Bruce Arians isn’t one to mince words or pull punches. The former Tampa Bay head coach who gave up the job 17 days after quarterback Tom Brady ended a 40-day retirement, and who continued to work for the team in 2022, has a theory on why the team struggled last season.
Recently appearing on The Rich Eisen Show, via JoeBucsFan.com, Arians cited injuries to key players (center Ryan Jensen, pass rusher Shaq Barrett) and the fact that the team’s most important player had, as Brady said himself, “a lot of shit going on.”
“Tom wasn’t himself, you know, with all the things that were going on,” Arians told Eisen. “And I got to give him all the credit in the world for battling through what he went through last year for his teammates. I think the world of him but it wasn’t the real Tom Brady out there.”
Currently, not the real Tom Brady is the last of Tom Brady that we’ll see. Whether that’s actually the case depends on whether he eventually changes his mind about not playing in 2023.
As the dust settles on what will have been Brady’s last year, maybe he’ll ultimately decide that he doesn’t want that season to be his last one.