Tom Brady Remade the NFL in His Image

So, now what? There’s no way to tell you what football will look like without Tom Brady, because he built so much of it for the past two decades. Brady was the most famous person in the most popular American sport during that span. Watching football is the last thing Americans do en masse anymore, and Brady was the game’s main character. The easiest way, I suppose, to tell the story of Brady’s impact is to tell the stories of those whose legacies he destroyed: The Oakland Raiders would have won another massive playoff game and changed the course of their franchise without Brady.