Tom Brady has told Peter King he wants to keep playing for another 10 years, at which point he would be 41 years old. It’s an ambitious declaration for someone coming off  major knee surgery, and might not be a given even if fate, and Bernard Pollard’s helmet hadn’t intervened.

After all, Marino, Tarkenton, Elway, and Montana all packed it in at age 38. All of them suffered various degrees of injury over their careers, but never experienced any thing close to the trauma that Brady experienced last September. Warren Moon managed a Pro Bowl season in 1997 at age 41, but it was a far cry from his early ’90s heyday in Houston. Len Dawson went 1-4 as a starter at age 40 in 1975.  Sonny Jurgensen had an effective 40-year-old season, throwing for over 1,000 yards and 11 touchdowns in1975, but he made it his last.

Even a sterling example of longevity like George Blanda only started one game as a quarterback after the age of 39, when he started a single game in November of 1968. Granted, he did quite well  for himself, but one game is hardly grounds to build a case for Brady’s own longevity.

But we are, at bottom, optimists here at WEEI.com, and so let’s permit ourselves to dream and imagine where Brady would rank on the all-time stat pile assuming he does match his stated goal of playing another 10 years.

Brady currently ranks 51st on the all-time passing yard list with 26,446 yards. Throw out the 76 yards he threw for in Week 1 last season, before “the incident,” and Brady’s averaged 3,767 yards in his first seven years as a full-time starter. Keeping in mind the fact that Carson Palmer threw for 200 more yards AFTER his comeback from a similiar injury, as well as the fact that Brady is more likely to throw for 4,110 yards (as he did in 2005) than for 2,843 yards (as he did in 2001), we can reasonably project that Brady could throw for around 35,000-40,000 yards over the next ten years. 35,000 passing yards would put him third all-time at just a shade under 63,500 yards, behind only Brett Favre and (presumably), Peyton Manning.

What about the touchdown count? Brady sits in a tie for 28th on the list with 197 touchdowns, tied with Ken Anderson. Throwing out the career high (50, 2007) and low (18, 2001), Brady has averaged 26 touchdowns per year. Again, we’ll round the average up, on the assumption that Brady will have similar years to 2007 than 2001 for the forseeable future. At 30 TDs a year for the next ten years, Brady is at 497 TDs in our hypothetical list ten years from now. Again, such a showing would put him behind Manning, who currently has 333 TDs, is only a year older than Brady, and has none of Brady’s injury history.

Let the conversation begin.

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