After his first year with the Buccaneers, Tom Brady made a stir when saying of a team that wasn’t interested in him in 2020, “You’re sticking with that mutherf—ker?“
Brady’s recent on-air story about his free-agency process brings the focus of the M.F. remark back to a quarterback with the initials M.T.
Was Brady talking about former Bears top-two draft pick Mitch Trubisky?
At the time, Colin Cowherd said Brady was indeed referring to the Bears when making the remark that sparked plenty of speculation as to whether he was talking about the 49ers and Jimmy Garoppolo, the Titans and Ryan Tannehill, the Raiders and Derek Carr, or someone else.
Brady shed a little light on the three-year-old mystery during his first Fox game in Tampa, filling garbage time by show-and-telling the old-school handwritten notes from his decision-making process.
He said he had 18 criteria. While he might have been exaggerating with that number, he mentioned factors like “salary, weather, facilities, how great the players were.”
Brady then mentioned that the Bears were a potential destination.
“Chicago was a team — and I’ve never told that story before,” Brady said. “They very stealth in their recruitment. I was seriously considering [them]. . . . They were really under the radar. And nobody would have realized that. You know, free agency’s a tricky thing. Once you make the decision, there’s no looking back and there’s no reason to ever tell anybody that.”
But Brady did talk about what might have been when he fired a scud missile at a still-unnamed muthereffer a year after the fact. The fact that he prefaced the profane remark by saying, “One of the teams, they weren’t interested at the very end” makes it not fit with Brady’s more recent comments, which characterized the Bears as a team that wanted him. As a team that didn’t back out “at the very end.”
Regardless, the Bears did stick with that Mitch Trubisky in 2020, adding Bradykiller Nick Foles to the roster. (Foles, by the way, beat Brady on the night in 2020 when he forgot which down it was.) The still-unanswered question is whether Brady was talking about Trubisky or someone else in 2021.
Maybe the next time a Brady game lands in garbage time, Kevin Burkhardt will try to pry it out of him.