Joe Thomas Describing How Facing Tom Brady's Patriots Reduced Him to Tears Will Break Your Heart

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If you've reached the age of about 10, and you haven't begun to figure out the basic unfairness of life, then you've been done a disservice.  Your parents didn't do a good enough job of saying "No," your brothers and sisters didn't pick on you nearly enough, and you got treated way to well in school. And you may spent the rest of your life getting beaten down by the world until life pounds that lesson into your naive head and beats the idealism of you. 

Joe Thomas probably learned about the unfairness of the world at an early age. If he didn't, it was certainly driven home over the 11 years he spent playing Hall of Fame left tackle, the Browns who unfortunately drafted him went 48-128. That's 80 games under .500, a .273 winning %. The won 10 in his rookie season, and never hit double digits again. In his last two seasons, (in the last he missed games for the first time in his career) they went 1-31. If life were a pure meritocracy, if football wasn't a team game, Thomas would have multiple rings. But this being reality, he never played in a postseason game.

And yet, for all that production from the assembly line at the Factory of Sadness, the one moment that finally broke him came late in his stellar career, against the Dynasty Era Patriots. If you have any of the milk of human kindness in you, you'll want to keep a box of tissues handy as you listen to or read these words:

… myself, I’ve got to convince myself this is a Super Bowl roster. That’s the mentality I have to have when I’m training, when I’m practicing, when I’m going through film study. And so you trick yourself every year, but after a while, you’re not that dumb anymore” 

“Going into year 10, we had traded away the first overall pick. We were trading guys away, saving capital for the future. The writing was on the wall that we were in a pretty significant rebuild. I kind of knew at that time, even though I was still trying to trick myself, in the back of your head you know you’re not going to be any good” 

“Then, about midway through that 10th season, we were playing the Patriots. Tom Brady comes to town, and I fucking hated Tom Brady, as everybody did in the league. I hated the Patriots. I just wanted to smash him so bad. We lost like 30 to 0. And I remember sitting in the car after the game, and I was just crying. I had ice on both elbows and knees. I was in pain, my wife was driving and I was just looking out the window. It was that moment when I realized I’d been kind of fooling myself for a while, and we were not going to win no matter what I did” 

“She finally said, ‘Are you okay? Did you have a bad game?’ Then the tears really came because I said, ‘I played a perfect game, and we lost by 30.’ It really sunk in at that moment that you don’t control the situation anymore. That feeling of loss of control is really hard. No matter what situation you’re in in life, it just feels like everything I’m working for, I have no control over the outcome. That’s a bad feeling” 

“I ended up meeting with the team psychologist and talking to somebody about it because it had been almost 10 years built up to that moment when you come to the realization that I’m kind of fooling myself. We’re not that team and we really don’t have a chance. And I don’t impact this game the way I’d hoped” 

"I'd hoped" are the saddest words in this. As Emily Dickinson put it:

“Hope” is the thing with feathers -

That perches in the soul -

And sings the tune without the words -

And never stops - at all -

And facing the Tom Brady Patriots was someone taking a shotgun to your songbird.

This gives me no joy. Which is to say, this gives me all the joy because this came in one of the Patriots most successful seasons. But I can still feel for a seemingly good guy like Thomas being one of the countless victims of the Pats relentless excellence during the Dynasty Era. In that way you think about the soldiers on the other side of a war that is a zero sum game. It's them or you. 

The facts aren't what's important here. It's the emotional toll on this fine man and all-time football talent. But just to be accurate, the game he's referring to wasn't 30-0. But it was a significant one. It was, in fact, Week 5 of 2016. Brady's first game back from the grave injustice that was his Deflategate suspension. And he took all his resentment and rage out on Thomas's Browns:

Those 406 yards and 3 touchdowns came in just 3 1/2 quarters. Brady came out of the game to a stadium that was empty save for the tens of thousands of Pats fans who traveled in order to see his first game back. 

For his part, Thomas is essentially correct about his own role in the game. He was basically perfect. With no penalties, a team-high blocking grade on Pro Football Focus of 74.2, and one pressure allowed on 40 pass blocking snaps. All in a hopeless cause on his was to a 1-15 season. 

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So thoughts and prayers to this proud warrior, reduced to crying in the car and venting on the psychologist's couch like Tony Soprano. One of many thousands of such victims at the hands of the greatest Dynasty of the 21st century. Again, better him than us. But still.