At 44-years-old, Tom Brady still has a major chip on his shoulder.
The San Mateo native still holds a major grudge against the team he used to root for as a child, for not selecting him during the 2000 Draft.
“I lost my allegiance for the Niners when they skipped over me six times 22 years ago, and drafted Giovanni Carmazzi after they had me do a local workout with Steve Mariucci, and decided I wasn’t good enough to play there,” Brady said on the “Let’s Go” podcast this week.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be a surprise that an all-time great such as Brady is still using events from over two decades ago as fuel to keep him going.
Mariucci certainly isn’t surprised by it, and sounded thrilled when he was told about Brady’s quote on Murph & Mac Wednesday.
“Everybody passed over him six times right?!” Mariucci said with a chuckle. “That’s awesome. I love Tom.”
Mariucci then recounted what he remembers of the local workout.
“Remember we used to do those local combines before the draft for kids that either didn’t get invited to the combine or wanted another workout kind of thing,” Mooch said on KNBR. “We always would bring in about 50-60 kids that were from the area. You’re allowed to do that if you have a kid that went to a local high school or college, so we had about 60 guys in for a workout, and he was one of them.
“You can’t get to know guys very well, it wasn’t a private workout or anything, it was a bunch of kids. Anyway, as you know we were looking for a guy who was going to replace Steve Young, an athletic kind of guy, and that’s the way we kind of wanted to play football with that west coast offense. Tom was kind of a drop back category for us and we were looking more for the athletic kind of quarterbacks, and they are hard to find. Heck we had a couple of swings and misses, and ended up finding Jeff Garcia.”
Garcia ended up working out pretty well. They quarterback they drafted in 2000, Carmazzi, did not. He never appeared in a regular season game.
Listen to the full interview below. You can listen to every KNBR interview on our podcast page at knbr.com/podcasts or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Catch Murph & Mac weekdays from 6 – 10 a.m. on KNBR 104.5 / 680 and streaming live on KNBR.com.