In a May appearance on “CBS This Morning,” his wife, Gisele Bündchen, either sent a message to her husband through the television camera or made a slip, telling the world something that Brady certainly hasn’t. “He has concussions pretty much every year,” she said. “We don’t talk about it, but he does have concussions.”

She even claimed that he’d suffered one last season. If that’s true, neither he nor the Patriots disclosed it.

Bündchen’s comments received only a fraction of the attention they deserved, as Malcolm Gladwell, who has written extensively about head trauma in football, noted on a podcast in June. “Why isn’t there a stronger drumbeat for him to retire?” Gladwell asked, adding, “I do not want to see Tom Brady at 55 drooling into a cup.”