Only seven times in NFL history has a quarterback aged 40 or older thrown for 4,000 yards. Brett Favre did it in 2009. The other six times were all Tom Brady. Only six times has a non-kicker aged 40 or older played in a Super Bowl, three of those being Brady, and he won two of them. That last one, a win over the Kansas City Chiefs, came after the 2020 campaign following an in-season transformation for the QB and his new team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
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After an ugly divorce from the New England Patriots, the Bucs won the Brady sweepstakes in 2020. He immediately brought in a bunch of his buddies, including Rob Gronkowski. And they turned the perennially mediocre team into a contender.
And they were challenging a burgeoning dynasty in Kansas City, which replaced the one Brady had just left in New England. One of the members of that emerging Chiefs team was safety Juan Thornhill, who grew up a fan of Brady and the Patriots. So when the safety played against the GOAT as a rookie in 2019, he was awestruck.
“I played against him three times in my career. One time, my rookie year [when Brady was with the Patriots]… I’m just freaking out as a rookie. I don’t remember much about that game, if I’m being honest, because I was just like, ‘I’m playing against a guy I’ve looked up to my whole life. Like this is unbelievable,'” Thornhill recalled on Not Just Football with Cam Heyward.
Kansas City went on to win its first Super Bowl since 1969 that season as the Pats faltered. And K.C. was the favorite again in 2020.
Then, in November, Patrick Mahomes and Brady went head-to-head in Tampa Bay. As Thornhill describes it, the Chiefs “blew ’em out” and “it wasn’t even a good game.”
The final score was 27-24 Chiefs, but they had been up 27-10 in the fourth quarter. So his memory of the game does make sense.
However, Thornhill suspected the Bucs were just trying to “figure it out,” because when they met again in the Super Bowl a couple of months later, Tampa Bay was a “different team”.
They embarrassed the young Chiefs in a 31-9 triumph. “Brady wasn’t like, truly Brady [in the November game]. I wasn’t really impressed with the Brady that I grew up watching,” recalled Thornhill.
“And somehow we had to play them again in the Super Bowl. And oh my goodness. I don’t know — that was like a whole different team. Like, they punished us. It wasn’t even a close game. I’m not gonna sit here and blame it on COVID, but everything about that year was weird,” he added.
Thornhill said that the game felt unlike any other game to begin with. They only arrived in town the day before due to COVID restrictions. No two weeks of festivities like they usually do. Not to mention that the game that year, Super Bowl 55, was to be hosted at Raymond James Stadium, the home of the Buccaneers.
Thornhill said getting booed as they ran out before the Big Game contributed to their lack of energy.
The 43-year-old Brady and company ended up becoming the first and only team to not only play a Super Bowl at home but also win it in front of their home crowd. And Brady kept stacking NFL records, rewriting the books right up until the very end.
