Tom Brady made his flag-football debut yesterday, and the Las Vegas Raiders minority owner dodged a Crosby question.
Not many teams have experimented with the concept of a player-owner, but Tom Brady’s desire to recapture his NFL glory days remains a well that’s something of a bottomless pit.
Yesterday he made his flag-football debut in a made-for-TV, round-robin tournament, and the results were decidedly mixed, especially when it comes to answering questions about the tackle football team, the Las Vegas Raiders, that he happens to partially own.
Most of the follow-up to this even focused on Brady’s performance, despite the fact that he and his NFL guys got routed by the flag-football specialists from Team USA, 43-16. But Mike Florio of Pro Football Talk focused on Brady’s mostly-successful effort to dodge a question about the ill-fated Maxx Crosby trade.
As Florio noted, the question was unfortunately phrased as a two-parter, which was part of the reason the dodge happened:
“Question about your NFL job. . . . [G.M. John] Spytek has talked about you being more involved in football this year. How will your role be different? And did you have any reaction to the Maxx Crosby trade that didn’t happen?”
This led to Brady flipping the switch into word-salad mode, as he proceeded to come up with the sort of non-answer that makes people wonder if there’s actually still a real human being beneath the celebrity facade.
In short order, Brady professed his love for the NFL, football and sports. He then mentioned New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft in the same sentence with Raiders owner Mark Davis, which sounds like a huge missed opportunity to add a laugh track.
The one thing of substance that Brady added was, “you know, we certainly have a long way to go,” which we actually all do know. After that, though, the fog got a lot thicker.
“What I learned about football in 23 seasons is, it’s a tremendous amount of resilience, adversity, discipline, determination, communication, of an entire organization to see, really the value in committing to one another,” he added.
“So, you know, it’s always, I think, process over outcomes, and I think we’re all trying — and all of us in our own role that we have, and the role that we have, and whether it’s an ownership role or a personnel department or strength and conditioning and athletic training and obviously players and positions and offense, defense — everyone’s got to come together. Everyone has to work incredibly hard for the people next to them.”
For those who enjoy puzzles and challenges, matching up subject and verb in that mess is a formidable one. Also, he missed the janitorial staff and the cafeteria workers. Someday Brady may provide a meaningful answer to this question, perhaps when he goes back to being a genuine human being at some point in the future.