Tom Brady’s infamously underwhelming NFL scouting combine photo inadvertently fueled his success, as he explained to Gary Neville, Roy Keane and Ian Wright on the Stick To Football podcast.
‘Do you want to see it?’ Neville playfully offered, while gesturing to an electronic tablet.
The 48-year-old Brady responded in kind: ‘No, I don’t. I know what it looks like. I lived it… I’m gonna break the f***ing iPad. Get rid of that thing.’
As most NFL fans know, Brady slid to the 199th pick of the 2000 NFL Draft despite an impressive college career at Michigan, where he went 20-5 after supplanting highly touted Drew Henson as the Wolverines starting quarterback.
In his mind, Brady explained, he could already hear the voices of NFL decisionmakers as they picked apart his wiry 23-year-old frame.
‘So, it was like they see the picture and they go, “Well, he’s not that big and he’s not that fast,”‘ Brady told the Premier League legends in a segment sponsored by SkyBet. ‘I’m tall. I’m not the most muscular. It has just been a hard thing for me to put on all that muscle. And honestly, you put on too much muscle, you’re going to get injured a lot of times, too.
Now 48, Brady spends a lot of his time recounting his career on various podcasts
Brady was famously a skinny quarterback out of Michigan at the 2000 scouting combine
‘And I wasn’t really a runner,’ he continued. ‘So what ended up being my biggest weakness – the fact that I wasn’t that fast – turned into my biggest strength that it forced me to prepare and study better than basically anybody that played.
‘There was a few other guys that I would compare myself to in terms of preparation, film study, anticipation. And I went into a system in New England that embraced all those things. And then I could truly play field general. I could play the game between my ears. And then my physical skill within two or three years really caught up to everybody else.’
The rest, of course, is NFL history.
After going in the sixth round behind forgettable quarterbacks like Spergon Wynn and Tee Martin, Brady sat a year behind Pro Bowl quarterback Drew Bledsoe in New England.
Although fans couldn’t see it at the time, Brady was making significant strides on the practice field and in the film room, where he had the support of Bledsoe, Patriots coach Bill Belichick and offensive coordinator Charlie Weis.
Tom Brady’s infamously underwhelming NFL scouting combine photo inadvertently fueled his success, as he explained to Gary Neville , Roy Keane and Ian Wright
So, when he was forced into duty when Bledsoe went down in 2001, Brady was remarkably seasoned for a backup.
Brady would go on to lead the Patriots to their first Super Bowl win that season — the first of seven Lombardi trophies in his career. Meanwhile, first-overall picks like JaMarcus Russell and David Carr struggled to make an impact in the league amid heightened expectations.
Of course, Brady has always made the argument that simply getting drafted is of bigger importance than when someone gets drafted.
‘Look, it’s a great opportunity to be drafted wherever you’re drafted,’ he told Wright, Neville and Keane. ‘And the reality is it doesn’t matter where any of us start in our careers. You could start as the prodigy. You could start as someone who never thought would be that successful.’
