It Seems Bruce Arians Was the Last to Find Out Brady is Retiring

Jerry Thornton1/29/2022 9:10 PM

Mark LoMoglio. Shutterstock Images.

You remember the version of events just before Tom Brady formally announced that he was leaving for New England? In the days just before March 17th, 2020 at 8:30 a.m., when he officially retired from my heart? He went to Mr. Kraft's house in Brookline, near where he lived. The two of them had a heart to heart talk. They reportedly put Bill Belichick on the phone (this being the very early days of quarantine and travel bans, so Belichick was at home), and the three long time collaborators discussed Brady's decision, their time together, and apparently wished each other well. As you'd like to think any trio of impossibly successful people who have shared so much would.

Yeah, about that. What happened in Tampa Bay appears to have been the exact opposite:

So Bruce Arians didn't know. But you'll forgive us if we don't pump the brakes at all. Because nothing is more official than the official it becomes once it's reported by Adam Schefter and Jeff Darlington. However big Brady's proverbial loop is, in most definitely includes them, but not his head coach of the last two seasons.

Arians found out when the rest of us did? That is absolutely the biggest slap in the face imaginable. I mean, I'm sure there are thousands of people out shoveling out their driveways or driving snow plows right now who haven't heard yet, But they'll come inside later and be told. And it won't be from an NFL reporter looking for a comment. Only Arians has to suffer that humiliation.

A few minutes ago I rhetorically asked the question why Brady made this decision. And it's hard not to hear that his coach found out slightly before the Sentinelese tribesmen who killed that missionary did, and not put two and two together. I'm just speculating here, but it's not unreasonable to think he's walking away because he's had it with playing for this organization and this coach. Otherwise, Arians and Bucs ownership would've gotten the same heartfelt sitdown that the Patriots brain trust got.

Maybe it was the fact that Brady gifted all his talents to this man, and won him a ring he was otherwise never going to earn in a million seasons. And not just his arm talent. As I've said repeatedly, you can go back and watch Brady's first month of games in Tampa and just see the moment he said Arians' offensive system is trash, started running the one he perfected in New England, and got a championship to show for it.

And the thanks he got was being publicly scapegoated by his coach every time things didn't go well:

Then the Antonio Brown fiasco happened. Whatever other assorted "turmoil" 10-year veteran Lavonte David was talking about last week:

… and Brady decided that he'd had enough. That whatever retirement brings him - playdates with the kids, building his fitness empire, doing TV, selling shirts - it has to be better than this horseshit. So his final act as a Buccaneer was to flip the coach and the organization the State Bird of Massachusetts on his way out the door. Diabolical.

He wanted out of New England. He'd been working under the same head coach since Bill Clinton was President. He needed more control over scheme, play calling, personnel decisions and how he conducts his public business off the field. And he got it. He proved he could win without Belichick. But after two short years, it became a "be careful what you wish for" scenario.

Get this man signed to a one-day contract in New England. Let him retire as a Patriot, then retire his number. And get busy breaking ground on his statue just outside the Gillette lighthouse. Just know that while he got the seventh ring he wanted, there's no other coach like the one that helped make him the GOAT.