Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history.

That’s just my opinion, and that opinion is fungible. If someone else had made the same claim five years ago, I would have disagreed; five years ago, I didn’t even think he was the best quarterback of his generation. But the erosion of time has validated his ascension. Classifying Brady as the all-time best QB is not a universally held view, but it’s become the default response. His statistical legacy won’t match Peyton Manning’s, and Manning has changed the sport more. But Brady’s six Super Bowl appearances (and his dominance in their head-to-head matchups) tilt the scales of hagiography in his direction. He has been football’s most successful player at the game’s most demanding position, during an era when the importance of that position has been incessantly amplified. His greatness can be quantified through a wide range of objective metrics.

Yet it’s the subjective details that matter more.

America’s fanatical, perverse obsession with football is rooted in a multitude of smaller fixations, most notably the concept of who a quarterback is and what that person represents. There is no cultural corollary in any other sport. It’s the only position on the field a CEO would compare himself to, or a surgeon, or an actual general. It’s the only position in sports that racists still worry about. People who don’t care about football nevertheless understand that every clichéd story about high school involves the prom queen dating the quarterback. It serves as a signifier for a certain kind of elevated human, and Brady is that human in a non-metaphoric sense. He looks the way he’s supposed to look. He has the kind of wife he’s supposed to have. He has the right kind of inspirational backstory: a sixth-round draft pick who runs the 40-yard dash in a glacial 5.2 seconds, only to prove such things don’t matter because this job requires skills that can’t be reliably measured. Brady’s vocation demands an inexact combination of mental and physical faculties, and it all hinges on his teammates’ willingness to follow him unconditionally. This is part of the reason Brady does things like make cash payments to lowly practice-squad players who pick off his passes during scrimmages—he must embody the definition of leadership, almost like a president. In fact, it sometimes seems like Brady could eventually be president, or at least governor of Massachusetts.

But this will never happen.

When I ask if it’s something he’s ever considered, he responds as if I am crazy.

“There is a 0.000 chance of me ever wanting to do that,” says Brady. “I just think that no matter what you’d say or what you’d do, you’d be in a position where—you know, you’re politicking. You know? Like, I think the great part about what I do is that there’s a scoreboard. At the end of every week, you know how you did. You know how well you prepared. You know whether you executed your game plan. There’s a tangible score. I think in politics, half the people are gonna like you and half the people are not gonna like you, no matter what you do or what you say.… It’s like there are no right answers. If there were, everyone would choose the right answers. They’re all opinions.”

Had Brady given this quote as a rookie, it would have meant nothing. It would have scanned as a football player with relativist views on politics. But the events of the past year imbue these words with a stranger, deeper significance. After last season’s AFC Championship game, the Patriots were accused of deflating the footballs below the legal level. What initially appeared to be a bizarre allegation against a pair of anonymous locker-room employees spiraled into a massive scandal that seemed to go on forever, consistently painting Brady as the conversational equivalent of a Person of Interest. This even applied to his own coach, Bill Belichick. During an uncomfortable January 22 press conference, Belichick said, “Tom’s personal preferences on his footballs are something that he can talk about in much better detail than I could possibly provide. I can tell you that in my entire coaching career, I have never talked to any player, [or] staff member, about football air pressure.”