By: JJ Lanier

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

For the past eighteen years, I’m not sure if there’s an NFL player I have liked less than Tom Brady. (I don’t count the year he took over for Drew Bledsoe because both he and New England were underdogs, and even I enjoy an underdog story.)

When other quarterbacks around the league yelled at their teammates or got in their face for making a mistake, a la Dan Marino back in the day, I viewed them as motivators who cared about winning. When Brady did it, I vilified him as a jackass.

While I applauded players for their business endeavors outside of football, I thought Brady was pompous for basically everything that had to do with his TB12 brand.

He was the rare player where I knew I viewed him through a hypocritical lens, but I didn’t care.

Yet, to my own dismay, there I was a few weeks ago watching Tampa and Chicago play on a Thursday, actually rooting for Brady.

It was as if I was having an out of body experience and my soul kept yelling at me, “No, don’t do it!”

Obviously, one of the reasons for my change of heart is that Brady no longer plays for New England. I’ve always put Patriot players in the same category as New York Yankee players- I can’t pull for them while playing for their respective teams but have no issue rooting for them once they leave.

But the main reason I’m starting to see Brady in a different light has to do with the year he’s having. Up to this point of the season, when you look at some of the major categories we use to determine a quarterback’s success- completion percentage, td/int ratio, yards per completion) the 43 year old is above his career average in every one.

And it’s not like this season is the continuation of a downward trajectory that still happens to be better than average. You could’ve made that argument over the last two or three seasons, but statistically speaking, Brady is on pace to have his best overall season in five years.

There’s no denying Brady and Belechick had a great run together with the Patriots but entering this season I was interested to see how each would adjust without the other.

My original hope was that both would implode, and I would revel in their struggles; it’s good to know New England is holding up their end.

It’s probably been four or five years since I allowed myself to admit that Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback to have played in the NFL.

Since that time, all he’s done is win a couple more Super Bowls and continued to be one of the best in the game.

The fact he’s doing this at an age when most of his peers have either already hung up their cleats or are barely clinging to a team, makes what he is accomplishing even more impressive.

I know there will be some that will argue he was surrounded by great talent and coaching, but so was Joe Montana, Peyton Manning, John Elway, and basically every other Hall of Fame quarterback you can mention.

And of course, there are those who will scream “Deflategate” at the top of their lungs, and while I won’t disagree with you, in my mind Brady has done enough to overcome that rebuttal in regards to him being the best ever.

That said, I still cringe a little saying these nice things about him, just not as much as I used to.