Tom Brady does not like losing. Downright abhors it, actually. When you’ve played for more than two decades, there is a strong chance you’ll have plenty of different streaks. For an NFL team and player, winning and losing streaks tend to come and go over the course of a career. Sometimes long ones can happen all in the same season. For one Brady, mere mortal status and streaks aren’t so easily applicable. To wit, do you know his longest winning streak? What about his longest losing streak? Surely, over the two-decade spanning, 23-season career, he has had some lengthy ones, but only in one direction.
As his Tampa Bay Buccaneers recently went on a two-game losing streak this season, a lot of people started to wonder and ask, has Brady ever lost three games in a row?
Before we get to that one, let’s look at the other side. His longest winning streak in the regular season is 21 games, spanning three different seasons—three wins to end the 2006 campaign, then the perfect 16-0 season in 2007, and another two wins to start 2008. However, if we count the playoffs, most fans know that the perfect season in ’07 didn’t end so perfectly, as that team actually lost in the Super Bowl to the Eli Manning-led New York Giants.
Back to the question at hand, with either the New England Patriots or Buccaneers, has Brady lost three games in a row? The astonishing answer is that, yes, it happened, but only one time, and that was all the way back in 2002. Twenty years ago, in his second season in the NFL, the Patriots actually lost four games in a row. Then never again for Brady.
This year, after Brady’s Bucs lost two in a row, they avoided his second three-game losing streak by beating the Atlanta Falcons, just barely, 21-15 this past Sunday.
Going beyond remarkable, Brady has lost two games in a row 13 other times apart from that four-game losing streak. Every single time, he and his team have won the next game. In fact, his teams have lost two in a row each year since 2018 when the Pats did it twice.
