Tom Brady Challenges Veterans to Stay in Preseason Action

Tom Brady has issued a direct challenge to current NFL players who prefer staying safe on the sideline during exhibition camp. He wants them back in the game. The seven-time Super Bowl champion recently took aim at the growing trend of veteran athletes sitting out preseason contests after a fan circulated an old clip showing him deep into action against the Rams in 2010. Brady reposted that footage to his Instagram Story and made his stance unmistakable. He wrote, Preseason Regular season I never wanted to be taken off the field. Practice makes perfect. Too many people looking for easy ways out these days.

The video captures a specific moment from August 26, 2010, when Brady played through New England's first offensive series of the fourth quarter against St. Louis. In that contest he finished with eighteen-of-twenty-two completions for two hundred and seventy-three yards, three touchdowns, zero interceptions, and a passer rating of one hundred fifty-eight point zero. One of those scores was a sixty-five-yard strike to Randy Moss. It is also worth noting that Brady did not need to prove his worthiness for an NFL roster at any point in his career. He already held three Super Bowl rings and two Super Bowl MVP awards by the time he made his comments.

There remains a reasonable argument for keeping star players out of meaningless preseason games. The league now schedules seventeen regular-season matches, and coaches understandably worry about risking the health of multimillion-dollar athletes in August. Brady, however, does not care for that particular logic. When you are a football player and it is football season, he concluded, your job is to play football. Some might dismiss this as a classic moment from an older quarterback telling younger players to stop looking for shortcuts. He put his seven Super Bowl rings where his mouth is. Maybe there is something to it after all.