Tom Brady’s 2019 season didn’t end as he would have liked, with a 20-13 wild-card loss to the Titans in which he completed just 20 of 27 passes for 209 yards, no touchdowns, and a pick-six to end the game. At age 42 — he’ll be 43 when the 2020 season starts — Brady is at an age where most players are well past retirement. And unless the Patriots re-sign him before the league year turns over in March, he’ll be a free agent for the first time in his career, a career that started in 2000 and includes more accomplishments — especially in the postseason — than any other quarterback can claim.
“I don’t want to get too much into the future and stuff,” Brady said after the game. “I mean, this team has fought hard. We battled every day, we tried to get better, we worked hard to improve and I was proud to be a part of this team. Not only this year, but every year. Again, I just don’t know what’s going to happen and I’m not going to predict it. No one needs to make choices at this point. I love playing football, I love playing for this team. I’ve loved playing for this team for two decades and winning a lot of games. And again, I don’t know what it looks like moving forward, so we’ll just take it day-by-day.”
Brady has said that he wants to play football until he’s 45, which would put a few more seasons in his quiver before he hangs it up. And though he was playing through injuries, was presented with a sub-par offensive line most of the season, had a rushing attack that underperformed, and was saddled with a group of receivers who could not gain separation consistently, he still finished his 2009 season completing 60.9% of his passes for 4,057 yards, 24 touchdowns, and eight interceptions. Not great numbers by his standards, but most NFL quarterbacks would happily accept them.
Whether Brady works in New England or elsewhere in 2020 and beyond has been a topic of some conjecture since the Patriots’ season ended last Saturday, but he seemed to put the topic to rest with a lengthy Instagram post on Wednesday morning.
I just wanted to say to all of our fans, THANK YOU! After a few days of reflection, I am so grateful and humbled by the unconditional support you have shown me the past two decades. Running out of that tunnel every week is a feeling that is hard to explain. I wish every season ended in a win, but that’s not the nature of sports (or life). Nobody plays to lose. But the reward for working hard is just that, the work!! I have been blessed to find a career I love, teammates who go to battle with me, an organization that believes in me, and fans who have been behind us every step of the way.
Every one of us that works at Gillette Stadium strived to do their best, spent themselves at a worthy cause, and prepared to fail while daring greatly (h/t Teddy Roosevelt). And for that, we’ve been rewarded with something that the scoreboard won’t show – the satisfaction of knowing we gave everything to each other in pursuit of a common goal. That is what TEAM is all about.
In both life and football, failure is inevitable. You dont always win. You can, however, learn from that failure, pick yourself up with great enthusiasm, and place yourself in the arena again.And that’s right where you will find me. Because I know I still have more to prove.
I recently speculated about five teams that would be good fits next season; it would appear that wherever he goes, Tom Brady is far from done with football.
Touchdown Wire editor Doug Farrar previously covered football for Yahoo! Sports, Sports Illustrated, Bleacher Report, the Washington Post, and Football Outsiders. His first book, “The Genius of Desperation,” a schematic history of professional football, was published by Triumph Books in 2018 and won the Professional Football Researchers Association’s Nelson Ross Award for “Outstanding recent achievement in pro football research and historiography.”