“Tom Brady’s just about done,” said ESPN pundit Max Kellerman on morning show “First Take” in July 2016. “It could be his next game, it could be a year from now, but he is going to fall off a cliff. Tom Brady is going to be a bum in short order.”
While it’s easy for Patriots fans to forget Kellerman’s equivocations on timing — acknowledging that his prediction might not come true for an entire year — the declaration of an approaching “cliff” was stark.
Brady was less than a month away from his 39th birthday at that point, and for all of Kellerman’s bluster, history appeared to be on his side.