Every time the New England Patriots would play the San Francisco 49ers, The Faithful were inundated with reminders that future Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady wanted the 49ers to draft him. San Francisco was his favorite team as a child. Brady grew up in the Bay Area.
Earlier this month, Brady announced his retirement, never having gotten to play for the team he once rooted for as a kid.
Then he came out with his "never say never" comment, painting a picture that his retirement might not be permanent. Could Brady return if a way could be found to get him to the 49ers? Naturally, that sparked a lot of social-media chatter.
Mike Sando of The Athletic believes that could be a possibility, and Brady's retirement may have been the first step in a plan for the all-time great to live out a childhood dream.
San Francisco could have had Brady in 2020 but passed in favor of Garoppolo, the quarterback who had just gotten them to the Super Bowl. Brady went on to win a championship with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers the very next season.
Mistakes happen.
Now, the 49ers feel they finally have their quarterback of the future, trading up last year to select Trey Lance with the No. 3 overall pick. However, the 21-year-old signal-caller stood on the sideline for most of his rookie season, watching Jimmy Garoppolo make start after start. Would San Francisco be willing to allow Lance to sit another year if Brady is an option?
"The Brady situation is very interesting to me because I think if you can say Tom Brady has a zero-regrets career except for the one thing, it would probably be that he wanted to play for the 49ers, right? That's really the only thing.
"So the way I see his career is he became the G.O.A.T. by just what happened in New England. And then in Tampa, he got to show that, 'Hey, I can do it outside of New England.' How cool is that? In your first year [with another team], you win the Super Bowl. There's nothing more for him to prove with Tampa, and from everything we've heard, it wasn't just completely seamless, that he was loving every aspect of it all the time. I think by the end, he sort of accomplished everything he could there.
"I think he'd be content to retire, probably, unless there was some graceful way to cross that last thing off the bucket list, which I don't think he would want to force his way to have happen. I don't think that Tampa would trade him necessarily to the 49ers.
"But, when you retire, you're gracefully telling Tampa, 'I'm not playing for you. I'm not really playing for anybody. Oh, by the way, my agent represents Garoppolo and me, and the door's open.' He said 'never say never.' Maybe that's just, 'Let's see what happens.' Is there a way to make that happen? I think that's plausible if there was a way."
Sando adds that the combination of Brady and Garoppolo sharing an agent and the 49ers having Garoppolo to offer to the Buccaneers makes a trade scenario plausible. The option to add Garoppolo for the rights to a player who can just as easily stay retired, has to at least be explored. After winning seven Super Bowls, Brady has no more to prove.
"Because it's Tom Brady, that's not a slap in the face of Trey Lance," Sando said. "And because it's one year, it's not like you have to trade Trey Lance. He'd get one year under Brady, and you can spin it as a positive, right? He's already had a great thing with Jimmy, learned how to handle yourself in a difficult situation. Now, he gets to be with this guy and really learn how you take care of your body and do all the different things."
In a recent column for The Athletic, Sando asked one unnamed veteran coach about the 49ers-Brady fit. He noted that if Matt Ryan can win M.V.P. honors with Kyle Shanahan in 2016, Brady might fare at least as well right now.
"Brady is more athletic now than Ryan was then," the veteran coach told Sando. "Kyle runs outside zone and outside zone play-action, and it takes a certain amount of fitness to run that. There is a wide landmark on that play. Brady is in that kind of shape, but no other 45-year-old quarterback in the history of the league could ever do that."
You can listen to the entire conversation with Sando below.