National Football League

Tom Brady's comments on repeating a dose of reality for Buccaneers fans

Published Jun. 12, 2021 7:42 p.m. ET

Winning back-to-back championships in the NFL is extremely hard. Tom Brady should know, as he is the last starting quarterback to do it.

But even as great as the New England Patriots were for the nearly two decades they had Brady under center, you have to go all the way back to 2003 and 2004 when they pulled off the repeat feat.

So, as much as Tampa Bay Buccaneers fans might not like hearing their quarterback’s recent comments on the matter, they might be wise to listen when they start crafting their expectations for the upcoming season.

"I think the assumption comes from the belief that it'll just be exactly like it was last year," Brady said earlier in the week on the difficulties of repeating. "I think that's what you gotta not fall into is that 'oh this is the way it worked last year so this is the way it'll be this year.' The reality is that everything is different."

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Brady went on to explain some of those things that would be different for the Buccaneers in the 2021 season.

"The teams will approach you a little bit differently. You know, you're kind of the team everyone's watching now, so there's different degrees of expectation," he said. "There's more external noise, there'll be more people that are wanting to come to games, more opportunity to do things outside of football. And I think the reality is you've gotta stay focused on what's really important. How do you improve? How do you get better from week-to-week, day-to-day?"

Brady, of course, has lived all of this throughout his career.

He won his first Super Bowl with the 2001 Patriots, then saw the 2002 team go 9-7 and miss the playoffs. Then, after winning the back-to-back titles, he didn’t win another until 2014.

The year after that, his 2015 team fell two points short of Peyton Manning’s Denver Broncos in the AFC title game. Then the Brady-led Pats went to three straight Super Bowls, winning two of them – just not consecutively. The 2016 and 2018 teams won it all, but the 2017 squad lost a 41-33 shootout to Nick Foles, Doug Pederson and the Philadelphia Eagles.

Getting to the Super Bowl is difficult enough. Winning them, Brady knows, is even harder.

All of this might be difficult to see for Buccaneers’ fans, whose last image of their team is of dominance over the Kansas City Chiefs in the Super Bowl. It’s easy to forget the road the team took to get there, including holding off the Green Bay Packers in the NFC title game.

"Even a lot of the games we won last year were very razor-thin margins," Brady said. "One or two plays make the difference in every game."

And it’s even easier to forget that the Bucs were just 7-5 entering December last season, before finishing on a four-game winning streak to earn a postseason wild-card spot.

"It’s unique in (the 2020 Bucs) the fact that they were a good team all year, but they didn’t become a really good team and start to come together until the last two, three games of the regular season into the playoffs," former NFL quarterback Chris Simms said on Pro Football Talk. "So, them playing at a really high level is still going to be new to them, which I think would add excitement."

On top of all this, Brady revealed that he played through a knee injury all of last season.

"It was an injury I dealt with really since last April, May. I knew I would have to do something at the end of the year," Brady said. "(I'm) happy I did it. It was something that certainly needed to be done. There was a great outcome. So I was very happy about that. I'll be able to do some different things this year than I was able to do last year."

That revelation created a strong reaction across the NFL, with plenty of observers scrutinizing Brady’s workouts and pondering what it meant for the upcoming season.

What does all of this mean for the Buccaneers' prospects in the upcoming season? Brady does turn 44 in August, after all, and health issues at any age can be a concern.

Then again, this is not any run-of-the-mill quarterback we’re talking about, but perhaps the greatest of all time. And as Louis Riddick said on ESPN’s "Get Up," he’s different.

"Tom Brady has proven people wrong at every single turn, so when we start talking about his expectations going into 2021, for me they're the same as they've been the last two decades," he said. "Until proven otherwise, I'm going to assign a baseline of excellence to Tom Brady, even coming off a knee surgery, even going into his age-44 season, because … it's just proven that he can elevate the talent that's around him."

And in the end, this might be just Brady trying to communicate to his teammates that the road ahead will be difficult, even with all of their key players returning, and even with a future Hall of Famer at quarterback. Maybe, he just doesn’t want anyone resting on their laurels.

"How I feel about it, and how (Bruce Arians) has talked about it with our team, he's done a great job of keeping us focused, keeping the intensity there, allowing us to continue to work out together and communicate and make improvements that we need to make because I feel like we're not finished products," Brady said. "It was really our first opportunity to play together last year, and there is a lot of opportunity for us to grow."

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers are defending Super Bowl champions. If Brady doesn’t envision them as a finished product, that should be frightening for the rest of the NFL.

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