TAMPA, Fla. — While again declining to reveal names, Tom Brady has offered some more choice words for the teams that bypassed him last year in free agency.
Only this time, his comments were pointed without being profane.
“I think what you realize is that there’s not as many smart people as you think. It’s just the reality,” the Bucs’ 43-year-old quarterback told Jim Gray for a SiriusXM Town Hall event that premieres Wednesday night.
Brady’s latest comments on the issue come roughly a month after the premier of his viral appearance on HBO’s The Shop: Uninterrupted. During that casual interview with a room of celebrities, Brady brought up one of the teams that chose to stay with its current quarterback instead of signing the future Hall of Famer.
“I was thinking, ‘You’re sticking with that motherf-----?’” he said at the time.
During his sit-down with Gray, Brady said the teams who bypassed him know who they are but declined to identify them because “there’s private things for me that are going to remain motivational for me.”
“It would be a no-brainer if you said, ‘Hey, you’ve got a chance to get Wayne Gretzky on your team,’ or ‘You get a chance to have Michael Jordan on your team,’” added Brady, who signed with the Bucs (on an original two-year deal) in March 2020.
“‘Ahh, we don’t need him. No thanks, we’re good.’ In my mind, I’m kind of thinking, OK, let me go show those teams what they’re missing. And at the same time, let me go prove to the team that did bet on me, and the team that really showed that they really wanted me and committed to me, that I’m not going to let them down.”
Brady’s lengthy interview with Gray premieres on SiriusXM’s Mad Dog Sports Radio Wednesday at 6. It will replay many times on both the Mad Dog Sports Radio and NFL Radio channels, while being available on the SiriusXM app.
Other topics discussed by Brady:
His return to New England (where he spent his first 20 seasons) for an Oct. 3 prime-time game
“It’ll be a great day for football. ... I’m not naive to the fact that there’s some marquee games that you always look at over the course of a season: a matchup of places guys have been versus where they’re at now, or brothers playing one another, or former Super Bowl teams going. ... It’s just naturally there’s more buildup, but at the end of the day it’s going to be a game where we’re going to go out there, we’re going to prepare like we’ve been preparing.”
The drive to keep playing in his mid-40s (Brady turns 44 on Aug. 3)
“Naturally I think for people, it’s always easy to say, ‘What more is there to prove?’ or ‘Why keep playing?’ I play because I love the game, I play because I love to compete. We shouldn’t stop our life, even though we love something, because just someone puts an arbitrary timeline on that. I felt for a long time I could play until I was 45 years old. I think I committed to say, ‘Hey, I’m going to play until I’m 45,’ and this year I’ll be 44, which naturally takes me to next year. And I’ve got a two-year contract, and we’ll see what happens beyond that.”
Whether he could play beyond age 45
“Yeah, I think I’ve got to get to that point first, and then just evaluate how I feel and where I’m at in my life. But things change as you get older, and there’s a lot of different responsibilities I have in my life. My kids and my family are certainly very important, and they made a lot of sacrifices over a long period of time to watch me play, so I owe it to them, too.”
