He's Gone !

Allow Shank to shed some crocodile tears:

Red Sox pitcher/outfielder Babe Ruth, a three-time World Series champion with Boston, was sold to the New York Yankees in January of 1920.

One hundred years later, New England woke up on a Tuesday morning in the middle of a national public health crisis and learned that Tom Brady has decided to leave the New England Patriots after 20 seasons that yielded six Super Bowl championships. Brady delivered the news in a goodbye message on his Twitter account at 8:45 a.m.

There will be plenty of days to dissect and analyze why Brady is leaving and where he might be going. We may never know whether the Patriots made a serious bid to keep him or whether they effectively pushed him away with a lowball offer. Or no offer.

I'm 100% certain Shank will follow up with this angle. By Stephen A. Smith's account of things, Kraft's saying 'nope, wasn't me', even though he would have been the person responsible for 'working it out' and he didn't work anything out. This will be sports gossip for a while, and Shank will be fanning the flames.

As suspicions rise and conflicting stories surface, we’ll have slices of blame pie for Bill Belichick, Bob Kraft, Alex Guerrero, Gisele Bundchen, TB12, and all the other influencers in Brady’s life.

Two things - with that sentence, the odds of Shank throwing more gas on the fire went from 'sure thing' to 'it's a lock', and like his fellow Boston sports asshole (Michael Felger), they are overly concerned / obsessed over needing to blame someone for this situation. Some things simply run their course and this is one of them. I'm pretty sure that's all part of their schtick - to spice things up and, in Shank's case, cheap and easy shots against Kraft.

The rest of the column reads eerily like the NFL Network special they had on Tom Brady last night.