That shiver flickering down the spine of NFC coaches, fans and general managers as the postseason looms doesn’t come from watching the Philadelphia Eagles get darn close to perfection.
The cold touch of anxiety doesn’t come from the Minnesota Vikings continuing to be impossibly clutch in a way that makes little mathematical sense. And not from the San Francisco 49ers‘ five-game win streak and positive Jimmy G injury update, nor the Dallas Cowboys strutting and swaggering to what shapes up as a big, big campaign.
I think the scariest, most gnawing thought in the mind of those who inhabit the NFC right now emanates from none other than Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and no, we probably wouldn’t be saying this if Monday didn’t go down in the way that Monday did.
What makes Brady and the Bucs scary is that they are here. Still here. Here, and not much more than that, not yet at least. It isn’t that they are finding spectacular form and growing in confidence, because they haven’t and they’re not, particularly.
But they’re around, and when Brady is in attendance and the turn of the calendar looms, it is a problem. It might have been different had it not been for Monday’s mind-blowing comeback against the New Orleans Saints, which had the dual effect of giving Tampa a stranglehold on the NFC South and everyone else a reminder that the usual rules don’t apply when Brady has the ball late.
“The entire NFC has to be devastated,” FS1’s Nick Wright said, on “First Things First.” “This team is as guaranteed to be in the playoffs as the Eagles and the Vikings.
“They are going to be hosting some NFC East team and they are going to beat them because they have a great defense and they have ‘that’ guy. The other team is just going to melt down in the face of Brady. And he’s never going to leave.”
Will Tom Brady’s Bucs be a tough out in the playoffs despite 6-6 record?
Emmanuel Acho, Joy Taylor, LeSean McCoy and David Helman discuss whether Tampa Bay would be a hard out in the playoffs despite their .500 record.
Brady will, presumably, leave the National Football League one day, and at age 45, has had one of the toughest seasons of his career. Overall, he wasn’t good against the Saints and he knew it, but was able to turn it on for a pair of late drives that tilted the result on its axis.
“Just like we drew it up,” he joked, less than an hour after shifting a 16-3 deficit into a 17-16 win. “Just like we drew it up.”
Of course, this season hasn’t been anything much like Brady drew it up, or the Bucs drew it up, but it’s now turning into something none of their NFC rivals would have wanted drawn up either.
Tampa Bay hasn’t resembled a functioning contender, Brady hasn’t been near his best and there have been times when the season looked close to degenerating into an ugly mess, something like the sort of thing going on with the Los Angeles Rams.
And yet, by a combination of timing, a weak division, good fortune and, yep — you just knew it — Brady being Brady in the critical moments, the Bucs are emerging as a serious headache for all those with dreams of a glorious postseason.
This is what Brady and his reputation do. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to be most worried about a team that is 6-6 and has played worse than that. Unless a player is involved who might just flip a switch and remember how to do all those ridiculous things he’s done for more than two decades.
And, because this would be just like him, remembers how to do it at the precise moment when it really matters. Like when things looked doomed against the Saints, in what was his record-setting 44th fourth-quarter comeback.
Like in the playoffs.
“We’ve got a lot of games coming down to the end,” Brady told reporters. “Some we’ve won, some we’ve lost which is why we are 6-6.”
The rest of the division is too far behind and just not good enough to stop the Bucs from cruising over the finish line. Once that home playoff game is booked, everything else goes out of the window and all things seem possible again, especially with that hardy and fearsome defense. And because, well, it’s Brady.
Brady loves to prove everyone wrong, but that’s not really what this is about. He’s not being underestimated this time, like so often in the past. In fact, it is almost irrational that a QB who is on track for little more than half of his touchdown tallies from the past two seasons and a group that has lost to the Browns, the Panthers, the Steelers and – gasp – even the Packers, should lurk as the playoff team no one wants to meet.
That’s how it is, though. Play them in the postseason and nothing much good can come of it. Beat them, and of course you should have, because the QB is old and look at their record, for goodness sake, which might even be below .500 by the time it shakes out.
Lose, and your season just got extinguished by a team that spent much of the season looking like it had forgotten how to play.
“We’ve got to find a formula that allows us to score more points more consistently,” Brady added. “I know we are still searching through it. We’re going to keep fighting.”
Fighting words? Pretty generic words, actually.
But they sure sound scary if you’re a potential postseason opponent, battling to keep your own dream alive. Faced with a guy who’s made a career out of winning — even when he’s not supposed to.
