Tom Brady should make no promises and play as long as he physically can | KEN WILLIS

Tom Brady should try to play until he’s 50.

There you go, I said it.

What’s stopping him? Seriously, assuming the recent news reports are true, what’s to stop him from plowing through age 45 and into next year at 46, and as far as his legs and arm will take him?

There’s an old saying in times like these. When one door closes, another opens.

My guess is, Tom Brady isn’t lacking for doors.

If he and Gisele Bundchen are indeed caput, it’s time to see what Monty Hall has behind Door #2.

Sure, Tom might not realize it yet, but in some instances, what comes out on the other side makes you forget the initial emotions. Or at least make it a less painful memory. ("Remember when I broke that tablet? Geez, I was a mess!")

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To try and short-story this, let’s go here: If Tom and Gisele are indeed through, and if Tom eventually limps his way back into a social life, let’s by-god hope he finds someone who’s a big football fan.

Better yet, a Tampa Bay Bucs fan who says, “Tommy boy, you need to keep slinging the pigskin until your arm falls off or they haul you away with a tag on your toe.”

Will others come along to test the time-honored expiration dates on quarterbacks? Of course they will. But for the here and now, Tom is all we have. And boy do we have something — perhaps the greatest QB ever, already a decade (give or take) beyond the old quitting time, performing at a premier level.

He planned to quit at 44. And he did. For several weeks. Then he decided to come back, for whatever reason — maybe it had something to do with those Miami plans falling through.

Shortly thereafter, we started hearing about discord under the Brady roof.

Here’s a thought that might be deemed inappropriate or, at minimum, lacking in modern sensibilities: Tom will have many, many years to be a dad and grandpa, but he only has the right-now to play quarterback at the highest level and continue redefining the lifespan of his ilk.

Tom as dad and husband affects a handful of folks. Tom as revolutionary age-defier affects millions. Maybe billions.

I can’t put myself in a wife’s shoes. Unless she’s a 13-wide. But I assume Gisele has been hurt, lied to, or both.

But as her hurt and/or anger ebbs here and there, I hope she’ll find a way to consider what this singular talent — that’d be Tom, by the way — is accomplishing in a very tough field of work, and maybe realize why he’s willing to risk so much to keep rewriting everything we thought we knew about it.

The Picks

A few weeks back we went through the motions, acting shocked about three Sun Belt Conference schools beating three Power 5 blue-chips. We now feign disbelief that Texas A&M, which supposedly “bought every player on their team,” lost again last week and has folks sifting through Jimbo Fisher’s buy-out language.

Sure, until Nick Saban leaves (and hopefully takes that damn duck with him), it’ll still be “death, taxes, and Alabama,” but everything else is off the table. Nothing you ever knew about college football is true anymore. Nobody knows nothin’.

Proof is available Saturday morning on your color television. ESPN’s wildly popular College GameDay lollapalooza will be in Lawrence, Kansas.

The Jayhawks are 5-0 and ranked 19th, and to fully comprehend the Bizarro World currently engulfing the Sunflower state, hear this: The Jayhawks hadn’t won more than three games (THREE!) in any of the previous 12 (TWELVE!) seasons.

Here’s a name for you: Mark Mangino. Remember him? Big dude, could coach a bit. He was the last KU coach with a winning record, and it came back in ’08. And now Lance Leipold, in his second season, has performed the so-called miracle that’s really not because, remember, this ain’t the college football we always knew.

Still, Leipold is the biggest thing to hit Lawrence since Alf Landon moved to town. Alf lost big to FDR in '36 and, unfortunately, since everything is pointing one way, expect the other — Horned Frogs over Jayhawks by 6.

• Elsewhere: Florida over Mizzou by 7; LSU beats Tennessee; Texas over Oklahoma; Utah beats UCLA; Notre Dame by 6 over BYU; Georgia big over Auburn; Ohio State bigger over Michigan State; Miami beats N. Carolina in OT; Saban by 18 over Jimbo; N.C. State by 1 over FSU; Kentucky beats S. Carolina; and in the lovely village of Greencastle, a bit west of Indianapolis, just as the weekly farmers market wraps up, the DePauw Tigers beat the visiting Tigers of Wittenberg by 13.

BTW: Don’t confuse the Methodist-bred DePauw with the Catholic-sponsored DePaul in Chicago. And don’t worry about investing your money in a Greencastle bank.

Sure, the Central National Bank downtown Greencastle is where John Dillinger, in 1933, made his biggest-ever heist, but nine months later he collected bullets in a Chicago movie theater.

Around the time Dillinger was planning and executing his Greencastle robbery, head coach Gaumey Neal was leading the DePauw Tigers to an unbeaten and unscored-upon season. Research!

— Reach Ken Willis at ken.willis@news-jrnl.com

This article originally appeared on The Daytona Beach News-Journal: If Tom Brady is indeed single, he should keep stretching the limits