Tom Brady given gloomy 2019 outlook by Shannon Sharpe
Shannon Sharpe, host of “Undisputed” on FS1, predicted that 2019 would be Tom Brady’s final season in the NFL… and that he’d have a terrible year as well.
Raining on the Tom Brady parade has become an annual tradition every NFL offseason, a sort of rite of passage for many fans and analysts of professional football. Unless you’re a hardcore Patriots fan, it’s that time of year where it’s once again fashionable to predict that Brady is over-the-hill, washed up, and sure to suck in the coming season.
After all, it happened to Brett Favre, and it happened to Peyton Manning. It’s long since started with Eli Manning, too. Sooner or later, Father Time is bound to catch up with Tom Terrific, and this is the time of year when people most like to forecast gloom and doom for the New England living legend.
Of course, we’ve seen this all before too many times. Despite going to the Super Bowl in four of the past five seasons – and winning three of them – critics still want to dissect Brady’s stat lines and try to find telltale flaws and signs of decline, even if there are none to be found.
The latest naysayer is none other than Shannon Sharpe, the superb Denver Broncos tight end who currently co-hosts “Undisputed” on FS1 alongside Skip Bayless. Sharpe and Bayless started debating Brady’s upcoming 2019 season on Thursday, and the outspoken former football great didn’t pull any punches.
“I think this year he’s gonna take some shots and say, ‘You know what? This is it. This is enough. Six Super Bowls, 20 years.’ Not to say they’re not gonna be good. I believe they’ll be good again as long as this duo is there, coach (Bill) Belichick and Tom Brady, and they play in that crap division that is the AFC East,” Sharpe said during the TV segment.
Bayless asked Sharpe how confident he was in his assessment that 2019 would be Brady’s final season, on a scale of 1 to 10. While initially starting at an 8 1/2, Sharpe later upped the ante by bumping his number up to 9.
"“We get jaded in that the Patriots won the Super Bowl again and Tom Brady was historically great throughout the entirety of the season. That was not the case,” Sharpe declared. “And so I believe this year will be Tom Brady’s — as a matter of fact as we speak, I’m at a nine right now because I believe he will take a few hits that will leave Tom Brady spending more time on the injury report. Not saying he will miss any time. I believe he’ll have the worst year of his career in the last five or six years.”"
It’s one thing to predict that the soon-to-be 42-year-old will retire after the upcoming NFL season; it’s quite another to predict that Brady will have the “worst year of his career in the last five or six years.”
Next. Patriots preparing for possibility Brady retires after 2019. dark
After all, Brady won the regular season league MVP just two seasons ago, and he won the Super Bowl last season. Predicting a steep drop-off will magically occur almost overnight to a player who has made a career out of proving his doubters wrong and extending his own remarkable longevity just seems like folly at this point… but Sharpe is entitled to his opinion.
However wrong that opinion might be this time next year. We shall see…