Tom Brady famously started his NFL career as a back-up to Drew Bledsoe - but once he got his shot, the rest is history.
Brady spent over 20 years as an NFL starter from 2001 until his retirement at the end of last season. During that time, he was backed up by a number of other quarterbacks who, ultimately, were competing with the hope of taking his job.
However, Brady’s behaviour towards them summed him up as the ultimate teammate and competitor which made him arguably the NFL’s greatest ever player.
“He held me accountable,” Matt Cassel, Brady’s backup from 2005 to 2008, told Sports Illustrated last year. When Cassel was getting reps, it meant Brady wasn’t on the field, but he still held relentless high standards.
“I was happy about it,” Cassel said. “It was a big play and he goes, Cassel, you can’t do that. He’s like, Dude, you missed the motion presnap. And I didn’t even realize it at the time. I was just kind of excited about the fact that I completed the ball.
“We’re moving it in the right direction and all this stuff. And I was like, What are you talking about? He goes, You can’t miss that motion because guess what? At some point you’re going to have to hold those guys accountable for not being at the right depth or not having the correct spacing.
“You don’t want them to ever be able to look at you and say, Well, you forgot the motion.”
The view of Brady as a role model and mentor to his back-ups, despite the element of competition, is a common theme throughout those who played beneath him. Jimmy Garoppollo was famously picked in the second round of the 2014 NFL Draft as a potential replacement for Brady.
That didn’t stop him from helping the youngster get to grips with the NFL, even if he never let him take his job.
“He helped me with things off the field, on the field, anything I had a question about,” Garoppolo told ESPN previously. “There was two years there where it was just me and him in the meeting room together.
“Just how to go about your business, how to be a professional quarterback and there’s little things people don’t even realise, how you carry yourself, and I think he does that better than anybody.”
Jarrett Stidham was a fourth-round pick by the New England Patriots in 2019, Brady’s final year with the team.
He told ESPN of Brady: “The amount of time he puts into film and just game plan and understanding who we’re playing, and personnel, all these different things that can come up throughout the week.
“That’s something I obviously have learned from him, and something I’d love to incorporate as much into my game as I possibly could. The list is endless, but that’s probably the No. 1 thing with him.”
Whilst he was a fierce competitor on an individual basis, Brady’s mantra was always team-first and focused on every detail. Even the back-up quarterbacks.
