As a living, breathing, Super Bowl-winning advertisement for his TB12 Sports brand, Tom Brady has a clear financial incentive to want to play football as long as possible.
But as recently as 2019, the 43-year-old star quarterback admitted he was targeting playing until the age of 45 before hanging up his football cleats for good.
“I think it is important for athletes to have short-term goals and long-term goals. I have set that number for a long time, and I work pretty hard at it every day,” Brady told Jim Gray on Westwood One in 2019. “I am not a robot out there. It’s a lot of time and energy, and I enjoy putting my time and energy in those places and taking care of myself. Hopefully, to afford myself the ability to play as long as I want to play.”
Now less than a week away from playing in the Super Bowl for the 10th time, the longtime New England Patriot is moving the goalposts about his retirement age.
During a media availability on Monday ahead of Super Bowl LV on Sunday, Brady said he would “definitely” consider playing past the age of 45.
“I’d definitely consider that,” Brady said Monday. “It’s a physical sport. Just the perspective I have on that is you never know when that moment is. Just because it’s a contact sport. There’s a lot of training that goes into it. And it has to be 100% commitment from myself to keep doing it … It’s just going to be me continuing to make that commitment to making it part of my year-round process to play football and continue my career.”
That’s great news for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who have Brady under contract for next season at a totally reasonable $25 million salary, and bad news for the rest of the NFL.
Brady, who was third in the NFL during the regular season with 4,633 passing yards and tied for second with 40 touchdowns, continued to look like an upper-tier QB this season and will almost certainly be offered a contract extension if the Buccaneers win the Super Bowl over the Kansas City Chiefs to capture the team’s first championship since the 2002 season.
Win or lose, don’t expect Brady to retire after Sunday’s game and end his career after 21 seasons to stay at home with his wife Gisele Bundchen and their two children.
“When to walk away, that’s a good question,” Brady said Monday. “I think I’ll know when it’s time. I don’t know when that time will come but I think I’ll know, and I’ll understand that I gave everything I could to get to this game … When I put it all out there and I feel like I can’t do that anymore and I don’t feel like I can commit to the team in the way that the team needs me, then I think that’s probably time to walk away.”
Based on what Brady’s saying, that time won’t be anytime soon.
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