Tom Brady has a message for NFL players who would rather spend the preseason safely watching from the sideline.
Get in the game.
The seven-time Super Bowl champion took a shot at the increasingly common practice of established players sitting out exhibition games after a fan shared an old clip of Brady playing deep into a 2010 New England Patriots preseason game.
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Brady reposted the video to his Instagram Story and made his feelings pretty clear.
"Preseason… Regular season… I never wanted to be taken off the field. Practice makes perfect," Brady wrote. "Too many people looking for easy ways out these days."
The clip came from an Aug. 26, 2010 preseason game against the then-St. Louis Rams, when Brady played through New England's first offensive series of the fourth quarter. He finished 18-of-22 for 273 yards and three touchdowns with no interceptions and a perfect 158.0 passer rating. One of those touchdowns was a 65-yard strike to Randy Moss.
It’s not like he needed to prove himself worthy of a spot on an NFL roster, either. At this point, Brady already had three Super Bowl rings and two Super Bowl MVP awards.
Of course, there's a perfectly reasonable argument for keeping stars out of meaningless preseason games. The NFL now plays 17 regular-season games, and coaches understandably aren't thrilled about risking the health of multimillion-dollar players in August.
Brady, apparently, does not care for that argument.
"When you're a football player, and it's football season, your job is to play football," he concluded.
Sure, this could be dismissed as a classic "kids these days" moment from a retired quarterback yelling at the younger generation to get off his lawn and work harder.
Then again, Brady put his seven Super Bowl rings where his mouth is.
So maybe there’s something to it.