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Tom Brady opens up about the most important factor in his retirement

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When the 2018 NFL season kicks off this September, Tom Brady will be 41 years old, and naturally that will stir up discussion as to how much longer he can play.

There’s not much precedent for quarterbacks playing this long, as only three players have started at least 10 games in a season after turning 41.

There’s even less of a precedent for quarterbacks being great at that age.

But Brady was voted by his peers as the NFL’s best player prior to last season, he won his third MVP award and he ended up one play from winning his sixth Super Bowl.

That’s why his inevitable retirement was the topic of discussion when he appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Monday morning. Brady sat down with Michael Strahan and discussed the key factor when it comes to his football future.

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“You can’t make decisions necessarily just for yourself,” he said. “I think that’s one thing I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older: There are collateral effects to every decision that I make.

“I have a wife [Gisele Bundchen] that aspires to be a lot of things, and she travels a lot. Our kids — my oldest son lives here in New York — three kids, and you’re just always trying to juggle and you want to be there for them, and you want to be there for the hockey games and the soccer games. But you also realize the level of commitment it takes to give as much as you can to the team that needs you.”

Strahan brought up a dinner he had with Brady and Bundchen, saying the Brazilian supermodel told him that her husband said he wanted to play 10 more years when the couple first got together in 2006. Five years later, she said Brady told her he wanted to play 10 more years.

Do you think Tom Brady will retire after the 2018 season?

“Yeah,” Brady said while smiling. “I wasn’t a great math student back then.

“She’s right. When we met, I was 29, 30 years old, and I thought, ‘Man, if I could get to 40, it’d be amazing.’ It’d be a great career — 18 years in the NFL, learned a lot, and it’s been such a great love for me. I love the sport, I love the competition, I love my teammates, I love working with people that I love to work with. So that part is really hard to give up, especially when I feel like I can do it, and I look around the league and see these other quarterbacks and I’m thinking, ‘Man, I can do what they do.’ I want to continue to do it the best I can because it really brings a lot of joy to my life.”

Speaking of those other quarterbacks, Brady’s production might be superior to theirs, but his salary makes him a bargain for the Patriots. He is set to count $22 million against the cap in 2018, which is tied for ninth among quarterbacks.

Brady is signed through the 2019 season and will make $15 million in each year. He signed that extension in February 2016, and there’s been no public talk of another extension that will take him into his mid-40s.

Perhaps he will be taking things year by year after the current deal ends, as even with his innovating training regimen, he can’t predict how his body will look like two years from now.

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But Brady did say he feels much better now than when he was younger, and even elicited a “Wow!” from Strahan when he said, “It got to a point early in my career where I didn’t envision myself being able to continue to play because my arm hurt so bad all the time.”

Brady will enter the 2018 season atop the depth chart with Brian Hoyer as his backup. But if the Patriots want to kick the tires on a former Heisman winner who has interest in coming to New England, Johnny Manziel is waiting on his phone call, Mr. Belichick.

“I’ll go to New England in a heartbeat!” he told TMZ.

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Ross Kelly has been a sportswriter since 2009.
Ross Kelly has been a sportswriter since 2009 and previously worked for ESPN, CBS and STATS Inc. A native of Louisiana, Ross now resides in Houston.
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