After just 40 days of being retired from the NFL, Tom Brady announced on Monday that he will be unretiring and playing for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for the 2022 season. This is really great news for the NFL and all of its fans. The NFL and its fans will have at least one more year to enjoy watching the greatest to ever do it go after his 8th Super Bowl Title. Brady went on social media to announce his return to the NFL, where he said, “These past two months I’ve realized my place is still on the field and not in the stands. That time will come, but it’s not now. I love my teammates and I love my supportive family. They make it all possible. I’m coming back for my 23rd season in Tampa. Unfinished Business.” There will be a time when there is no more Brady in the league, and his haters will rejoice, but for now, the league is more fun to watch with Tom still in the NFL.
Brady will turn 45 during training camp, which will fulfill his once-mocked goal of playing until he was 45. Even at his historically old NFL age, Brady will enter the season with the active “ironman” streak among quarterbacks. He has started 107 games in a row and has missed no games due to injury since 2009. Brady’s health is something that has definitely played a role in him becoming one of the greatest athletes of all time. His longevity has allowed him to play in 48 playoff games, almost equivalent to three full 17-game regular seasons. The average length of a typical NFL quarterback’s career is only 4.44 years. Of course, this number accounts for all quarterbacks, including backups and third-stringers, but this still shows that longevity has been scarce among quarterbacks in the NFL. Going into his 23rd season, 20 with the New England Patriots, and 2 with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, Brady has the longest career among active NFL players but will be tied for 5th on the longest all time NFL careers after his 23rd season.
There are some big-time milestone career stats that Brady now has an opportunity to reach after announcing that he will come back for another season in Tampa. In both the regular season and the playoffs in his career, Brady has 97,569 passing yards, only about 2,500 yards away from 100,000 passing yards in his career. The next closest quarterback to the 100,000-yard mark was Drew Brees with 85,724 total passing yards in his career. I think that arguably the most impressive part of Tom Brady’s career so far has been what he has been able to do in the last 2 years after going to Tampa Bay and joining the Buccaneers. There was a lot of questioning going on in the football world about if Brady could do what he did with the Patriots, without head coach Bill Belichick. While Belichick is still easily one of the greatest head coaches of all time, Brady came into Tampa and won a Super Bowl in his very first season with the team. To be able to come in and lead the Buccaneers, who had gone 7-9 just a year before, to a Super Bowl was the best way that Brady could have proved that he was not just a system quarterback who needed one of the greatest coaches of all-time in Bill Belichick to be successful. It will be very exciting for football fans to watch Brady try to lead the Bucs to another Super Bowl, in what could very likely be his last season in the NFL.
