Tom Brady
Tom Brady is a quarterback savior of the National Football League, who plays for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. He is a key player in advancing two goals of the league:
- To treat fans to superhuman displays of perfect athleticism, and
- To reassure fans that the rules are on the level, and that championship seasons are won through athletic prowess and not mere trickery.
Early life[edit]
Brady was born in San Mateo, California after Galynn Patricia Motheroftom Brady was impregnated by the Holy Spirit. As a youth, Brady regularly attended San Francisco 49ers games at Candlestick Park. He was a fan of quarterback Joe Montana, and was in the stands during the 1981 NFC Championship, when Montana threw "The Catch" to Dwight Clark. Ayn Rand writes that, after Montana threw this impossible pass, he gazed into the stands and caught the eye of the four-year-old Brady, who then-and-there realized his destiny was to become a pro quarterback too.
Brady was drafted as a catcher in the 1995 baseball draft by the Montreal Expos. He was also drafted as a stockbroker in the 1998 draft by Merrill Lynch. However, at that point, The Almighty put His foot down and He declared that it was time for Brady to stop "pussyfooting around" and follow his destiny into football.
Junípero Serra High School has renamed the football field where Brady used to play, the "Brady Family Stadium," and Merrill Lynch has likewise named after Brady one of its facilities, now a small retail branch of successor Bank of America, on the strip on the north side of Decatur, Illinois, at least until it was closed in 2002.
College career[edit]
Brady began demonstrating athletic perfection at the end of the pine bench at the University of Michigan. Brady was seventh on the depth chart, and entered therapy for the mental anguish of wearing a football uniform and yet never playing in a football game. He contemplated transferring to California, until academic counselors explained that U of M didn't have a campus there. Then God nodded again, and Brady started every single game in 1998 and 1999, and was only sporadically benched. Head Coach Lloyd Carr has stated, "Tom is the most excellent player I have ever had in the role of seventh-best quarterback."
NFL career[edit]
2000 draft[edit]
NFL teams virtually ignored Brady during the 2000 draft, on the flimsy excuse that they had no seventh level in the quarterback depth chart, and most teams could barely afford to carry three quarterbacks. Nevertheless, the New England Patriots picked Brady 199th overall. It was a "compensatory" pick, and ironically, the "comp" belonged to starting quarterback Drew Bledsoe, who thought he was using it to allow his mother to watch the combine.
Brady started the season not as the seventh quarterback but as the fourth, behind Bledsoe and two other players who don't even dare mention to their fellow burger-flippers at McDonald's that they used to play in the NFL. Before the season was over, Brady did see live game action, and achieved six perfect passing yards (plus two incompletions that no one believes were his fault).
2001 season[edit]
But the Lord is a wrathful and impatient Lord, and this progress was not fast enough for Him. Thus in the Patriots' 2001 home opener against the New York Jets, linebacker Mo Lewis clobbered Bledsoe. There was internal bleeding and Bledsoe was slow to understand that destiny had asserted himself and he was about to transition from star quarterback to footnote.
In the next two games, Brady compiled a mediocre passer rating and a 50-50 record, surely the fault of the slow adaptation of his teammates. But then the team hit its stride, winning its last six straight, to win the AFC East and enter the playoffs.
In the first playoff game, Brady was leading the team to certain defeat against the Oakland Raiders despite a pestilence of snowflakes the Lord hath sent. Thus the Lord our football God had to intervene again. On a desperate offensive drive to save the game, Brady coughed up the ball as cornerback Charles Woodson came out of nowhere. However, on instant replay, God himself explained, through the sideline headset of referee Walt Coleman, that Brady had started to pass the ball, was trying to abort the pass and "tuck" it back in when he coughed it up, and the result was merely an incomplete pass, giving Brady a fateful chance to try again.
"Tuck that," the fans said, but the die had been cast. The Patriots won that game and pulled out a victory in Super Bowl XXXVI. At the end of the season, Drew Bledsoe was traded to the Buffalo Bills, clinching Brady's job as Pats QB. Bledsoe is still in Buffalo today, operating a squeegee at a busy intersection, and commentator John Madden was converted to animal feed for his wimpish comment that the Patriots settle for a tie, run out the clock, and try to win the Super Bowl in overtime. Pussy. It was evidence to anyone willing to see it — whether or not they had read The Picture of Dorian Gray — of how many careers would be sacrificed for the sake of this one exceptional career.
More championship rings than fingers[edit]
The 9-7 finish in 2002 is not statistically significant, as Brady had a shoulder injury, and that could happen to anyone. That year was not part of Brady's destiny. Destiny reasserted itself in 2003, as the Patriots won Super Bowl XXXVIII over the Carolina Panthers and Brady was named Most Valuable Player again.
In 2004, Brady helped the team set a streak of 21 straight wins, although an anomaly in the Official Scoring Rules treats it instead as a 21-game losing streak. Brady played his best game of the year in the playoffs against Pittsburgh even though his entire blood supply had to be replaced by Mobil synthetic motor oil the night before, because of a condition that was not his fault, and oil is not a growth hormone or other banned or illegal substance. Thus the Pats entirely legally won Super Bowl XXXIIIIIIIII over the Philadelphia Eagles.
Hard times[edit]
In 2005, the Pats' 10-6 record was good enough to win the division, but Brady suffered his first playoff defeat, 27-13 to the Denver Broncos. This was not Brady's fault, either, as he had been playing with a sports hernia since December.
He had also begun having frank discussions with the Almighty about the two odd horns on His forehead and the spiked tail.
In 2006, the Pats were 12-4 in the regular season, but lost the AFC Championship to the Indianapolis Colts. Brady began having more earnest talks with his supernatural friend as to what it would take to climb back on top of football and of humankind. He also began having more earnest talks with the NFL Rules Committee, which would come back to bite him. Still more earnest intercourse resulted in benching actress Bridget Moynahan, who had become unplayable due to game-related developments in the womb, in favor of Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bündchen.
In 2007, the Pats were spectacular. ESPN in 2013 would unanimously vote Brady's year the "best passing year in history," moments before conferring a comparable honor on the Presidency of George W. Bush. The Pats relied on Brady's arm even more than the arm of a video camera operator, who was illegally recording hand signals used by New York Jets coaches, for which the club was fined and got its tail docked.
The Pats won 18 straight games. Unfortunately, there are 19 games in a season that includes playoffs. Ace World War II fighter pilots understand the letdown of winning all but one contest, though they are not available to discuss the subject. This means the Pats went straight to Super Bowl XXXIIIIIIIIIIII, and only then began to see black smoke billowing from their own tail section. Brady's pal Satan explained that he also had a large clientele in New York City and had to throw a sop to the New York Giants, who beat the Pats with a last-minute touchdown.
Harder times[edit]
In 2008, Kansas City Chiefs safety Bernard Pollard rolled over Brady and shredded his knee ligaments. The hit was a flagrant offense against the enjoyment of football that is every American's Constitutional right, and set the NFL's greatest minds to writing new and longer rules, resulting in the current situation where it is illegal to tackle low, tackle high, tackle in the middle, sneeze or breathe heavily on a quarterback or even on his pass receiver, or utter hurtful words. Brady got a new ACL and MCL in the deal, with championship antibiotics that are referred to as Super Bowl I.V.
Matt Cassel replaced Brady as quarterback, compiling an 11-5 record, which football experts regard as "pretty good" but not good enough to make the post-season. Something happened to Cassel, and Pats fans refer to this as "the lost year."
The broken finger and three broken ribs in 2009 were also patched up, but it was a lost year too.
Deflate this![edit]
In 2014, secret plans of Brady, his pointy-tailed supernatural agent, and co-conspirator Peyton Manning bore fruit. In 2006, they had gone before the NFL Rules Committee, which was furiously trying to make teams play under identical conditions and was even considering making teams switch ends of the field on every other down.
Brady and Manning said quarterbacks would look better if each team could bring its own set of 12 footballs, in exactly the condition the quarterback preferred. The Rules Committee chairman at the time was Vidal Sassoon; he shrugged and said, "If you don't look good, we don't look good." But he turned away the suggestion that each offense be able to provide its own set of seven referees.
2015 AFC Championship game[edit]
On January 18, 2015, game against the Indianapolis Colts, two low-level Pats flunkies — who, despite both being No Longer With The Organization, have never given a press interview — made the decision, approved by no one, that Brady's preference for a soft football should supersede the NFL rule that the ball should have at least 12.5 psi of air in it.
The Colts had told the NFL that the Pats were likely to cheat, the referees knew it and did nothing even though television delayed the game 15 minutes, the Colts didn't complain until their D'Qwell Jackson intercepted one of Brady's passes and told his coaches the football felt funny, and he denies he said that.
George Brett, a pine-tar engineer who also played a little baseball, explained to sports fans years ago that a little technical cheating is simple gamesmanship, but knowing that an opponent is cheating and warehousing the complaint until the most opportune moment is thoroughly unsportsmanlike. Nevertheless, the Colts waited until halftime before complaining. They spent halftime discussing ball inflation and got the referees to substitute a third set of 12 balls that were perfectly inflated. Whereas the Pats spent halftime discussing football, and outscored the Colts in the second half, 28-0. The Pats rolled on and won a championship known as Super Bowl XXXL, with footballs that were XXXS.
The Wells Report[edit]
The league took five months to study the incident, assigning lawyer Ted Wells to write a 243-page report. Wells has no connection to the NFL, apart from taking millions of dollars for that report, and writing other reports that saved the Commissioner's other chestnut from previous fires. Wells concluded that no one knows what happened or even if anything happened, but that all the Pats were acting sneaky.
Brady's response was that:
- He had not read the Wells report, as college never taught him to read anything but Xs and Os.
- He did not know the two equipment-room attendants charged with deflating the balls, as he never bothers to meet employees to whom he is personally autographing game balls after every game although they certainly had done him no favors.
- He was advised not to submit his cell phone for study because Giselle and he do "sexting" to one another and NFL fans ought not to have to see his supermodel wife's naked body.
- He knows nothing, nothing!
The club refused to make employees available to the NFL without pre-approving a list of questions. One commuted from New Hampshire and the club explained it was infeasible either for Wells to go there or to ask him to drive an hour into work. The club's own lawyers put a 20,000-word rebuttal on the Internet, which gave honest interpretations of all the texts the league studied, such as that the guy named "The Deflator" was only talking about his weight-loss goals, although he was the one who was trying to gain weight.
With the 31 other franchises breathing down Commissioner Roger Goodell's throat and asking for more justice than he had administered in the child-beating thing, the wife-beating thing, and the dog-torture thing, Goodell drew the obvious conclusion: A club with so many lawyers does not act sleazy because lawyers are sleazy — though they are — but because lawyers concluded the Pats would do better being sleazy than they would do being truthful. The Commissioner benched Brady for the first four games of the 2015-16 season, and told the Pats that, if they wanted to exercise their right to appeal, he would clear a hefty block of time one morning in his own office.
2015-16[edit]
So the new Pats quarterback who will help unfurl the team's fourth Super Bowl banner would not be Brady but someone named Jimmy Garoppolo, and fans would surely buy tickets and tune in to Red Zone TV in record numbers for that.
Missing four games will cost Brady $5 million, but he still has a supermodel wife and a rabid fan base that gives him a standing ovation every time he gives his deer-in-the-headlights stare and says, "I don't know anything about that...I let the club handle all that business," in a part of the country that still thinks John Kerry is a statesman, Ted Kennedy is innocent, and Elizabeth Warren is a Cherokee.
The Pats expressed solidarity with Brady and protested the league's ruling by changing their Facebook avatar to be the back of Brady's jersey. You cannot see Brady's face, but you can tell it's him from the uniform number. One, two, asterisk.
Appealing the suspension[edit]
Owner Robert Kraft called a hasty press conference where he sucked up to the Commissioner. He asked to let bygones be bygones, said the team would pay the $1 million fine and fans certainly would not notice the new, higher ticket prices, and never mind the draft picks either. But don't punish Tom for someone else's mistake.
When the Commissioner was unmoved, the Patriots took a playbook out of any American sports team: Use technicalities to make the punishment occur at some later date when it will not matter. The Patriots activated every lawyer on the 53-man roster. After a couple more appeals to the Supernatural, Judge Richard Berman stepped out of the smoke and vacated the four-game suspension. In the best American tradition, losers and winners appealed the decision, to make sure it went to a court of their liking, winding up in the Second Circus Court of Appeals in New York City.
Unfortunately, the U.S. court system does not work with footballs of any inflation but with dice rolls, at which the Patriots are not as expert. One member of the three-judge panel said, "The evidence of tampering is compelling, if not overwhelming." As American government is not about facts but about the seriousness of the charges, the handwriting was on the wall. Tom Brady and the Patriots declared their fidelity to the American system of justice, their months-long efforts to evade it having not borne fruit, and announced that Brady would sit out the first four games of the 2016-17 season.
2016-17[edit]
So Garropolo was the starting quarterback, but he got hurt. Then Jacoby Brissett was the starting quarterback, but he got hurt. Then the suspension was over, the Pats were 3-1 anyway, and Brady made a triumphant return. The team fired key teammates, experimented with a rookie defense, took outrageous risks, and coughed up the ball in key playoff games, and nothing mattered. They roared into Super Bowl L.I.E. in Houston.
In the first half, unfortunately, Satan had to take a lengthy phone call from an ex regarding child visitation, and the Pats fell behind the Atlanta Falcons, 28-3, the biggest and most insurmountable and impossible deficit in Super Bowl history. However, in the second half, the team roared back to tie the game and force the first-ever Super Bowl overtime period, which was all Brady. Brady got an unprecedented fourth Super Bowl Most Valuable Player award for his clutch performance, which ignored the oil-pan performance in the first half. And Commissioner Goodell came onto the platform, shook the hand of the man whose reputation he had tried to ruin forever, and ate a big dogshit sandwich in front of a delirious crowd of 70,807.
Brady was now 57 years of age, drinking only distilled and de-ionized water and eating only vegetables carefully prepared with 3-D printing, and charting his workouts ten years into the future. And he had not aged a day, nor had his throwing arm. The other 31 teams realized that their best hope of giving one of them a beggar's chance of winning a championship had failed and it was virtually pointless for any of them to even field a team for the next season. The reader will never guess what they did next.
Career Records[edit]
Most Superbowls with an asterisk (*XXXVI, *XXXVIII, *XLIX, and *LI)
Incredible 5.28s 40 at 2000 Combine
World Record 2 foot vertical leap (better than Usain Bolt's)
Achieved top speed in mph (15.44)
Once beat the Browns