 |
| Can the Animals beat the Curse of Brady? |
By R.E. Porter
Associated Web Press
West Nashville Beelzebubbas owner Mos’ Ded was talking with a longtime league observer earlier in the week about the title game between the Cambridge Animals and the East Nashville Black Dogs. “There are two main storylines this weekend: whether the Black Dogs can win their fifth championship and whether the Animals can defeat the Curse of Brady to win their second,” Mos’ Ded said. “The Black Dogs have a much easier path.”
A trip to the league archives shed some light on the Curse of Brady which supposedly prevents any team from winning a championship with Tom Brady as its quarterback. The curse itself dates back to the second week of the 2011 season, but the bad blood behind the curse goes back much further, back to the 1960s when London Bakers owner QCurl Sharif and Cambridge owner Dave the Animal first met while living in a Kolkata orphanage. As it would turn out, that orphanage was the birthplace of one of the NFFA’s longest-running and fiercest rivalries, a rivalry that came to a boil on the night of the 2011 NFFA draft when the Bakers picked New England quarterback Tom Brady with the third pick in the first round.
As anyone who follows the NFFA even a little knows, both Sharif and DTA are notorious homers, with the Bakers drafting a lot of Tennessee Titans and the Animals drafting a lot of New England Patriots. When the Bakers selected Brady, DTA became enraged. Brady was supposed to be an Animal and had been the previous season when the team captured their second Jorge division title. But what would become known as the Bobber rule was passed during that 2010 campaign, limiting the number of consecutive seasons a player could be one of a team’s keeper players. With the introduction of the Bobber rule in 2011, all players returned to the draft pool which prevented the Animals from keeping Brady and enabled the Bakers to draft him.
When Brady went off for 72 points in the first week of the 2011 season and led the Bakers to a 63.5-point blowout of the Atlanta Smack Daddies, DTA simply couldn’t take it. Some would later say he lost his mind. But insane or not, prior to the second game, DTA put a curse on the Bakers which haunts them till this very day. "I made mother[expletive] Tom Brady," the Cambridge owner, a self-proclaimed fantasy quarterback guru, boasted at the time. "I wasn't about to have Q profit from my genius."
The second weekend of the season, the one immediately after DTA put the curse on the Bakers, Brady went for 60 and the Bakers scored 200 points, but incredibly they lost, becoming the first team in league history to score 200 and lose, as the Fidalgo Island Sea Hogs scored 208.5. That would be the first of ten straight losses for the Bakers on their way to a 2-12 finish.
Since 2011, the Bakers have not had a single winning season, although they have finished 7-7 four times in that stretch. That was good enough in three of those seasons to earn the team a trip to the playoffs, only to lose in the opening round.
But the curse that DTA unleashed in 2011 turned out to effect not only the Bakers. As Mos’ Ded noted, “Sometimes these curses take on a life of their own,” and that’s exactly what happened with the curse DTA put on the Bakes. There were a number of unintended consequences, including the spawning of two other curses involving the Animals and Mos’ Ded’s Beelzebubbas franchise, the Mother of All Curses and the Grandmother of All Curses.
But back to the Curse of Brady: one of the consequences DTA did not intend when he put the spell on the Bakers was that Brady himself would be accursed, but that’s exactly what happened, although it was not immediately apparent.
When Sharif realized the curse on the Bakers was “fo’ real,” as coach Snoop Dogg later put it, he appealed to Shiva to end the curse, but to no avail. So feeling he had no other choice, he dealt Brady to the Animals just before the start of the 2012 season in a six-player blockbuster trade which was the largest in league history in terms of number of players involved. According to news reports at the time, new Animals GM Wilder the Animal, DTA’s middle son, was the team’s point person on the deal.
Brady was the starting quarterback for the Animals from 2012-2014, a stretch in which the team posted disappointing records of 7-7, 4-10, and 6-8, and missed the playoffs all three seasons. Just before the trade deadline in 2014, DTA sent Brady to the Beelzebubbas for quarterback Drew Brees with the tacit understanding, at least in DTA’s mind, that the teams would reverse the trade and send the quarterbacks back to their previous teams prior to the 2015 season. When Mos’ Ded instead traded Brady and linebacker Paul Posluzny to the Bakers for quarterback Peyton Manning, DTA felt doubly betrayed. Feeling he really had no other choice, that the Beelzebubbas had asked for it, DTA unleashed the Mother of All Curses on the West Nashville franchise. Being from Texas, Mos’ Ded countered with and the Grandmother of All Curses.
Mos’ Ded was probably the first person (if you can call the ghost of a ghost a person) to notice that Brady himself was accursed, that no team had ever won an NFFA championship with Brady as their quarterback. “All of this stemmed from his feeling that somehow he’d been cheated out of the opportunity to get Tom Brady back on his team this year,” he told Al Jazeera America shortly after the conclusion of the 2015 season. “But look. He never made it to the championship game all those years when he had Brady. And this year he does it without him. Coincidence? Not when you consider that Brady really did nothing for the Bubbas during our stretch run last year, and then the Bakers had him and didn’t even make the playoffs. I know that Brady and DTA have a special relationship — some would say ‘extra special’ — but I think Dave missed the forest for the trees.”
Will the Curse of Brady remain undefeated? We'll find out this weekend. With the curse in their corner, oddsmakers see the Black Dogs as slight favorites to become the first franchise with five championship rings.
