Tom Brady is actually making ‘Tompa Bay’ merchandise

Tom Brady is jumping in with both feet and fully embracing his move to Tampa Bay. I’m sorry, that was a typo. It should read “Tompa Bay.”

Tampa Brady is also acceptable in this dark vision of reality. It’s difficult to even process how bad this is — I’ve been going back and forth whether this falls in the realm of “bad” or “so bad it’s good.” However, there is one clear marker that the phrase “Tompa Brady” is cursed — our own Eric Stephen.

Eric has a deep, soul-crushing love of puns. He uses so many puns we have a special slack emoji just to respond to his puns, because our words of contempt no longer have meaning, to him or us. This was Eric’s response on Slack on March 17, shortly after it was announced Brady would be signing with the Bucs.

This was followed by the New York Post, which also decided to embrace “Tompa Brady.” Now, I’m no expert — but I’d posit that if your pun is embraced by Eric and the New York Post sports page then it’s an objectively bad sign.

I also know he’s going to sell a million of these shirts and people will think they’re the funniest things ever printed, because that is the world we live in.

I’m not sure it’s likely, but it’s at least plausible that the reason Brady picked the Bucs is because of the possibility of Tompa Bay and Tampa Brady being available. There’s simply no other team in the league with that kind of branding potential. When a team name shares five letters with your actual name you’re legally obligated to sign with them — or at least that’s my assumption.

Now the battle we never knew would occur will soon take place: Tom Brady vs. The Dan Patrick Show, which has been selling “Tompa Brady” shirts since he signed.

We need sports to come back.