After a few-days-long hiatus, Tom Brady has poked his head up (on social media) to say goodbye, but just for now.
“I just wanted to say to all of our fans, THANK YOU! After a few days of reflection, I am so grateful and humbled by the unconditional support you have shown me the past two decades,” Brady began the post.
The more significant part comes later: “In both life and football, failure is inevitable,” Brady wrote. “You can, however, learn from that failure, pick yourself up with great enthusiasm, and place yourself in the arena again.”
“And that’s right where you will find me. Because I know I still have more to prove.”
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So Brady still wants back into football for 2020, not retirement. He’s said so many times that he loves football, needs football and wants to play until he’s 45 that this shouldn’t be a huge surprise.
It may seem like he’s stopping short of saying something definitive, like he did when he said after the Patriots’ season-ending loss last Saturday that it was “unlikely, hopefully unlikely” that he’d retire, but wanting back in the arena is a pretty clear message.
You will note that over the course of Brady’s long post, there’s one word that does not appear: Patriots.
That has the same function as the inclusion of the word “hopefully” in is postgame comments last week – it hints at the fact that he’s going to need someone to put him in a good situation to perform the way he wants to next year.
While “hopefully” sounded like more of a reminder that this is a two-way street as Brady is set to hit free agency this March, the post reads in part as assurance to anyone out there who might be in the market for a veteran quarterback of significant acclaim that he’s fired up and motivated. If you were a general manager of a team considering a short-term quarterback situation, wouldn’t you have a hard time thinking about some of the warts of this season’s offense if the image of Brady taking the field to silence the doubters was there to paste over it?
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Don’t take that as a sign that Brady is actively trying to leave New England. The smart read going forward is to look at these as chess moves in a game that’s ultimately about leverage. The fact of the matter is that the triumvirate of Brady, Bill Belichick and Robert Kraft don’t share a perfectly-overlapping set of interests right now, and each of the three is going to try to work public opinion in a way that makes his case seem most reasonable.
It’s going to be a long couple months of jockeying for pole position in negotiations that may or may not work out. There will be enough tea leaves read to fill the Library of Congress. If you are a Patriots fan, take a breath and read your quarterback’s message of thanks. If there’s a little strategy mixed in, consider this: Brady has never hit free agency before and gotten a chance to play these sorts of games. Did you think he would be bad at it?
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Nora Princiotti can be reached at nora.princiotti@globe.com. Follow her on Twitter at @NoraPrinciotti.
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