Why should the end of the 2020 football season be any less ridiculous than most of the rest of 2020 was? After the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ 31-9 victory over the Kansas City Chiefs on Sunday night, a large portion of Black Lives Matter types took to Twitter and complained that Super Bowl-winning quarterback Tom Brady was somehow “racist” for having the gall to lead his team to victory.
Brady, a Caucasian, won his seventh Super Bowl title overall and his first for the Buccaneers, with whom he signed during the last offseason. Brady’s Buccaneers defeated the Chiefs, who were led by phenomenal young quarterback Patrick Mahomes, who is of mixed-race heritage.
Many in the Twitterverse would rather have seen the partially black Mahomes win the big game, especially considering that it is currently Black History Month.
Some didn’t accuse Brady of overt racism. They just found it unseemly — a “low key” form of racism, sort of like Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society.”
The National Football League’s season starts in early September, running 17 weeks, followed by three weeks of playoff football, an off week, and then Super Bowl Sunday. This schedule tends to have the big game fall in February as it has for the last 18 years — the same month as Black History Month.
Should the NFL adjust its schedule to prevent the off chance that a white quarterback might win another Super Bowl during the month of February? Oddly, the schedule didn’t seem to be a big problem last season when Mahomes led his Chiefs to a Super Bowl title.
Prior to the season, Brady addressed his thoughts on race in an interview with radio host Howard Stern. Stern asked Brady if he ever felt “guilty” or “self-conscious” about being a white quarterback at the head of a largely black roster of players.
“Never. I never saw race,” Brady responded. “I think sports transcends race, it transcends wealth, it transcends all that. You get to know and appreciate what someone else may bring. When you’re in a locker room with 50 guys, you don’t think about race … because you’re all the same at that point.”
Brady concluded: “White, black, whatever it is, you figure out how to get along.”
Widely considered to be one of the best players in NFL history, the 43-year-old Brady has been in leftist crosshairs since at least 2015 when a MAGA hat was seen in his locker. Brady also admitted to a friendship with Trump, saying of the former president, “He always gives me a call and different types of motivational speeches at different times.”
“I mean it’s pretty amazing what he’s been able to accomplish,” Brady said of Trump in 2015. “He obviously appeals to a lot of people, and he’s a hell of a lot of fun to play golf with.”
Just days before the Super Bowl, left-wing columnist Nancy Armour foreshadowed the intersectional anger against Brady and his victory. Writing in USA Today, Armour accused the quarterback of having unchecked and unadmitted “white privilege.”
“Brady’s ability to enter and exit the debate at his choosing, to shield himself from accountability, is the height of white privilege,” wrote Armour — a white woman. “As this country grapples with the far reaches of systemic racism, look no further than Brady, for whom the expectations and allowances granted, will always be different.”
In a league where drug abusers and those who kneel for the National Anthem are given a pass again and again, Brady once served a four-game suspension because the footballs used in a playoff game were slightly under-inflated. Without proof that Brady had anything to do with the air pressure of the footballs, the quarterback was suspended anyway.
So, in a way, Armour is correct. Brady is definitely looked upon differently by those in charge of the league. Where lesser players are given a pass for disrespect of the American flag and even for outright crimes, Brady was punished for a ridiculous infraction of an inconsequential rule.
In other words, Brady is held to a higher standard by a league who looks the other way on far more serious issues.
Brady also incurred the wrath of the COVID-19 mask police as he was shown entering Tampa’s Raymond James stadium without wearing today’s most necessary fashion accoutrement. Even the niece of Vice President Kamala Harris felt the need to comment on the absence Brady’s mask, tweeting, “What’s Tom doing without a damn mask?”
It’s easy to dismiss many of the comments about Brady’s win being “racist” as tasteless jokes — no doubt that’s what many of those statements were meant to be. But in today’s societal climate where people are either “woke” or pure evil in the eyes of so many, such jokes aren’t funny — they’re vicious.
If you want to dislike Tom Brady, there’s reason enough. He wins all the time — that’s reason enough for the fans of the other 31 NFL teams to not like him. But there’s no need to make up ridiculous reasons to dislike the man.
