Why former Patriots LB Tedy Bruschi doesn’t want his jersey retired at Gillette Stadium

I hopped on a conference call today with former Patriots LB Tedy Bruschi, with the intention being to discuss him being honored on Monday night. You read about that here. It also struck me that this wasn’t a ceremony to retire his number. He doesn’t quite have those credentials yet. I wanted to know if that was something to which he aspired. His response was surprising. It definitely made me think. “It was never really my goal to have my number retired,” Bruschi said. “I wanted to win championships, and whatever came with that, so be it. I know the Patriots have a good amount of numbers that are retired. I would love to see a linebacker in the future wear number ‘54’ and perform well. I would love to see that. All retired numbers of the New England Patriots should be unretired and other players should be able to wear those numbers. Realize the history of the number and who wore that number before and the standard that they should try and uphold of past...