Tom Brady announced that he has thrown his last NFL pass, and this time there does not seem to be any hesitation or doubt on his part. I placed Brady's career in historical context the first time that he retired, and I wrote about his first game back after his brief retirement, so this article will focus on Brady's final season. Brady did not play poorly in 2022, but his performance dropped off significantly from his 2021 campaign when he finished second in AP NFL MVP voting after leading the league in passing yards (a career-high 5316), passing touchdowns (43), completions (485) and attempts (719). In 2022, Brady again led the league in completions (490) and attempts (733)--setting single season league records in both categories--but his yardage plummeted to 4694, and he threw for a modest (in this passing friendly era) 25 touchdowns. He received no MVP votes, and he was not selected to the Pro Bowl.
Most significantly, Brady's team posted a losing record (8-9) for the first time in his 22 seasons as an NFL starting quarterback (the New England Patriots went 5-11 in Brady's rookie season, but he only appeared briefly in one game during the 2000 season). Brady won a Super Bowl in his first season in Tampa Bay after the team went 11-5 during the regular season, and the Buccaneers improved to 13-4 in 2021 before losing to the eventual Super Bowl champion L.A. Rams in the Divisional Round of the playoffs, but the 2022 Buccaneers were flawed and limited in ways that even prime Tom Brady may not have been able to overcome--and the very good but not consistently great 45 year old Tom Brady was not able to lift this team above .500, though the Buccaneers snuck into the playoffs thanks to winning the divisional title in the league's weakest division.
Did the 2022 season tarnish Brady's legacy? No, not any more than Brady winning a Super Bowl in 2020 tarnished Bill Belichick's legacy. By definition, legacy includes a person's entire body of work viewed in the largest possible context, not one slice of that body of work viewed in a narrow, distorted context. Brady was a brilliant and durable performer for over two decades, and he generally played his best in the games that meant the most, resulting in seven Super Bowl titles--an individual record for NFL titles that not only figures to stand for a long time, but that outpaces the lifetime totals of all NFL franchises except for Green Bay, Chicago, and the New York Giants. Brady's legacy is that he consistently performed at a high level individually while also playing a major role in team success as he led the New England Patriots to six Super Bowl wins and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers to one Super Bowl win. Similarly, Belichick's legacy as a championship-winning coach and as a mentor to other highly successful coaches--including, most notably, Nick Saban, one of Belichick's assistant coaches with the Cleveland Browns in the early 1990s--is unaffected by whatever has happened or will happen in the final stages of his long career.
Brady was far from being a stumbling, ineffective player in his final season but even if he had been it would be wrong to say that he would be remembered that way. When we think of Willie Mays, Johnny Unitas, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and other legends who played well past their prime years, we may be aware to some extent that they were not at their best in those last seasons but it would not be true to say that their careers are defined by those seasons: Johnny Unitas as a San Diego Charger is a footnote in the book of his career, not a chapter heading.
Only Brady knows what effect his final season had on his personal life, and only he knows whether or not he regrets not retiring as a champion in 2020, but his football legacy was not impacted in any way by the turbulent waters that he and the Buccaneers navigated in 2022.
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