A New Theory Wonders If Tom Brady’s Unexplained Training Camp Absence Is Because He’s On ‘The Masked Singer’

One of the stranger stories in the NFL right now is that Tom Brady is in the midst of an unexplained leave of absence from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. It could be argued that Brady, the most accomplished football player of all time and a 45-year-old human who retired earlier this offseason before coming back, doesn’t need to participate training camp, and taking some time away will keep him from going through the grind of playing football in the summer.

Having said that … boy, that just does not sound like a thing Brady would do, right? Brady has gotten to this point by being an absolutely relentless competitor whose preparation is unrivaled in the sport. Why, exactly, would Brady take a vague leave of absence during camp to “deal with some personal things”? And why would Bucs coach Todd Bowles give the following quote about it on Friday?

“I’m not concerned about it right now. We’re trying to practice against Tennessee and play a game,” Bowles said, per The Athletic. “I said sometime after Tennessee. There’s no definitive date for me. We’ll check on it, we’ll keep in touch and find out.”

So, it’s personal things that are not a concern to the team, and at the same time, there’s no definitive date for him to come back. One theory that is making its way around the internet posits that the reason Brady’s not around is a prior commitment he made to appear on Fox’s The Masked Singer. If you want to read an in-depth post on Reddit about it, you can do that here. If you want to see a video laying it al out, here’s this:

Basically, the two smoking guns are that Brady signed a monster deal with Fox this offseason to join their NFL coverage once his career ends and the filming dates for this season of the show line up almost exactly with Brady’s absence. I decided to do a little more research into this, and by that, I mean I searched for “tom brady singing” on YouTube. My findings suggest that Brady does like to sing, and while he isn’t great at it, he’s not as bad as, like, Rudy Giuliani was.

Brady once appeared on The Late Late Show with James Corden and expressed that he is a big fan of “Hamilton.” The long of the short of it is that Brady grew up disliking that his dad would play show tunes in the car, but as he got older and his kids started to like singing along with that genre of music, he warmed up to them considerable. And in the below clip, Brady sings along with Corden to “Alexander Hamilton.”

Whether or not this means Brady is on The Masked Singer or not, well, I do not know. NFL reporter Lindsey Ok was told by a player that this is “100%” something Brady would do, but I just cannot wrap my head around Tom Brady punting on the chance to prepare for an NFL season because he had to go do a TV show, especially considering the Bucs have a new head coach (who, in fairness, was the team’s defensive coordinator the last few years). I suppose we’ll all find out soon enough when Brady is coming back, although if he was, indeed, on The Masked Singer, it might take a bit longer to figure out the reason why he was gone.