NFL (American Football)

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Allenatore
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Brock Purdy is going to be facing a defence unlike any other he has played in the most hostile environment in the NFL.

Like Slay said in the post match interview against the Giants, “Philly is lit as fuck!”

Fly Eagles Fly!
 
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DiegoMilito22

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Wasn't afccg supposed to be played in a neutral stadium? Why is it at Arrowhead?
 

junkie

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it would be played if Bills won, but we all know how that went...who dey :cool:
 

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Allenatore
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Tom Brady’s Last Season Didn’t Go as Planned. Was It Worth It?​

He thrilled his fans by announcing that he would come out of retirement to play one more season in 2022, but things soon went sour, on and off the field.

By Kris Rhim
Feb. 1, 2023, 5:49 p.m. ET

The debates on sports talk shows and in barbershops about who is the greatest football player of all time will always start with Tom Brady. He is the most accomplished player in N.F.L. history, with two decades of dominance over the sport. But along with all of the exclamation points — seven Super Bowl titles! five Super Bowl Most Valuable Player Awards! — Brady’s career also now carries a question mark:

Should he have come back for one last season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers after initially retiring last year?

Brady, who announced his retirement again on Wednesday, saying he meant it this time, did not have the kind of year, either on the field or off, that he had been used to when he returned to the Buccaneers at age 45. His season and his career ended in a 31-14 loss to the Dallas Cowboys in an N.F.C. wild-card game last month, but things had started to unravel long before that.

Because of his style as a pocket passer (even early in his career he was not a scrambler), Brady relied heavily on having a talented offensive line that could give him time to find open receivers. The Buccaneers had built one of the best offensive lines in the league. But before this season, guard Alex Cappa bolted for the Bengals in free agency, guard Ali Marpet retired and center Ryan Jensen suffered a knee injury in training camp that sidelined him for the regular season.

Brady himself missed 11 days in training camp to attend to what Coach Todd Bowles called “some personal things.” His absence generated speculation about Brady and his relationship with the former model Gisele Bündchen. In October, the couple divorced after 13 years of marriage, one day after the Buccaneers’ fifth loss in six games.

Throughout the season, the Buccaneers’ offense struggled to score and Brady threw for just 25 touchdowns, tied for the fifth-worst total of his career as a full-time starter. Brady had never hidden his frustrations with a struggling offense, whether while playing with the New England Patriots or Tampa Bay, sometimes slamming tablet computers on the sideline or yelling at linemen.

This year, Brady turned to a new tactic when frustrated: tripping or kicking defensive players. Brady kicked Falcons defensive lineman Grady Jarrett at the end of a play in a Week 5 win and was fined $11,139 by the N.F.L. In the postseason loss to Dallas, Brady tried to slide tackle Cowboys safety Malik Hooker. (The slide tackle, illegal in football, is allowed in soccer.) The N.F.L. fined Brady $16,444. He planned to appeal because, he said on his podcast, “I didn’t even hit him. I tried to trip him, but I didn’t.”

The problems off the field continued. Brady endorsed FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange that collapsed last year. Many of the millions of people who lost money expressed some animus toward Brady and other celebrity endorsers. Brady himself was a major shareholder in FTX, according to a court document, and his stake went from tens of millions of dollars to virtually zero.

“I sure don’t feel bad for him,” said Lee Smith, a retired tight end whom the Patriots drafted before he played 11 seasons with Buffalo, Oakland, and Atlanta. “Maybe his crypto losses I feel the worst for him on. And his family stuff because, once again, man, the guy’s a human being. He’s not a robot.”

Brady’s human vulnerability caught up with him. Getting hit by abnormally large men is a part of a quarterback’s job description, but in his final year Brady seemed afraid to face that, which was perhaps understandable given his age. Whether because of fear, pressure in the pocket, or both, he made throws into the ground to avoid hits and threw a costly interception in the season-ending loss to the Cowboys. This year’s Buccaneers finished with the worst record (8-9) of any team for which Brady was the full-time starter in his N.F.L. career. And the Buccaneers were only in the playoffs because their division, the N.F.C. South, was the worst in the N.F.L.

Pundits stopped bloviating about how great Brady was for his age and insisting he could play into his 50s, as they did when he retired the first time, and began begging him to quit.

“You out here looking like somebody that’s stealing money,” Marcus Spears, a former N.F.L. defensive lineman who is now an ESPN personality, said on a podcast. He added: “Bro, go home, bro. Go home. Figure out something else to do. I know it’s Tom Brady. I know it’s the G.O.A.T. You scared to get hit, and you play football. Those two things don’t align.”

Many debated whether Brady, who was a free agent after the 2022 season, would sign with another team. The San Francisco 49ers, his favorite team as a child in the Bay Area, seem to be a good quarterback away from a Super Bowl appearance. The Las Vegas Raiders have Brady’s longtime offensive coordinator, Josh McDaniels, as their head coach and many talented offensive players.

“Honestly, after watching tonight’s game, who would want Tom Brady starting on their team next year?” Ryan Clark, a former N.F.L. defensive back who works as an ESPN personality, wrote on Twitter after the Buccaneers’ loss to the Cowboys.

So was coming back in 2022 worth it for Brady? He will likely answer that one day on his podcast or on a Fox broadcast, where he will be a commentator. Brady wasn’t terrible in his final season; he threw for the third-most passing yards in the league and the sixth-highest total of his career. But he was clearly not the player he once was, nor did he have a championship-level team around him. So Brady’s career, which had played out like the perfect Hollywood movie, came to what seemed to be an unsettling end.

“All of us have to go out on our terms, or we won’t be happy, and most of us don’t get to leave on our own terms,” said Smith, who retired after the 2021 season, his 11th in the N.F.L. “They make that decision for you. So I think that it was worth it because he gets to have the closure that he walked away when he was supposed to.”
 
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Allenatore
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Tom Brady’s Retirement Is the Best Thing for Football​

Give Brady his due but let Patrick Mahomes and all of the other young, exciting quarterbacks take it from here.

By Kurt Streeter
Feb. 1, 2023, 3:18 p.m. ET

There is no reason for sadness.

This is a time for celebration and fond remembrance.

Tom Brady retiring at 45, seven Super Bowl rings on his fingers, as he sits comfortably atop the list for nearly every significant passing category in football, is a reminder that time has its way with all of us — even those who seemed like they had found the fountain of youth.

It is a chance to give Brady his due but also celebrate this: Just as he leaves the game, a new wave of quarterbacks took center stage in this season’s playoffs. They are young, confident and collected — Tom Brady traits — and they even offer a little more. They possess true out-of-the-pocket mobility and a fleetness of foot that Brady lacked.

Also, this year’s Super Bowl will feature two Black starting quarterbacks for the first time, Kansas City’s Patrick Mahomes and Philadelphia’s Jalen Hurts. They are 27 and 24 years old, respectively.

They could be Tom Brady’s sons.

Should we be surprised and even skeptical of Brady’s retirement announcement? Remember that last year on this date, Brady also announced he was leaving the game. He wrote a heartfelt note and posted it on social media. Months later, itching for the drama of competition, he returned to the game that had defined his life.

Brady nodded to that hiccup in his Instagram post this morning. “I’m retiring … for good,” he said in his video, which, fittingly, he appeared to have shot while hanging out on a beach. “I know the process was a pretty big deal last time, so when I woke up this morning, I figured I’d just press record and let you guys know first.”

He continued: “You only get one super emotional retirement essay, and I used mine up last year.”

Stifling tears, he acknowledged family, friends, teammates and fellow competitors. “Thank you, guys, for allowing me to live my absolute dream. I wouldn’t change a thing. I love you all,” he said.

Let’s take him at his word. Brady’s 13-year marriage to the model Gisele Bündchen ended in divorce last year. He most likely has much in his personal life to attend to. The lavish contract, said to be worth at least $375 million over the next decade to be a commentator for Fox Sports as soon as the next season, should help ease the pain of career transition.

This is the right moment.

Brady looked creaky this season. True, he put up good numbers and remained among the league’s best passers.

Yet as his team limped to an 8-9 record, barely making the wild-card round of the playoffs, there were games in which he missed target after target, looked lost, and in which a hungrier opponent from the jump poleaxed his team, and him. There he lay at 45, struggling beneath a pile of defensive linemen.

Watching, it was hard not to wonder: Why keep playing?

Why, Tom, after seven Super Bowls and three league M.V.P. awards and a narrative for the ages: the skinny, slow, middle-round draft pick climbs his way to a place on football’s Mount Rushmore, sits atop it, stays and stays. Why keep going?

Brady and the Buccaneers’ season ended badly: a 31-14 loss to the Dallas Cowboys.

And yet … it was only two years ago when he won a Super Bowl, beating Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs. The safe bet was that Brady would keep going, maybe even try to play until he was 50, perhaps for the San Francisco 49ers, his beloved boyhood team.

The fact that being on an N.F.L. team at a half-century years old seemed possible — that’s surely another sign of his greatness.

What memories he provided. There are far too many to recount here fully, but several stand out. Brady, in 2002, his second season and first as a starter, leading the Patriots over the St. Louis Rams in the Super Bowl on the wing of a last-minute drive.

Brady — or should we have called him Tom Houdini? — in the Super Bowl of 2017, forging an escape for the ages, overcoming a third-quarter score of 28-3 on the way to beating the Atlanta Falcons, 34-28.

Wait, how did he do that? We asked the question with such metronomic constancy as Brady led his teams from the brink that it might as well have been a meme.

Yes, there was luck. Ask any Raiders fan about the notorious Tuck Rule Game. And yes, there were shenanigans. Ask any Indianapolis Colts fan about Deflategate, and they will offer chapter and verse.

Still, luck and bending the rules hardly define him.

What defines Brady, along with all the winning, is the way he bent time.

Off the field, he pushed common notions of longevity in sport with his obsessive, out-of-the-box training: resistance bands instead of weights; water, lots of electrolyte water; sleep, lots of recovery sleep. What did he eat, something like 20 protein-rich, nutrition-packed micro-meals a day?

On the field, well, he was something else to behold. He slowed minutes, owned seconds and put the hours in his hip pocket.

To watch him operate late in a game, everything on the line, his team behind but within striking distance, was to watch something uncanny and ethereal.

Everything could be breaking down into shambles around him, but No. 12 had a way of maintaining composure. Slowly, surely, carefully, he would walk from the huddle toward his center, line up his receivers and survey the scene, tall, sure, and oh-so-confident. And then — snap — Brady would deliver a sudden, perfectly placed bolt to his receivers. He did this so often and for so many years (46 fourth-quarter comebacks, 58 game-winning drives) that it took effort to keep from becoming numb to the certainty.

What a glorious ride.

But now, after 23 seasons, it’s the right moment to leave.

Mahomes and all of the other young sons of Tom Brady are ready to take it from here.
 
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DiegoMilito22

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I was pretty busy in the past week and finished watching the conference championships right now. Damn, the refereeing in the Chiefs Bengals game was beyond pathetic.
 

brehme1989

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Nostradamus
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NFL teams have stupid names
 

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Allenatore
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Commanding bottom of the NFC East and possibly the most dysfunctional franchise in the NFL!

Fly Eagles Fly!
 
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Helenio Herrera

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Phila fans weren't ready for this but it's unavoidable

Phila only won once and that's because Belichick's the greater evil

Man that town is shitty. The fuck's a philly bro lmao fuck horses and fuck that onion cheez whiz abomination
 

Helenio Herrera

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Them dirty eagles thought they can injure opponent QBs to victory... They did my boy Purdy in... Inb4 Mahomes powers through the ankle to manhandle them eagles.
 

Helenio Herrera

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Trailing in the postseason for the first time? No worries, Mr. Hurts the clutchman will go three and out. LMAO that returnnnn LMAO where are u Eagles fanss huh
 

Helenio Herrera

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An entire city's hopes & dreams vs. Andy "Big Red" Reid & Mahomes standing on one ankle

Who would win?
 

Helenio Herrera

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Remember the 2011 Eagles aka the dream team? Remember them thinking Andy Reid was the problem. Lmao
 

Helenio Herrera

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Lol the refs are out to get them dirty eagles hahaha they'll cry about this for at least four years
 

Helenio Herrera

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Ahahahaahha that's gold my buddies from Philly thought they were kind of winning there at the end that was perfect

Non-Americans of the forum: Did you know that Kansas City is not in Kansas? Trippy.

My condolences to the forum eagles. Maybe once Reid retires
 
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