Tom Brady's retirement post through the eyes of a Patriots fan

By Charlotte Wilder
FOX Sports Columnist

Tom Brady has finally announced his retirement. I say "finally" because reports broke Saturday that Brady was leaving the league, but he wouldn’t confirm them. 

I also say "finally" because, since about five or six years ago, the NFL world has been wondering when this man would hang up his cleats. When he was 38 or 39, questions started to percolate: How much longer can this guy do this? 

The answer was, well, maybe forever. Brady went on to play the best football of his life in his 40s. That is, until Tuesday, when he announced that he was officially done at the age of 44. 

Brady probably could've continued to play at a high level for several more seasons. But the Tampa Bay Buccaneers may be entering a rebuild, and Brady has cited a desire to focus on other endeavors, such as his clothing company, his media company, his crypto company (?) and, of course, his TB12 apparel/workout/training/hydration company. Brady also seems to want to make his family his main focus after so many years spent in practice facilities, on the road, in dark rooms watching film and making sure he got enough sleep. 

I didn’t doubt the reports Saturday that Brady was leaving the NFL. But Brady said it was "day to day," his father denied that he was retiring, and the Bucs said their QB had yet to inform them of a decision.

I laughed at the thought that perhaps Brady was so angry that he didn’t have a chance to make the announcement himself — and he probably hated that it dominated the news cycle on conference championship weekend — that he would play another year out of spite. I have learned to never underestimate this man, and so Brady’s retirement wouldn’t feel completely real until he himself announced it. 

On Tuesday, he did. 

In Brady’s retirement post on Instagram, he started with a picture of himself in a Bucs uniform. He then posted several slides of text. In his statement, Brady thanks his Bucs teammates, Bucs fans, the city of Tampa, Bucs owners the Glazer family, Bucs GM Jason Licht, Bucs head coach Bruce Arians, Bucs coaches, Bucs staffers, his longtime trainer-slash-friend-slash-nutrition guy (??) Alex Guerrero, his longtime agents Don Yee and Steve Dubin, his parents, his family and, finally, his wife, Gisele Bündchen, and his three kids, Jack, Benjamin and Vivian. He also mentioned his business ventures by Instagram handle. 

There was not a single mention of the New England Patriots. And people are talking about it.

Now, I have accidentally built a role for myself as the resident expert on Tom Brady’s social media. It all began when I became obsessed with the TB Times, the fake newspaper Brady posted on Instagram after every Patriots win starting in 2017. Most panels featured a crocodile in a trenchcoat whose name was Croc, and I became completely obsessed with deciphering what he represented.

I looked up the HTML code of the TB Times website. I sleuthed around the internet and found the artist who illustrated the pictures. I DMed him constantly and badgered Brady’s social media guy every week. I even went to Brady’s news conference at the 2018 Super Bowl in Minneapolis and screamed, "Who is Croc?!" at the top of my lungs, which was difficult because I had no voice after contracting the flu.

I even drew my own. 

Brady told me that we would find out about Croc if the Patriots won, which they didn’t, and so I spent two more years of my life obsessing over the answer. 

Brady brought Croc back in 2019, after he won his last Super Bowl with the Patriots. I freaked out.

Finally, after Brady signed with the Bucs in 2020, his social media team agreed to talk to me. They basically told me they were flying by the seat of their pants the whole time and didn’t really know who Croc was or why he existed. They also told me a lot about Brady’s approach to social media.

It turns out that the media operation around Brady is staggering. He launched his own creative agency called Shadow Lion, which, according to its website, "was founded in 2017 with the goal of supporting Tom Brady’s off-field media efforts." The company is run by Brady’s longtime friends from Boston, Ben Rawitz, Jeff Fine and Gilad Haas. Shadow Lion also does work for other athletes, influencers and organizations. 

Fine, who started as Brady’s assistant in 2014, and Fine’s friend, illustrator Dean Krupka, were responsible for Croc and the TB Times. Shadow Lion now makes some of the best hype videos and social content in the game.

The main takeaway? Fine and Krupka told me that everything Brady does online is more deliberate than you might imagine. Every detail matters, and every detail is planned. Brady would obsess over each image and make Krupka change things he didn’t like. 

Once, the social media team turned Brady into Captain Planet, and Brady made them take him out of the drawing altogether. He wanted the focus to be on his teammates, not himself, and so the artists had to scramble after a win to post the edited version. Things like that happened several times.

It might seem silly to become obsessed with a cartoon crocodile, and trust me, it was. But diving into Brady’s social media taught me more about how Brady operates than I ever would have thought. 

And given that Brady is that meticulous about his image and images, the omission of his time with the Patriots in his retirement announcement feels pretty significant. 

Because it was definitely not a mistake. 

My first instinct as a Patriots fan was to hope that it didn’t mean that much. I wondered if not mentioning the Patriots could be Brady’s way of downplaying the significance of the announcement itself. Given his not wanting to be the center of those drawings and the way he deferred to teammates after Super Bowl wins and the fact that he thanked his teammates first in his message, I get the sense that Brady is very careful to appear humble. I therefore wouldn’t be surprised if he really wanted his retirement message to focus on the past two years. 

He already bid his farewell to New England a few years ago. Retiring is a huge deal for this man, and perhaps he was trying to soften the magnitude, to make it more emotionally and mentally manageable, by keeping it contained to his time in Florida.

But still — he’s retiring. And 20 of his 22 years in the NFL were spent in New England. Whether he intended it to be or not, it’s a big deal to leave the Patriots out of his statement. 

Brady did, however, repost the Patriots’ tribute on his story. It was almost as though he posted something on main for his best friend’s birthday and then posted something on his story for that ex-best friend whose family he became really close to and therefore couldn't totally ignore. Stories disappear after 24 hours, so if we’re really reading the tea leaves here, it seems like Brady would rather remember his time with the Bucs. Which was 9.09% of his career. 

Let me caveat this: I’m willing to bet Brady has another move coming that will focus on his entire career. Shadow Lion might have an epic video in the can. I have tried to ask them about this, but in a throwback move to 2018, Fine has yet to respond to my requests for comment. 

If my first hypothesis isn’t correct, however, and Brady isn’t trying to downplay his retirement with that post, that would lead to hypothesis No. 2. Which is that Brady is still angry with the Patriots, despite having proven his greatness beyond all doubt (which I would argue he could only have done by separating from Bill Belichick). 

The Patriots are, after all, the team that shipped him off when he said he could still play, that didn’t offer him control over the roster and decisions the way the Bucs did. Belichick is the coach who didn’t believe that Brady could perform at the highest level after the age of 42. Things got famously messy, and it would be completely natural if Brady were still salty about the fact that he had to leave the only NFL home he’d ever known. 

He did so much for New England; the Patriots had never won a Super Bowl before him, and he brought six back. He made the Patriots more popular than the Red Sox and the Celtics and the Bruins and spawned a generation of fans wearing the No. 12 on their backs and chests and inked into their skin.

Brady is the most beloved athlete in the northeast and the reason Patriots fans are insufferable. He brought us immeasurable joy. And he probably feels like the place he gave everything to shoved him out the door before he was ready to go.

Do I blame him for not including this fan base and organization in his announcement? No. I think at this point, the man has earned the right to do whatever he wants. Does it bum me out a little? Yes. Even my mom — who does not follow football unless I’m covering a game because she is a lovely, supportive woman — said it made her sad. 

Brady was a huge part of every NFL fan’s life for so long, but he meant so much to everyone in New England. Patriots fans can map significant moments of their lives by his accomplishments, and he provided a steady constant in a very turbulent world. It felt strange for none of that to be acknowledged as his unmatched career came to an end.

It also makes me sad to think that Brady might still feel discarded by a place that loved him so fiercely. Fans didn’t have any say over whether he stayed or went, and they certainly weren’t in the rooms where decisions were made. For the past two years, my almost-91-year-old grandmother watched two NFL games every week: the Patriots' and the Buccaneers'. I would imagine that many other people in New England did, too. 

The emotions around Brady’s departure were complicated — I have to admit that I wondered in 2020 if it weren’t for the best, if it was time to move on to another quarterback. But a lot of my hedging, I am now realizing, was to mask my intense sadness that the man whose name had become synonymous with the Patriots wasn’t with the team anymore. It felt too big to contemplate. It still does.

Reading into social media is a slippery slope, and speculation is often wrong. But despite his superhuman ability, Brady is still a human, and humans have feelings. And in my time as an Instagram sleuth — if you think I’ve gone down rabbit holes on the NFL, imagine the dirt I’ve dug up on people I actually know — I’ve learned that your first impulse as to why someone does or doesn’t post something is often correct. 

It just doesn’t have to mean as much as it might appear to. And you never know. We could wake up tomorrow with a new post from Brady thanking New England for everything. 

If so, I just really hope Croc makes an appearance.

Charlotte Wilder is a general columnist and cohost of "The People's Sports Podcast" for FOX Sports. She's honored to represent the constantly neglected Boston area in sports media, loves talking to sports fans about their feelings and is happiest eating a hotdog in a ballpark or nachos in a stadium. Follow her on Twitter @TheWilderThings.