Amid several other issues, the NFL is dealing with a quarterback crisis. The retirement of Tom Brady after the 2022 season closed the door on an era of play in the league that included the likes of Peyton Manning, Drew Brees, Aaron Rodgers, Philip Rivers, and Eli Manning. And though the league is scrambling to reproduce this seminal period of signal-callers, a certain character has leeched from the game. It hasn't been bled of mystery in the way sabermetrics demystified baseball. But there's just something gone.
What made Tom Brady great at football was what probably made him a boring husband and a generally weird person — absolute, computer-like consistency. He was a pseudo-person, never evincing anything that suggested a true deep personality. He's always seemed nice enough, but it's the niceness of a cardboard advertisement, or an awkward smiling child. Unlike Peyton Manning — a genuinely charismatic and intelligent presence who could sell products with an aw-shucks Southern twinkle in his eye — Brady's commercial endorsements often played on the fact the kind of a humanoid totem for athletic excellence.
But on the field, this was all a kind of magic. The man's heart rate never seemed to fluctuate, and despite not having the most elite physical traits, he could carve up defenses like a surgeon. He did this through multiple eras, with a wide array of defensive schemes drawn up to stop him and all of them failing. His singular consistency enabled the Patriot to plug in whatever pieces around him — often a menagerie of greenhorn draft picks and veteran cast-offs — and get the same results. He had a truly elite wide receiver only once, Randy Moss for a few years in the late 2000s, and that partnership didn't yield any of his seven Super Bowl victories, though it produced absurd touchdown totals.
Some would say this meant Brady had natural chemistry with everyone he played with. But I think he was immune to "chemistry." He just operated — processed the same series of variables no matter who played for or against him. But that can inspire in its own way. It was said that Salieri was the most passionate of the Vienna composers, but he broke his own mind watching the boy-genius Mozart turn ethereal mathematics into symphonies. Brady's magic was that of an astronaut — that unique Western blend of cold-as-steel human mechanics with a Faustian compulsion for elevation to higher ground. It was a pleasure to watch.
Now Brady is gone, and the game can't really decide what it wants to do with most important position in American team sports. The pure freak athletes like Michael Vick and Lamar Jackson are entertaining but don't have the cerebral game management to make title runs. The statuesque pocket passers like Peyton Manning and Drew Brees can no longer hold up against a modern pass rush replete with startling physical specimens. Patrick Mahomes at a certain childlike backyard brilliance to him, but he's not the smiling killer Brady was.
The NFL careens forward on the shoulders of gambling now, until its inevitable destruction by means of brain damage lawsuits and American demographic changes. So it goes. It makes me wonder who the last great charioteer in Rome was before the end.
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