“I am very tired of the one football game I watch every year always featuring Tom Brady,” a friend texted me midway through the first quarter of Super Bowl LV. If you are that sort of fan, the one who watches one football game a year, you can be forgiven for thinking this is how the NFL is set up, like every year is just a layup for Tom Brady. After all, most sports are structured this way. The Yankees, Dodgers and Red Sox have the most money in baseball, so those teams are always great; the Lakers and Warriors have superstars like LeBron James and Stephen Curry, so those teams are always great too. If you didn’t know any better, if you were just tired of seeing Tom Brady in the Super Bowl all the time, you’d think the NFL was the same way.
But it isn’t. The NFL is structured specifically so dynasties don’t happen. It has a notoriously draconian salary cap; players’ careers typically only last a few years; and if you happen not to be a Super Bowl contender, you are incentivized to lose as much as possible so that you can get a higher draft pick and start over. Legendary NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle once said his ideal was to crown a different champion every year. Parity is what the NFL was founded on.
That’s why what Tom Brady has done—even if you hate him, especially if you hate him—is so truly remarkable. You’re not supposed to go to the Super Bowl every year; the league is designed to stop you. And yet there is Brady again, over and over, seemingly every year, winning Super Bowls and reliably giving you someone to send your friends grouchy texts about.
Brady won his seventh Super Bowl on Sunday night in a thoroughly dominating 31-9 Buccaneers victory over the Chiefs. It was his 10th Super Bowl appearance; no other quarterback has appeared in more than five; no one has won more than four. And the thing about the quarterbacks who held the marks before Brady (John Elway, five appearances; Joe Montana and Terry Bradshaw, four wins) is that those records felt unbreakable when they had them. Five Super Bowls? One guy? Come on. And now Brady has doubled one and nearly doubled the others. And he’s coming back next year too.
As usual, it wasn’t just Brady who won. The Tampa Bay defense relentlessly attacked Kansas City’s would-be Brady heir Patrick Mahomes all night—it was the best I’ve seen any defense play Mahomes since he entered the league. If Brady were still with the Patriots, it was the sort of thing everyone would have credited his former coach Bill Belichick with. But remember, the Buccaneers had a losing record just last season, before Brady had his much-discussed split with Belichick and headed to Florida. Brady showed up, brought in his meatheaded tight end pal Rob Gronkowski and gave the wayward franchise a clear direction.
It was done in the usual polarizing Brady way; paparazzi caught Brady having stealth workouts with his new teammates back in the spring, when the rest of us were supposed to be on lockdown, and the NFL explicitly banned such gatherings. Amusingly, he was even cited for working out in a public park during lockdown; the mayor “pardoned” him last month. It is a very Tom Brady thing to think that the rules and physical restraints of a global pandemic do not apply to him; this is a guy with shady medical advisors and a side market of absurdly overpriced “supplements” with questionable scientific attributes.
Brady was also savvy in picking Tampa Bay: Even though they struggled last year, there was clearly talent there, along with a coach in Bruce Arians who fit Brady’s philosophy and, unlike Belichick, was just happy to be along for the Brady ride. It also helps that when Brady signs up to play for a team, a lot of veterans in search of a title of their own suddenly decide that team sounds like a lot of fun for them to play for too. Brady always makes sure he’s holding winning cards.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Brady is still, somehow, at the age of 43, an uncannily brilliant quarterback, still with that sixth sense of when to throw it, and where. His line in Super Bowl LV is cartoonishly perfect: 21-for-29, 201 yards, three touchdowns, no interceptions. If any other quarterback in the NFL did that in the Super Bowl, we’d say they were a breakthrough talent who will revolutionize the league and the position. When Brady does it, we throw something at our screen and proclaim how sick of that guy we are.
I have written before about the inherent absurdity of how we talk about Brady, how our grandchildren will ask us what it was like to see the greatest football player of all time and we will lie to them and say it was awe-inspiring when we were actually calling him a fascist. But however we process him, he just keeps doing this again and again. My friend, like millions of Americans, will not watch another game until next year’s Super Bowl. And I bet he’s there again, aged 44, pissing her off, pissing off the rest of us, one more time.
Will Leitch is a contributing editor at New York Magazine, national columnist for MLB, a writer for Medium and the founder of Deadspin. Subscribe to his free weekly newsletter and buy his upcoming novel “How Lucky,”out from Harper Books this May.