Three years ago, Tom Brady envisioned his post-football future like this: “I imagine not playing. And I imagine watching football on Sundays going, These guys suck. I could do way better than that. And then still knowing in my heart that I actually could still do it.”
Brady isn’t playing. He will be watching football on Sundays, as part of his $37.5 million per year job with Fox. And even if he’s thinking to himself, “These guys suck,” he apparently won’t be saying it out loud.
Speaking on Friday with Stephen A. Smith at the first-ever Fanatics Fest, Brady addressed the balance he’ll try to strike between speaking his mind and calling out players in a way that embarrasses them. While doing so, he kind of called out Giants quarterback Daniel Jones in a way that might have embarrassed him.
“‘That was horrible,’” Brady said at one point, expressing what he might like to say after a play he believes was not good. “I just can’t say that on TV.”
Why not?
“Well, because there’s parents . . . and there’s family members and I don’t wanna always necessarily say it in that way,” Brady said. “But I think if, OK, if I was doing it myself, and let’s say I threw a really bad interception. I would walk down the sidelines and I would say, ‘You are the worst quarterback in the world. How could you possibly make that throw? That was terrible.’”
Brady, who spoke with a tone and demeanor suggesting he recently received a Kid Making His First Visit Home After Leaving For College software patch, knows there’s a chance he doesn’t know enough to know whether it was the quarterback’s fault.
“I just don’t wanna be so critical,” Brady said. “Because in some ways, I don’t necessarily know exactly what the problem was on that play. Let’s say Daniel Jones throws an interception.”
And the crowd roared with laughter.
“I didn’t mean to say it like that. I wasn’t even being critical of Daniel Jones. Maybe I was a little bit.”
People will expect Brady to call it like he sees it. These aren’t kids who are playing for free. They’re highly-paid professionals. Professionals who when they don’t perform well get criticized. Brady will hopefully have the guts to do it.
If he doesn’t, plenty of people will react to Brady’s performance by saying, “That was horrible.”