| In today’s FOX Sports Insider: Tom Brady aims to bring his winning ways to a franchise that could desperately use a culture shock … Freddie Freeman’s young son learns the harsh lessons of life (and baseball) in an adorable moment … and we look at NFL Draft wagers one month out from the marquee event. It is far from unusual for successful East Coasters, from New York and Boston and D.C. and so on, to relocate to the warmer climes of Florida’s Gulf communities. They do it after they’ve had their triumphs and made their money, and they do so in search of a slower, easier, more relaxed life. Tom Brady is 42 and a multi-millionaire, but he doesn’t have much in common with the typical southbound sunchasers. Brady isn’t headed for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers as an initial, lucrative step towards retirement. Incongruous as it might sound on the surface, he’s doing it to win. Sure, in leaving the New England Patriots and trekking to Tampa, Brady is essentially going from first to worst. He’s coming from a franchise that has been beyond compare in collecting regular season wins and Super Bowl titles under his watch; he’s heading to one that has the weakest winning percentage of any current professional sports team. But this isn’t a play about tradition. It is about a small window of time in the National Football League, because that’s all that Brady has left. It is about two years of trying to sign off his career in the same way he has played out most of it, by collecting victories. If it was someone else, it might have been different. Plenty of professional athletes have made late-career moves for reasons that were wide and varied and often didn’t have much to do with winning. On its barest surface, it looked like this could be one of those. He’s giving up the frost of New England for the balmy pleasantness of the Sunshine State. He’s heading to a place with no state income tax and getting a contract worth up to $59 million, $50 million of it guaranteed, for a couple of years’ work. He’s going to a team that hasn’t been to the playoffs since 2007, has had just one winning season since 2010 and whose sole Super Bowl triumph in 2002 sticks out as a glaring anomaly. However, Brady has spent his entire career being quicker in thought than opposition defenses — and now, he’s using those same smarts to get ahead of the doubters. He knows that expectations for this coming campaign will be tempered somewhat just because we are so accustomed to the Bucs being mediocre that we assume they must always be so. Yet while we are fans of the sport, Brady is a student of it. In a Tampa Bay Times feature by Rick Stroud, it was revealed that the Bucs’ courtship of Brady got flipped on its head. When the veteran quarterback spoke for 90 minutes last week with team general manager Jason Licht and head coach Bruce Arians, he was the one asking most of the questions. He had already watched reams of tape and therefore knew what on-field qualities elite wideouts Mike Evans and Chris Godwin brought, but he wanted to know if they were good guys, the kind he could forge a cheery rapport with. They are, he was told. His research was deep enough that he had also noted Tampa’s greatly improved defense under Todd Bowles. He rattled off players’ names and dug for more information. He wanted to understand the culture because he knows, from all his time at Foxborough, that sustained success depends on it. “He spoke a lot about winning,” Stroud wrote. “And it was obvious to Licht and Arians that Brady’s competitiveness burns white hot, and the three-time league MVP still thinks he has something to prove. Maybe to Patriots coach Bill Belichick. Maybe just to himself.” As talks progressed, Brady didn’t bring up money or try to squeeze out more of it. He asked for his new teammates’ phone numbers, so he could get things rolling. “He is going to be all-time hungry,” FOX Sports’ Skip Bayless said on Undisputed. “You will never have seen him as driven as he is to get to a Super Bowl before Belichick does.” A lot can happen with a big move like this, and in the NFL more than anywhere, past reputations count for nothing. As much as Brady craves more glories, fate and fortune will have their say on how things play out. With his approach to the most talked about departure professional football has ever seen, however, Brady has already proven one thing. A retirement tour this is not. Here’s what others have said … Albert Breer, Sports Illustrated: “As [Arians] looked at Brady’s tape, the veteran coach — who’d historically worked with big-armed Clydesdales like Ben Roethlisberger, Carson Palmer and Andrew Luck — saw a quarterback who could make every throw his offense required. He also saw where Brady was being held back. The feeling was that with more speed and explosiveness around him — which the Bucs could give him with Mike Evans, Chris Godwin, O.J. Howard and Cam Brate — Brady wouldn’t be forced to hold the ball like he had his last year in New England, where he had slower skill position talent on hand.” Rick Stroud, Tampa Bay Times: “His preparation, as usual, was next level. He knew all about Arians’ offense and was eager to operate it. He could recite, by position, the list of the Bucs’ offensive weapons. He was intrigued by the notion of having two Pro Bowl receivers, Mike Evans and Chris Godwin. He didn’t ask about them as players. He wanted to know, ‘Are they good guys?’ The best, Licht assured. … Brady never asked for control of the offense. He knew that Arians, offensive coordinator Byron Leftwich, quarterbacks coach Clyde Christensen and special assistant Tom Moore would collaborate with him on game plans.” Seth Wickersham, ESPN: “Nobody knows what motivates great athletes. It’s as mysterious and unique as their own DNA. Brady has struggled to explain it for himself. Sometimes the motivation came from anger that he was draft pick No. 199; other times from understanding and learning from why he was pick No. 199. But in interviews with people close to Brady, team and league executives, coaches and owners involved in the Brady sweepstakes, it’s clear that there’s a feeling he is chasing, and has been chasing for years. Not just to prove the Patriots wrong, but to find — no, rediscover — an essential version of himself.” |
