Tom Brady's Coy Instagram Comment About Retirement Is Just the Sort Of NBA-Type Stuff the NFL Needs

The sports world is aflutter Tuesday night, as Tom Brady, America’s most golden golden boy, has taken to Instagram to speak in Spanish (for some reason) about when he may or may not retire.

Sunday, ESPN made an Instagram post alluding to Brady’s retirement. Remarkably, Brady himself wrote a comment.

That comment?

"“Cuarenta y cinco.”"

That translates to the number 45 in English, and would seem for all the world like Brady is indicating he intends to retire four years from now, at age 45.

This is not exactly news. Brady has been saying stuff like this for a while, and he recently told Oprah he planned to retire in his mid-40s. But nobody who cares about Tom Brady watches Oprah, and this is not the sort of morsel Brady is likely ever to divulge in a press conference.

Posting a coquettish comment (with emojis) on an ESPN Instagram post is the kind of thing an NBA player would do, because NBA players know how to move the needle. They know how to imply something without saying it, and they don’t care how juvenile it looks.

Unless there is some kind of league-wide scandal playing out, the NFL rarely produces much offseason news anymore that is interesting to anybody who is not actually on an NFL team. The NBA dominates when it comes to off-court news, but maybe that’ll change by the time Brady actually retires.