All offseason the drama surrounding the Patriots Super Bowl loss to the Eagles has lingered, with people wondering why New England quarterback Tom Brady never shook Nick Foles hand after the game. It's the sort of non-controversial controversy that crops up in the NFL offseason; feel free to blame John Breech for propagating it.
The problem is, the questions never went away and Foles didn't help matters with his answers. Brady himself was finally asked about it after the Patriots manhandled the Eagles in their preseason Week 2 game (which featured Foles suffering a shoulder injury) and said he believes the whole thing is "kind of made up."
I did hear that. I know that was kind of made up to me because that was never my intention that I would, you know, be a bad sport. But, I have a lot of respect for Nick and Carson [Wentz], all those quarterbacks, and that team and the way they played," Brady said. "They're a great team. I know how hard it is to win that last game, and they did it and congrats to them.
"But, we're on to 2018. We've got our goals ahead of us. We're going to try to go out and put together a great year."
A very Patriots-like answer, no? On to 2018! In Cincinnati! Or something.
The thing about Foles winning the Super Bowl for the Eagles and besting Brady is it probably hit close to home for the future Hall of Famer. Once upon a time he took down one of the league's best teams looking for back-to-back Super Bowl wins (the Rams and the Greatest Show on Turf) after coming in as a backup when the starter (Drew Bledsoe) suffered an injury.
It would have been a good time for Brady to give Foles a shoutout for the win, and it's not as if he was sitting around being super busy after the game. He was hanging out on vacation with his family all summer. Take 10 minutes and tag Foles in an Instagram post or something.
This is a very 2018 "controversy" though: 20 years ago, no one gives one flying bleep about how Brady reacted after the game and we're not spending hours and hours dumping virtual ink all over the place debating whether or not Brady should have congratulated Foles or shook his hand. If anything, he might have been criticized for not being tough enough about it if he was too congratulatory. We have weird, ever-changing, unwritten rules about how we want sports figures to act.
It wasn't Brady's job to walk around the field in Minneapolis, desperately searching for every single Eagles player to congratulate. He could've quashed any concerns by going out of his way a little sooner but he went ahead and used the word "congrats" in his statement -- it might have straddled the line towards a begrudging congrats, but it was a congrats nonetheless -- so we can all move on past our offseason nightmare.
