Patriots: Did Tom Brady take Gronk-related shot at Pats culture?

Former Patriots QB Tom Brady knows the “real” Rob Gronkowski so well that he nabbed him and took him down to Tampa with him last offseason when the time felt right.

It goes without saying, then, that Brady knows exactly what he’s doing when he brings up Gronk’s name to make a point about how much fun football is again down in Florida.

We’re getting pretty tired of this whole charade, and would really like to move on.

Of course, when you spend 20 wonderful years with a person, sometimes, you just can’t quite let each other go, especially since the ending was bizarrely un-storybook.

Brady brought up Gronk’s renewed will to play the game of football again this week.

Call it an “indirect” jab all you want, but it reads to us as a clear shot at the team that clouded his previous experience and made the game less fun than it should be.

Did Tom Brady take a shot at the Patriots’ culture using Rob Gronkowski as an example?

Listen to Brady himself tell it:

"“For someone who’s watching him for a long time, he had it, it faded away,” Brady said. “He ended up retiring because he didn’t find the joy that he had. To see him regain it is one of the really great, satisfying things for me in pro sports. I wish the best for him every single day and every single time he performs because the kind of guy he is. If you’re going into battle, you want to go in with Rob Gronkowski on your side.”"

Now, the reason this really feels like a shot is because Gronk’s initial retirement seemed to be based mostly on his physical ailments, and the relentless nature of the NFL.

Quite frankly, most of the things he described that were keeping him off the field sounded frightening, and the Patriots’ “culture” isn’t exactly responsible for Gronk’s head having a “centimeter of liquid” (his words) floating around in it. When you remove the physical trauma from the equation and place the blame squarely on Gronk’s loss of joy, it sounds like you’re trying to make a larger point about the organization you both just left.

Brady, for whatever reason, finally seems to feel as if the game is passing him by this year, as he looks around the room and sees rookie quarterback after rookie quarterback (of course, none of those youngsters have a current claim on the Lombardi Trophy).

Is it possible that salty TB12 has finally lost all his inhibitions, and is just going to keep offering up these anti-Pats nuggets any chance he gets?

Gronkowski and Brady seem to be having a great deal of fun in the sun, and that’s dynamite. Gronk looked as physically uninhibited as he has in years during the Buccaneers’ Week 1 squeaker.

That doesn’t seem like a Patriots-related tidbit anymore, but nevertheless, Brady’s working overtime to make it one.

Patriots: Mike Vrabel trolls Tom Brady over son’s favorite Pats star

Ex-New England Patriots star and current Tennessee Titans head coach Mike Vrabel took some jabs at Tom Brady at training camp this week.