Is Tom Brady still the most hated player in football?

By Martin Rogers
FOX Sports Columnist

"I hate Tom Brady," said Monty G, a Philadelphia Eagles superfan and hype man, last weekend, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, releasing a phrase that has been spoken often and by many across the past couple of decades.

Brady hate is real and has been a hobby within the sport of football for a good long time. It is real enough that there was no shortage of material when the seven-time Super Bowl champion appeared on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" last year and rattled off some of the "Mean Tweets" written about him.

"Is there really anyone you’d rather see dropped in a vat of rendered bacon fat than Tom Brady?" read one of the more graphically imaginative offerings, which sent the QB into fits of laughter as he read it.

Even Brady himself has wondered publicly why he has generated so much animosity from fans of rival teams, though you can also tell he kind of likes it.

"Great question! Why do so many people hate Tom Brady?" he tweeted, when Gotham Chopra’s "Religion of Sports" podcast recently explored the topic.

And yet, after he once again put himself and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers in prime position for another title push, there are signs that Brady isn’t hated anywhere near as much anymore.

Sure, the wounds for Monty and his Eagles friends are real and fresh after last weekend’s wild-card beatdown, but you don’t hear the same sentiment uttered as much these days.

Brady, at 44 and in search of another slice of history, might still be able to throw it with zip and accuracy, but has he lost his knack for infuriating everyone except his team’s loyalists to the point of distraction?

A simple answer is that he left the New England Patriots. Everyone who doesn’t possess Bostonian sympathy had gotten sick of the sight of the Pats winning it all, time after time, behind a combo of Bill Belichick’s coaching and Brady’s calm relentlessness.

It seemed unfair. It was too much. It was the strong getting stronger, the rich getting richer. It was time to give someone else a chance. When Brady’s jersey was stolen after Super Bowl LI, the haters smirked. When New England got Philly Special-ed and Brady dropped a pass on a trick play a year later, they rejoiced.

"The Patriots have just gotten too damn good," Chopra, Brady’s friend and co-collaborator on his television series, "Man In The Arena," said. "So people wanted the team and its star quarterback to go down. It is a fundamental human desire to hate on the great."

But as Brady somehow gets even greater, the hate is waning. For a start, all that dominance that irked people is now restricted to Brady and Brady only, not his present team. Only the coldest of hearts would begrudge the Bucs their long-awaited success after they held the worst winning percentage across major men's American sports when he arrived.

Fan emotion is a strange thing and is often more about other fans than players or even teams. The worst part for rival supporters during the Patriots' dynasty was the simple reality that another group of die-hards got to experience winning all the time, while their own team didn’t. As the figure primarily responsible for that, Brady was the outlet for frustration.

There is also the part of the Patriot Way that in some ways prevented the American sports public from getting to know Brady on a deeper level. That quickly changed when he joined Tampa Bay and was suddenly with a franchise that wanted him out there, giving interviews and expressing his personality.

Even for those who dearly want to dislike him, Brady comes across as a pretty decent guy who isn't afraid to poke fun at himself, and people are seeing that with more frequency.

On Sunday, he will be back under center as the Bucs host the Los Angeles Rams with a spot in the NFC Championship Game at stake. Truth be told, there is no widespread swell of desperation to see Brady get knocked off. Football fans are a fickle bunch, but they recognize greatness when they see it.

As time ticks on and numbers and stats pile up, the hate has begun to seem a little petty. There’s too much proof of excellence that gets in the way, along with other stuff, such as wondering how it can be that he’ll be 45 at the start of next season, how it's real that he has won 35 playoff games and how he does what he does at such an elite level as contemporaries (Ben Roethlisberger was the latest) fade into retirement.

FOX Bet has Tampa Bay as a narrow, 3-point favorite over the Rams, who recorded a comfortable 34-24 victory over the Bucs when the teams met in Week 3.

"It only gets tougher from here," Brady admitted.

If the Bucs prevail — and it’s always difficult to bet against Brady — he would move to within a game of one more piece of statistical absurdity: an 11th Super Bowl appearance.

Such an outcome would surely prompt a few more "I hate Tom Bradys" from sore Rams fans, but likely not so many — which might be the most unexpected part of this — from everyone else.

Martin Rogers is a columnist for FOX Sports and the author of the FOX Sports Insider Newsletter. You can subscribe to the newsletter here.