Tom Brady having a tough time transitioning from football player to football spectator

BOSTON -- Those of us who spend a double-digit number of hours on the couch every Sunday watching football know that it's not for the faint of heart. Tom Brady is now learning that, too.

The 46-year-old retiree has open Sundays for the first time of his adult life, now that he's officially done being an NFL player. As a result, he's forced to watch the games on TV like the rest of us.

He admitted it's been a rough transition.

"I just watch," Brady told Jim Gray on his podcast. "It's a hard thing, because you just want to pull your hair out and go, 'What the [bleep] is going on here?'"

For Brady, having no control over the outcome of any game still requires some mental adjustments.

"I had a very big impact on every single game. [Now] I have zero impact on any games," Brady said.

Those answers came when Brady was asked about watching the Patriots lose 38-3 to the Cowboys, according to a transcript posted by NESN's Zack Cox.

That Q&A comes from the full podcast, available on SiriusXM. On the podcast available to non-subscribers, Brady did open up about his philosophy on football when asked how and why teams can look so different from one week to the next.

"The reality is, in sports, in a physical sport -- and no one sees it like this -- how many times can you play your ultimate best in something that's physical? How many times can the casual golfer go out there and shoot his best score? The reality is you could shoot a good score one day and a really bad score the next day. Well, I need a sports psychologist to understand why that happens, but the reality is in a sport that's determined by a lot of precision, sometimes you're more precise than others," Brady said. "Maybe in a 100-meter dash, the fastest guy usually always wins, not the person who runs the better race. But when you have a lot of people engaged -- offense, defense, special teams, [or] a pitcher, infielders, a catcher ... there's so many variables of why things go really well. And really, the maddening part about sports is you do expect that you should play your best every single week, but that's just not the case."

Brady, the most successful football player of all time, held himself to the absolute highest standard during his playing career. Now just a few months removed from that career, he can see how unrealistic that point of view can be.

"We do put these expectations on our sports teams that every week it should be the very best, and I just think we kind of create a false expectation," he said.