To the Media in re Tom Brady’s Retirement

Not seen: integrity

I don’t know about you, Dear Theoretical Reader, but I don’t want to spend an unproductive amount of time watching sports. Most effectively football.

Games are three hours or so, you can do your laundry and other things while it’s on due to all of the commercial breaks. When it’s done, maybe you can spend a few minutes with your chosen media to cover what happened or whether or not there was an injury or something… but honestly, there is Game and there is Not Game.

Not Game, is for the most part, the drizzling shits. It’s also what most sports channels sell, most maddeningly, when they decide that there are more interesting things to talk about then THE GAME THAT IS IN FRONT OF THEM.

Which leads us to this week’s will-he-or-won’t-he and I guess he’s now gone and did… retirement of Tom Brady.

This isn’t about the man’s career.

What is it about is clickbait.

To wit… Tom Brady is not playing football right now.

Other people are.

Let’s hear about Matthew Stafford and Joe Burrow and any number of Bengals and Rams, please. They won. They are playing football. They have a game coming up. Give me reasons to think about it other than, well, yes, that’s happening. Their fans deserve as much.

What would have been the right thing to do if you were the media covering Brady? Ask him about retirement after the game, and then DO NOT COVER HIM UNTIL AFTER THE SUPER BOWL.

What happened instead? Several days of More Attention on Brady because that’s more fun / easy / clickbait then, I don’t know, finding a fresh insight or nugget of delight about the people who are still playing football. Or just not wasting all of our time until Lord Brady His Own Damn Self quit.

It made them money. It will always make them money. It also just infuriates anyone who, I don’t know, wanted to think about football without having to get dragged into the same (insert insult that will get me on naughty lists) that we’ve been living with for 22 years.

Instead, you did the lazy thing. (Which, shh, I might be doing as well. But this is a mostly unpaid hobby for me, while it’s your actual job and such. Besides, my clickbait is better than your clickbait. It just is.)

Can we please stop doing the lazy thing, and cover Game?

Because you have been missing some unbelievably good Games recently.