Touchdown Tom

2013Catchphrase / running joke / sports nicknameclassic
Touchdown Tom is a 2013 running joke by SB Nation's Jon Bois celebrating NFL quarterback Tom Brady's improbable comebacks, built on never counting him out—a theme that reached peak absurdity during Super Bowl LI.

"Touchdown Tom" is a nickname and running joke for NFL quarterback Tom Brady, coined by SB Nation writer Jon Bois in November 2013. Built around two simple ideas (Brady's nickname should be "Touchdown Tom" and you should never count out Touchdown Tom), the bit took on a life of its own when Brady kept staging improbable comebacks every time Bois tweeted about it. The joke became the backbone of three legendary "Breaking Madden" episodes and reached peak absurdity during Super Bowl LI in 2017, when even Bois himself briefly counted Tom out before the most famous comeback in NFL history proved the meme right one last time.

tom brady memesnfl memescatchphrase memesjon bois memescelebrity nickname memes

Overview

Touchdown Tom is a deliberately generic, aggressively alliterative nickname for Tom Brady that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The core joke is simple: whenever Brady's team is losing, you declare that you should "never count out Touchdown Tom," and then Brady wins anyway. The humor comes from the nickname's extreme blandness (it describes literally nothing special about Brady that doesn't apply to every other quarterback who throws touchdowns) combined with the eerie, almost supernatural way that real NFL games kept vindicating the bit.

The meme exists in two forms. On Twitter, it was a running gag where fans would invoke the phrase during Patriots games, especially when the team trailed. On SB Nation, it became the narrative engine for a trilogy of "Breaking Madden" episodes where Jon Bois filled entire NFL rosters with cloned Tom Bradys and staged impossibly rigged scenarios in the Madden video game.

SB Nation sports blogger Jon Bois started calling Tom Brady "Touchdown Tom" on Twitter in late November 2013, when the New England Patriots sat at 7-3 and Brady was posting the worst passer rating of his career at 83.61. Bois later admitted he had no real explanation for why he picked that moment or that player. "I didn't really like him any more or less than the next player," he wrote1.

The earliest known usage appeared on November 4, 20134. Bois pushed two specific messages on Twitter: that Brady's nickname should be "Touchdown Tom," and that you should never count him out1. The nickname was intentionally banal. As Bois later explained, "it's alliterative" and "it's a title so generic that even American pop culture wouldn't give him that nickname, because it's too obnoxious and stupid"3.

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (coinage), SB Nation (spread via Breaking Madden series)
Key People
Jon Bois
Date
2013

SB Nation sports blogger Jon Bois started calling Tom Brady "Touchdown Tom" on Twitter in late November 2013, when the New England Patriots sat at 7-3 and Brady was posting the worst passer rating of his career at 83.6. Bois later admitted he had no real explanation for why he picked that moment or that player. "I didn't really like him any more or less than the next player," he wrote.

The earliest known usage appeared on November 4, 2013. Bois pushed two specific messages on Twitter: that Brady's nickname should be "Touchdown Tom," and that you should never count him out. The nickname was intentionally banal. As Bois later explained, "it's alliterative" and "it's a title so generic that even American pop culture wouldn't give him that nickname, because it's too obnoxious and stupid".

How It Spread

The joke gained traction almost immediately because reality kept cooperating. The week Bois started tweeting the nickname, the Patriots faced the Denver Broncos and fell behind 24-0 by halftime. Bois kept tweeting that you couldn't count out Touchdown Tom. Brady led a second-half comeback, and New England won in overtime. The following week, Brady engineered another come-from-behind victory against the Houston Texans. The week after that, the Cleveland Browns held a win probability above 99 percent near the end of the game before Brady threw two touchdowns in the final 61 seconds, aided by the Patriots' first successful onside kick in nearly 20 years.

On January 9, 2014, Bois published the first Touchdown Tom episode of his "Breaking Madden" series on SB Nation. He created 21 identical copies of Tom Brady in *Madden NFL 25*, replacing every offensive player on the Patriots roster. Brady threw to himself, handed off to himself, and blocked for himself. The scenario was rigged for a dramatic comeback: the opposing Indianapolis Colts defense had maxed-out ratings in the first half, then Bois quit the game at halftime and dragged all their ratings to zero. The article framed the entire experiment around the "never count out Touchdown Tom" narrative.

The second installment, "Edge of Tom-orrow" (a riff on the Tom Cruise film), arrived on October 16, 2014. This time, Bois placed Brady at his own 1-yard line and attempted a quarterback sneak against the strongest possible defense, repeating the play hundreds of times until Brady scored a 99-yard touchdown.

The trilogy concluded on January 15, 2015, with Brady's clone army facing a Colts defense made up of 7-foot-tall, 400-pound superhuman players whose football awareness ratings were set to zero. Bois recruited the defensive players from Twitter followers who shared stories of spectacular personal failures. Every play ran without human input; Bois simply called the recommended play and put the controller down.

Three days later, on January 18, 2015, SB Nation writer Ryan Van Bibber referenced the nickname in his "Gen. Andrew Luck" series, writing dispatches in the voice of a Civil War general. After the Colts lost to the Patriots in the AFC Divisional round, Van Bibber's fictional Luck described Brady: "My counterpart, a wily veteran called Touchdown Tom by his men, was magnificent. He commands a formation with the will of Zeus".

The meme's defining moment came on February 5, 2017, during Super Bowl LI. With the Atlanta Falcons leading 28-3, Jon Bois did the unthinkable: he officially counted out Touchdown Tom. The Patriots then mounted the largest comeback in Super Bowl history, winning 34-28 in overtime. Bois was forced to rescind his doubts. The game gave the meme its ultimate punchline. Even its creator couldn't resist counting Tom out, and he was wrong.

How to Use This Meme

The Touchdown Tom format is loose and mostly text-based. The standard usage goes like this:

1

The Patriots (or later, the Buccaneers) are losing a game, ideally by a large margin.

2

You post some variation of "Never count out Touchdown Tom" on social media.

3

Brady comes back and wins.

4

You nod knowingly.

Cultural Impact

Touchdown Tom rode the larger wave of Jon Bois' influence as one of the most distinctive sports writers on the internet. The Breaking Madden series drew massive readership to SB Nation, and the Touchdown Tom trilogy was its emotional center. Bois described it as "the most annoying Twitter meme in history," which was both self-deprecating and accurate.

The meme fed into a broader sports media conversation about Brady's comeback ability. By Brady's own standards, his career statistics were staggering: seven Super Bowl victories, six with New England and one with Tampa Bay, along with records for career passing yards, completions, and touchdown passes. The Touchdown Tom joke gave casual fans a framework for that legacy that was funnier and more accessible than any stat line.

The Super Bowl LI incident in 2017 became the meme's canonical moment. Bois counting out his own creation, only to watch the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history unfold, gave the bit a narrative arc that most internet jokes never achieve. It turned a deliberately stupid Twitter gag into something approaching sports mythology.

Fun Facts

Bois recruited real Twitter followers to play the opposing team's defenders in every Breaking Madden episode. For the trilogy finale, he asked people to share stories of times they "really, really fucked up" as their application.

In the first Touchdown Tom episode, Bois noted that Brady's Madden kicking power rating was so bad that his clone army had essentially no chance of making field goals.

Before becoming the greatest quarterback in NFL history, Brady was drafted 199th overall in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft, making him one of the biggest draft steals ever.

The Montreal Expos drafted Brady as a baseball catcher in the 18th round of the 1995 MLB draft, projecting him as a potential All-Star.

In the Breaking Madden trilogy conclusion, Bois set everything to autopilot. "At no moment in these GIFs did I actually take control of any player. I just called whichever play Madden recommended, put the controller down, and watched it happen".

Derivatives & Variations

Breaking Madden Touchdown Tom Trilogy

Three full-length articles/videos on SB Nation (January 2014, October 2014, January 2015) featuring Brady clone armies in rigged Madden scenarios[1][2][3].

Gen. Andrew Luck references

Ryan Van Bibber's fictional Civil War dispatches from Andrew Luck adopted the "Touchdown Tom" nickname into their in-universe lore after the 2015 AFC Divisional Round[6].

Frequently Asked Questions

Touchdown Tom

2013Catchphrase / running joke / sports nicknameclassic
Touchdown Tom is a 2013 running joke by SB Nation's Jon Bois celebrating NFL quarterback Tom Brady's improbable comebacks, built on never counting him out—a theme that reached peak absurdity during Super Bowl LI.

"Touchdown Tom" is a nickname and running joke for NFL quarterback Tom Brady, coined by SB Nation writer Jon Bois in November 2013. Built around two simple ideas (Brady's nickname should be "Touchdown Tom" and you should never count out Touchdown Tom), the bit took on a life of its own when Brady kept staging improbable comebacks every time Bois tweeted about it. The joke became the backbone of three legendary "Breaking Madden" episodes and reached peak absurdity during Super Bowl LI in 2017, when even Bois himself briefly counted Tom out before the most famous comeback in NFL history proved the meme right one last time.

tom brady memes nfl memes catchphrase memes jon bois memes celebrity nickname memes

Overview

Touchdown Tom is a deliberately generic, aggressively alliterative nickname for Tom Brady that became a self-fulfilling prophecy. The core joke is simple: whenever Brady's team is losing, you declare that you should "never count out Touchdown Tom," and then Brady wins anyway. The humor comes from the nickname's extreme blandness (it describes literally nothing special about Brady that doesn't apply to every other quarterback who throws touchdowns) combined with the eerie, almost supernatural way that real NFL games kept vindicating the bit.

The meme exists in two forms. On Twitter, it was a running gag where fans would invoke the phrase during Patriots games, especially when the team trailed. On SB Nation, it became the narrative engine for a trilogy of "Breaking Madden" episodes where Jon Bois filled entire NFL rosters with cloned Tom Bradys and staged impossibly rigged scenarios in the Madden video game.

SB Nation sports blogger Jon Bois started calling Tom Brady "Touchdown Tom" on Twitter in late November 2013, when the New England Patriots sat at 7-3 and Brady was posting the worst passer rating of his career at 83.6. Bois later admitted he had no real explanation for why he picked that moment or that player. "I didn't really like him any more or less than the next player," he wrote.

The earliest known usage appeared on November 4, 2013. Bois pushed two specific messages on Twitter: that Brady's nickname should be "Touchdown Tom," and that you should never count him out. The nickname was intentionally banal. As Bois later explained, "it's alliterative" and "it's a title so generic that even American pop culture wouldn't give him that nickname, because it's too obnoxious and stupid".

Origin & Background

Platform
Twitter (coinage), SB Nation (spread via Breaking Madden series)
Key People
Jon Bois
Date
2013

SB Nation sports blogger Jon Bois started calling Tom Brady "Touchdown Tom" on Twitter in late November 2013, when the New England Patriots sat at 7-3 and Brady was posting the worst passer rating of his career at 83.6. Bois later admitted he had no real explanation for why he picked that moment or that player. "I didn't really like him any more or less than the next player," he wrote.

The earliest known usage appeared on November 4, 2013. Bois pushed two specific messages on Twitter: that Brady's nickname should be "Touchdown Tom," and that you should never count him out. The nickname was intentionally banal. As Bois later explained, "it's alliterative" and "it's a title so generic that even American pop culture wouldn't give him that nickname, because it's too obnoxious and stupid".

How It Spread

The joke gained traction almost immediately because reality kept cooperating. The week Bois started tweeting the nickname, the Patriots faced the Denver Broncos and fell behind 24-0 by halftime. Bois kept tweeting that you couldn't count out Touchdown Tom. Brady led a second-half comeback, and New England won in overtime. The following week, Brady engineered another come-from-behind victory against the Houston Texans. The week after that, the Cleveland Browns held a win probability above 99 percent near the end of the game before Brady threw two touchdowns in the final 61 seconds, aided by the Patriots' first successful onside kick in nearly 20 years.

On January 9, 2014, Bois published the first Touchdown Tom episode of his "Breaking Madden" series on SB Nation. He created 21 identical copies of Tom Brady in *Madden NFL 25*, replacing every offensive player on the Patriots roster. Brady threw to himself, handed off to himself, and blocked for himself. The scenario was rigged for a dramatic comeback: the opposing Indianapolis Colts defense had maxed-out ratings in the first half, then Bois quit the game at halftime and dragged all their ratings to zero. The article framed the entire experiment around the "never count out Touchdown Tom" narrative.

The second installment, "Edge of Tom-orrow" (a riff on the Tom Cruise film), arrived on October 16, 2014. This time, Bois placed Brady at his own 1-yard line and attempted a quarterback sneak against the strongest possible defense, repeating the play hundreds of times until Brady scored a 99-yard touchdown.

The trilogy concluded on January 15, 2015, with Brady's clone army facing a Colts defense made up of 7-foot-tall, 400-pound superhuman players whose football awareness ratings were set to zero. Bois recruited the defensive players from Twitter followers who shared stories of spectacular personal failures. Every play ran without human input; Bois simply called the recommended play and put the controller down.

Three days later, on January 18, 2015, SB Nation writer Ryan Van Bibber referenced the nickname in his "Gen. Andrew Luck" series, writing dispatches in the voice of a Civil War general. After the Colts lost to the Patriots in the AFC Divisional round, Van Bibber's fictional Luck described Brady: "My counterpart, a wily veteran called Touchdown Tom by his men, was magnificent. He commands a formation with the will of Zeus".

The meme's defining moment came on February 5, 2017, during Super Bowl LI. With the Atlanta Falcons leading 28-3, Jon Bois did the unthinkable: he officially counted out Touchdown Tom. The Patriots then mounted the largest comeback in Super Bowl history, winning 34-28 in overtime. Bois was forced to rescind his doubts. The game gave the meme its ultimate punchline. Even its creator couldn't resist counting Tom out, and he was wrong.

How to Use This Meme

The Touchdown Tom format is loose and mostly text-based. The standard usage goes like this:

1

The Patriots (or later, the Buccaneers) are losing a game, ideally by a large margin.

2

You post some variation of "Never count out Touchdown Tom" on social media.

3

Brady comes back and wins.

4

You nod knowingly.

Cultural Impact

Touchdown Tom rode the larger wave of Jon Bois' influence as one of the most distinctive sports writers on the internet. The Breaking Madden series drew massive readership to SB Nation, and the Touchdown Tom trilogy was its emotional center. Bois described it as "the most annoying Twitter meme in history," which was both self-deprecating and accurate.

The meme fed into a broader sports media conversation about Brady's comeback ability. By Brady's own standards, his career statistics were staggering: seven Super Bowl victories, six with New England and one with Tampa Bay, along with records for career passing yards, completions, and touchdown passes. The Touchdown Tom joke gave casual fans a framework for that legacy that was funnier and more accessible than any stat line.

The Super Bowl LI incident in 2017 became the meme's canonical moment. Bois counting out his own creation, only to watch the greatest comeback in Super Bowl history unfold, gave the bit a narrative arc that most internet jokes never achieve. It turned a deliberately stupid Twitter gag into something approaching sports mythology.

Fun Facts

Bois recruited real Twitter followers to play the opposing team's defenders in every Breaking Madden episode. For the trilogy finale, he asked people to share stories of times they "really, really fucked up" as their application.

In the first Touchdown Tom episode, Bois noted that Brady's Madden kicking power rating was so bad that his clone army had essentially no chance of making field goals.

Before becoming the greatest quarterback in NFL history, Brady was drafted 199th overall in the sixth round of the 2000 NFL Draft, making him one of the biggest draft steals ever.

The Montreal Expos drafted Brady as a baseball catcher in the 18th round of the 1995 MLB draft, projecting him as a potential All-Star.

In the Breaking Madden trilogy conclusion, Bois set everything to autopilot. "At no moment in these GIFs did I actually take control of any player. I just called whichever play Madden recommended, put the controller down, and watched it happen".

Derivatives & Variations

Breaking Madden Touchdown Tom Trilogy

Three full-length articles/videos on SB Nation (January 2014, October 2014, January 2015) featuring Brady clone armies in rigged Madden scenarios[1][2][3].

Gen. Andrew Luck references

Ryan Van Bibber's fictional Civil War dispatches from Andrew Luck adopted the "Touchdown Tom" nickname into their in-universe lore after the 2015 AFC Divisional Round[6].

Frequently Asked Questions