After an unusual pre-season absence from the team that lasted longer than a week, the superstar quarterback is back. It was another dramatic twist between last season and this one.
With the start of the NFL season now on the horizon, someone very notable took an unusual absence from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers for more than a week: Tom Brady.
Brady, who coach Todd Bowles said on Aug. 12 would be excused and absent, finally returned Monday. Now that he’s back, there may finally be clarity on why he was gone from the team for much of the pre-season as he prepares to play this upcoming season as a 45-year-old.
Brady’s unconventional break from training camp was just the latest in a series of dramatic plot twists involving the superstar quarterback between last season and the new one.
He retired and unretired. His communications with Miami Dolphins brass became part central to an NFL investigation that led the league to take away draft picks and take the extraordinary step of suspending the club’s owner, Stephen Ross.
Then Brady’s strange off-season was capped by an abnormal absence from the Buccaneers during what’s typically seen as a critical period for ramping up towards the season — even if he wouldn’t actually be taking snaps in the pre-season games he missed.
There have been only scant details about Brady’s absence. Bowles said it was scheduled with the team ahead of training camp and that Brady was dealing with “personal things.” Brady hasn’t commented on it. Bowles then added this weekend that Brady was expected back “early” this week before the quarterback arrived for practice Monday, according to reporters who cover the team.
The unusualness of the absence, combined with the lack of information about it, has produced rampant speculation and rumours, some of which are silly even for the NFL.
Focus on Brady’s summer break has been heightened because, for a period of time a few months ago, it looked like Brady might not be with the Buccaneers at all this season. Before last season’s playoffs even ended, reports emerged that the seven-time Super Bowl champion was calling it quits. A few days later, Brady said so himself. That lasted barely a month before Brady tweeted that he was coming back.
“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,” his tweet in March said.
Recent weeks, though, have shed startling new light on other factors that were swirling unseen in the background. There were plans to lure Brady to a different part of Florida.
The NFL’s investigation into the Miami Dolphins spawned from a racial discrimination lawsuit by the team’s former coach, Brian Flores, which also alleged that Ross offered to pay Flores to lose games in order to obtain a better draft pick. Ross denied the allegation, and the league’s findings said nobody at the team, including Ross, instructed Flores to throw games. The lawsuit also alleged that Ross pressured Flores to tamper with a “prominent” quarterback in violation of league rules.
The biggest bombshells from the probe turned out to have to do with that laugh morsel: confirmation that the Dolphins’ brass had violated league rules by having improper communications with a player under contract with another team. That was Brady.
Those communications began as early as August 2019, according to the NFL, when Brady was still with the Patriots. They continued during and after last season, when Brady was a Buccaneer. The talks focused on Brady becoming a limited partner or executive with the team. They also included the possibility of Brady playing for the club — even though Brady remained under contract with Tampa Bay.
The NFL also said the Dolphins broke the rules by having communications with the agent for Sean Payton before the coach had stepped down from his long-time role as coach for the New Orleans Saints. (Brady and Payton, who share an agent, were not penalised.)
As a result, the NFL stripped two draft picks from Miami while fining and suspending both Ross and Bruce Beal, one of the team’s limited partners.
“The investigators found tampering violations of unprecedented scope and severity,” commissioner Roger Goodell said in a statement at the time. “I know of no prior instance of a team violating the prohibition on tampering with both a head coach and star player, to the potential detriment of multiple other clubs, over a period of several years. Similarly, I know of no prior instance in which ownership was so directly involved in the violations.”
It isn’t particularly difficult to see the future the Dolphins potentially envisioned: Payton as coach and Brady as an executive or perhaps still a football player. The problem was that both still had deals with other teams.
That plan didn’t come to fruition. Brady, unretired as a Buccaneer. Payton remains off the sidelines. The Dolphins are going ahead with a different coach, Mike McDaniel, and quarterback, former Alabama star Tua Tagovailoa.
There was yet another buzzy development over the past week suggesting Brady might never have made his way to Tampa Bay in the first place. Dana White, the head of the UFC, said in a conversation with Rob Gronkowski that he nearly brokered a deal for them to go play for the Las Vegas Raiders in 2020 — before Jon Gruden, the then-coach of the team, nixed it.
Now that Brady has returned to the Buccaneers, again, he also faces questions about how he’ll fare on the field because of factors that have nothing to do with his presence. Tampa Bay’s offensive line, which was one of the league’s best when the team won the Super Bowl after the 2020 season, has suffered a rash of ailments and lost another player due to retirement. Star receiver Chris Godwin is still working his way back from an injury. Brady’s longtime security blanket, Gronkowski, also retired.
Despite all of this, there’s good reason to be bullish on the Buccaneers in 2022. They still have Tom Brady.
– Wall Street Journal
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