Can Reports of Tom Brady Going to the Chargers Be True if He's Interested in Zillion Beers Merch?
Bear with me as I connect a few dots here. This business of Tom Brady's future being completely in the dark is going to be the death of me. I knew that months ago. But now that I'm living it, it's worse than I thought. Because there are simply not enough dots to actually connect in any kind of a logical way. You end up like a very bored ancient Greek looking up at a half dozen randomly spaced stars and making a lion, a virgin or a guy pouring water out of them. But I'm left with no choice. Here goes nothing.
Greg Bedard of Boston Sports Journal [paywall] and a regular on "Felger & Mazz" (full disclosure: he and I talk fairly often at Pats practices and on Twitter) is reporting that Patriots sources are telling him they believe the only team really in contention to sign Brady is the Chargers.
There's been a lot of talk about the Raiders. But he's confirming something I've only speculated on, that it's preposterous to think that, at 43, Brady would want to start from scratch learning the Raiders' system.
Jon Gruden didn't go back to the sidelines from the MNF booth just to NOT use the offense he won a Super Bowl with. So Brady would have to adapt for him, not the other way around.
Bedard's report words it that Brady has no desire to go play for Gruden with "all that verbiage." The Titans have been talked about a lot, in spite of the fact that report he and Gisele were in Nashville signing their kids up for school turned out to be bogus. But according to Bedard, when the Titans and Pats held joint workouts, Brady told people their offense was "laughable." I didn't hear anyone laughing as that offense steamrolled the No. 1 defense in the league for the 1st quarter of the Wild Card game, but he's entitled to his opinion. As far as the Dolphins, they're scratched off the list because they're in a rebuild. That leaves just the Chargers holding out the Final Rose. Again, this is according to the article.
Then this next dot appeared. Not surprisingly, because this has pretty much been hiding in plain sight for a couple of weeks. But it became official today.
With Rivers now hitting free agency, it's impossible not to draw a line between these two dots. Even if they're sitting on the No. 6 pick in the draft, the new trend in the league - thanks in large part to the rookie wage scale - is to let a quarterback sit, the way Patrick Mahomes and Lamar Jackson did. So signing Brady wouldn't preclude them from still taking Tua Tagovailoa or Justin Herbert. Anything to convince a city of notoriously fickle, easily led, trend-obsessed sheeple that the fashionable thing to do is pretend to care about this bastard franchise no one loves. For a couple of years at least.
But here's why I'm still confident. Why I think it's more probable than not that Brady stays in New England.
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There's all the proof you need. Brady is not originally from here. But he is most definitely of here. You don't Retweet the Fore Play guys to crap on Peyton Manning:
… and reach out to inquire about Zillion Beers merchandise without being part of the culture. The very fabric of Boston. Because yes, this region and Barstool are intertwined, no matter how intergalactically big we get. The way the GOAT is interacting with our posts is the strongest signal yet of what his intentions are. He couldn't be more Masshole if he was carrying Kelly's Roast Beef take out into a brew pub and bitching over a couple of New England IPAs about the car he had to key because it took the space he shoveled out. Hell, just like the rest of us, he owns all sorts of Tom Brady gear. Him being all over Barstool is just the next logical step. And the final dot that draws a picture for me of 2020 Brady lining up under center in Foxboro.
That said, this can't be resolved soon enough.