth chart. To say that a team doesn't have a clear future at quarterback when they were employing

Tom Brady is fine. Like, I'd like, yeah, like, I don't care about that. Like, I don't, I'm not like, you should have been more careful by your backup quarterback. No, just all the resources. The Patriots went through the same thing. And we overpraise the Patriots for everything. Like sometimes when you lose Tom Brady, you don't really have a plan. Yeah, he's like, just push resources into shack bear and everybody and yada, yada, yada, whatever.

And go, like, try to win championships with Brady. There's nothing wrong with that. The timing here does suck because the draft class upcoming is really bad. The free agent class upcoming is also not super great. There is one James Winston in the free agent class, by the way, in case anyone's wondering, which to me is hilarious. Then you have to make, Bucks fans are already going through it. Come on. my old buddy who covers the bucks Trevor Sycambe was just going through it.

I was just sending him just screenshots of the draft class, screenshots of James Swiss's contract, just as many bad quarterback options as you can. Listen, Jimmy Garoppolo, he once backed up Tom Brady. He's going to be available in trade. Let's get it done. I guess, like, you hope for Rogers and like, what if we just did this again? Veteran elite quarterback part two electric boogaloo. But in general, you're going to sit and take one on your chin.

this year. You're going to probably start Trask, if not like Teddy Bridgewater, and you're going to probably let Godwin walk, and you're probably going to take, you know, some, you're going to let some bad contract leaves. You can get under the cap. And then you're going to look and see who your head coach is moving forward, because Bruce Ariens was retired before Jason Light said, I think I can get you and I can get Brady here. I don't know how long Bruce is for it. And this whole Byron left, which in Jacksonville situation throws a whole other monkey wrench into that. And so I'm interested to see what what happens there with Leftwich. I think of Left Witch stays, he'll probably know that Ariens isn't long for the job. And then you're in your kind of two year, three year rebuild

window. And that's okay, because you got a championship out of it. So it was all worth it. One thing that I think needs to be restated here, and this is not groundbreaking information. The New England Patriots franchise. So there's an anecdote that's been told a bunch of times. I recently read it in the Jeff Benedict book where Tom Brady ran into Robertcraft on his first day of OTAs or mini camp and said, I'm the best decision you've ever made. Draft to me, it's the best decision you've ever made. And I know, and Kraft was taken aback.

Brady, I think, bought a house when nobody thought he was going to make the team. Like, Brady is the only person who saw this coming, right? But this is, when you look at what Tom Brady meant to that franchise, the only other person who had any other, any other statutes or even approaching it, that's anywhere near analogous is what, is what Michael Jordan did to the Bulls. that's it. Those are the only two. Nobody else has rewritten the history of a franchise like this, saved a franchise,

taking a franchise that was going nowhere. And I know that they had the Parcells years and all that stuff. But it wasn't any, a lot of teams make one flicking Super Bowl. Okay. This was the best decision in the history of football to draft Tom Brady. And then every other decision that supported it were the second, third, fourth, fifth, best decisions. Like this was, he was the perfect football player. and I don't know if there's anything else to say.

Is there anything else to say? There's nothing that happens post Brady that isn't touched by Brady. That's the way that I think about it, right? Like, I don't, I think I'll be 70 watching, you know, virtual reality 3D football with my grandkids or whatever. And I'll go, you see that route? Tom Brady through that route to X-1 Randy Boss, the 2013 season, for 50th touchdown, whatever.

It is era-defining, right? It is. There was the pre-Tom Brady, there was Tom Brady, and then there's post-Tom Brady. He is that much of a tent pole, I think, in terms of the timeline of the NFL football for as long as that goes. There's nothing afterwards that is not impacted by him. And I don't know what else you can say about an individual in a sport that's greater than that. It's just you are a defining moment in the timeline of however long this league goes on. Era defining and sport defining.

That's it. Anything else in your notes? Do you want to get out there? Tom Brady dropped a pass. lost to the Super Bowl. Eagles, the 41.33, didn't shake Nick Fulles' hand afterward. Thank you, Kevin. He does that sometimes. Yes, he does. All right. Thank you to Isaiah, Blakely for hopping on here.

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