Twice-retired quarterback Tom Brady hopes he doesn’t have company in the form of Aaron Rodgers.
“You know what, I hope he doesn’t retire,” Brady said during the latest episode of his Let’s Go! podcast from SiriusXM. “Because like I said, I think the league needs good quarterbacks and he’s one of the greats. So if he retires it’ll be a sad day for the league.”
Brady seemed to endorse Rodgers’s plan to conduct a four-day darkness retreat before making a decision on whether to play.
“He’s an incredible player and everyone has their different processes they go through,” Brady told Jim Gray. “And you know what, I think we all need to get off our phone a little bit more. I think we all need to get away from the TV a little bit more. I think we all need a little more nature and a little more silence and a little more peace. And however he’s going about it, good for him.”
Brady is right. But it’s one thing to turn off the phone during family dinner. It’s quite another to voluntarily be locked in a room devoid of light for four days.
“Everyone’s got their unique way to process the season,” Brady said. “It’s very intense for all of us and everyone gets to choose what they want to do. But certainly from the standpoint of him leaving the game the way that he’s playing, he broke his thumb this year and still played tremendous. And you could see as he got healthy throughout the year how incredibly talented he is. So I hope the good players keep playing. That’s what my hope is. That’s what I tried to do. And now you hope that the next generation does that and I hope they have the tools necessary to do that. I was very fortunate to work with a guy [in] Alex [Guerrero], who is my best friend, a brother to me and taught me so much. I hope these other guys like Patrick [Mahomes] can play a long time. And Jalen [Hurts] can play a long time. And Josh [Allen] and Joe Burrow and these tremendous players that bring so much. That’s why we watch, not because of the color of the jerseys, because of the players in the jerseys.”
Tom Brady could still be one of those names. He said last week that he knows he can still play, and that he wants to play.
As Brady said, it’s about the players. And Brady is one of the all-time greats. With Mahomes now at two rings and working on three, maybe Brady will still decide to come back and try to get to eight.
