The More You Know (Your Meme) Episode 2: Tom Brady
Tom Brady. A household name that the internet has largely divided into two camps: the anti-hero or the GOAT. Regardless of how you feel about him, the memes and viral speculation that have surrounded Brady’s career, retirement, and now, his unretirement, have spanned generations and sports fandoms. The last two months have been a rollercoaster of Brady news, fueled by speculative reporting and exploitable image macros that fold into a 10+ year meme cycle that we’ve broken down to illustrate Brady’s simultaneous status as one of our country’s most hated and beloved athletes of all time.
It’s 2011. Brady was coming off his 11th season with the New England Patriots where he broke a (then) personal record with over 5,000 yards, meaning the number of yards the ball traveled in the air on a passing play, from the line of scrimmage to contact point. The arc of his stories as both the anti-hero and the GOAT is well underway as he already has 3 Super Bowl rings and is in the prime of what many call the “Brady Belichick era”. The following season, the Patriots face the New York Giants in Super Bowl XLVI where they lost 21–17. An image macro of Brady sitting on the field in the first few minutes following their loss exploded across platforms and inspired a trend dubbed as “Bradying” a photo fad that involved taking pictures of oneself sitting on the floor with the head lowered and hands clasped between the legs. The camp of Brady haters obviously ate this one up as many were tired of seeing Brady (and the Patriots) dominate the league.
Two years later, he’s dubbed the nickname “Touchdown Tom” which was typically used when the team was performing poorly in reference to the many unexpected victories orchestrated by Brady over the years. The nickname Touchdown Tom originated in November 2013, though it was more fully explained on January 9th, 2014, when sports blogger Jon Bois included it in his Breaking Madden video series [2] featuring different scenarios in the football video game Madden 25. Brady stans exploited this image macro frequently, particularly any time the Pats came back to win a game after being down by 20–30 points.
Following Brady’s 2014 season, we see an influx of gimmick accounts or social media pages solely dedicated Brady memes and fandom. On January 24th, 2014, the /r/tombradygifs subreddit was launched for animated GIFs of Brady. In July of 2014, a Twitter account called Tom Brady’s Ego was started and has since accumulated more than 135k followers. On September 15th, 2014, a Tom Brady Facebook page was launched, which gathered upwards of 3.2 million likes in the next year. These pages attracted a mix of Brady’s fans and haters, somewhat serendipitously ahead of Brady’s 2015 season which many remember as #DeflateGate.
To recap, #DeflateGate refers to the controversy surrounding the New England Patriots’ alleged use of deflated footballs towards the team’s advantage during their American Football Conference (AFC) Championship game against the Indianapolis Colts in January 2015. The accusations of foul play prompted an investigation from the NFL. The controversy became a meme itself, but non-Pats fans and Brady haters wasted no time in exploiting the story with viral macros like Brady’s first press conference following the news of an impending investigation where he denied any involvement, which popular YouTuber schmoyoho autotuned into a song called Those Balls Are Perfect which has amassed more than 3.5million views.
The NFL released a report in May that revealed texts between an employee of the Patriots and an equipment assistant indicating that the balls had been intentionally deflated after they were approved for play by the league officials. The equipment assistant and Tom Brady purportedly called each other several times after the emergence of the official report of the balls being deflated. The primary investigator or the report concluded that it was “more likely than not” that Brady was aware that the balls had been deflated.
On August 12th, 2015, Tom Brady appeared at a public hearing in a New York City courtroom to discuss a potential settlement with the NFL regarding his involvement in Deflategate and the penalty of a four-game suspension. During the proceedings, several sketches of the both parties were drawn by New York City courtroom sketch artist Jane Rosenberg, one of which featured a moody and self-resigned looking portrait of Tom Brady. This became a viral image macro known as Tom Brady’s Courtroom Sketch that users in both camps exploited for humor, many of them photoshopping Brady’s sketched and saddened face into other franchises like “The Brady Bunch” or Crying Michael Jordan.
Following #DeflateGate and its subsequent updates, Brady is easy pickings for exploitable memes and viral discussion. Both his fans and his haters continued to fuel the Brady meme machine which produced a plethora of image macros that exploited Brady’s memeability as both a famous athlete and after #DeflateGate, an imperfect and ironic anti-hero. Brady’s 2017 season didn’t disappoint, producing memes like Tom Brady’s Huge Jacket, Sad Tom Brady, and Angry Tom Brady.
Rumors and speculation about Brady’s retirement begin to pick up steam following his 2019/2020 trade to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. This is somewhat expected with any athlete of Brady’s stature — as they start to become older players in the league, they’re swarmed with questions or conspiracy theories about how long they’ll stay in the game. Brady kind of ate this up, always leaving fans (and foes) wondering how long he would play in the NFL. However at the end of January this year, we watched as Brady’s official retirement chapter unfolded. On Jan. 29th, 2022, ESPN’s Adam Schefter tweeted that multiple sources had told him and the network’s Jeff Darlington that Tom Brady was retiring. A flood of stories, most citing that reporting, blanketed the internet and social media almost immediately.
Later that day, Michael Silver of Bally Sports reported that Brady had contacted the general manager of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, for whom Brady played the last two seasons, and told him he hadn’t decided whether to retire or return. A lot of people on Twitter joked that this is the kind of story that would inspire the notoriously thin-skinned and ultra-competitive Brady to change his mind and come back even if he was planning to retire.
Brady announced his retirement via official statements posted on his Twitter and Instagram. On Instagram, he has since deleted the caption about retiring. The Twitter thread with his official statements is still public. Initial response included reaction gifs, expressions of support, and some frustration from Patriots fans that his statements did not mention his time in New England. On Instagram, memes of Brady playing were understandably popular as fans, celebrities, and athletes shared tributes for Brady and his impact on the sport. Early memes also idolized some of his accolades like one that mentioned QBs named Joe have made the Super Bowl nine times which is second most and only behind QBs named Tom.
On March 13th, Brady posted a video on Instagram of himself and Ronaldo having a conversation after the legendary Manchester United forward broke FIFA’s all-time record for goals scored. After the two exchanged pleasantries, Ronaldo, speaking on behalf of football fans everywhere, asked Brady point-blank, “You’re finished, right?” causing him to pause and smile before responding. And while Brady’s answer may be hard to make out, his body language added more than enough fuel to the rumor mill on social media.
Later that evening, Brady tweeted “These past two months I’ve realized my place is still on the field and not in the stands. That time will come. But it’s not now. I love my teammates, and I love my supportive family. They make it all possible. I’m coming back for my 23rd season in Tampa. Unfinished business LFG.” Memes and image macros about Brady “unretiring” spread across all social platforms. Early themes / macros: (1) how Brady must have spent the last month in order to reverse his retirement decision so quickly ie “Tom Brady sat in the pickup line at school for six weeks and said nah.” (2) black & white image of Brady with caption “f**k them kids” — a reference to a 2018 macro of Michael Jordan. (3) memes and jokes about the guy who purchased Brady’s “last” touchdown ball for over $500k finding out that Brady is coming back for another season.
Between March 16th-17th, Brady memes began to shift to include more football context. For example: “tom brady retired and saw russell wilson leave the NFC, his division basically become the worst in the NFL, the Cowboys trade their best WR,and Aaron Rodgers return to Green Bay just to choke in the playoffs and said.. “yeah, i’m back.” Image macros also evolve outside of using Brady’s image and we begin to see more reaction gifs or memes from other shows and social media platforms that are recaptioned for Brady unretiring, walking back into the lockerroom, and hypothetical reactions from other teams if retired players tried to come back.
It’s only fitting that Tom Brady’s retirement produces the same kind of meme attention that his career did. You can debate about whether or not he’s football’s greatest of all-time quarterback, but he was definitely the most meme-able as he elicit strong responses from anyone who watched him play, whether they were a fan or not. His character arc as one of the most beloved and loathed people of all time has evolved through meme discourse and viral conversations.
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