Bedard: Tom Brady seems to be going year-to-year, and Patriots are OK with it

Tom Brady will receive, maybe, an extra $5 million for 2018 in the contract adjustment that came to light on Thursday.

Wonderful. He's now gone from being tied for 20th in the NFL in cash made this season to, if he hits whatever incentives are laid out (we won't know that for a few days), to tied for 10th with Sam Bradford and Blake Bortles.

Yes, you read that right.

The big question right now: Why didn't the Patriots and Brady come to some sort of agreement that would keep him securely — as much as you can for a 41-year-old — as the starting quarterback until age 45? It's not like they have Jimmy Garoppolo waiting in the wings.

Even after this tweak, Brady's contract is up after next season. I never thought I'd see them get this close to the end of Brady's contract. But that should tell you a lot.

Namely, Brady's not sure at this point how much longer he's going to play, and the Patriots don't want to be on the hook for dead money if he suddenly moves to Costa Rica full time.

It would have been very easy for the Patriots to strike a deal similar to what Drew Brees and the Saints cooked up. Basically, the Patriots and Brady could have come up with a three-year extension with a series of one-year options through 2022. They could have converted much of Brady's remaining base salaries ($28 million) into a signing bonus and used annual bonuses to boost his numbers. Brady's cap number would, essentially, remain the same. NFL cap expert Joel Corry laid out this scenario well earlier this offseason.

But they didn't do that.

The only plausible reason I can think of why they wouldn't is that the Patriots were worried — and perhaps Brady and/or agent Don Yee signaled this to them — that Brady could walk away at any time. When Brady does retire, any proration of bonuses would accelerate and the team would take one big hit that year, or spread it out over two.

That's not going to happen, now that the Patriots have kept his current contract in place. There's little chance Brady would walk away before next season after the Jimmy Garoppolo trade — or he would look very poor. Now it looks like both sides have agreed to say, "Let's see where we are in 2019 and go from there."

This should also tell you that the drama of the offseason isn't over yet. It may have cooled, but neither side seems to be enamored with the other. For Brady to go from I've giving up my life and I'm playing until 45 and I have all the answers to the test, it's easy for me now to, Yeah, I'm not sure what I'm going to do past 2019 is a huge change in the span of one year.

We've all been waiting for a signal as to what Brady's future is and how his relationship is with the organization.

Looks like we just got our answer. And it's not great news.