TOM BRADY SAYS GOODBYE
NFL great officially announces retirement after spectacular 22-season career
Long before he hoisted seven Super Bowl trophies, earned five Super Bowl MVP awards and began the two-decade process of rewriting the NFL record books, Tom Brady was the pride of Serra High in San Mateo.
Feb. 1, almost 30 years after he took his first snap as a high school freshman, Brady, 44, announced his retirement from football.
“This is difficult for me to write, but here it goes: I am not going to make that competitive commitment anymore,” Brady wrote in an Instagram post. “I have loved my NFL career, and now it is time to focus my time and energy on other things that require my attention.”
After 22 NFL seasons, including 20 with the New England Patriots, Brady leaves in a style most athletes only dream about. In his final season, the most accomplished player in league history had a career-best 5,316 passing yards and led the league in touchdown passes with 43.
The only thing missing from a storybook ending was an eighth Super Bowl trophy. Brady and the defending champion Tampa Bay Buccaneers lost in the playoffs.
Rumors of Brady's retirement, which surfaced earlier, picked up steam last week and were reported as fact last weekend.
“It's as big of a retirement as there's ever been,” 49ers head coach Kyle Shanahan said Feb. 1. “I thought this probably 10 years ago, but I think he's the best quarterback to ever play and the best football player to ever play. Probably the best athlete I grew up with, Michael Jordan was that guy, and now I see Tom Brady as that guy.”
Brady won the Super Bowl in three of the first four seasons he started for the Patriots after taking over in his second season for an injured Drew Bledsoe. For the next 15 years, the Patriots were the NFL'S most dominant team — with Brady as their charming but cold-blooded face.
Before embarking on a college football career at the University of Michigan, Brady graduated from Serra in 1995 with another option. An All-west Catholic Athletic League selection as a catcher his senior year, he was selected in the 18th round of the 1995 MLB amateur draft by the Montreal Expos.
“He was good,” the late baseball scout and fellow Serra graduate Gary Hughes previously told the Bay Area News Group. “And he had a nice arm, obviously.”
Eric Byrnes, the former major league baseball player, was a high school rival at St. Francis in Mountain View and once sacked Brady three times in a football game.
“He was one of the best high school baseball players I saw,” Byrnes told Fox Sports 1. “He hit one of the farthest home runs that I ever saw hit in a high school game — it was across the street at St. Francis.”
His college football career started slowly. After playing sparingly his first two years at Michigan, Brady secured the starting job as a junior in 1998 and led the Wolverines to a 20-5 record over the next two seasons, including a victory over Alabama in the 2000 Orange Bowl. While considered an NFL prospect, Brady wasn't viewed as a franchise quarterback or even a lock to be drafted.
As he prepared for the 2000 NFL Draft, Brady was among 50 to 60 local prospects who received an invitation to a combine held by the 49ers.
“We were looking for a guy who was going to replace Steve Young,” former 49ers head coach Steve Mariucci told KNBR in January. “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.”
The 49ers took a quarterback in the third round of the 2000 draft — a guy out of Hofstra University named Gio Carmazzi. He never played a regular-season NFL snap.
Brady went to the New England Patriots in the sixth round after 198 other players had been chosen.
“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 his “Let's Go” podcast in January.
After replacing Bledsoe in a Week 2 matchup with the Bengals in 2001, Brady maintained his grip as the Patriots' primary starter through the end of the 2019 season. Shortly after a playoff loss to the Tennessee Titans, Brady announced his intention to leave the Patriots in free agency, potentially opening the door for the Bay Area native to finish his career in San Francisco.
Multiple reports at the time indicated Brady's preference was to play for the 49ers, but after Jimmy Garoppolo had led San Francisco to a Super Bowl appearance against the Kansas City Chiefs, Shanahan and general manager John Lynch remained committed to Brady's former understudy in New England.
In his first year with Tampa Bay, Brady led the Buccaneers to a Super Bowl victory, giving the quarterback more individual titles than any franchise in NFL history.
He has seven. Pittsburgh and New England have six. The 49ers and Dallas have five.
“He committed anything and everything and it was reflected in the way he separated and distanced himself and his flair in big moments,” Lynch said Tuesday. “Being able to make the plays and make his team better, that's why they call him the GOAT, and he's earned that.”
Brady still has family in the area, including his parents. His visits are low-profile, although there have been exceptions.
In 2012, he returned to Serra and spoke to the student body.
“I can't remember how many times I was playing at Michigan or with the Patriots that I heard, `Go, Padres!' walking on or off the field,” he said. “It means so much to me, and it means so much to be able to call this place — Serra High School — my home.”