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A Potentially Great Joke Steps on the Punchline

Last Saturday night, Tom Brady was in Las Vegas to catch the Conor McGregor UFC bout. While there, the Patriots quarterback ran into none other than now-Las Vegas Raiders owner Mark Davis and the two had a pleasant chat.

As you may have heard, Brady will be a free agent on March 18. Speculation on Brady's future is now the NFL's leading industry, far surpassing that game the Chiefs and 49ers will play on Groundhog Day, alleged insiders and outsiders in Boston and around the nation wondered aloud or in print if this meant the Pats' ultimate hero is considering becoming a Raider.

I wish. Brady becoming a Raider would be the most hilarious Boston sports story in my 45 years of living here, topping Rosie Ruiz's fake Marathon win by miles and miles of belly laughs. Instead of a midlife crisis, Brady would be giving us a midlife heel turn, making his NFL last act a boffo finale with a franchise that's been associated with pigskin villainy since the 1960s. He could show up at his first press conference holding a football and a bicycle pump. Raiders fans would eat it up.

Patriots fans would lose their shit entirely. This is a region that still holds it against Johnny Damon for going to the Yankees in free agency, that has reacted to a decade of unprecedented professional sports success with whiny paranoia. Given something to really be paranoid about, the frenzy would go off the charts.

That's not funny? Come on. Think about Jim Nantz having to cover his first Raiders game with Brady at the helm. Admit it, that image made you smile.

Sadly, as is too often the case in pro football, humor is always a four-touchdown underdog. Brady is about the last celebrity athlete on the planet capable of pulling a heel turn. Aside from fanatical competitiveness, his personality has no discernible rough edges. He likes an even strain, or at least likes the world to think he does.

That, however, is not the main reason my hoped for cosmic joke on the NFL will not come to pass. Great comedy requires a straight man. That would be the Raiders in this skit, and they have no reason to play the role. Except for publicity, Tom Brady would offer the new Vegasites nothing they're not getting from their incumbent starter Derek Carr. In fact, if we go by 2019, the Raiders are much better off with Carr.

In nearly every statistical category by which NFL quarterbacks are rated, Carr performed better than Brady this season, sometimes by dramatic margins. He completed 70 percent of his passes to Brady's 60. He averaged 7.9 yards an attempt to Brady's 6.6. Brady did edge Carr out in touchdown passes, 24 to 21, but he also threw exactly 100 more passes to do so.

Ah, but the Pats were 12-4 and the Raiders a most mediocre 7-9. Surely Brady was superior in the clutch moments when close games are won and lost.

Not so you could tell from the statistics, he wasn't. Brady had one fourth quarter comeback and one game winning drive in the regular season. Carr had two of the former and three of the latter.  There are doubtless many reasons the Raiders were 7-9. It is hard to see how Carr was one of them. He had a good season for his team. Brady had an average one. Not average for him, average for anybody.

And of course there's the most obvious statistic of all. Carr will be 29 when the 2020 season begins in September. Brady will be 43. The Raiders may think they're a short term fix away from the Super Bowl. Many teams mistakenly think that. But Mike Mayock and Jon Gruden would be daft to think the fix is TB 12.

No, the Raiders almost surely won't be bidding for Brady's services. The harder one looks, the harder it becomes to see many teams that will. Only franchises with solid talent elsewhere and complete dysfunction at the quarterback position would find it worth their while. Few of those come to mind. The Chargers if Philip Rivers leaves the Bears, the Buccaneers, the Colts maybe. That's about it.

Then again, if Brady does leave New England, the Patriots will instantly become one such franchise and in a big way. The logic for both the team and Brady to renew the vows of their long if not currently happy marriage remains strong. As time rolls on towards March 18, that strength will grow.

Without Brady, the Patriots need a completely new starter. He's still the best quarterback in the AFC East, an admittedly small honor indeed. The idea it'd be easy to find that caliber replacement on short notice is silly. Brady may have been average this season. Andy Dalton just plain stunk. Counting on Jarret Stidham to step in without a hitch is hoping the Pats win the lottery twice with the same ticket.

If Brady wants to play for a team good enough to make the playoffs and contend there, well, he's already on one. That's what happened in 2019. The Patriots took Tom Brady to the playoffs, not the reverse.

posted by Michael Gee @ 9:45 AM