Warren Moon doesn’t believe Tom Brady will be completely impervious to Father Time in the upcoming NFL season.
Moon knows a thing or two about longevity in the game of football. The Hall of Fame quarterback, who began his professional career in 1978, didn’t hang up his pads until after the 2000 campaign when he was 44 years old. Brady is closing in on Moon’s territory, as he’ll turn 43 a month prior to the start of his first season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
It’s tough to doubt Brady from a physical standpoint. The six-time Super Bowl champion could not be more committed to his health and training regimens, which have allowed him to maintain his high level of play. Moon is confident Brady largely will be his typical self in 2020, but the Houston Oilers legend believes the tread on TB12’s tires could catch up to him later in the season.
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” … I can see — especially later in the season, and you can see this with Drew Brees and some of the other quarterbacks as well — their arms don’t have the same pop at the end of the season that they had early in the year,” Moon said Monday on FS1’s “The Herd.” “That has to do with their age, and that’s something I started to see in my career when I got older, that I didn’t have that same pop in my arm. A lot of it has to do with your legs because you’ve just become fatigued over the course of the whole season.
“You saw Tom’s arm that same way at the end of last year. It’s not a huge deterioration to where he can’t throw certain routes, but there will be times when it gets later into the year you’re going to see some of that take its place. He has great talent around him, which is great, and he doesn’t have to do as much on that football team, which will be good for him at this stage of his career. So I still think he’s gonna have success because of those reasons, but he’s not the same quarterback he was three or four years ago.”
It will be interesting to see how the Bucs handle Brady this season. Tampa Bay head coach Bruce Arians is known for his pass-happy offenses, and the team might not be able to lighten Brady’s workload given its mediocre rushing attack. This isn’t to say Brady will be regularly airing it out 30, 40 yards each week, but we’re probably not going to see a shortage of pass attempts from him in his 21st season.
Time will tell if Brady runs into the issue Moon projects. But on the flip side, it certainly wouldn’t be unlike Brady to defy the odds yet again.
