Former Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Boomer Esiason wasn’t exactly optimistic about Tom Brady’s prospects with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
Brady elected to leave the New England Patriots after 20 years. In New England, Brady won six Super Bowls, an unprecedented amount of success for a quarterback. But this situation isn’t unprecedented. Brady is following in the footsteps of Joe Montana, Joe Namath and Johnny Unitas, all of whom decided to leave their longstanding team and finish their career elsewhere.
And of course, Esiason spent nine years in Cincinnati before defecting for the New York Jets for three seasons. He returned to the Bengals for his final season. His seasons in New York were, for the most part, less statistically impressive than his time in Cincinnati.
“What I really was, I was disappointed when I heard the news,” Esiason told WEEI’s “The Greg Hill Show” in a recent interview. “I wanted Tom to end (his career) a Patriot and that is probably pretty selfish of me to think that way, but when you think of iconic players, iconic franchises and the greatest of all time, you’d like to see them run it all the way out through the end no matter how long it took, no matter how bad he might have played. Whatever the situation may have been, I would have loved to have seen him finish his career that way.
“Everything that I have heard and listened to and things that have been said by all parties, it just sounded to me like he wanted to go in a different place and go somewhere and maybe not have the intense pressure of the relationship that he and Bill (Belichick) have during the season. I would just always tell him that the grass isn’t always greener elsewhere and he will find out pretty quickly how things are different from one franchise to another.”
[vertical-gallery id=83044]