For the first half of Tom Brady’s NFL career, I stubbornly held onto one of football’s hottest of hot takes. “Dude’s a Hall of Fame kicker (Adam Vinatieri) away from going down in history as a backup from Michigan,” I would say. At the time I was an assignment editor at Fox Sports and one of the broadcasts I worked on was NFL on Fox. So it was very easy for me to track down a random, foul-mouthed Bostonian producer and pick fights on a daily basis. I became well versed in my anti-Tom Brady narratives during this part of my life (seriously, I’m daring you, comments section).
Years before, when I was an impressionable and fragile youngster, the man crushed my soul as the beneficiary of the most horsesh** (non)fumble ruling in the game’s history. He then watched his kicker drill two monumental field goals in the middle of a freakin’ blizzard, en route to a historically pathetic franchise’s first taste of glory. My team’s season was wiped away in an instant while a 199th draft pick was catapulted from near obscurity to super stardom. When the Patriots eventually won that Super Bowl a few weeks later, young Tommy once again led his offense just far enough downfield to put the fate of his season on the leg of Vinatieri while time expired. As you know by now, Tom Brady got all the glory. It wasn’t long before the Patriots won another Super Bowl on the leg of Vinatieri as the final seconds wound down. Naturally, Brady was named Super Bowl MVP instead of, you know, the guy that had made the game winning play…again. It seemed as if any time TB12 came up short, objectively speaking, the world spun his fortunes into a ball of All-American virtues and placed them on the shoulders and smug half-smile of this handsome California kid. I don’t sound like I’m still bitter, do I?
A few weeks ago Brady celebrated the biggest Super Bowl choke job in the history of professional sports when a group of professional athletes forgot to play the second half of a game. He’s clearly a better quarterback than a skier (not a good surfer, either. Kook).”What other high-profile athlete would post a pic of themselves eating absolute shit in the kid’s terrain park,” The Inertia Mountain Editor and Tom Brady super fan, Joe Carberry wrote, “double ejecting, no less, and back it up to a classic South Park episode?” I could hammer out another bitter 500 words on that alone, but I won’t. The rest of The Inertia staff is sick of it. Anyway, current Patriots placekicker Stephen Gostkowski just took us back to the good old days of New England kickers one-upping their quarterback then getting next to no credit for it. While Brady’s unoriginal meme and yardsale footage went viral and everybody thought, “Oh how cool, Tom Brady’s just like us. That’s classy,” Gostkowski casually threw down this backflip to troll his QB. With style. It probably won’t blow up your social feeds or be talked about on sports radio because, unlike every simple and stupid thing Tom Brady does, kickers that are rad get little attention. But I appreciate you, Mr. Gostkowski. You could kick a 70-yarder to win next year’s Super Bowl and we both know the Ugg model would get that MVP trophy as another legacy award. But at least you don’t double eject coming off a kiddy slope kicker.
Or it was all just a hoax with a fancy bit of video trickery and a shredding stunt double. Either way, Tom Brady still sucks.
