Tom Brady is great, but he’s not that great. Is he?
The experts are calling “fake.”
“Training camp starts this week,” the quarterback for the Super Bowl champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers writes. “I’m looking forward to having some actual receivers again…”
Brady is good, but this is Minnesota Fats trick shot good. And it turns out even an athlete as good as Brady needed some help with this one. When he posted the video on Instagram, Brady tagged video director Ari Fararooy and creative agency Shadow Lion, a company that was founded “with the goal of supporting Tom Brady’s off-field media efforts.”
Fararooy captioned the video on his own Instagram by saying, “haters will say it’s fake,” and then explained things/muddied the waters further by crediting himself as the director and person in charge of VFX (visual effects), Shadow Lion as the producer, and creative studio Warm N Fuzzy TV with the CGI, or computer-generated imagery.
Fararooy and representatives for Shadow Lion and Warm N Fuzzy TV didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. But urban-legends site Snopes.com seized on the viral video and started pointing out that, in addition to the credits given to people who work to create special effects, there are other indicators that this isn’t real.
Snopes points out a three-tweet thread from the Captain Disillusion account, which often points out and explains fake or misleading images and videos.
“Note how the patch of the background behind/above the machine wobbles differently from the rest of the environment,” the account noted. “It’s hiding a person who was catching/throwing back the ball I guess. Also……check out how the machine & its cord slide around on the field. The perfect isolation and the single rigid toy bounce with which it falls tell me it’s CG! They prob didn’t want to crash a real machine because for some reason they cost $2K dollars.”
Fake or real, fans had fun with Brady’s video, Remember that deflated football issue back when Brady was with the New England Patriots? Twitter users sure do.
“Is that fully inflated?” wrote Andrew Feinberg.
Another person thought the machine could make an NFL team, writing, “Sign that thing to a 3yr 15mil contract.”
Said one Twitter user of the video, “I can’t tell if this is real or nah.”
And someone else responded, “the fact that we have to consider it, shows his greatness lmao.”
It won’t be long before Brady will be out there throwing for real again. The Bucs’ first preseason game is Aug. 14 against the Cincinnati Bengals, and the Bucs will play the Dallas Cowboys in the first real game of the NFL season on Sept. 9.