When Tom Brady entered the NFL, there can’t have been many people who believed he would be a starting caliber quarterback. Every NFL team, including the Patriots, passed on him in the draft until he fell to 199th overall in the sixth round. So as quarterback Drew Bledsoe reflected upon Brady’s career, Bledsoe was honest about the early days.
“Here’s the real truth of it,” Bledsoe said before making his confession. “So when he was on the practice squad his rookie year, I actually called my financial advisor about him like, ‘Hey, I really like this kid. He’s never going to be a starter. He’s just going to be Jason Garrett or one of those guys who are just around forever, but you’ll really like the kid.'”
Bledsoe and Brady have had a long-standing friendship, even after Brady supplanted Bledsoe in 2000 and went on to win the franchise’s first Super Bowl (with five more coming later).
“Tommy was a young kid out of Michigan, a skinny little twerp,” Bledsoe told me in 2019. “The one thing that stuck out about Tommy when he was a young kid was that he was immediately an extremely hard worker and had a great personality about him. People naturally gravitated toward him. None of us — at that point — thought he would be something special.”
